Title Test

I am considering this alternative.

Hah.  Perhaps drop the 'Advanced' part?

Light of Day

Fan Expo will happen in Toronto on the dates of August 28 to 31.  I plan to be there.

That means renting a table and paying the fees, which is child's play.  Air to get there is more tricky, as is accommodation.  I don't know anyone in Toronto that's close, and even if I did the last thing I would want to do between barking my book at a table is going to be hanging with friends.  I'm going to want to find a hotel room and crash.

I need a back-up, so that I can leave the table from time to time, to pee and eat and things, so my daughter is coming.  That's two air fares.  We can share a room at least.  She is probably good with buying her own food, so I will only have to cover mine.

Then there is the inventory cost.  I don't know how many books I'll need.  As many as I can sell, obviously - and selling is the crucial factor.

The decision to go was only made yesterday at noon, so I've been thinking of things I need to do to reach the goal.

To begin with, obviously, finish the book.  It has been going well since the weekend, I finished the chapter that was giving me trouble and I'm into the next, which is really just a survey of bad gaming.  Then there's a bit to write about protecting yourself as a DM, and at last I'm out of the DM vs. Player portion.  I am looking forward to writing about asthetics and design.  That's going to feel great.

There is now, however, a hard deadline for the book - I figure, July 15th.  I'd like to manage it before that time, particularly as I seem to be unable to perfectly edit my own work (as much as I try, I always seem to gloss over in my head and miss that there's a word missing - I'm told writers should never edit their own work and I believe that).  The self-publisher Lulu has a service they provide that fixes that, but I have to investigate the time that takes.  In any event, I definitely need a book that can be sold by that date, perfection be damned.  Still, I like perfection, so I'll wear out light bulbs doing my best with that.

Number Two on the list is capitalization.  Most of it I can raise out of my own income, but that means sacrificing.  I know people will argue that I should kick-start it, but that annoys me; I don't open my email any more without some stranger I've never heard of asking me to support their venture to create something I don't care about and will never buy.  Donations of course are always helpful to anyone starting in business; I've relied in the past on free equipment, loans and all sorts of generousity.  When I ran a couple of zines back in the 90s (distribution over 2,000 copies), I found that the most common advice began with the four words, "You have to buy."  These notions were invariably the worst advice I received.  If you are so hard up that you have to buy something to solve your problem, you are in fact solving someone else's problem. You're making them wealthier and yourself poorer.

I like free money as much as the next person, and I might be able to get some.  There's credit, of course, which undoubtedly I will have to rely upon.  But it would be nice if I could do a little promotion ahead of time, a reading or something here in the city, to sell a few more copies than what I'll manage online. Yesterday, my friend who runs a game store now in Seattle (Tacoma?) has offered to move 12 copies for me.  I might be able to arrange a few more deals like that.

It occurs that the Gentle Reader might have in mind a stunt or two.  At the moment, my only thought is to write some small handbook on a desired subject, something that would run five or ten thousand words, which could be bought for the price of two cappuccinos.  If someone wants to jump up and tell me what the content of such a book ought to be, let me know.  I can make time, write it on the side and have it ready for sale in June.

I don't think that raising money at one time rather than another will necessarily be a factor, but given that it might, I am wondering about pre-sales.  That wouldn't happen until I was sure the book was set, and an exact publishing date too - but if I did need money in June rather than July, that might be a method of getting it.  Tell me, would it be worth pre-ordering if I were to put something on the cover like 'first edition,' which was then removed when the book went public?  Would that carry any special cachet?  Would you pay a buck extra for it.  Is there something else that might have more verve?

I doubt it's going to be an issue.

There are other things, too.  I make a profit off every book I sell through Lulu (I will have to look into Amazon's self-publishing practices, I've always been leary), but it is damn near as much for me to buy them as to sell them.  I will have to roust up a local publisher if I want fifty, a hundred books published up front for selling in Toronto.  I will need a computer, too, better than the lap-top I've got, so that I can sell e-book copies for those who want them.

I don't think I'm going to go costumed.  That has already been recommended, but I think I'll suspend the idea.  My daughter is keen for it; she's a firebrand and an attention-getter, I'm sure she's going to do fine. I'm also sure she'll harass me between now and August, so she might win that battle.

I am definitely going to need some practice speaking.  I've been living through text so long I've let a lot of my performance skill lax, as is evident in my apparently inability to speak the correct words when I'm describing map work on a you tube video.  I also haven't spent that much time standing up, not since my cooking days. This August I'll be just two weeks shy of 50, and I'm a terribly relaxed computer-chair potato.  I'll have to push myself some.

Those are the highlights.  There are always other details; I will need to attend some trade shows for tips, talk to a girl that used to work them like a carny from one end of the country to the other, get a backdrop made once I know the dimensions I'm allowed - with lots of color, I'm told - clear the time with work, etc., etc.

If anyone has any reasonable ideas for raising capital, shout them out.  Tell me what you'd like to see 7,500 words describing.  Give me some support.  I'm just around the corner from the light of day.

Wro-onng ... Do It Again. Wro-onng ... Do It Again

Recently, J.K. Rowling joined a Change.org petition urging the bookseller Amazon to do more to prevent bullying in their comments section.  I appreciate that we are moving past the word troll to the more proper, accurate word bullying.  I believe that starting hence forward, I'm going to stop calling people trolls.  That's an insufficient euphemism for what's going on.

I am hardly a famous person.  I make no great money off the internet, I have one book and a few minor game features that I have distributed, and yet somehow I am worthy of quite a lot of abuse.  I don't believe that this is because of what I write, or who I am.  I don't believe it is because I am a bad person.  I think it's because I am not cowed, and I have not stopped writing.

Most every blogger I followed five years ago is gone; those that are still around retain a presence on-line, like Tom Tomorrow, but have largely ceased to blog (Tomorrow usually only writes a line or two about his comix).  The political bloggers have it the worst; and as they have stepped off, one by one, they have written that the main reason is the unbelievable beat-down that they face every day from people who do everything possible to bully them into silence.  Most of them start with moderating comments.  Eventually they get rid of comments altogether.  Then, a year later, writing in a vacuum, they just stop.

I don't wish to get rid of my comments.  There are some sharp, insightful people who write very human things on the comments section here; they are involved in what I'm writing, they have a great deal to add from their own experience, and I absolutely do not want any of these people to feel for a moment that they can't speak their minds to me.  The comments, moderated as they are, stay.

But I am clearly moving forward into a position where I'm getting enough attention from the bullies to make them sense blood in the water.  I would estimate that personal attacks against me, here and on other sites, have increased about 400% above what I received last year.  That is telling.  As my friend Carl says, I must be really, truly, getting under their skin.  Given what I wrote Friday, they know they can get a rise out of me. That has been true.  I was talking it out with my family over the weekend and three meaningful bits of perspective presented themselves.

The first, that I am still reading these comments.  This is true.  It is a train-wreck, it is compelling, and virtually everyone wants to read things about themselves that others write.  There are a lot of positive comments out there that turn up on Reddit and other blogs, people trying out systems of mine or praising my maps on bulletin boards.  But when I set out to go find out what may have been written about me recently, I get the bad with the good.

The second is that there is a LOT worse than what I'm getting.  This is also true.

And third, perhaps I might consider having someone else moderate my comments for me.  Someone who isn't a target.

I may someday have to employ the third.  If I am able to sell the book, if I set up to promote it at conventions around the country, then the level of commentary might get beyond me.  I might find there's too much to wade through, or that it is getting hard to parse.  If this is what I am getting now, where does it go when I have something that is really popular?

For the present, I feel there is one thing I can do.  I can intensify the moderation.  Up until this point, I have been satisfied with restricting personal abuse and off-topic statements, as well as cutting down on those who write, "You won't print this, but ..."

I'm going to tighten that up, starting now.

Those who have never feared that I would remotely deny a comment have nothing to worry about.  Gentle readers, you know who you are.  But I am going to make some more specific rules about commenting, in the interest of retaining the higher level of discourse that has always been a part of this blog, while eliminating or at least reducing the lower discourse.

If the reader opens my page, and sets to read me, and in turn takes a mind to comment, then I presume the reader has an interest in my opinion.  Otherwise, why have they read anything?

It does not follow, then, that because the reader has opened my blog in order to read my opinion, that I am automatically interested in theirs.  There is great hay made of the fact that I only want to hear people who agree with me, or that I attack and abuse people for "just giving their opinion."  This sort of statement is, naturally, meant to encourage guilt, to cause me to change my perspective and of course allow every reader to have free rein in commenting here.

I feel, given the climate of bullies that infests every comment section everywhere on the net, making the very circumstance of comments sections poisonous for everyone, that the real answer to such a guilt-making argument is to say, "Yes, that's true.  If I don't agree with you, I'm really not interested in what you have to say."

The idea that anyone, anywhere in the world, should feel bad about wanting to recreate, hang, chat or otherwise interact with only those people they like is, in general principles, a bully's argument.  It is an outsider's idea.  It is the philosophy of a lonely outcast who has no homies, who resents that anyone is entitled to encircle themselves with friends and people of like mind, and who uses notions like 'free speech' or 'elitism' as weapons to promote their misguided ideal.

I do only want people of like mind around here.  I want people experienced at speaking frankly, who prefer to be up front about their reasons for anything, who draw their arguments on sources or examples, rather than gut-instincts.  I want the people who write here about their perceptions and thoughts to feel this is a comfortable, welcome house - and it always has been, for them.  It's only an unwelcome house for the clodding fools who think their 'opinion' - and the fact that it is an 'opinion,' as though that alone and nothing else counts for everything - matters.

So here are my new comments rules.

1)  Feel free to agree with me and expand on what I've written.  Most every comment like this highlights the best parts of my post, adds things I never thought of, deliberates over the nuance of a particular ideal and straightens out my thinking.  If you have a comment that does this, go straight to it.

2)  Don't piggy-back on my blog and offer an alternative method for 'how you do it.'  I am writing here about how I do it.  Either address my method, or go write your idea on your blog, where you won't have the benefit of boring my readers, who aren't here to read YOU.  Writing about your method in a vacuum is advertising.  Go advertise in your space.

3)  If you want to disagree with me, fine.  Do so.  I better see a source or a credibly prescient example from your personal experience, and that example better be specific, detailed and ungeneralized.  It better be in the first three sentences, too, unless I know you.  I'm not going to read four paragraphs of your opinion to see if it's more.  I can waffle on, but you can't.  This is my blog.  I don't have to provide sources (though I do and I will, when it pleases me).  I already have credibility, else you wouldn't be here.  Unless I know you, YOU have no credibility at all.  Make some good points and earn some.  If all you have is opinion, save it.  If I were interested in your opinion, I would be reading your blog.

4)  If I get the tiniest, infinitesimal whiff of an insult, either to me or anyone else, then you're gone. If I see more than a lot, I won't just deny your recent comment, I will seek out and hunt down every other comment you have ever left on this blog in my good time and I will kill it.  And I will never allow you to post here, no matter how reasonable you are.  You can make another nick if you want, but I am guessing that if you can't contain yourself once, you won't in the future, no matter what you post as.  I am through being patient.

Let's be clear.  Your opinion, if it is only an opinion, carries no weight with me.  And I am done with bullies. I don't want you here.  No one wants you here.  Up until now, I've been trying to deal with you as human beings.  I've gotten angry with you, I've written paragraphs attempting to educate you, I've wasted my time on you.  That stops.  Now.

For everyone who is staying with this blog ... I am going to take strong steps to contain my anger.  I'm going to decimate the comments section and stop writing rants that address something stupid someone has said. Anger is going to stop being my default.  I may allow myself, occasionally, off the chain ... but this lately has been too much, too often, for the wrong reasons.

The bullying against me is going to step up.  That's a fact of life.  But I am going to stop it from having any effect on anyone reading this blog - including it's effect on me, second-hand.

Now let's raise the discourse and consider this subject managed.  I would appreciate support - particularly from anyone who told me last week that I would be a happier person if I were not angry all the time.

Well, let's see if that's true.

Rumson

Holbrook:  You movin' out, Ben?
Rumson:  No.
Holbrook:  Me neither.  I guess there's two kinds in the world, Ben.  People who move, people who stay.  Ain't that true?
Rumson:  No, that ain't true.
Holbrook:  Well what's true?
Rumson:  Well there's two kinds of people.  Them goin' somewhere, and them goin' nowhere.  And that's what's true.
Holbrook:  I don't agree, Ben.
Rumson:  That's 'cause you don't know what the hell I'm talkin' about.

I've included these lines from Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon in order to make a point about the way many people express themselves and the way they understand others.  I have for a long time now believed that most difficulties in communication between people, and most efforts to educate, suffer from two fundamental philosophies.

The first I've spoken of before, but I'll reiterate it because it's been three years.  If you are working with a graphics program, occasionally you'll need to insert a picture from your desktop into a frame on the program. In that case, you'll be asked a question:  do you want the picture to fit the frame, or do you want the frame to fit the picture?  If you choose to make the picture fit the frame, the frame stays the same but the picture distorts.  If you choose to make the frame fit the picture, the picture stays clear but the frame changes size.

Those are your choices.  Most people in this life would rather distort the picture than change the frame.

The other error is that which occurs above.  People hear (or read) the words, but they don't immediately make sense.  And because they don't immediately make sense, it is presumed the words must be senseless. From that point on, anything that is added is a waste of time.

Consider the post thus far.  I have chosen to include every sentence written so far for a reason.  None of the sentences I've written are included randomly or by chance.  So it is with Logan's play.  Look carefully at all the little parts of the exchange above and recognize that there is more that is included beyond the set-up for Rumson's final line.  Think, for a moment, why Holbrook, having made his statement about two kinds of people, finds that he must turn to Rumson and ask, "Ain't that true?"

Why does Holbrook do that?  Doesn't Holbrook know?  More to the point, why does the writer have Holbrook ask the question?  Was he padding the script.  Was he merely creating a reason for Rumson to answer?

I don't think so.  I think Logan wants Holbrook to ask the question because many people, when they speak or say something they 'believe,' feel the need to have that belief confirmed.  They don't want to feel alone. They're aware that the moment they speak, they're going to be judged.  It isn't pleasant to be judged. Particularly if one does not know what the judgement is.  So Holbrook asks.  "Confirm my thesis," he says. "Don't leave me out here not being certain where you stand."

Rumson, however, does not confirm the thesis.  He proposes an alternative thesis ... but he doesn't ask if Holbrook agrees.  He makes it clear: "This is so.  There is no room for argument."  That's because Rumson isn't proposing a thesis ... which is, after all, the entire point of Logan's play.  Rumson knows.  That's why, when Holbrook answers that he doesn't agree, Rumson doesn't care.  He gets to the root of it.  Holbrook doesn't agree because Holbrook doesn't understand.

More to the point, Holbrook doesn't try to understand.  He has his thesis, and from his perspective, his thesis and Rumson's thesis are just two philosophies in a wilderness of philosophies.

Holbrook's character is the nominal leader of the community.  He chairs the meetings that are held, he is the auctioneer in selling off the Mormon's second wife, he's the 'minister' that presides over Rumson's wedding to Elizabeth.  He's an experienced miner and he's no duff.  He is however, second string compared to Rumson throughout the play (and not only because Rumson is the main character). Rumson is older, more experienced, and more certain than Holbrook.  Holbrook chairs the meeting, but even dead drunk Rumson is the one that takes action.  Holbrook is an observer.  Rumson is a doer.

Despite the fact that Holbrook defers to Rumson, then, he still doesn't answer with, "Why, how is that, can you explain that remark?"  No.  He doesn't understand it, and therefore he disagrees with it.

So it goes.  The same impulse that compels Holbrook to admit that he needs confirmation also restrains Holbrook from confessing that he doesn't immediately understand what Rumson says.  Perhaps, more accurately, Holbrook thinks he understands when in fact he doesn't.  From Holbrook's perspective, he hasn't made an error when he disagrees.

But you have to look hard to find anyone aware of the play that is standing on Holbrook's side, here.  It's plain to the audience that Holbrook doesn't understand.  Rumson has said something deep, too deep for Holbrook's analysis, even though it is the same position Rumson has been arguing throughout the play. Rumson contends that he's the only sane man in No Name City.  He's seen what civilization does and he sees the future that's coming.  He knows full well that he's one of the people going nowhere.  Moreover, Rumson expects that Holbrook won't understand.  Most of the time, no one understands.

It changes nothing for him.  The thing is the thing, and it doesn't rely on Holbrook's agreement.

This is a blog and I write things here.  I am as clear as I can be, but I will never be clear enough for Holbrook.  Writing is not done for the Holbrooks of this world, who think that reading and investigating the world is about making a choice between agreement or disagreement.  Holbrook is assessing the wrong issue.

I have on my shelf a copy of Paint Your Wagon, the film, that worries so many people who think it is about whether or not Eastwood can sing, or should have sang.  I am indifferent to that.  I am concerned with Logan's thesis, or play, the one he produced first for Broadway before taking it to film, as is always the process. Logan hasn't produced a thesis from which I am set to cherry-pick.  He did not include a line in the play that doesn't belong there.  He did not include an argument in the play that does not address the thesis. It isn't a question of what do I agree with, or what do I not agree with.  I am indifferent to agreement.

My concern is to consider why Logan decided to place his story in a boom town.  What is the relevance for the wagons being painted?  What does that signify?  It was all written to make a point.  None of it can be dismissed.  It is all important.  It is all relevant.

I have done the same here.  I am making a point about blog posts, and about my writing of them.  I don't care that the reader agrees.  The response, "I agree with some of what Alexis writes, but not all of it," is pure Holbrook.  I am not Holbrook.  I am Rumson.  I don't care that the reader agrees.

I do care that the reader understands, in so far that I am carefully choosing the words, the sentences and the order of my position, to enable understanding to occur.  Valuable comments are those that begin, "I understand, and that's why I ..." - or - "I don't understand ..."

Those caught up in the concerns of agreement have set themselves to distort the picture so that it fits the frame.  The picture is still, more or less, the same picture.  It is distorted, but it is still recognizable.  If some of what I have said is agreeable, and some of what I have said is disagreeable, we have a distorted picture. Understanding, on the other hand, is gone.  The picture is distorted.  Nothing proper or meaningful can be discerned from a distorted picture.

Ah, Insight

Recently, I made the argument that if the Players were to get up from the table and desert the DM, there would be no game.  I inferred that because the DM does all the work, the DM has more to lose in the power struggle.  Others proposed that if the DM refuses to play, that the Players would have no game.  The inference there is that the DM has all the power, and the Players must submit to that power.  Finally, still others argued that it is balance of power, and the inference there is that both the Players and the DM are two sides of a see-saw, and that both must agree or there is no game.

Three philosophies.

However, what is actually important is not which of these philosophies correctly defines who has power, or how much they have.

What is important is which of these philosophies, if embraced, produces the BEST game.  Best being defined here as most pleasant, most productive and least oppressive.

Anger Is My Default

Anger is my default position.

It isn't that I've stopped thinking.  Nor is it that I like being angry.  My anxiety levels increase, I become less productive, I'm focused on the wrong things and I end up writing a lot of things I wish I hadn't written.

I try not to be angry.  I tell myself it isn't worth the effort, I tell myself that I should let it go, or that there are always going to people of a particular type in the world, there's nothing I can really do about it and that I'm better off just moving on and talking about something else.  I tell myself that I'm writing a book and that I need to save my energy for that.  I tell myself that I need to sell a book, and that it's better if people like me, even really stupid, ignorant, obviously misdirected people with bad upbringings.  They have money too.  And I tell myself that getting angry only makes a lot of smart, educated, decent people very uncomfortable, because they've been raised in a life environment where abuse or cruelty weren't common behaviors.

I tell myself these things.  Then I start writing, and it just goes.

I saw a lot of cruelty over the years.  Cruelty to me, but more towards affecting my outlook, cruelty to others.  Seems I've never been able to get away from cruelty to other people.  There's something about me in reality (not online, where the reader can't hear my voice or see my face or, probably, smell whatever pheromone I give off) that makes people want to tell me their troubles.  And people have a lot of troubles. All over.  For some reason, I seem to care about all that.  Yet, because my default is to get angry, I'm really only contributing to all those troubles.

I have an incident on this blog where I just friggin' lose it.  Every now and then.  Sometimes, I leave it up. Sometimes, I feel compelled to pull it down.  But always, always, I want to bury the blog, tell the whole environment to go fuck itself, and settle into an existence where I am not compelled to deal with people who are just so ... stupid.

Here I am, though, not doing that.

Yesterday, I got pissed.  Really, really pissed.  It was in part because of a passage I wrote Monday that was freaking brilliant, but has since been impossible to follow up on.  Like making a five hundred mile dash to the coast in record time, only to find there's no fucking ship to board.  I know what I want to say; I know the details of what needs to be said ... I just don't know how to say it in a way that stupid people won't go pffft! what a load of bollucks.  It's not a load of bollucks.  I know that because the research behind it comes from the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship of the Department of North Carolina State University.  The research convinced me, changed my mind, broke my brain open and was responsible for the writing I did Monday.

But ... the research is accusatory.  It says, certain people in positions of power are abusive and self-serving because they're self-promoting, ambitious and charismatic, and they're compensating for perceived misfortune in their lives by promoting an atmosphere of cruelty and 'fun' through emotional sadism.  And this speaks directly to my experience with DMs who abuse their power, promote player-vs.-player, intimidate their players, crow about the greatness of their worlds and dismiss player agency of any kind while defending the right to be deceptive.

I'm working incredibly hard not to make the book accusatory.  I'm washing out everything in the book that might carry some of the stink of this blog, that is extraordinarily accusatory.  That is fine for this venue, but I don't think that works for a book that is meant to helpful.  So I am trying to find the right language.  I'm trying to say, "here are the pitfalls, don't be a dick," in a positive way.  I'm trying to do it, while at the same time being detailed and thorough about the behavior of a dick, because I have that research that some very smart people worked on to explain exactly why dicks are dicks.

So this is in my mind.  I'm angry that I can't find the way to write it.  I'm angry because there are trolls telling me that I'm a bad writer when clearly I'm not, and even more clearly I'm tearing myself into pieces trying to be a better writer.  I'm angry because there's ordinary crap going on in my life that is being added to the pile. And anger is my default position.

Then there comes this fellow who tells me that the idea that the GM or the players would ever come meekly to a campaign, asking to play, is ludicrous.  At once I recognize that this asshole's demeanor is obviously so outwardly dismissive of the least sort of weakness that people who aren't blowhards immediately feel it isn't worth approaching him.  In his universe, no one is ever hesitating before sitting down to run, or asking to be part of a campaign.  In his universe, the very idea is a tremendous laugh riot - and he said so, in the next comment.  The next comment that says, "I am looking forward to your book.  While I'm sure there will be things I disagree with, I am also certain that there will be insights I have not considered."

Right there, I just fucking lost it.

Anger is my default position.  I wasn't half as angry with him as I was with my own frustration at not being able to hammer those 'insights' (hard-fought, acquired research from expert sources) into language that guys like this might open their eyes at.  But that is where the anger went.  The whole condescension of it sent me off.  "I'm sure you'll write a cute little book, with a few cute points, but I'll keep my superior point of view just the same."

So it goes.  I should be satisfied that he's going to read the book, right?  It's a buck or two in my pocket.  I should shut up, and take his money, and not worry in the least about whether he agrees with the book or not. I should concentrate on being liked, so many people will buy the book, because they think I'm a great guy and that I'm someone readers can identify with.  I should not get angry.

Unfortunately, I am not, in actual fact, a person that readers can identify with.  I am not the common man.  I am not one of the boys.  I'm not interested in the things ordinary people are interested in.  And I am not basing my writing about RPGs on my opinion.  I'm basing my writing on difficult-to-interpret research that has been telling me for months now that many of the things I do as a DM are wrong.

You, the reader, and I, the writer, wouldn't be friends in real life.  You would almost certainly really bug me. I would probably be bored by the things you like to do, or the things you're interested in, and I doubt very much that anything I do on a day-to-day basis would impress you.  You and I, we have nothing in common. Beginning with the fact that I don't think that our having things in common means shit where it comes to the business relationship between us.

That business relationship is based on one thing.  You have money.  I'm working to write a book that is worth that money.  The book won't make you feel good about the game you're running.  Nor is the book going to give you a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings.  It is going to describe in an advanced way how to improve your Dungeon Mastering.

We don't have to be friends for that.  In fact, you don't really want a friend for that, do you?  I think at this point, where it comes to your DMing, a friend isn't going to be much help.  A friend won't be honest.

I will be.  And it will hurt.

The Sides of Power

I am, at the moment, having an argument with myself.

On the one hand, I firmly believe that the DM's privilege of running a campaign is dependent upon the players.  The DM is effectively 'chosen,' or in the very least tolerated by the players, enabling the DM to have authority and run the campaign.  If the players don't wish to play, they can shut the campaign down by not turning up.

Of course, there are many DMs who believe the contrary.  They are responsible for their own campaign, they do the work, the players are lucky to be able to play, etc.  "No one 'grants' me the right to be a DM, I earn that by doing all the work," etc.

There are going to be the inevitable fence-sitters who rise up now and say, "It's both, yes, it's everyone working together ..."  Cue sappy tone of voice and bright shiny eyes staring into the distance, thinking of a time when the whole world joins in union to live life in perfect harmony.

I don't believe it's 'both.'  I think that's a very convenient evasion of the fact that the players can force the DM's game to end, while the DM cannot force the players to play.  Of course, the DM can also force the game to stop, but does that really make sense?  The DM works on the world so the moment can come to play and the DM says, "Well, fuck you all, I don't like you, we're not playing."

Naturally, the DM can always wander off and find a different group of players.  Except that the DM will still be beholden to them to run the campaign, so it's really just trading off either bosses or consumers for the DM's product.  The latter there, however, certainly makes it sound like the DM is in control, the DM has produced something and now it's being flogged around to find buyers who are ready to buy into the product and play.  The recent culture has even embraced the term, "buy in," in order to reflect this premise that the onus is on the players to bow down and acquiesce to the DM's product.

And thus, the argument I am having with myself.

It doesn't take much thought to recognize that any product that is provided to anyone to satisfy a need is, in fact, the making of money from servicing people ... or as George Orwell called the restaurant business in Down and Out in Paris and London, a servile practice, one that is done by a slave.  So there you have it. The DM may be in charge of the product, but the product itself is fundamentally one of servility, in that the player's needs - for a good game, presumably - are being satisfied in exchange for their attention and appreciation.  The DM might go find another party to play in the DM's game, but this is done hat in hand, with the proviso that the DM is reduced to begging.

Aha, says the opposition, doesn't the player also come begging?  Doesn't the player plead with the DM, "Please let me come play in your game?"  It certainly looks like the DM has all the keys, and all the power, and that if the DM closes the door, the player is out of luck.  It's not like a restaurant, because the DM can close the doors if you don't happen to dress properly or if you speak incorrectly or if you're just plain annoying to the other customers.

Of course, you can just start your own campaign.

That leads, I think, to the difficulty of starting a campaign.  If DM's are truly 'talent,' then they offer something that you, the player, cannot obtain on your own.  You can't make food that tastes as a good as what a restaurant can provide, or in the very least you can't provide it for yourself as conveniently, in your car on the way home.  For that privilege, you're ready to eat absolute shit ... and in the same light, showing up on a Friday night without having done even as much as rewriting your character sheet, you're all set to play having done no prep work at all.

So the DM is in control, nyet?  The DM has the talent, the DM is the gatekeeper, the DM sets all the rules for behavior and what restrictions the game will follow ... and the player had better just suck that down and be grateful they're allowed to sit in the DM's hallowed presence.

I guess where my issue lies is that if the DM does have anything remotely like that attitude, they're more than likely to behave in a manner that demands their own importance, including intimidating and influencing players to make them grateful when they are not, or to demand that the attention at the table be directed at themselves, while DMs pursue a set of behaviors that are set to compensate for their miserable lives outside the game, or their miserable childhood, or their personal enjoyment derived from killing player characters, or watching players fight one another, like Elvis dragging in hookers to wrestle each other while offering more money to the one that gouges deeper.  There are many DM's who silently ingratiate themselves on their own importance while cheerfully directing players to participate in a different fantasy game, one that is at the same time gladiatorial and sycophantic, at the expense of players who have been browbeat into believing that they are lucky as hell just to be in the company of this great fellow who has deigned to work so hard to make the game possible.

THAT, I think, is the central reason why players have problems in games ... it is because they are mistreated by DMs who simply fail at being human beings, who manage still to delude players into thinking there are no other options, that the players have got to take attend this bastard's game because there are no other games available, and because it is just so gosh darn hard to create a world of their own where everyone plays cooperatively and has a good time.  I also think these miscreants running their campaigns are advertisements for every dirty bastard of a player who wants gladiatorial games and are more than prepared to by sycophantic in order to get them.

It isn't so much that the players necessarily ARE in control, but they could be, any time they're willing to cease putting up with this shit together, which they could do by speaking up during a campaign against both the bastards in the player role and the bastards in the DM's chair.

But then, we've been crying for some time now that any time we're willing to get out into the street as a group and threaten to tear down the fucking government, the government will change their tune, but as long as we sit quietly and suck our own tongues down our throats, the corruption and criminal behavior of politicians will continue unchecked.  The pitch for unilateral action is about as successful as waiting for a Republican to admit that perhaps God didn't say fuck all about abortion in the Bible because God had never heard of it.

Still, we're not talking about all of society here.  We're talking about three or four adult people sitting at a table saying, "You know what, it's time you, the DM, started running a game we want to play in," and seeing what happens.

Goodbye Initiative

As a reminder for the reader, let me preface this post by saying that I use 12-second combat rounds, I use a scale of 5-foot hexes for movement and that in a combat rounds a normal person moves at a rate of 5 hexes.

That said, those of us who have done our time in wargames have seen tables like this:

However you may happen to measure your combat rounds, or the movement of one character vs. another as they both attack the minotaur or whatever other creature they happen to be fighting, tell me this:  why don't we all automatically use tables like this all the time?

I think the answer is obvious.  Players don't like them.  I don't think DMs are overly fond of them, either. But really, really gritty wargamers love them.  Why?  Because it really gets down into the meaty, deep, simultaneous mess that is instant to instant uncertainty.  The reason why it's uncertainty is because, from the games I used to play that incorporated this sort of table, both sides had to write down their entire movement for the round BEFORE any of it was played out.

That way, both sides can use their weapons, spells, bombs, tanks, etc., at the same time.  Goodbye, initiative.  Hello major pain in the ass.

This is the answer to turn-based combat.  Everyone starts at the first segment and progresses forward, and if both attack at the same instant (demonstrated here in half movements, which will mean more for those following my blog and combat stylings than the majority of the readers), then they do.

This is hard for spellcasters that have to make absolutely sure no one is in their way when they cut loose with a spell.   If everyone is sent to the four corners of the room to write out their orders silently before handing them over to the DM (or even better, another party entirely that keeps the DM honest and doesn't play at all), then the spellcaster starts getting nervous.  After all, suddenly he or she doesn't know where the fighter is going to be.  At the same time, the fighter doesn't have a clue where the spell is going to land, either ... or the thieves' arrow shot, or the grenade missile thrown by the assassin.

Fact is, parties SAY they don't like this turn system because its cumbersome and slow and inconvenient and as many other tension-alternative words they can find in their thesauri ... but suppose we found a way to get rid of all that?  Suppose, a player could punch their move into a game system (there's your third administrator, a computer!) in as long as it took to punch a tweet on your cellphone ... and then the map was instantly created for everyone?  If we got rid of the 'cumbersome' problem, would players embrace this system?

Hell no.  What players like - love, even - is the benefit of 'group mind' that turn-based combat systems offer. The round may be 12 seconds, but everyone seems to have a lot of time to deliberate between what everyone does. They also have time to ask questions that reasonably they wouldn't even have time to think.

For example, in the on-line campaign going on right now, one of the character's asked the harmless question, "Does it look like he can reach out 2 hexes with that axe?"  A perfectly normal in-combat sort of question any player would ask.  And unhesitatingly, I answered, because that's just understood; player's ask questions like that, and the DM answers.  Only ... in this case, the actual axe hasn't been swung yet.  So how does the character know?

Now, I'm not saying the character couldn't make a judgement ... but would they really, jumping around and getting into position to throw and attack, really have time to make a judgement?  I don't know what the reader knows about cognitive tunneling ... it is really interesting stuff.  I've been reading on it because even during mild stress, this can occur - and DM's experience occasionally more than a little stress.  Given that this isn't theory, this is fact, it is probable that in no way, with heart rate soaring and potential terror in dealing with a creature 8 feet tall, 425 lbs and holding a giant axe, that the character is going to be thinking all that clearly.

We ignore all that because this is a game.  And a convenient game for the players.  If the players want to have five minutes to figure out which guy the fighter has to attack so as to be out of the way of the mage's acid arrow, then everyone acquiesces to the irrationality of it all and goes along.  After all, the bad guy's have their own group mind, haven't they?  The bad guys are all the DM.

Really, the group mind of the players is harder for them than it is for me, because I am already in agreement with myself - most of the time.

I don't have a problem with time in the game being mutable, and I don't feel any requirement to install the turn system shown at the top of this post.  I just think it's important to understand WHY we don't want to use it, and what using it would do to the interactivity of the players in the game.  Calling it 'cumbersome' is an easy non-answer to those questions.  The question deserves more than an answer of, "It's hard."

If we're not going to use it, let's not use it for the right reasons.

Intuition

Over the weekend, I obtained an artist for the book cover of How to Run: An Advanced Guide to Managing Role-playing Games.  Perhaps I might be able to replace the image at the left sometime in a month or two.  Things are steadily moving forward.  I finished a complete rewrite of the second section, Mastering Yourself As DM, from which an excerpt appears below:

"It is not so much that we learn lessons from our errors.  Rather, it is that by repeating our errors — and we will repeat them — we adapt ourselves to circumstances our errors create.  We learn to recognize when we’re making the self-same error again, and we teach ourselves what to do once the error is made.

This can be both good and bad.  On the one hand, it means that no one handles the chaos resulting from our errors as well as ourselves, so in creating the error we also create a familiar, even comfortable circumstance.  But in getting used to that circumstance, we are tempted never to change.  We gain a fondness for our mistakes that translates to pride, which then demands a set of rationalizations to ensure that these are not mistakes, but instead are sensible courses of action.

Improvement begins with stepping out of our comfort zone.  When a novice first learns, everything is uncomfortable.  As time goes on, the novice adapts, comprehends, then eventually — with familiarity — relaxes into a confident, self-assured groove, even if the confidence is unwarranted.  That is why confidence, and fundamentally all comfort in one’s knowledge, is to be distrusted.  That doesn’t say that if we think we’re right, we probably aren’t — that’s a misnomer.  What it does say is that even if we think we’re right, we should still walk over the ground again.  We should still consider the details and the evidence behind our actions on the premise that we might be wrong.  The dangers of confidence are not in the certainty that we are right.  The danger is in being certain that we can’t be wrong.  We can always be wrong.  The circumstances may not be what we suppose.  That is why they have to be reviewed.  Not just for a few sessions.  Not just until we’ve been running the game for a year.  But every time.  Every Time.  Until the process of reviewing itself becomes intrinsic to running the game.

In reviewing what we do, we steadily collect a series of patterns that we come to associate with game play.  To the novice, every game session and every game group seems new and indistinguishable — like the paired images in puzzles where the reader is challenged to find the six differences between the left and right panels.  On the surface, both images are the same.  It takes examination to see that the image on the left is not quite the image on the right.  The man is wearing one black shoe in the left picture, and two white ones in the right.  The woman is carrying a square handbag in the left picture, and a round one in the right.  It is in this manner that we learn to distinguish details, which aids in the process of running.

My behavior on a given night, or my player’s behavior, may look random.  The players may look accepting or enthusiastic.  And I might take that as fact if I were looking cursively at their faces, or if I were dismissing many of the things that might have been said.  Being alert, I might recognize clues in a player’s behavior that might suggest a rising dissatisfaction throughout the game.  This is not something I would want to miss.

I am an experienced DM.  I have, as I said, played thousands of hours, and I have collected a very large set of game-playing patterns, so when something happens during a game, I have my ‘training’ to fall back on.  I understand how that training works.  It means that I must trust my gut and my intuition when it’s telling me something is wrong.  Nothing may appear wrong.  My intuition might tell me things that, as far as I can rationally tell, don’t make sense.  Yet, intuition occurs on a subconscious level ... and it is on that level that I begin to sense that something is going wrong, or that the players aren’t ‘engaged’ when everything else suggests they are.

There are reasons this might be so.  I always remember that I’m dealing with people whose motivation for participating, or their mood, is unknown to me.  The worse their mood, the less evidence I may have for it — because people suppress their feelings, particularly if they’re going out in public to be with others to play a game where everyone is expected to have a good time.  The last thing a moody, miserable, tense player worried about their job or their relationship wants to convey is their real emotional state.  Yet, though they might be moody, I don’t notice.  I’m vigorously pursuing the processes of being a DM, and ramping the emotional state of my players upwards.  I’m busy.

My intuition, however, might.  The player’s mood, and other things, might bear similarity to something that happened twenty years ago ... but I don’t really remember the events of twenty years ago.  I wouldn’t think, for example, “Ah, this is like when the other party I ran in the 1980s encountered that thing that did that stuff to them.”  Instead, what I get is a feeling that something is wrong ... and that I need to change my tactics, even if consciously I don’t see a reason to change.

It is very important that I don’t question this feeling, but to go with it when it occurs.  The common tendency is to doubt oneself, or dismiss the feeling as baseless, and then go on making things worse despite having obtained a warning.  Part of that is because changing mid-running is more uncomfortable than continuing with the chosen agenda.  Without solid evidence, it’s hard to convince ourselves that discomfort is preferable to comfort.  It only when discomfort is forced on us that we reconcile ourselves to managing it.

This intuitive understanding that something is wrong, derived from years of experience, is an identified connection in the brain that is called a ‘pattern match.’  It happens regularly to old hands in high stress occupations, such as the military, fire fighters and surgeons.  We can’t say what’s wrong — but we know something’s not right.  When this happens, the worst thing we can do is try to rationalize the feeling away, and allow our rational judgement to overrule our intuition.  In dangerous professions, that gets people killed.  In role-playing games, that starts fights.  It makes for bad blood.  It’s a session killer, and occasionally it can end a whole campaign.  Intuition needs to be trusted.

Those matching patterns supply another measure of vitality to my campaign — the power to project those mental simulations that I earlier discussed.  It is from that collection of patterns that I create those mental ‘movies’ that I have in my head as I play.  Having seen so many versions of the present, and the way the present becomes the future, my imagination is supplied by thousands of previous experiences that I can draw on, both consciously and unconsciously.

In training myself to run games, then, I am training my perception to look for details; I am honing my comprehension not only in terms of what I can describe, but also in terms of what I habitually detect; and finally, I am projecting that training into the near future to enable me to manage it more efficiently once that future arrives.

I don’t dream that I can create a pristine environment.  Nor do I think I can control my players’ reactions as well as I’d like.  Not without dictating to them their reactions, at least … and that wouldn’t give me the game I want.  I may be able to reduce the distractions occurring around me, but there will always be distraction.  To over-manage distractions would be, again, to undermine the player experience.

The only real solution has been to train myself to accept an imperfect environment, uncontrolled players and distractions as a normal part of gaming.  To increase my ability to DM, in short, I have run a lot of games.  I have learned with practice to master the various elements, and to install that mastery into my DMing by repeating things that have worked, by being realistic about things that haven’t, and by adapting myself to the demands of the game, rather than circumventing the game in order to suit myself.

Role-playing is noise and mayhem.  It is rules and details and memory work.  These things can be learned.  Very young children are taught the alphabet; and this is something that becomes utterly natural to all of us.  If the reader takes a moment and scans through the letters, there’s no need to remember that ‘s’ comes after ‘r.’  It just does.

But if the challenge were, by tomorrow, to be able to rattle off the letters of the alphabet backwards, we all know how to rise to that challenge.  For a time, yes, we’d have to think consciously that ‘g’ would now come after ‘h’ — but with repetition, saying the alphabet backwards would come as easily as saying it forwards.

If the goal is to be a better DM, then the solution is obvious.  We must pursue good habits rather than bad ones.  It will be better if steps are taken to fix the game’s principles in our minds, or that we engage the players, or that we make everyone at the table understand what behavior is acceptable — but the overall quality of anyone’s actual running will only come from doing it, and examining rigorously after the fact what was done right, and what was done wrong, then repeating what was done right, and refraining from what was done wrong."

Demi-Gods & Gods

I have discussed this subject before, but not for a long, long time, and at any rate it gives me an opportunity to cease tearing people down.  About time, huh?

I don't know what I can do about making people more familiar with my world.  Fact is, the world is so deep, so extensive, and incorporates so many different philosophies, as I write them out on the blog they steadily disappear into the backlog of time, until they're so lost in the hundreds of thousands of words I've written that I can't find them, either.  I suppose what I should try to do is write a single, encompassing overview of everything ... a few sentences, then a link to an argument I've made.

Sounds dull, though.  I shall give it some thought.

Yesterday, to update the sage study descriptions I'm adding to the new work blog, I had to make a distinction between "demi-gods" and "gods."  It's not a distinction that many would feel the need to make, and for most, it is a reference to importance.  Zeus, for instance, would be a 'God' while someone minor, like Atlas, a titan, would be a 'demi-god.'  Or something along those lines.

My world, however, being based on earth history, culture and geography, includes the notion of the Christian God and Allah, formless deities that don't fit the Zeus appearing as a Bull to sleep with Europa type myths. From my perspective, the dividing line between demi-gods and gods is divided between supernatural type beings that have form and resemble living creatures (demi-gods) and omnipresent entities without form that comprise everything that exists in the world (gods).  Once I wrote about how one tear drop of Isis was said to be the source of the Nile, giving the sense that the Goddess Isis was of such incomprehensible size that a mere tear could form the mightiest river in the Egyptian universe - that is, too big to lust after the cute girl on the riverbank.  This is what I mean by 'god.'

A better distinction might be found, however, in the motivations of a demi-god versus the motivations of a god.  After all, quite reasonably the Christian god was a mere demi-god, particularly in the days when he was called Yahweh and was the son of a Sumerian goddess, Ana, the Mesopotamian counterpart of Isis, that was - according to the Sumerians - the mothergoddess of all that exists in the world, and from which everything and everyone comes.  The Sumerians perceived that the birth of the universe would obviously come from a woman, and to facilitate that myth created a rather strange tale about how the mother gives birth to a son (Ana to Yahweh) who then matures and impregnates the mother, who then kills the child before giving birth to the same son, over and over.  The reader can find this myth appearing again and again, for it was very popular.  Ana, incidentally, is the root of In-anna (also nin-anna), the same Goddess that's mentioned in the Dieties and Demigods, a 3rd millenium BCE goddess that was a re-incarnation of the original Ana that goes back to around 8,000 BCE (usually associated with white, hence the 'white goddess').  The name pops up all over, in the Irish Mother Goddess Anann, in the Greek mythology as Di-ana (where she's downgraded as the opposite of Greek Apollonian male-dominated pantheon to be goddess of the Moon), in Britain as Brit-anna, mother goddess of the island, and pleasantly as St. Anne, the mother of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus (I can't resist giving a 'religious' link to that last, since it always shows how little research believers do).  Polytheism is so much fun.

So supposing that Yahweh was once a figure such as Thor or Odin or any of the other figures that people like to think of has having an appearance and personality, how was it that Yahweh broke forward to becoming the omnipresent, omnipotent entity without fault or substance, that no longer needs to speak to Moses's in this world?  Today, he's got Jesus' mother for that stuff.  Well, my theory, as it applies to my game world (and what matter does it have otherwise, it's all make-believe anyway), would be that enough people believed in him hard enough, putting him over the top of God status.  Allah is really just another name for him, and the Jews were the group that gave him his grand start, so most of the time where it comes to one great god, Yahwah, or Jehovah, or just 'God,' is the top being.

Of course, another 'god' might be Shiva, if we want to recognize that Krishna is the demi-god in the mythological salt-mines, and Buddha can probably be said to have made the grade, and for my money I'm prepared to grant major status to the old gods of Cthulhu, being that they haven't actually appeared yet on this plane of existence.  Perhaps they made this plane of existence, and Yahweh is a recent player on it, getting credit for another god's work.  Still, Yahweh is certainly a god now, for there's very little chance (in the 17th century at least, when my world occurs) of his belief structure being toppled.

Now, a demi-god has trouble in that department.  If we stipulate that a god's influence, power, strength, survival even, is dependent upon the number and dedication of that demi-gods worshippers, than certainly there are some supernatural figures in the world that are just getting by on the local interest of a village or two in New Guinea (and elsewhere, obviously).  Heck, it is tough going for these demi-gods.  They can barely get enough food and blood from the paltry sacrifices the villages can afford annually.  And there's always the danger that the next villages over will rise up and kill everyone in the valley, and where is the demi-god then? Existence hanging on a thread, that's that real deal.

Given that all you've got to grant your immortality is the survival of a few crummy villages, are you really going to refrain from talking directly to a shaman or two?  No, you're going to talk to those boys every day, and give them a lot of direct intervention.  Thing is, you don't have much power, so your intervention is pretty low-key, but you do what you can.  You stir them up against threats, such as a party coming over the hill, and you talk to the party as straight as you can in the off chance that the party might get on your side.  Then again, if you see that damn cross, the one that says that Yahweh johnny come lately bastard who's been getting all the hoopla lately is loved by this bunch of interlopers, you're going to get your people hopped up and freaked out pretty damn quick.  Screw reasoning with these strangers ... just kill them.  Kill them all.

And maybe, maybe if you luck out, and some genius gets born inside your religion, who can work as a crackerjack missionary, drawing together a lot of villages in your stead to worship you, you can pick up some extra powers and knowledge, and start aiding that fellow in conquering enemies and spreading your message throughout the countryside.  Maybe, just maybe, you might build yourself up to the point where a world-wide expansion could occur, because people from your personal bailywick set up colonies in the new world, or conquer their way through Africa ... but that's not likely to happen.  Chances are, you'll have your hey-day, then you'll experience a long, long demise as you watch areas you once mattered in disappear, and your shrines are torn down or buried, and the books telling of your greatness are lost and rewritten so badly that some other demi-god gets the credit, until finally there's just one old grandmother of 80 dying in a hut somewhere in the jungle, that no one listens to any more, with whom you have long conversations while you both wait for her to die, and you too.

Perspective.  D&D and gaming is all about perspective.  Not yours, but the potential perspective of any entity you can imagine.  Want to build your world into something stunning?  Gain some perspective.

Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Yesterday I was reminded that many of the wars in human history were fought by citizens who were not primarily Fighters (with a capital 'F').  This was meant to be insightful, suggesting that not all 'Fighters' exist only to fight, but that they might have other skills too ... but in fact, it fell short of the mark.  Far short.

I do wish people who don't understand history would stop treating the subject as disconnected trivia piled together like a billions of plastic meeple, with no link or rhyme nor reason behind a single fact about a particular general's 70-year life and what that's supposed to prove.  The willing myopia of role-players in particular, who compare Fighters (capital 'F') with historical examples as though somehow we're all supposed to forget that 'Fighter' is a game designation and that yes, there really were people who did 'fight' in history that were not primarily game designations.  I don't know what its supposed to prove anyway, because there were a lot of people who fought in history (small 'f') who had no meaningful secondary skills at all, as they were employed primarily as labourers.  It is as though my saying, "Some of the people in this theatre are doctors," somehow proves that doctor-hood is something that might automatically be conferred upon any of us because we happen to be inside the same constructed building.  Role-players are always making associations like that, as if to say "some samurai were also poets" means that samurai-poets are by no account rare, but were in fact extremely common, which is proved by the fact that the three samurai the speaker happens to know by name were poets, after all.  They all must have been, then.  We don't know, of course, if they were any good at being samurai, because they're in fact known best for their poetry, but that doesn't matter, because in the minds of people who spout meeple-generated bits of history, the word "samurai" is proof positive that every person with that title was a fuckin'-A fighter, just as every American marine is a fuckin'-A fighter today, because it must be so.

Because I do not like generalizations like this in my game, and used by players as 'evidence' that their characters are able to do this or that at will, because someone they imagine is very much like their character was able to do that in history, I came up with an answer for most of these arguments.  Mind you, this is a 'game answer,' which applies only to game designations and what game designations can do.  It does not apply to scattered ideals of actual human historical figures, or five-minutes research into the life of Genghis Khan, or whatever other disconnected idealized perception the reader might have about the whole of Islamic culture.  It is an answer that only applies to my specific game.  That answer is "no."

Now, I do run a very, very, very deep game.  And there is a chance that in my game a fighter could be a poet, or know about art history, or gods, or some other detail.  I posted all about that when I put my character background generator on my wiki, and wrote about what the generator's purpose is.  And no, I don't expect that every present reader of my blog today is going to be up on those posts, because they're old and it's hard to remember that I run a deep game and that I've been doing this for 35 years and that I've heard many, many, many arguments about classes and limitations of what Fighters are allowed to do and what a cleric is and what separates a mage from and illusionist and so on.  And I understand perfectly, there are many, many DMs in the world who in the last 35 years of running their worlds have managed to BUY a lot of shit from stores, and who have done exactly shit themselves, and are still running games thinking that this sort of argument about  Fighters not strictly being fighters but potentially having an ability to make stuff and know stuff still needs to be hashed out.  I understand that occasionally someone is going to assume that I'm just the same, that I've done no work, made no effort, offered no feature or system in my world that might address this sort of thing, and that I need to be educated by someone who has read all of 5% of my blog, and who has never, ever run in my world.

I get that.  From the outside, yes, I'm just as dumb as anyone else.  From the outside, my 35 years of experience count for exactly nothing.  Why should the reader think I have anything special to say?  Why shouldn't the reader suppose that the only reason why I make a statement about fighters not being poets is because I'm dead set against it.  After all, Tacitus was a general and he wrote books.  That means generals CAN be writers!  Hey, Lew Wallace was a general too, and he wrote a book.  Heck, that proves it.  All generals are writers.  And all D&D bloggers still have their head up their asses about imposing unfair restrictions on what a fighter can do.

All of them.  Every ... fucking ... one.

Don't try to tell me different.

Listen.  I want to try to insert this bauble inside the reader's head.  I have written two popular posts on this blog that were 10,000 words each, this one and this one.  More than 12 months and 2 years after they were written, they are consistently in my top 10 posts, right there in the side bar.  They're popular.  They are because it is clear I know what I am talking about.

I am now writing a book that is floating somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 words.  I'm still coming up with little side things that have to be added to it, so I think it will be longer.  This book is not going to be one of these shit-art-filled choke fests that WOTC has some hack spew out.  This book is going to address subjects that no game manufacturer would be comfortable discussing.  The content is going to blow the reader's conception wide open.  Because I know what I'm talking about.

There won't be a lot of half-assed arguments about what some historical figure did once upon a time that proves that players should get fan-serviced up the anus in the way that makes them giggle like fourteen-year-old girls.  The content is going to be deep, it's going to discuss frankly the problems of running, it's going to ask the reader to improve themselves in ways the reader will find extraordinarily difficult, and it's going to express exactly how that's done.  There won't be a page where the reader is thinking, "wow, he could have not bothered with this filler."  There won't be any pictures except the ones in the reader's head.

I hope it helps people run their games better.  And I hope it raises this juvenile level of dialogue, like I've heard many times, to questions about how gawd-damned hard it is to run this game well.

Nit-picking over the details is easy.  When do we get to talk of serious things?

Spoiled Rotten

John, who posts as jbeltman, added this comment to my work blog yesterday, leaving me to wonder if we have learned anything at all:

"What, fighters get no love? You mention clerics, magic users, etc but not the other classes. Was that just an oversight or are you restricting sages to these classes? I would prefer leaving the areas open to any class so that players can have any character concept they like. Like fighters who know about monster biology or famous arms and armour, or cultures and their military tactics, or art, science or poetry (think renaissance dandy or samurai poet), or religion and they love debating it; or thieves who know all about art and how much it is worth, or locks and mechanical devices."

Now, John's a good fellow, I have no wish to disparage the comment.  He is, after all, arguing for democracy, and the principle of enabling players to participate as they like.  It's noble, really.

Only, we went down this path, didn't we?  This was the sentiment that began somewhere in the early 80s and gained steam through national conventions and people who wanted to listen to players complain that thier characters weren't as powerful as mages and ... well, mages, and how we had to throw open the doors and embrace skills, not classes, because skills were more individual and friendly, and everyone could be the character they wanted to be, not the characters they were forced to be.  Yay.  Because the game is really about how I measure up to other people, it's about how important I am, and about how my personal needs to express myself need to be incorporated right into the game, for the good of everyone!  Because we know, when I get what I need, that makes me feel special, then that is always good for everyone.  That's why everyone needs to get what they need, so that I can too.

And so on until 4e spills squalling out of its mother's uterus, fully deformed and quite literally 'bloodied.'

So why didn't democracy work?  Well, to begin with, we began a system with skills that weren't all exactly the same value, so that power players quickly learned what were the strongest skills for the least cost.  RPG character construction follows exactly the same principles as Wall Street in that regard, or any other system in which the biggest rewards are given to those prepared to be the biggest, least morally compassed dicks.  This then left everyone else at the table as weaker than the biggest dicks playing, so to compensate they had to take the power options too, so that everyone's individuality ultimately became "the perfect path to sheeplehood" ... a process that was honed and refined right up through all the lovely 3.5 days.

This was then improved upon by getting rid of every skill or power that wasn't ridiculously powerful, then reducing everything in the game to meaningless proportions by giving beggars and little children living on the streets upwards of 200 hit points, and really tough monsters thousands of hit points, what with surges and special healing features and wands and god-given special compensations, until a battle between two ordinary citizens having a disagreement over bread prices could take all evening to play to its bloodied conclusion (all conclusions are necessarily bloody now, because bloody is a nice word, it works as a verb and a noun and an adverb and an adjective and ... heh heh heh, bloody - now you say it).

In reality, it isn't the expression of individuality that matters, that's just an euphemism for "When do I get what's coming to ME?"  John's comment above only seems to be about nobility and players liking things and having character development about samurai's loving poetry and so on.  The reality is that we see a rule like the one I proposed yesterday and a big part of our consciousness rushes towards the players in our campaign (because John was legitimately thinking about his players) suddenly moaning and complaining that the casters were getting all the pie, that the fighters and thieves and so on were getting shafted again, poor bloody fighters and their endless misery, standing in the rain and staring into the library at the mages and clerics having a great raucous time shouting phrases out of books and shimmying around in the glory of their superior knowledge.  Have I no love for fighters? John asks.  Hell no.  Freaking brain-dead meat-shields, I hope they get a sword stuck through their middles, spilling their weak-ass crybaby intestines so they spread like a carpet for the beautiful people to walk on.

For forty years players have been pounding their chests and simpering about what their character hasn't got, what their character needs to be happy, how unfair the game system and the world is to their character, blah blah blah, and for forty years the game industry has bent over backwards in absurd ways to compensate for what amounts to a shit load of poor moral fibre and the rectitude of a rectum.  This one cry and the service of it has irrevocably split the players into defensive clans, it has spoiled the continuity of the game, it has damned development, and it has now wasted two whole generations of children.  And still, there is the cry, there is the damnation of any system that says, for the sake of creating individuality, some characters can do this, while some characters can't.

Never mind that this is true for every class.  Never mind that the player can choose which class to play, or that options exist for a player to have more than one class at a time, so that the player can be a samurai poet (monk/bard) or a biology studying swordsman (fighter/druid) or a thief that knows about locks (um ... that would be just 'thief' - locking making is a secondary skill, not a field of knowledge).  The point isn't that the player CAN be those things, the point is that the player has a right to be those things in the way the player wants to be those things.  They want everything personally tailored for their personal satisfaction and their personal need, or else the thing is abusive, unloving, immoral, unacceptable and ultimately proof of poor game design.

And then everyone else, wanting no one to feel abused, answers "Yes, yes, you're right, I'm sorry, I'll redesign the game until you're happy. Okay, Veruca?  Okay?  Daddy loves you, yes he does!  And he will buy you squirrel, any squirrel you want ..."