Numbers

This has been a thought in my head since round about 1979; I've never sat down to write it, though I have remembered it from time to time.  I remembered it yesterday - and though it isn't new, as I just today found the same observation elsewhere on the net, I'm going to go ahead and write this anyway. Call it fan service.  The post below is based loosely on an essay by Isaac Asimov (but the conclusions are mine).

A 'number system' is a means of expressing calculations based upon the number of symbols used, in order to produce natural numbers - numbers used for counting.  We use what's call the 'decimal' number system, or base 10, in which ten symbols are employed: 0, 1, 2, 3 and so on.  The binary number system only uses two symbols, 0 and 1.

So let's take a number, say "54."  We don't normally think of it this way but the structure of the number represents two columns: the "5" is in the first column and the "4" is in the second column. Express in scientific notation, the first column equals 5 x 101 while the second column equals 4 x 10 to the zero power (100).  Anything to the zero power is equal to 1.  Feel free to read further on exponents on Wikipedia if you so desire.

Let's say you want to multiply 18 by 3.  If you weren't doing this though the use of a tool, you would start by multiply 3 by 8.  You would then divide the product by by 10, putting down a "2" in the 101 column and a "4" in the 100 column.  Then you would multiply 3 by 1 - and since the "1" is already in the 101 column you would again divide by 10 and add the product, "3", to that column:

Simple stuff.

The principle is the same with a 2-based number system, only then the columns are based on 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and so on.  In ten-based numbers this translates to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on.  Written in 2-based numbers, however, this is 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 and 100000.  Each column outwards from the right represents an exponent of 2.

If we want to translate "54" into a 2-based system we would begin by dividing 54 by 32 (1 with a remainder of 22), then dividing 22 by 16 (1 with a remainder of 6), then dividing 6 by 4 (1 with a remainder of 2) and finally dividing 2 by 2 (with  no remainder).  We don't need the "8" column (23) and we don't need the "1" column (20).  Let me express the number using the same sort of table as above:

This is old hat for a lot of you - but believe it or not, some people have never stumbled across this before.  Others took this in school but never really got it, you know?  Some people aren't getting it now, but  - well, we do our best.

So 54 expressed in a binary number system equals "110110."

Very well.  Let's try multiplying six times nine in a 13-based number system.  We typically think of 6 x 9 as "54;" but in a 13 based number system, the columns are 131 and 130, or "13" and "1."

Therefore, we start by dividing 54 by 13, not 10; this gives us 4 with a remainder of 2.  The 2 then fits into the 130 column, so our product is 42.  9 x 6 = 42.

This was pointed out to Douglas Adams, who answered, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13."  Pity.  This is the sort of thing that comes back to bite writers in the ass.  We sit at our desk, stare into the garden and concoct a number - and then it turns out somewhere down the line that the number means something.

Personally, I choose to disregard Adams' explanation.  Obviously, the number did not come into his head at random.  It was placed there by a 13-fingered God who was trying to send a message to the modern world.  The universe may not fundamentally make any sense, as Arthur Dent noted, but it isn't because 9 x 6 doesn't add up to 42.  It is because God has more fingers on one hand than he has on the other.  God is a freak.  God is an outcast among his own people, creating this world in order to assuage his deep-seated need for both affection and total obedience.  He is a shallow, hurting, abused boy stuck in his room, afraid to go out where he will be taunted and ridiculed, so instead he hides and haphazardly mis-fashions a world (his left hand, the Left Hand of God, has the extra finger and winds up fucking up everything the right hand tries to build) while we remain blissfully unaware of this all-too-important defect.

And millions of Adams' fans missed it.  Perhaps the greatest theological proof in the universe and people missed it!

God must be so pissed.

The Tutorials Are Available Now

We're Live.

Here are descriptions of the three classes I'm offering on how to be a better Dungeon Master.

I have no idea what the demand might be.  For anyone who wishes to buy in, I'm prepared to begin arranging classes for Thursday or Friday - as I feel some preliminary communication and sorting out will be needed on the internet (we can communicate through Twitter or Facebook), to ensure we feel comfortable and it's not a mental shock when we get started.  My first few classes in each subject will undoubtedly be a steep learning curve, so I'll be motivated to ensuring that those who step up will get their money's worth. 

Brochure Preview

As I said on the podcast, I like to play Show and Tell.

Someone properly in business would wait until all three outlines for the classes were completed, but I feel that in a world full of internet it is silly not to get feedback.  It is equally silly not to recognize that I rely on the good wishes of others and as such, it serves us both to be forthcoming and direct, rather than push to be as impressive as possible.  If I am impressive, that happens because I am flexible and vulnerable, as well as dedicated and passionate.

So, here is the first "brochure" for the first class that I proposed last week.  What do people think?

Too bright, too flashy, there's a spelling mistake in the second column, a word is missing (there probably is but the grammar check doesn't catch it and I can't see it).  Perhaps it is too icy cold, perhaps too wordy, perhaps not clear enough.

I think it is encouraging.  But I can always stand a little criticism (after all, the content provides that a DM should promote trust and enable the players).

Now, there should be a podcast today but we're having a few technical problems.  My Soundcloud account is, apparently, limited in minutes.  I would never have started in Soundcloud if I'd known - I presumed that because it was Google-run, it would work like Youtube.  Nope.

So we're adapting the fifth podcast to run on Youtube.  I hope.  I'm told we should have it up tomorrow.

UPDATE:

Following the discussion in the comments below, I'd like to suggest this as an alternative:

Homework Time

Tell me in the comments section,

What are the rules that restrict a DM from telling the party what to do.


This question came up as I was working on the lesson plan for my tutoring; and I think it is very telling that after a day and a mess of page views (so I know people have seen the question) that there is a hesitancy in answering.  Readers know me well and naturally do not want to be 'caught' giving the wrong answer.

But is there a 'right' answer?  I don't think that there is.  Yet this is a question that every DM must face and overcome - and has, if they have been a DM for any period of time.  I know that many will feel that their personal solution to the problem will be something that others will see as errored and wrong - but we all know there is no absolute and defined rule to this query.  Therefore, I encourage people to speak up and express themselves: we cannot change the universe if we're not occasionally ready to stand up and speak against 'correctness.'

What Matters

"Then there's Alexis again. Damn it, Alexis. If you're a regular reader of his blog you've been subjected to all manners of posts on the fantasy economy via the man's extensive and elaborate trade tables (here's an example). The point often missed by folks, including me when I first started looking at them (*cue eyes glazing over*) is that they're NOT about modeling 'reality' or a 'realistic' economy. They're just about modeling an economy . . . period."

And imagine - some people don't like being talked about.  This is from JB's B/X Blackrazor post from Wednesday.  I think it is an accurate description of what I'm trying to do.  To accomplish the goal takes exhaustive charts and number crunching; it does take tremendous amounts of work on my part.  I am well aware that the value of doing this escapes others.  Surely, it would be better to apply that effort to the development of the adventure or to non-player character creation.  Why waste time with a bunch of figures that only translate to numbers that can be generated on the fly?

That perception is understandable.  Certainly the makers of the game saw the world in exactly those terms.  Certainly the time that has been spent by the makers of games has concentrated far more on "what" to buy rather than how much that thing should cost.  Moreover, we as a society have very, very little understanding of how the economy works in the world we actually live in.

For example, take this document that was offered by one of the commenters on JB's blogpost, called Grain Into Gold.  It is a very rational document.  It attempts to establish a basis for the production, distribution and consumption of goods by starting with grain production, in order to give the user a handle on how an economy is 'grown.'

Quite rationally, he begins thusly:

"At an overly simplified level, farming requires two bushels of seed sown to produce eight bushels of seed harvested on an acre of land. This varies by crop types, but is often true. It is likely that the farmer will lose a like amount (around 25%) to taxes and spoilage together. The result is that assuming a farmer brings in a yield of eight bushels of seed per acre, after preparation for the next year's planting and taxes are taken into account, he will only have half his harvest to feed his family."

 Unfortunately, while the proposals made are 'simple,' they are also presumptive.  I would be the first to argue that this is necessary - my own system, for example, specifies a presumptive total for the amount of grain that applies to a set number of references.  Thus when I say that one reference = 6800 tons of grain, I'm saying the same that the designers are saying above (I presume, since I could not find the name of an author attached to the document).  One farm produces eight bushes of seed per acre.

Except it doesn't - at least, not in a fantasy world.  Most sources that can be found on grain production prior to 1400 will argue 1.5 bushels per acre; 3 was possible but tended to apply only in unusual places.  This was due in part to the means we had of tilling the land, the lack of horses to do very heavy labor (oxen cannot plow as much land as horses nor as efficiently), lack of crop rotation, lack of fertilizers, poor seed to start with and dozens of other factors that were slowly overcome. Eight bushels per acre describes a period well after 1700, after changes in the Earth's weather affected by the Little Ice Age and discoveries in the New World, as well as the onset of science.

Moreover, the example applies in no way to rice culture in Asia nor to the comparable abundance of food in West Africa and the New World, where 'cultivation' applied almost wholly to how much effort one chose to give in gathering food that wasn't sown and yet existed in profound abundance (ever looked at how many actual tons of bananas that an acre in Rwanda will produce?).

Let's put aside those problems, however, and simply accept that the designers are accurate for the world being represented.  I want to point out how much wasted effort is applied to the calculation being asked:  Once we've created a number for how much is produced, we then create other numbers which are as ad hoc as the first: taxes are such-and-such, spoilage is such-and-such, such-and-such is needed to feed the farmer's family.

Why go through this calculation?  The only real number that matters - as the document itself declares - is the excess.  In determining the yield per acre, why not simply discount everything else?  If the spoilage depletes the yield by 1/4th, then isn't the yield 6 bushels an acre?  If the family eats half of what they produce, can't we say that the farm yields 2 bushels an acre?

The way it is written, we're to presume there is no excess: except that there IS.  The farmer "loses" the 25% of the grain to taxes but the economy doesn't.  That remaining 2 bushels of grain will still be used or sold somewhere - so the relevant data we need is how much of that grain is consumed by the lord and his household?  The document doesn't tell us.  The government appears to take their cut of grain ("Boooo!" says the designers) and then we continue to look at the economy from the farmer's perspective, as though the economy of a nation is based upon what the farmer can get at the market or what the farmer's troubles are with the millwright.

What do we care?  We want an economic system for our world, not a microeconomic lesson in a farmer's troubles.  Here is where most ideal 'systems' fail: they reflect the perspective of ordinary people living ordinary lives who continue to think that money that is paid in taxes is "lost."  Taxpayers chafe at the taxes, but they do understand on some level that money is needed to pay firefighters and policemen and to buy asphalt and equipment for road repairs.

Yet when people talk about these things and their cost, they use phrases and descriptions along the lines of money "wasted" on education, roads, infrastructure, bureaucrats and the like, because once money is taken out of our pockets it cannot be spent as wisely as we will spend it: as in, "If the government hadn't taken so much money in taxes, I would have enough to take a trip to Cancun; instead that money is going to go to some stupid pencil-pusher whose job it is to count wolves in fucking Alaska."

I am eternally amused by the money "wasted on pencil-pushers" argument.  It is as though the pencil-pusher in Alaska, once he is paid, will take the money and burn it in his fireplace in order to keep himself warm.  On the contrary, he will spend the money at grocery stores, car dealerships and liquor stores in Alaska, rather than allowing you to channel that same money into a foreign country, something you don't care about but which the government does.  It has to care because if the Alaskan economy doesn't do a little bit better with the government wasting money there in paying pencil pushers (which keep the grocer and car dealerships on their feet in a place where no sane non-pencil pusher would live), then disaster happens.

This is why my trade system, such as it is, takes no account whatsoever of what one farmer on one piece of land produces or how much he keeps - because none of that matters.  The farmer is a dupe, an instrument of labour that the government endures because it is easier to encourage him to spend his labour in making us 2 bushels per acre than to have him sitting around angry and starving.  Who cares how much more than that he produces?  No one else will see it.  We only care about those two bushels.  The farmer's angst (let him boo, so long as he keeps grinding his life into the soil to make us what we want) is the same angst you feel as you grow up and realize you don't have any power either.  You may bitch and moan all you want about taxes but mostly you're just quibbling over a buck here and there.  On the whole, you want the government to exist and keep taking taxes from people (preferably, other people) because the alternative would really, really, really, really suck.  More than "Boooo."

It is this fundamental principle that goes far, far beyond arguments that an economic system only applies to "What the players do in town."  Without a clear, solid understanding of what the government is doing around and in spite of  the players, there is no framework.  If it wasn't for all the boring, uninteresting details involved in funding the theatre, paying the rent or the mortgage, or the taxes, cleaning the carpets in the lobby, fixing the chairs, paying the heat and other utilities, paying staff to clean the fucking washrooms, the space for the players to act the play (the part you came to see) wouldn't be such a great time for the audience.  For that matter, the actors like to be paid as well, as does the director, the stage manager, the gaffer and the grip, the costume designers and the make-up artists, so you're dinged as you even walk in the door.  That's a tax, too.

Is it a lot of work?  Fuck yes.

Those who say, however, that we need to spend more time concentrating on making better non-player characters or applying ourselves to making better adventures are completely missing the point.  We're not talking just about the price of the local beer: we're talking about a beer-drinking culture versus a wine-drinking culture, a beef-eating culture vs. a fish-eating culture, a culture where everything is made out of wood and a culture where everything is made out of stone.  When people dismiss such nuances in behaviour it is plain that they've had a very, very narrow experience with life, with the way people choose to live, with how they choose to spend their time and their effort, with their philosophy of life or with the way that human nature affects everything about a culture, from its daily grind to its government.

To some, if I say beer-culture versus wine-culture, all they hear and understand is that these people drink beer and these people drink wine.  To others, that mere distinction is incomprehensible. Germany IS Germany because it drinks beer.  Italy IS Italy because it drinks wine.  No European is unclear about this.

But then, why not just designate this crowd in the world as wine drinkers and that crowd as beer drinkers?

If it were only that easy.  Italy is divided between those people who eat tomatoes and those that don't.  Germany is divided between hill people and river people.  There are endless divisions, endless - and they're all based on what we grow, dig out of the earth, drink, smoke, wear and so on.  There are a million distinctions and every one of them arises out of two things: what we can buy and what we want to buy.

Until a DM understands that, a DM might perhaps want to keep quiet about how the world works.

Who Pours It?

One to grow on.

Digging around with etymology, trying to keep the text of my novel as properly 'contemporary' as possible, I've come across a small point.  I'll skip the individual links; feel free to look these up.

Barkeeper starts from 1712; barkeep, not until 1846.  Bartender, 1836.  Mixologist, 1856.  Barmaid, 1650s.  Wench wasn't a barmaid, it was any young girl, especially if not married.  An Innkeeper starts in the 1540s.  Tapster has to be pre-15th century, since that's when the dictionary says they stopped making a distinction between a male tapper and a female tapper.

Server starts in the late 1300s.  Alewife is probably better, runs at about the same time.  But they're not called taverns until the late 1200s, which is way past a lot of worlds and most of the tropes associated with D&D armor and weapons.  Comes from the French taverne, which is a shed made of boards, a booth or a stall.  Latin is taberna, just in case anyone wants to know.

So the right term is anyone's guess.  I'm going to go with Tapster.  Just so the readers know, if your players enter a drinking house and want to talk to the bartender, you might let them know that your world doesn't take place in the Old West or Post-Napoleanic Europe.  Unless it makes sense that they can sit down and drink with Karl Marx, Andrew Jackson or Charles Dickens.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

I remember when I first began working on the world I'm still running today.  This would be sometime around 1984 or '85.  I had lost all my enthusiasm for the campaign I had been running: a world without a name that consisted of six hand-drawn maps that made up a ring of land surrounding a central sea.  The north boundary to this land was the polar icecap, the south boundary was an ocean that would have filled the bottom hemisphere of the world and the remaining land to the east and west was part of a wide, imagined desert that offered the residents no respite.

I wasn't thinking about climate patterns then, as I would now.  A planet that was half desert and yet possessed of plenty of water and ocean would have to defy some rather immutable convection realities.  But I was 20 or 21, somewhat aware of these things but certainly not educated enough to model a believable world purely out of my imagination.  I don't feel bad about that; Middle Earth doesn't make much sense from a geographical perspective either, nor does Oz (which also employed the eternal desert idea), nor do most fantasy worlds.  Fantasy can ignore logic.  I don't say that I believed this or even considered it - only that, in retrospect, that is a very convenient justification for poor planning, minimal consideration of details and wish fulfillment.

I remember I did not abandon that world easily.  I had done a lot of work on it (well, what I considered 'a lot' in those days) and I liked what I'd done.  But it wasn't serving its purpose and the players weren't embracing the world like they should.

The inspiration for change came, I remember, from my saying that it would be easier to say that the city was Vienna rather than like Vienna . . . and within a week I was running the party in a new campaign, in Vienna.  The players liked it right away.  We broke out maps and began studying the lands around Vienna and though this was pre-internet we found lots.  I remember saying that it changed my perspective of game design from imagining a landscape to investigating a landscape - which in fact made the world deeper.  Whereas before creating a place was a drain on my creativity, suddenly this new world was a boost to my creativity - in that I began discovering all these things that had happened in places, all these reasons that places existed and all these things that places made.  This was a couple of years before I began thinking about trade tables - that came later.  Still, just knowing that a particular town in Austria makes toys . . . that is just interesting.

Having started on that world, however, soon ruined me for any other world.  Suddenly I was anxiously aware of how inadequate was my experience in the shallow worlds of other people.  It was somewhat like comparing checkers to video games - a metaphor that worked even then, as checkers were still a thing and video games like Galaga, Out Run and Rampage were blowing our minds.  All around me people were still wetting themselves at the prospect of getting kinged while I'd moved on to Gauntlet.

Let's just leave the subject of how far I've come since then.

I don't think it was the DMing.  I don't think it was the running at all.  I think what bothered me was all the infatuation with things that didn't matter.  What bothered me was the fantasy - the pile upon pile of imaginative crap that didn't add to the running and didn't make anything feel real, like we were there, like what happened mattered or that what we did made a difference.  My world didn't appeal to me in some special manner because it was more profound than someone else's world, but because it carried a feel that I wasn't getting elsewhere.  Video games aren't less real than checkers - they're more real.

Think about it.  The checkers are tactile but I'm being asked to believe this round, flat, featureless disk is an army or a person or some other thing.  Whereas I can see the person I'm trying to be in a video game; I can identify clearly what tools that person has and what working with those tools does.  There's less expectation on me to reach really, really hard to transform something dead and featureless and give it life.

I wanted to run in this world I'd created.  We all want to run in our own worlds, don't we?  We want to be players, we want someone who can ask us, what do you want to do?  We want to stretch our legs and say that we're walking down to the inn so we can have a chat with the bartender there about the road out to some ruin, the price of an ale and these kids today.  But what would that take?

When asked, the Player we might ask to step up will believe that running us in our own campaign will take understanding the whole world from top to bottom.  They think it will mean thousands of hours of work and somehow creating an adventure that will blow our minds.  They don't understand.  They just don't understand.

I don't want an amazing adventure.  I don't need someone who can describe a road up into the Alps with immense skill.  I only need someone to say that I'm at the start of the road and to say where it goes.  I only need someone to say after a while that there's a few creatures in the road that want to stop me.  I only need someone who can roll a few dice and run the combat with me, like the creatures where their player characters while I fight them with my player character.  Then I need an answer to my proposal to loot the bodies.

After that I need a dungeon entrance, a hallway, a few more creatures and a treasure.  Then I can haul this back to town and buy a few things.

That's all I need.  From there, my fellow players and I will help fill in the details.  We'll tell the DM what we're hoping to find and the DM can go ahead and help us find it - with a few obstacles, naturally.

Seriously.  Right, not left.  If new DMs would just start from there, they would gain a little confidence and a little courage.  They'd see a different way to put a few creatures in the road and a little different kind of hallway and perhaps two sets of creatures instead of one before we come to the treasure.

We can figure it out from there.  Later.  It doesn't have to be so damn complicated.  Players just want to run.  They just want to be there.  Stop trying to impress them.  Just run them.

Preview Returns

I released the preview for The Fifth Man two weeks ago (remember, that's the book that the Jumpstarter was all about).  I am pleased to say I am receiving some very positive reviews.  Here are a couple without spoilers, withholding their names:

This is very encouraging

Fees

And so we come to the least pleasant element of the subject: how much will it cost?

I'd like to keep the costs low.  I'd like to ensure that the fee covers my rent.  Between these two points we're just guessing.

Having discussed it with my people, we agree that the price should be a flat rate per class and 10-15% off for all three classes if bought together.  I'm also told that because these tutorials will feature personal one-on-one time for people to ask direct questions and get direct answers, I shouldn't undervalue myself.

Using this as a guideline, then, I've decided to price each individual class at $60.  All three classes, which would likely come out as 3.5 - 4.5 hours of discussion (as I don't intend to wrap things up in a flat hour).  Together, I will price these at $150.

Too expensive for some, I know.  I feel confident, however, that my experience and wherewithal will make these tutorials worth the investment.

I will take money through donations to paypal on the blog or as pledges to Patreon, to be honored after the first of the month for as long as the reader chooses to leave up their pledge.  I promise to work on more classes, so that I should have more to offer those who have enjoyed three classes and are still looking for more.  I'm sure that some will make proposals; I'm equally sure I can develop a way to rise up and meet those proposals when the time comes.

Am I offering a guarantee?  I guarantee that the student will have to become unconscionably abusive before I will disconnect the call.  I would rather have it out rather than quit; it's the reader's world, the reader's dime.  Sometimes we just need to vent.

All tutorials will be made through appointment, so there will probably be some difficulty there.  I'm a homebody, however, not prone to going out of the house or caring much what goes on more than ten meters from my computer, so I think we'll be able to work something out.

One small point.  I'm not quite launching yet.  I mean to outline the tutorials in greater depth, then begin on Monday.

Questions?

Help Costs

I let my players bully me into giving them a session on Saturday and it was a mistake.  The night went very well, the party finished Ternketh Keep and walked with a mess of treasure.  People died and tension was very high going into the end game and the treasure took three hours to separate and manage, what with five of the party's nine characters and henchmen progressing up a level and two of those players having an option to roll up a new henchman each.

However, it drained me creatively and I haven't written a damn word since Friday.  That is death at this point since I'm working against a deadline I've already extended from May to June because I worked for a month and now I'm terrified I'm going to miss my planned date in June.  To feel better I remind myself that the album Chinese Democracy took 15 years and then I feel like crap all over again when I remember that album was total shit from end to end.  So there we are.

I'm set to give the rest of the day to the book, with interruptions - so I hope I can move forward from the present expository situation and into the next reveal, plot turn and following expository dialogue.  This is writing: we move steadily forward from telling the readers something about what's going on so we can take them to the next place to tell them something about what's going on.  They've been doing it this way since Aeschylus.

Meanwhile, I wanted to write a little about henchmen and followers.  For a change in pace, rather than defining these, I just want to talk about how much players love them.

That is, if players can be encouraged to believe that hirelings are not in-house enemies waiting to stab them in the back.  I haven't created a traitor NPC in a player's party since, oh, must be around 1990.  Never with this particular party and never in the online campaign.  Once I had a fellow that had just been met on the road who proved to be a criminal and his wife as well - but these were not people the party had reason to trust.

The result of this is that parties in my game will overload their activities with additional NPCs, when those NPCs will take orders.  The party entered Ternketh Keep with eleven follower NPCs.  If this seems excessive, you're right: but it made the party feel safer, it helped them feel confident in tackling a scary enemy and ultimately this number was winnowed down as the NPCs were injured and forced to retreat or hang back.

The downside is, for some, that it means a lot more accounting and slower combat rounds, though it means the party can handle six or seven hard battles in a row instead of one or two before having to retreat.  The upside is that the party will take greater risks if they know there's someone there to carry them off the field of battle, especially if the healer is one of the people on their backs or the healing has just run out because this is combat #6.

One thing I like about a large party like this is the eternal money drain it represents.  Three to five tough characters can easily provide for and equip themselves - but with the party's henchman total now climbing up to seven additional persons that must be fed, bought passage for, bought equipment for and considered in dividing experience and treasure, the cost fulfills that thing that DMs have always felt justified a thief popping out from the woods just to deplete the party's resources.  I don't have to create circumstances to do that.  Every additional follower is another complete set of equipment - and an encouragement for the players to spend ludicrous amounts in an effort to "complete" their experience.

Here I speak of an obsessive compulsive behaviour that makes the player want to buy the highest quality armor possible for every henchman and follower, wants to make sure everyone has at least two silver weapons, wants to buy everyone a horse of the highest quality, etcetera.  This kind of thinking, not promoted by me, is a terrific money soak where it comes to ridding a player of their coin.

I encourage other DMs to recognize that, while it seems a good idea for drama purposes to make followers into traitors, or that it seems irrational to use followers to actually fight for player characters faithfully and obediently (it somehow seems like the player is getting a free ride), it is a terrific motivation when the player is told that food for the month, for all the party, is 715 pounds and that food for adventurers here is 3 gold pieces a pound.  Ouch.

To which the players say, "Woah.  We better get to adventuring."

Words to joy a DM's heart.

Proposal for DMing Tutorials

After much discussion, advice, research, devil's advocacy and contemplation, I feel that I will be ready to offer one-on-one classes in How to DM starting no later than a week today.  I feel that there is a marketable demand for this service.  I feel that I am up to the task and that I'm perfectly capable of teaching such a course.  And I feel that a reasonable price for such a course would be somewhere between $45 and $60 per class (three classes would be three times that amount).

Sessions would be enabled through Skype.  I've used Skype before, though not for a long time, so part of my task this week will be to take a refresher course.  I foresee sessions would run between 60 and 90 minutes, in order to allow flexibility regarding the end of a session.  At this point I'm going to offer three classes (and undoubtedly with some sort of deal if the DM wants to buy three sessions in advance).  For the moment I want to concentrate on three things: presentation, communication and adventure planning.  I'll be more specific about these in a moment.

I could talk about other things, but for the moment I feel these are universal and don't require any discussion of rule systems or specific character design.  Like the book I wrote, I would rather approach the material from a genre-free perspective, since how the DM acts, speaks or creates drama is a universal condition based upon our being human beings, not based on what system we play.

For the moment, I feel it would be wisest for me to offer a few well-considered subjects until I get my legs under me.  This is a learning curve for me as well, for while I have given advice now on the blog for 8 years, I have answered hundreds of direct questions about games and I have been there to counsel other players and DMs in role-playing games for more than three decades, I need to integrate these skills into a lengthy, personal approach that will work with people through the internet who are unfamiliar to me.  I am glad that I had the experiences I've had with fans of RPGs in Toronto and Edmonton recently.  I do believe, from talking to literally hundreds of strangers at those events, that the chances of meeting someone toxic (and willing to pay money upfront for the privilege of being such) is virtually zero.

There are some who will be against this; and some who will feel that I'm not the person they'd want to get advice from.  However, the response and the numbers of people who have expressed interest has been very encouraging.  The rest is up to me.  As I said before the weekend, I have a firm belief that the solution is not to preach an ideal but to promote investigation into each DM's individual challenges and to find solutions that will work for them.  To this, I'll add that a very strong part of the lesson plan will be to help create confidence and assurance in the DM, to encourage a greater willingness to run and to run well.

I feel I am able to teach DMs how to turn left when they say right.

Here is a breakdown of the three classes:

Class 1: Presentation:

Many will feel that this is their biggest hurdle, for many DMs are over-aware of their own failings where it comes to engaging their players, gaining their focus, delivering descriptions and ideas that are compelling, creating a positive impression and worst of all, learning to "think on our feet."  Obviously, no one should expect miracles after an hour or so of evaluation.  However, having a voice that can deconstruct what we're doing, encourage our ability to speak more passionately and with greater energy, while enabling us to "hear" how we sound from another person's perspective can put us on the right path in finding out what we need to do in the future.  It isn't that we can solve problems overnight, but we can gain insight into how to solve those problems.  We are each one of us different - but an ear other than our own, unafraid to give us real perspective and offer real direction, that is something everyone can gain from.

Class 2: Communication:

The way that DMs and Players interact is so often presented in the worst possible light in our hobby, with one side claiming that DMs are absolute rulers and the other that DMs take the game way too seriously.  It's very important that we understand that it is not the DM's role to impose our will upon the players or to use our title as DM to win an argument.  At the same time, Players must be guided to understand that we have limitations, that we are operating within those limitations and that the underlying principles of a successful role-playing game demands that we are all on the same page.  This class wants to help DMs better connect with their players, producing a symbiosis in the game that enables both DM and Players together to move towards a common goal: DM as facilitator and Players as participants.  A substantial part of this class would revolve around the student "running their world," supported by propositions on how we, together, feel that we could improve the message that has been given.

Class 3: Adventure Building:

Here we are speaking of creating the adventure that the players will run on, not the world that Players will run in.  First and foremost, I will focus on the DM's role in these adventures: how the DM 'fits' into what's happening, what elements we will want to include - and most important, how we should not be bullied by the expectations of the Players and ourselves to make bigger, better, greater, more imaginative games.  All too often, we bite off more than we can choose, trying to 'impress' in order not to fail, only to build adventures that fail catastrophically.  Here I can offer considerable insight on what Players really want from a campaign, what they can expect and how we can train ourselves to start easy and build confidence and ability before asking ourselves to build the moon.

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Let me say as a placeholder that the exact means of how payment is delivered will be left for the next post that I right.  For this post, it is best that we limit any consideration to content alone.

Comments, please.  I strongly recommend that readers ask me to better explain any element in the above three classes that seems doubtful - not only for me, but for everyone else who might be reading who may not think to ask such a question.  I have no doubts whatsoever about my ability to deliver on these three tutorials - the more I talk about them, the stronger I will be on how to communicate the prospects that others will gain from each tutorial.

I think this is going to be a lot of fun, that it will be powerfully enlightening and that it could be the start that brings an end to many a new DM's frustrations.

Western Sahara

For weeks now, to relax, I've been steadily adding to my maps of the south fringe of the Sahara Desert, working eastward from Mauritania.  These are big, empty sections of the world with few cities that are - compared to England - actually very simple to manage.  A big desert erg covers hundreds of empty hexes that only have to be colored to complete - the only effort is to define the boundaries of that desert against other deserts or areas of relative civilization.

In any case, here is a map of the Sahara Desert west of Algeria.  If the reader is familiar with the diamond shape of Algeria, the bottom point of that country would come about three quarters down the map right on the right-hand edge (about half way down the white space corner).

A composite of six Saharan maps.  Where two labels appear on the map
it is due to multiple maps being folded on top of one another
(the label is written out on each map)

I know the detail on the map isn't great.  It doesn't matter, because these maps are not done.  All I've established are the names of the areas/topographic features, the boundaries of the kingdoms on the south edge of the Sahara and the plotting of towns and cities.  I'm only posting it now to give a 'feeling' for the map and to remind the reader that a $20 donation on Patreon gives access to the Publisher versions of these (the above shows six maps overlaid on each other - some of which don't quite match up, because there is still a bit of work to be done on each map).

In any case, please enjoy the feel of the map and the sense of size.  As always, hexes are 20 miles in diameter.  Total area represented is about that of the United States west of the Mississippi.

I'll be posting later today on the subject of D&D classes and tutoring.