Most games are defined by their rules; we recognize what chess or bridge are by the manner of the pieces or the way in which the cards are played. Most of the time, if there is a change in the rules, this usually indicates that we are playing a different game. There are many, many versions of bridge, for example, where a change in the rules indicates that we're playing whist, pinochle, hearts, euchre and so on.
Generally, this is not the case with role-playing games. In order for the game we are playing to be considered different, there has to be a major shift in the methodology of the game. Even with genre, we're prepared to accept marked differences: if I were to propose a campaign in which the Masquerade would take place during the 1st century BCE in Rome, we would still call it the Masquerade.
And so, if we play with fairly accepted core rules, we're allowed to continue to call a game D&D [or whatever]. Since there are numerous "core rules" now, some of them quite fairly distinct from the original versions of the game, we have considerable latitude in which rules we play and how we want those rules defined. This encourages virtually everyone to feel comfortable changing rules, since that is a distinct feature of RPGs.
Unfortunately, there are no dictums for how a rule should be rewritten or how a non-existent rule should be created. On the whole, the process is a mystery ... with a fair number of would-be designers wallowing around without much success while a number of voices are now being raised to say that they want less rules, not more, and that rules-as-written neatly takes care of all this amateur designing mayhem.
I would be prepared to accept that, except that this is D&D and the "rules-as-written" are massively underwritten, under-presented and, in many cases, just not thought through. The rules-as-written phenomenon expects players to change their expectations of the game to suit the rule-book, rather than the far more dynamic opportunity of driving the game by advancing the rule-book. The argument against more rules is a gut reaction to multiple epic fails coming from a lot of different places: bloated rule systems, contrast shocks resulting from four new editions all launched within the space of 14 years (three of which are incompatible), an endless flame war consuming the community on every aspect of game design and a general ennui promoted by a conceptual vision that has seen mediocre development in the whole time of the game's existence.
We're making new rules, yes, but we're not doing so from a design viewpoint that has a theoretical structure: we're going on our gut, arguing that when it works, it's okay, without any real idea of what defines "works." At best, we're relying on people voicing their feelings about a given rule, which makes further development on a particular idea impractical or ineffective.
Am I the person to address this? I'm not so sure. With my last post, I expressed my attitude that I am relatively alone in the practice of RPGs, being met with arguments that less rules are better because they are "simpler to build upon," which basically means not building at all; or that they are "easier"; or that complexity is an "obstacle" for new players. I don't remember that campaign from Android where they argued that people who have never used a phone before shouldn't use their platform because the complexity is an obstacle for first-time users. Too, I'm told that having to fill out "long lists of calculations" [that is, copying numbers onto a page, occasionally having to add or subtract like a 2nd grader] puts off "intelligent, creative folks" and that it is an excessive learning curve, far too excessive for ordinary humans to master. Given such extraordinary expectations on my part, frankly unreasonable in every possible way, I'm beginning to feel that most role-players are just ~
Hurm. Well, see, that's how the last post went. I started off with a reasonable introduction into rules progression and let myself off the chain regarding my deepening lack of respect for participants who make such arguments. It suggests that millions of words can't actually educate, that what's fundamentally needed is some sort of nanny-program that can be systematically designed to simply by-pass the need to think, thus enabling these intelligent, creative people to play at the level of grade 10 high school students. As I was, when I first started playing the game, making long lists of calculations while carrying five and ten hour conversations with my peers about what kind of changes we'd like to make to the rules of this game that was only five years old at the time.
Clearly, I am having trouble getting over this particular angry hurdle. I was going to say that I'm probably not the writer to explain how to make rules, because I am plainly just out there ... but after a few days of research, in which I was hoping to find academic content on the theory of rule design, I might just as well be the one. Because there is no one else.
Ian Bogost wrote an interesting book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, which incorporates some compelling content on his theory of procedural rhetoric, but unfortunately it's not the vision I have about how to teach someone how to make rules for, say, players to mountain climb. Bogost's argument is basically that a game about mountain climbing will produce an immersive experience that will increase one's personal experience with the nature and feeling of mountain climbing, enabling one to more thoroughly interpret the emotional and intuitive response of mountain climbers, having sort-of been one in virtual reality (I suspect Bogost watched David Cronenberg's Videodrome in his youth), but that is only loosely connected to how to actually make rules that enable the procedural effect he postulates. It suggests a goal for making rules, and an effective one: but not the structure on how to achieve that goal.
Beyond that, it's an empty field. Just now, we're relying on young, imaginative game designers to immerse themselves in playing games, and thus be altered by the procedural rhetoric of that experience to a degree that they comprehend how to make games ... but it's lightning in a bottle, really. Not everyone who spends a lifetime playing games will be touched sufficiently by that rhetoric ... promoting the very incorrect notion that game making is a special talent that is only available to the specially blessed and talented. This is how people used to feel about medical practitioners, people who could write letters and those who could understand math. As it turns out, once those things were properly deconstructed, it turned out that even an ordinary person can be taught how to perform a tracheotomy, compose an essay or resolve algebra. The only thing that keeps the ordinary person from designing a video game right now is that the educational theory is way, way behind the technology and there's little motivation to encourage it to catch up.
So, if you want to learn anything about rule making, I'm sorry, you're going to have to rely upon grumpy old me.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Sunday, November 5, 2017
You're Just Not Me
I finally listened to the recording of the WHTSI podcast ~ I find that a hard go, it just never sounds right to me. I really understand these actors who never watch the films they're in.
There's a part where I talk about rules being enabling and not restrictive; I'd like to tackle that in print, where I sound better and not like I'm embarrassing myself. Here goes.
I don't want to be pedantic about this, but we will need to understand the term "rule," so here's the definition I'll work inside. Rule: a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.
Let's take a single instance of governing conduct within D&D. With my weapon in hand, I roll to hit an opponent. The principle goes that I have to achieve a certain number on the die in order to succeed, and thus remove hit points from my enemy, in an attempt to remove my enemy as an obstacle.
Now, there are rules defining hit points and defining the die number needed to succeed, but let's just focus specifically on the circumstance of attempting to hit. Effectively, the understood activity is that my character, or entity, is in combat with another entity, and that I have the explicit right to attempt to remove that entity as a threat. The rule to hit is designed to address this.
But let's be clear: for the rule to be explicit, it has to be understood that my entity's position is directly in front of the enemy entity's position, and that the enemy is facing me. What if the entity is not facing me? Does that change the sphere in which the particular activity is taking place?
If we argue "no," then we are making the decision not to increase the variability of the combat sphere. If we argue "no," then two entity combatants might as well not have a front or a back, since we have decided not to make a rule governing that situation. However, to add nuance, to add opportunity to the combat experience, to make it deeper and richer and therefore more interesting, we can argue that the defendant's facing matters! If it does, we will need to create a rule that will govern the defendant's facing.
And if we want to make a judgement that attacking the enemy from the flank is a different activity that attacking the enemy from the back, then we need a different rule for that as well. Each time we want to expand the sphere in which we operate, we need to increase the number of rules in order to maintain the expansion.
Yes, naturally, there is a limit to how many rules we can practically maintain within the game space. Rolemaster's appearance near the beginning of the RPG era coincided with an idea called "hit location," which proposed that any hit should include a random roll to determine which part of the body was struck, with a commensurate effect depending upon the result. At first, this seemed like a wonderful idea, and most games I was involved with, including my own, ran towards hit location with gusto. At first, it seemed to work marvelously.
However, while the location rule's complexity was suitable for one-on-one fights, it quickly lost its appeal when the number of combatants increased. Five opponents against five player characters was manageable. Though it slowed combat, the effects were interesting and the time could be allowed. Once the game reached ten opponents against five player characters, however, the increase in necessary rolls verged on annoyance. At fifteen or twenty opponents against a party, battles that might take half an hour to run were now an hour and a half. Even with the hit location table open on the table, constantly having to address it again and again, along with the effect, along with keeping track of multiple effects, seriously began to wear on everyone's patience.
Those who stayed with it for a few months were able to memorize the tables and that improved the manageability - but by that time, we could not help noticing the repetition of more common results, which itself increased our annoyance and impatience with the system. After five or six months of playing in games with hit location, we just did not give a fuck where the blow landed ... and all but a few games I knew dropped the system. Fundamentally, the rule added to the verisimilitude of the combat experience ... but because it was entirely based on random numbers, hit location did not improve the player's opportunity for play.
If I know that my approach against the opponent's flank or rear will improve my chances of hitting, then what I want from a rule is the right to arrange that situation. If, however, my character's position in relationship to the opponent is a random chance, then this rule offers nothing with regards to my personal ability to play the game. It's just bother without a meaningful payoff. It's a bad rule.
Where people respond to the addition of rules to the game, it is most often a response to bad rules. 3rd Edition was a composite of hundreds upon hundreds of similar bad rules, which despite having a structure that enabled characters to tailor-make their characters, the stitching inside the tailoring reduced the act of game play to a die roll. For the most part, those involved in that version failed to understand where the fault lay. As such, the structure was allowed to linger as a game design flaw for more than a decade; it was only after the presentation of 4th Edition that at last people began to see that the game's structure had seriously gone astray ... with the only imaginable alternative being to go back to the basic structure of an easily understood, rules-lite game system, such as B/X.
But this was more of a gut instinct than a clearly understood deconstruction. Like a cook that empties a shaker of salt into the soup, making the soup so salty that it cannot be eaten, the game makers have decided that the solution is NO salt, none at all, because salt is obviously bad for soup and no sane person would add it.
I expect this problem will right itself. However, examining my own comments on the matter, I feel that I'm probably not helping. I have a tendency to embrace new rules, which I design specifically to expand opportunities for the players. To others, this sounds like a lot of detail that, surely, can only serve to overwhelm the DM during the game. "For fuck's sake, Alexis, I can barely manage the rules that I have! And you want me to adopt more?"
Yeah. I suppose people do look at my version of play like that. I don't know what to tell them. The search engine on my computer and on my wiki lets me dredge up obscure rules I wrote four years ago in seconds, although occasionally I do forget the name of that old file. But it may be that I have an unusual memory, or that I have some unusual skill with search engines and finding things, that others don't possess. If, during a game, I don't have time to look up a rule, because I'm already looking up something for some other purpose, I will tell my players to look it up. And they will. But perhaps that is because I have some special way with people, or I'm profoundly intimidating, that enables me to impel other persons to carry out my will without complaint. Players seem to be able to look up the rules without any problem, and understand the rules, even turning them against me for their own purposes, using my own words as a weapon. And I go along with that. But maybe that's because I have some unusual quirk in my brain that's willing to concede to a player's willingness to argue with me; maybe its because I don't care as much about my preconceived world or my designed adventure as other DMs, or perhaps I'm faster at adapting to an unexpected thwarting of my expectations. And perhaps the rules are comprehensible because I have an unusual skill as a writer and as a designer that other DMs can't achieve.
Perhaps everything I say about running a game, about working at the process and understanding it, about writing down rules and putting them in an electronic format so that all the players can read them, all the time, can only work for me because I am totally and completely a different person than every other person running RPGs. Perhaps my advice can only work for me, because a person has to be me before they can appreciate what a good rule set can accomplish.
If so, then I'm wasting my time. When I say, put the rule book on your lap and type the rules into a computer, until your fingers and your wrists are sore, there's no possible way that advice can be valuable because, well, you're just not me. You don't think the same way. You can't learn things like I have learned things, in the 38-odd years that I have painstakingly gone about steadfastly repeating and repeating the work that I've tried to do. You can't memorize more than you have, no matter how many decades you work at it. You're fundamentally crippled in some way that I am not crippled.
I suppose that must be it.
There's a part where I talk about rules being enabling and not restrictive; I'd like to tackle that in print, where I sound better and not like I'm embarrassing myself. Here goes.
I don't want to be pedantic about this, but we will need to understand the term "rule," so here's the definition I'll work inside. Rule: a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.
Let's take a single instance of governing conduct within D&D. With my weapon in hand, I roll to hit an opponent. The principle goes that I have to achieve a certain number on the die in order to succeed, and thus remove hit points from my enemy, in an attempt to remove my enemy as an obstacle.
Now, there are rules defining hit points and defining the die number needed to succeed, but let's just focus specifically on the circumstance of attempting to hit. Effectively, the understood activity is that my character, or entity, is in combat with another entity, and that I have the explicit right to attempt to remove that entity as a threat. The rule to hit is designed to address this.
But let's be clear: for the rule to be explicit, it has to be understood that my entity's position is directly in front of the enemy entity's position, and that the enemy is facing me. What if the entity is not facing me? Does that change the sphere in which the particular activity is taking place?
If we argue "no," then we are making the decision not to increase the variability of the combat sphere. If we argue "no," then two entity combatants might as well not have a front or a back, since we have decided not to make a rule governing that situation. However, to add nuance, to add opportunity to the combat experience, to make it deeper and richer and therefore more interesting, we can argue that the defendant's facing matters! If it does, we will need to create a rule that will govern the defendant's facing.
And if we want to make a judgement that attacking the enemy from the flank is a different activity that attacking the enemy from the back, then we need a different rule for that as well. Each time we want to expand the sphere in which we operate, we need to increase the number of rules in order to maintain the expansion.
Yes, naturally, there is a limit to how many rules we can practically maintain within the game space. Rolemaster's appearance near the beginning of the RPG era coincided with an idea called "hit location," which proposed that any hit should include a random roll to determine which part of the body was struck, with a commensurate effect depending upon the result. At first, this seemed like a wonderful idea, and most games I was involved with, including my own, ran towards hit location with gusto. At first, it seemed to work marvelously.
However, while the location rule's complexity was suitable for one-on-one fights, it quickly lost its appeal when the number of combatants increased. Five opponents against five player characters was manageable. Though it slowed combat, the effects were interesting and the time could be allowed. Once the game reached ten opponents against five player characters, however, the increase in necessary rolls verged on annoyance. At fifteen or twenty opponents against a party, battles that might take half an hour to run were now an hour and a half. Even with the hit location table open on the table, constantly having to address it again and again, along with the effect, along with keeping track of multiple effects, seriously began to wear on everyone's patience.
Those who stayed with it for a few months were able to memorize the tables and that improved the manageability - but by that time, we could not help noticing the repetition of more common results, which itself increased our annoyance and impatience with the system. After five or six months of playing in games with hit location, we just did not give a fuck where the blow landed ... and all but a few games I knew dropped the system. Fundamentally, the rule added to the verisimilitude of the combat experience ... but because it was entirely based on random numbers, hit location did not improve the player's opportunity for play.
If I know that my approach against the opponent's flank or rear will improve my chances of hitting, then what I want from a rule is the right to arrange that situation. If, however, my character's position in relationship to the opponent is a random chance, then this rule offers nothing with regards to my personal ability to play the game. It's just bother without a meaningful payoff. It's a bad rule.
Where people respond to the addition of rules to the game, it is most often a response to bad rules. 3rd Edition was a composite of hundreds upon hundreds of similar bad rules, which despite having a structure that enabled characters to tailor-make their characters, the stitching inside the tailoring reduced the act of game play to a die roll. For the most part, those involved in that version failed to understand where the fault lay. As such, the structure was allowed to linger as a game design flaw for more than a decade; it was only after the presentation of 4th Edition that at last people began to see that the game's structure had seriously gone astray ... with the only imaginable alternative being to go back to the basic structure of an easily understood, rules-lite game system, such as B/X.
But this was more of a gut instinct than a clearly understood deconstruction. Like a cook that empties a shaker of salt into the soup, making the soup so salty that it cannot be eaten, the game makers have decided that the solution is NO salt, none at all, because salt is obviously bad for soup and no sane person would add it.
I expect this problem will right itself. However, examining my own comments on the matter, I feel that I'm probably not helping. I have a tendency to embrace new rules, which I design specifically to expand opportunities for the players. To others, this sounds like a lot of detail that, surely, can only serve to overwhelm the DM during the game. "For fuck's sake, Alexis, I can barely manage the rules that I have! And you want me to adopt more?"
Yeah. I suppose people do look at my version of play like that. I don't know what to tell them. The search engine on my computer and on my wiki lets me dredge up obscure rules I wrote four years ago in seconds, although occasionally I do forget the name of that old file. But it may be that I have an unusual memory, or that I have some unusual skill with search engines and finding things, that others don't possess. If, during a game, I don't have time to look up a rule, because I'm already looking up something for some other purpose, I will tell my players to look it up. And they will. But perhaps that is because I have some special way with people, or I'm profoundly intimidating, that enables me to impel other persons to carry out my will without complaint. Players seem to be able to look up the rules without any problem, and understand the rules, even turning them against me for their own purposes, using my own words as a weapon. And I go along with that. But maybe that's because I have some unusual quirk in my brain that's willing to concede to a player's willingness to argue with me; maybe its because I don't care as much about my preconceived world or my designed adventure as other DMs, or perhaps I'm faster at adapting to an unexpected thwarting of my expectations. And perhaps the rules are comprehensible because I have an unusual skill as a writer and as a designer that other DMs can't achieve.
Perhaps everything I say about running a game, about working at the process and understanding it, about writing down rules and putting them in an electronic format so that all the players can read them, all the time, can only work for me because I am totally and completely a different person than every other person running RPGs. Perhaps my advice can only work for me, because a person has to be me before they can appreciate what a good rule set can accomplish.
If so, then I'm wasting my time. When I say, put the rule book on your lap and type the rules into a computer, until your fingers and your wrists are sore, there's no possible way that advice can be valuable because, well, you're just not me. You don't think the same way. You can't learn things like I have learned things, in the 38-odd years that I have painstakingly gone about steadfastly repeating and repeating the work that I've tried to do. You can't memorize more than you have, no matter how many decades you work at it. You're fundamentally crippled in some way that I am not crippled.
I suppose that must be it.
Friday, November 3, 2017
Justifiable Homicide
When I was no more than five or six, I remember my parents taking us three kids to a little strip mall in the northwest corner of Calgary, where there was a pet store, a model shop and a Simpson's Sears. Circa 1970. I can see the looping letters on the side of the brick building, my first experience with a department store. But of course, that was just a place for the uncomfortable experience of having my mom fit me for shoes and pants and stuff. Not a place for fun.
At six, the pet store was the fascination. Though nature shows existed on television, it was all black and white - whereas fish tanks were rich in vibrant colors, along with scurrying hamsters, snakes, spiders, lizards, puppies and kittens.
Within a few years, however, towards eight or nine, it was the model shop. Begging my parents for three bucks for a P-38 or a model of the Missouri battleship, wishing for the unimaginable $78 box for a two-foot long model of the U.S.S. Constitution ... oh lord, how I did spend many hours fiddly bits of plastic and the smell of glue.
That little strip mall was eventually enclosed and expanded, becoming "North Hill Mall," repeatedly enlarged over the decades, revamped, reimagined ... I out-grew modelling about the time the model shop closed forever. Video and computers became my fascination, as they did for everyone. A first-class video arcade opened in the mall, expanded ... only to slowly diminish, then sit empty, then disappear. A blockbuster video rental store appeared, expanded ... then diminished, sat empty and disappeared. Technology enables, then destroys.
The mall itself is an example of that. In 1970, Calgary had 389,000 people. As people rolled in, filling new suburbs, indoor walk-through malls proliferated and appeared everywhere. As the suburbs grew larger and further apart, the inner city malls lost their customers to huge, outer city box store parking lots.
North Hill mall has always been an anathema. Placed between the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and the University of Calgary, it has always been empty. Except, perhaps, for a few weeks every Christmas. There's nothing to buy there. There's nothing to see. There's the Sears, still the mall's anchor, but the rest of the mall is a desert of faux-fashion clothing stores, cell phone outlets and assorted crap that appears and disappears with yearly regularity.
And now, Sears Canada has officially died, amidst a flurry of corporate greed, corporate idiocy and a blatant denial that it is no longer 1970. It has taken a long, long time for Sears to die ... but those of us in Canada who have been here to witness the event knew it was coming 35 years ago. It only goes to show how deep the pockets were.
Sears here is dead because the owners, despite their wealth, refused to believe that technology enables, then destroys. And most who have lived on the earth more than a few decades still haven't learned that lesson. Everything that we know, that exists now, in the form that it exists, is already on its last legs. In a few decades, it will all be dead, dead as video arcades and video rental shops. Dead as video tape itself.
But don't worry, it will be replaced by something better. It always is.
I'm happy that Sears is dead. All that land, all that empty parking lot space, all that empty mall hallway without people in it, all those shitty shops appealing to three people a day (and I have known counter people working in the mall who would testify to those numbers), can all die forever, to be replaced by a product that arrives at my door in three or four days, and I will feel nothing. Because that mall was ugly. That mall served no purpose. That mall needed to die.
Those people who just can't get this; who can't believe that their cherished nostalgic memories of model shops, pet stores and even black-and-white television; they will chafe and complain and resist the change with the last marrow in their bones ... but they won't go to the malls or buy enough pets or sustain a business still trying to keep video tape alive. They won't hesitate to buy on the internet and fail to buy at a counter. They will bitch, but they will carry themselves along with the changes that technology brings because it is better. It is more interesting. It is more fun.
The least opinion of value in the world is the one that claims that the way we used to do things was better.
At six, the pet store was the fascination. Though nature shows existed on television, it was all black and white - whereas fish tanks were rich in vibrant colors, along with scurrying hamsters, snakes, spiders, lizards, puppies and kittens.
Within a few years, however, towards eight or nine, it was the model shop. Begging my parents for three bucks for a P-38 or a model of the Missouri battleship, wishing for the unimaginable $78 box for a two-foot long model of the U.S.S. Constitution ... oh lord, how I did spend many hours fiddly bits of plastic and the smell of glue.
That little strip mall was eventually enclosed and expanded, becoming "North Hill Mall," repeatedly enlarged over the decades, revamped, reimagined ... I out-grew modelling about the time the model shop closed forever. Video and computers became my fascination, as they did for everyone. A first-class video arcade opened in the mall, expanded ... only to slowly diminish, then sit empty, then disappear. A blockbuster video rental store appeared, expanded ... then diminished, sat empty and disappeared. Technology enables, then destroys.
The mall itself is an example of that. In 1970, Calgary had 389,000 people. As people rolled in, filling new suburbs, indoor walk-through malls proliferated and appeared everywhere. As the suburbs grew larger and further apart, the inner city malls lost their customers to huge, outer city box store parking lots.
North Hill mall has always been an anathema. Placed between the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and the University of Calgary, it has always been empty. Except, perhaps, for a few weeks every Christmas. There's nothing to buy there. There's nothing to see. There's the Sears, still the mall's anchor, but the rest of the mall is a desert of faux-fashion clothing stores, cell phone outlets and assorted crap that appears and disappears with yearly regularity.
And now, Sears Canada has officially died, amidst a flurry of corporate greed, corporate idiocy and a blatant denial that it is no longer 1970. It has taken a long, long time for Sears to die ... but those of us in Canada who have been here to witness the event knew it was coming 35 years ago. It only goes to show how deep the pockets were.
Sears here is dead because the owners, despite their wealth, refused to believe that technology enables, then destroys. And most who have lived on the earth more than a few decades still haven't learned that lesson. Everything that we know, that exists now, in the form that it exists, is already on its last legs. In a few decades, it will all be dead, dead as video arcades and video rental shops. Dead as video tape itself.
But don't worry, it will be replaced by something better. It always is.
I'm happy that Sears is dead. All that land, all that empty parking lot space, all that empty mall hallway without people in it, all those shitty shops appealing to three people a day (and I have known counter people working in the mall who would testify to those numbers), can all die forever, to be replaced by a product that arrives at my door in three or four days, and I will feel nothing. Because that mall was ugly. That mall served no purpose. That mall needed to die.
Those people who just can't get this; who can't believe that their cherished nostalgic memories of model shops, pet stores and even black-and-white television; they will chafe and complain and resist the change with the last marrow in their bones ... but they won't go to the malls or buy enough pets or sustain a business still trying to keep video tape alive. They won't hesitate to buy on the internet and fail to buy at a counter. They will bitch, but they will carry themselves along with the changes that technology brings because it is better. It is more interesting. It is more fun.
The least opinion of value in the world is the one that claims that the way we used to do things was better.
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Dexterity of 7
Fell down a flight of stairs today. Was carrying a hotel pan of sizzling hot tomato bisque in two hands, when another cook decided to fly up the stairs, his head down, because he was in a hurry. I stopped him, avoided the collision, then took a step to the right to let him pass. And then, when I took my next step, there was no stair there.
I stumbled down, nailed myself several times on the left hand side with the metal railing as I struggled not to deadfall down the stairs. I kept the pan in my hands, half juggling it, until I was at the bottom, when I finally had to let go of it to grab the railing. The pan hit the floor, losing only one third of its contents - with bisque, you oven cook the tomatoes until they're on the edge of burning, to bring out the flavor - but that meant tomatoes all over the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling.
Cleaned it up, made the remaining five liters of bisque and slowly cooled down while cutting a dozen heads of lettuce.
Life in a kitchen.
I stumbled down, nailed myself several times on the left hand side with the metal railing as I struggled not to deadfall down the stairs. I kept the pan in my hands, half juggling it, until I was at the bottom, when I finally had to let go of it to grab the railing. The pan hit the floor, losing only one third of its contents - with bisque, you oven cook the tomatoes until they're on the edge of burning, to bring out the flavor - but that meant tomatoes all over the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling.
Cleaned it up, made the remaining five liters of bisque and slowly cooled down while cutting a dozen heads of lettuce.
Life in a kitchen.
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Two Camps
Be sure and hear this podcast, to which I was invited.
Meanwhile, let's tackle this, from Silberman on October 22nd:
Do be sure to follow the link and read the whole comment.
The question above has been more and more prevalent these last ten years ~ I believe because the continued lack of proper design towards aiding the DM in constructing the actual game has been lacking, and because many of the people who began their participation more than 20 years ago have had their input compromised, leaving many new people without proper mentorship in how to DM. That said, however, I'll address the question.
As Silberman words it (and everyone words it the same way), this is an either/or question. That is how it is argued on bulletin boards and blog comments throughout the internet. So they say, "My game is story-based" as opposed to the use of dice to determine outcomes: "Role-playing" vs. "Roll-playing." These two camps support one option or the other, slinging stones at each other across an invented no-man's land, where no compromise is possible.
Silberman's question is related to a very sarcastic post I wrote about DMs who clearly feel it is in their mandate to regulate what happens in a game, to ensure the best possible experience for the player. My post responded to a series of loaded questions clearly deriding positions such as following the rules, killing characters with low-level monsters, painstakingly rolling appropriate dice for situations and not fudging those dice. As such, I took Silberman's reference to the predictability of storytelling as a DM prepared to fudge dice, ensure player survival and cheat the rules in order to sustain their vision rather than the game.
But people do take it farther than that.
On the 15th of last month I proposed a means of charting a game adventure, based on character motivation, with the idea of the DM creating obstacles that would serve as causes, eliciting responses which would drive the characters through the adventure. While some hailed the clarity of this procedure, declaring that they'd not heard it put so succinctly, the post also drew condemnation as a pursuit of the DM's narrative, bordering on (tolerable) illusionism and, in general, not necessarily the best way to approach the campaign ideal.
Basically, the two camps. And whereas one camp stands on their right to force the story, the other can be just as dogmatic in enforcing the rules: any deviation from strict randomness is seen as a game sin, a philosophy that creates situations which, as Silberman notes later in his comment,
Every game DM who has tried to follow the rules faithfully, most often in their uncompromising youth, had that experience ~ not just once, but many times. It is an awful situation to manage: particularly if one is 12 or 13, knowing nothing about the nature of humans and how to motivate even people of one's own age. Without tools, without perspective, without a mentor to guide them and without wanting to quit playing, many a young or new player makes the decision that, "No, I'm not going through that again." And how easy it is to fudge the dice and ensure that. How easy it is create a merchant's brother, who happens to know everything the merchant knew; how easy it is to roll a die and change the rat bite's infection to a mild, passing illness; how easy it is for the party to find food; how easy it is for the DM to make it stop raining.
From there, it is just as easy to change a crit to an ordinary hit, or a hit to a miss. It is just as easy to remove ten hit points from the enemy's pile. It is all the more easy if this can be done behind a screen, where no one can see, where there is no check or balance on the DM's behaviour, no quality assurance, no measurable second witness to hold the DM accountable for anything.
So which is it to be? Either/Or, yes?
Strict adherence to the rules does create a problem, there's no denying it. The real criminality here is, however, that the first and most obvious solution to the problem, the easy solution, is execrable. However, it is so damn easy, so damn ready to hand, so pervasively supported by the industry, the presence of computer screens and from of the most prestigious voices among the participants, putting an end to it reflects taking up arms against the sea with a broom.
However, there are hard solutions that will also manage the problem. For example, understanding how causality works; understanding how to motivate others without adversely challenging their agency; stretching the mind to be more creative in adventure building and problem solving; understanding how reaching for easy expositional devices paints a party ~ and an adventure ~ into a hopeless corner, by making the whole adventure depend on one participant, such as a mage, or on one contact, such as a merchant. In other words, learning how to manage the damn game.
Research. Diligence. Experience. Open-mindedness. Work. And a willingness to see that changing a 17 to a 16 on a d20 matters. A little thing called honor.
And here, yes, I sound like an old man. I am an old man; and as such, I can game any of these young punks under the table, without cheating and without forcing a story down anyone's throat.
[Admittedly, I seem to have an online problem with players who distrust me, apparently because the series of events I've envisioned is so rational it must be a scam. Ah well]
For anyone who wants to take the hard path, I can help. Want to write better adventures? Familiarize yourself, first, about what makes a bad story. Open every folder, one by one, and read every link. Yes, every link. And when you read that such and such a link says that a key plot point of one of your favorite movies is a piece of bad writing, change your fucking mind about your favorite movie and recognize that it's true. Because if you can't change your mind, on evidence, about something you love, you'll never be a good anything, much less a good DM.
Changing your mind about something you love doesn't mean you have to stop loving it. It just means you have to learn to love it for what it is, not for what you wish it was. And that is fucking hard. If that is too hard for you, you're welcome to go back to cheating your friends.
Meanwhile, let's tackle this, from Silberman on October 22nd:
"Does the DM's pursuit of her narrative liberate the game from the stodgy rules, or do the interactions of multiple die rolls and player moves liberate the game from the predictability of one participant's storytelling (most likely a pastiche of assorted genre fictions and past runnings)?"
Do be sure to follow the link and read the whole comment.
The question above has been more and more prevalent these last ten years ~ I believe because the continued lack of proper design towards aiding the DM in constructing the actual game has been lacking, and because many of the people who began their participation more than 20 years ago have had their input compromised, leaving many new people without proper mentorship in how to DM. That said, however, I'll address the question.
As Silberman words it (and everyone words it the same way), this is an either/or question. That is how it is argued on bulletin boards and blog comments throughout the internet. So they say, "My game is story-based" as opposed to the use of dice to determine outcomes: "Role-playing" vs. "Roll-playing." These two camps support one option or the other, slinging stones at each other across an invented no-man's land, where no compromise is possible.
Silberman's question is related to a very sarcastic post I wrote about DMs who clearly feel it is in their mandate to regulate what happens in a game, to ensure the best possible experience for the player. My post responded to a series of loaded questions clearly deriding positions such as following the rules, killing characters with low-level monsters, painstakingly rolling appropriate dice for situations and not fudging those dice. As such, I took Silberman's reference to the predictability of storytelling as a DM prepared to fudge dice, ensure player survival and cheat the rules in order to sustain their vision rather than the game.
But people do take it farther than that.
On the 15th of last month I proposed a means of charting a game adventure, based on character motivation, with the idea of the DM creating obstacles that would serve as causes, eliciting responses which would drive the characters through the adventure. While some hailed the clarity of this procedure, declaring that they'd not heard it put so succinctly, the post also drew condemnation as a pursuit of the DM's narrative, bordering on (tolerable) illusionism and, in general, not necessarily the best way to approach the campaign ideal.
Basically, the two camps. And whereas one camp stands on their right to force the story, the other can be just as dogmatic in enforcing the rules: any deviation from strict randomness is seen as a game sin, a philosophy that creates situations which, as Silberman notes later in his comment,
I have to acknowledge that players get frustrated--as DM, I get frustrated--when bad decisions and bad luck draw out the players' pursuit of a once-clear agenda to the point of stagnation. The fighter went asshole and killed that merchant who hired the party, so nobody knows who their contact is in the next town; the wizard is dying from an infected giant rat bite; it's been frigid and raining for the past week; everyone is out of food and starving. Around the table, every die roll is accompanied by a mumbled, "Whatever."
Every game DM who has tried to follow the rules faithfully, most often in their uncompromising youth, had that experience ~ not just once, but many times. It is an awful situation to manage: particularly if one is 12 or 13, knowing nothing about the nature of humans and how to motivate even people of one's own age. Without tools, without perspective, without a mentor to guide them and without wanting to quit playing, many a young or new player makes the decision that, "No, I'm not going through that again." And how easy it is to fudge the dice and ensure that. How easy it is create a merchant's brother, who happens to know everything the merchant knew; how easy it is to roll a die and change the rat bite's infection to a mild, passing illness; how easy it is for the party to find food; how easy it is for the DM to make it stop raining.
From there, it is just as easy to change a crit to an ordinary hit, or a hit to a miss. It is just as easy to remove ten hit points from the enemy's pile. It is all the more easy if this can be done behind a screen, where no one can see, where there is no check or balance on the DM's behaviour, no quality assurance, no measurable second witness to hold the DM accountable for anything.
So which is it to be? Either/Or, yes?
Strict adherence to the rules does create a problem, there's no denying it. The real criminality here is, however, that the first and most obvious solution to the problem, the easy solution, is execrable. However, it is so damn easy, so damn ready to hand, so pervasively supported by the industry, the presence of computer screens and from of the most prestigious voices among the participants, putting an end to it reflects taking up arms against the sea with a broom.
However, there are hard solutions that will also manage the problem. For example, understanding how causality works; understanding how to motivate others without adversely challenging their agency; stretching the mind to be more creative in adventure building and problem solving; understanding how reaching for easy expositional devices paints a party ~ and an adventure ~ into a hopeless corner, by making the whole adventure depend on one participant, such as a mage, or on one contact, such as a merchant. In other words, learning how to manage the damn game.
Research. Diligence. Experience. Open-mindedness. Work. And a willingness to see that changing a 17 to a 16 on a d20 matters. A little thing called honor.
And here, yes, I sound like an old man. I am an old man; and as such, I can game any of these young punks under the table, without cheating and without forcing a story down anyone's throat.
[Admittedly, I seem to have an online problem with players who distrust me, apparently because the series of events I've envisioned is so rational it must be a scam. Ah well]
For anyone who wants to take the hard path, I can help. Want to write better adventures? Familiarize yourself, first, about what makes a bad story. Open every folder, one by one, and read every link. Yes, every link. And when you read that such and such a link says that a key plot point of one of your favorite movies is a piece of bad writing, change your fucking mind about your favorite movie and recognize that it's true. Because if you can't change your mind, on evidence, about something you love, you'll never be a good anything, much less a good DM.
Changing your mind about something you love doesn't mean you have to stop loving it. It just means you have to learn to love it for what it is, not for what you wish it was. And that is fucking hard. If that is too hard for you, you're welcome to go back to cheating your friends.
WTHSI
The Point of Insanity today released another podcast in which I am a participant, along with a regular reader of this blog. Carl and I chat with Scott and Chad on "Want to Hear Something Interesting?" The podcast just went up this morning.
I enjoyed this more, I think, than the one back in August. Hope you'll take the time to listen and make a comment or two here.
I enjoyed this more, I think, than the one back in August. Hope you'll take the time to listen and make a comment or two here.
Monday, October 30, 2017
A Programmed Trade System
I've been approached by a programmer who, reading the recent posts, has expressed an interest in making the trade system into a program. We're just discussing it, right now. No time lines have been set. Only the scantiest of details have been discussed. There is enough for him to try out a few things, to solve some up front problems.
We'll probably be looking at some kind of beta stage, as a problem solving tool. And, whenever that comes to light, I'll probably have to take down the trade content on the Patreon account, since if the auto-trade system works, people might look at those files and see how to duplicate our work. That's a very real thing, but it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, I'm going to continue working on upgrading things, particularly as I have reformatted everything and worked out an interesting availability system.
Just now, I'm tagging items according to the climatic classification that each market city exists in, according to the Koppen system. I'm hoping this will narrow the distribution of certain agricultural resources in my system. For example, looking up "olives" would probably tell me that they're grown in a warm, Mediterranean climate, but that wouldn't be very helpful. On the other hand, by tagging every market in my system where olives originate, I can get an exact distribution for olives and everything else, helping me build an availability system not only based on what climates have access to olives, but which ones don't. And that applies to every other product as well.
I was also thinking of making a mirrored distance table - the table that calculates the distance of any given trade city from every other - for the winter period, which would involve finding all the calculations for very cold regions (specifically, humic micro-thermal climates, like most of Canada), doubling or perhaps trebling the distance between markets to simulate the decreased likelihood of trade during the winter months. This would just mean that when I wanted to calculate a city when my game was taking place in December, I'd simply go to the other table and use that. No doubt, northern products would increase in price and decrease in availability (and thus disappear from my equipment list), while places that made use of northern trade routes, such as the Baltic Sea, would have to ship through more southern cities and ultimately that would increase the price and lower the availability of many things that yet originated in relatively warm climates.
Work, yes, but the results could be fun.
So, still thinking, still developing. I still have many ideas.
We'll probably be looking at some kind of beta stage, as a problem solving tool. And, whenever that comes to light, I'll probably have to take down the trade content on the Patreon account, since if the auto-trade system works, people might look at those files and see how to duplicate our work. That's a very real thing, but it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, I'm going to continue working on upgrading things, particularly as I have reformatted everything and worked out an interesting availability system.
Just now, I'm tagging items according to the climatic classification that each market city exists in, according to the Koppen system. I'm hoping this will narrow the distribution of certain agricultural resources in my system. For example, looking up "olives" would probably tell me that they're grown in a warm, Mediterranean climate, but that wouldn't be very helpful. On the other hand, by tagging every market in my system where olives originate, I can get an exact distribution for olives and everything else, helping me build an availability system not only based on what climates have access to olives, but which ones don't. And that applies to every other product as well.
I was also thinking of making a mirrored distance table - the table that calculates the distance of any given trade city from every other - for the winter period, which would involve finding all the calculations for very cold regions (specifically, humic micro-thermal climates, like most of Canada), doubling or perhaps trebling the distance between markets to simulate the decreased likelihood of trade during the winter months. This would just mean that when I wanted to calculate a city when my game was taking place in December, I'd simply go to the other table and use that. No doubt, northern products would increase in price and decrease in availability (and thus disappear from my equipment list), while places that made use of northern trade routes, such as the Baltic Sea, would have to ship through more southern cities and ultimately that would increase the price and lower the availability of many things that yet originated in relatively warm climates.
Work, yes, but the results could be fun.
So, still thinking, still developing. I still have many ideas.
Saturday, October 28, 2017
New Pricing Table
For those supporting me on Patreon (it's only $10, one time, for one month, to see it), I have added the new pricing table to my Google drive. The title includes "28oct17" ~ but I'll leave up the old pricing table a bit before taking it down, if anyone wants to get a copy and hasn't thought to do that.
Patreon will be taking out donations in just three days, so if you'd like to pledge $5, $10 or $20 towards the continued great content of this blog (going by what people have told me), now would be a good time. It's early enough that you still have plenty of time to find money for Christmas, yes?
Thanks for reading and for your fine comments. I've already been thinking of ways to implement some of the additional changes I suggested in today's earlier post ~ but I'm not rushing to do anything just now.
Patreon will be taking out donations in just three days, so if you'd like to pledge $5, $10 or $20 towards the continued great content of this blog (going by what people have told me), now would be a good time. It's early enough that you still have plenty of time to find money for Christmas, yes?
Thanks for reading and for your fine comments. I've already been thinking of ways to implement some of the additional changes I suggested in today's earlier post ~ but I'm not rushing to do anything just now.
How Much, And If At All
I've gotten through my equipment list and established Sets for each object. I realized as I went that the Sets are quite crunchy enough to manage every item, as many things are simply excessively rare and happen to be made of things that are bound to be made of a common good: say, a floating castle made of stone, as an example of something not on the list. That can be solved by simply dividing the reference availability by the workmanship number on the table, but even that has to be arbitrarily tweaked somewhat. I'm never happy with an arbitrary solution, so no doubt I'll be messing with this system until I am happy ... or until I die, which ever seems more likely.
Still, I'm more pleased with it than I have been with any other availability system, and that's good. I'm just rebuilding the pretty table for players to use during the game, then I'll post it on my drive for patreon users.
There's a different aspect to availability that needs addressing, and that connects to the quantity of goods that can be bought (a whole other headache). I'll use elephants as an example.
Let's say that we're in Stavanger: a cool Norwegian climate in the summer and bitterly wet and cold in the winter. In my system, the total number of references for elephants in Stavanger is 0.0200. I have 7 world references for elephants just now (there would be more, but Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have not yet been added to the system). Here's the breakdown of how the sources of elephants affect the Stavanger market:
All of these are in India. The distance between Stavanger and Mysore, Bombay, Galle, etc. are all over 300. Myingan, in the region of Pagan, in the Empire of Toungoo, is in Burma (and I'll bet you recognize none of those names), making it the farthest away.
It's no use arguing that these are mastodons in Norway, because the table clearly shows where they're coming from. And since 0.015625 is the minimum for set one objects, and since and "elephant" is a set one object from elephant references, this puts elephants in Norway. I can eliminate elephants by arbitrarily listing them as "set 2," but then I would have to remember to personally change that set if the trade numbers were being generated for a market in India. No good. The programming has to work for everywhere.
Put that on a shelf for the moment.
My trade system bases the price of an elephant on the number of references vs. the number of elephants. I have 50,637 head of trained, domesticated elephants in the world, obviously in India and Burma. This doesn't seem like many, but it compares with established numbers early in the 20th century. And I don't have many references, because the source comes from the 20th century and even India had been advanced enough that not every town in the country named elephants as a resource.
If we take that number and divide it by 7, we end with slightly less than 7,234 elephants per reference. If we multiply the number of references in Stavanger by 1 reference of elephants, we get 144.55 elephants in Stavanger. In Norway.
That's ridiculous. There are only 2,500 people in the town of Stavanger in my game, so where the hell are they keeping all these elephants?
It helps to think of products appearing on the market tables as things going through the market, rather than as things being kept there. Most of anything is a wholesale product, piling up in a given town like Stavanger before being distributed throughout a large section of the hinterland. Stavanger market serves a population ten times its number, and of course merchants in Stavanger import things they expect to then ship forward to other trade cities.
If we think of the number of elephants, or any other product, as the amount going through Stavanger in a year, it reduces the physical appearance of every commodity. If we divide the year into 52 weeks, however, it still means almost three elephants moving through Stavanger per week, but that's at least a little easier to swallow.
Technically, it could be the same three elephants, or even one elephant, being sold over and over, since that's how economies work. We could also argue that only the paperwork is moving through Stavanger. A fellow doing business in Stavanger has a plantation in India and as such, he's managing his elephants overseas; yes, you can buy an elephant in Stavanger, but you have to pick it up in Mysore.
That's a way of handwaving the issue and it has been the thought process I've had for a long time. Besides, no player character wants to buy an elephant in Stavanger, even if it is only 89 g.p. Even if the thing is in a stall, as a DM I'm going to be a complete asshole about it and tell the player the elephant is going to die if it doesn't get a sufficient shelter or moved pretty quick to a warmer climate. That's a way of controlling it too. That and the fact that an elephant eats 450 lb. of food a month.
None of this actually solves the problem, however ~ as I say, it is handwaving. Logically, the trick it to establish another variable that states an elephant won't or can't be sold in such-and-such a climate, even if the adjusted references say it exists.
And that is easy to write and to propose but it includes hundreds of other items that must also be arbitrarily limited in market appearance based on a very wide variety of issues. Saltwater fish and shipbuilding being sold inland (along with defining what is "inland"), furs and heavy cloth items even being available in hot, humid climates (why would you want a fur even as a rug in Burma? And who would bring it thousands of miles to market it there?), wagons existing in places without roads and so on. These things are fiddly and highly particular to some areas and we're talking about a lot of work defining the margins of where a product occurs and where it doesn't.
On top of this, add the argument of seasonal availability, something I have always wanted to incorporate but which was just a bridge too far. I think I see now how this could be done more easily, but again it is a process of going through each item one at a time and arbitrarily deciding whether something can be bought in a given season at all, and then how much of what is sold in what season ~ and even that doesn't yet take into account fruit that is shipped a thousand miles vs. a hundred.
I've hand-waved that by saying an apprentice mage with a freshen cantrip can restore a cubic yard of vegetable material a day, enabling a full wagon to be restored entirely every four-six days, depending on the size of the wagon, long enough for it to be hauled from Andalucia to Warsaw or further. But a system that argued that Israeli hushhash couldn't be bought in Stavanger at all would be better.
These are long-term plans, and hopefully will be implemented one by one. The hold-up until now has been a base system that could be used to adjust items; now that I have found one (hopefully, it holds up), I can patiently figure out these other issues one by one, creating features that will discount something if it is such and such a distance from the sea, if it is autumn, if it is in such and such a climate that discounts its presence and so on. A long, frustrating process towards a deeper, grittier detail, but I think in the long run worth it.
I look back at what I've created thus far; it would be hard to imagine something this big and this complex at the beginning of this project without losing heart at ever accomplishing this much. Yet I have accomplished it, because I didn't think of the whole scale. I just thought of one little bit of it at a time, letting the process itself determine the monolith of the project that it became.
Still, I'm more pleased with it than I have been with any other availability system, and that's good. I'm just rebuilding the pretty table for players to use during the game, then I'll post it on my drive for patreon users.
There's a different aspect to availability that needs addressing, and that connects to the quantity of goods that can be bought (a whole other headache). I'll use elephants as an example.
Let's say that we're in Stavanger: a cool Norwegian climate in the summer and bitterly wet and cold in the winter. In my system, the total number of references for elephants in Stavanger is 0.0200. I have 7 world references for elephants just now (there would be more, but Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have not yet been added to the system). Here's the breakdown of how the sources of elephants affect the Stavanger market:
All of these are in India. The distance between Stavanger and Mysore, Bombay, Galle, etc. are all over 300. Myingan, in the region of Pagan, in the Empire of Toungoo, is in Burma (and I'll bet you recognize none of those names), making it the farthest away.
It's no use arguing that these are mastodons in Norway, because the table clearly shows where they're coming from. And since 0.015625 is the minimum for set one objects, and since and "elephant" is a set one object from elephant references, this puts elephants in Norway. I can eliminate elephants by arbitrarily listing them as "set 2," but then I would have to remember to personally change that set if the trade numbers were being generated for a market in India. No good. The programming has to work for everywhere.
Put that on a shelf for the moment.
My trade system bases the price of an elephant on the number of references vs. the number of elephants. I have 50,637 head of trained, domesticated elephants in the world, obviously in India and Burma. This doesn't seem like many, but it compares with established numbers early in the 20th century. And I don't have many references, because the source comes from the 20th century and even India had been advanced enough that not every town in the country named elephants as a resource.
If we take that number and divide it by 7, we end with slightly less than 7,234 elephants per reference. If we multiply the number of references in Stavanger by 1 reference of elephants, we get 144.55 elephants in Stavanger. In Norway.
That's ridiculous. There are only 2,500 people in the town of Stavanger in my game, so where the hell are they keeping all these elephants?
It helps to think of products appearing on the market tables as things going through the market, rather than as things being kept there. Most of anything is a wholesale product, piling up in a given town like Stavanger before being distributed throughout a large section of the hinterland. Stavanger market serves a population ten times its number, and of course merchants in Stavanger import things they expect to then ship forward to other trade cities.
If we think of the number of elephants, or any other product, as the amount going through Stavanger in a year, it reduces the physical appearance of every commodity. If we divide the year into 52 weeks, however, it still means almost three elephants moving through Stavanger per week, but that's at least a little easier to swallow.
Technically, it could be the same three elephants, or even one elephant, being sold over and over, since that's how economies work. We could also argue that only the paperwork is moving through Stavanger. A fellow doing business in Stavanger has a plantation in India and as such, he's managing his elephants overseas; yes, you can buy an elephant in Stavanger, but you have to pick it up in Mysore.
That's a way of handwaving the issue and it has been the thought process I've had for a long time. Besides, no player character wants to buy an elephant in Stavanger, even if it is only 89 g.p. Even if the thing is in a stall, as a DM I'm going to be a complete asshole about it and tell the player the elephant is going to die if it doesn't get a sufficient shelter or moved pretty quick to a warmer climate. That's a way of controlling it too. That and the fact that an elephant eats 450 lb. of food a month.
None of this actually solves the problem, however ~ as I say, it is handwaving. Logically, the trick it to establish another variable that states an elephant won't or can't be sold in such-and-such a climate, even if the adjusted references say it exists.
And that is easy to write and to propose but it includes hundreds of other items that must also be arbitrarily limited in market appearance based on a very wide variety of issues. Saltwater fish and shipbuilding being sold inland (along with defining what is "inland"), furs and heavy cloth items even being available in hot, humid climates (why would you want a fur even as a rug in Burma? And who would bring it thousands of miles to market it there?), wagons existing in places without roads and so on. These things are fiddly and highly particular to some areas and we're talking about a lot of work defining the margins of where a product occurs and where it doesn't.
On top of this, add the argument of seasonal availability, something I have always wanted to incorporate but which was just a bridge too far. I think I see now how this could be done more easily, but again it is a process of going through each item one at a time and arbitrarily deciding whether something can be bought in a given season at all, and then how much of what is sold in what season ~ and even that doesn't yet take into account fruit that is shipped a thousand miles vs. a hundred.
I've hand-waved that by saying an apprentice mage with a freshen cantrip can restore a cubic yard of vegetable material a day, enabling a full wagon to be restored entirely every four-six days, depending on the size of the wagon, long enough for it to be hauled from Andalucia to Warsaw or further. But a system that argued that Israeli hushhash couldn't be bought in Stavanger at all would be better.
These are long-term plans, and hopefully will be implemented one by one. The hold-up until now has been a base system that could be used to adjust items; now that I have found one (hopefully, it holds up), I can patiently figure out these other issues one by one, creating features that will discount something if it is such and such a distance from the sea, if it is autumn, if it is in such and such a climate that discounts its presence and so on. A long, frustrating process towards a deeper, grittier detail, but I think in the long run worth it.
I look back at what I've created thus far; it would be hard to imagine something this big and this complex at the beginning of this project without losing heart at ever accomplishing this much. Yet I have accomplished it, because I didn't think of the whole scale. I just thought of one little bit of it at a time, letting the process itself determine the monolith of the project that it became.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Wonderful Opportunities for Adventure
This afternoon, I had a discussion with a regular reader who tells me that I should find a programmer and have my trade system made into a format that will let people plug in data and spew out the results. It's a lovely idea. Unfortunately, I don't know a programmer, programmers don't listen to instructions, I don't believe there's enough demand for the product to justify paying a programmer the necessary money, or even splitting the money even with someone who, if they did listen, is merely translating my work into a different format. I love the idea. It's just that it doesn't make sense.
A part of me says, "Fine, do it for them." I hear from people who tell me they like the idea, but it is just too much work. They start into it and they lose the verve and it never gets done.
What most people would want to do with a trade system, with a typical world that I see posted on line, to resounding cries of "I love your art style," would be a cake walk for me. The map on the right, from socksandpuppets.com, consists of 12 habitations, not counting the "base camp." It would be easy to build up a distance table, then select a hundred products and build a trade system for this that would serve the world well enough to, as Ian Pinder said, "search for adventure" within that system.
It also came up, "Would I make the world itself?" A hundred years ago, back in 1984, after making a world that looked somewhat similar to the picture above, I was asked to make an imaginary world for others. At the time, I charged the outrageous price of $150. I can't imagine doing something like this now. Back then, I did hand drawings. Now, to do it on computer (as I am not hand drawing and shipping anything), I certainly wouldn't be cheap. And it wouldn't be worth it anyway. For what most DMs use a D&D world for, stealing a map like the one linked should be enough for them.
At this point, on this subject, I'm merely poking the bear. I doubt there are more than two or three persons who would find any use for this service, were I to offer it. I haven't hesitated in the past to monetize this blog, so I don't worry about that. I only wonder, is this something I want to actually do.
 |
| A Typical World |
What most people would want to do with a trade system, with a typical world that I see posted on line, to resounding cries of "I love your art style," would be a cake walk for me. The map on the right, from socksandpuppets.com, consists of 12 habitations, not counting the "base camp." It would be easy to build up a distance table, then select a hundred products and build a trade system for this that would serve the world well enough to, as Ian Pinder said, "search for adventure" within that system.
It also came up, "Would I make the world itself?" A hundred years ago, back in 1984, after making a world that looked somewhat similar to the picture above, I was asked to make an imaginary world for others. At the time, I charged the outrageous price of $150. I can't imagine doing something like this now. Back then, I did hand drawings. Now, to do it on computer (as I am not hand drawing and shipping anything), I certainly wouldn't be cheap. And it wouldn't be worth it anyway. For what most DMs use a D&D world for, stealing a map like the one linked should be enough for them.
At this point, on this subject, I'm merely poking the bear. I doubt there are more than two or three persons who would find any use for this service, were I to offer it. I haven't hesitated in the past to monetize this blog, so I don't worry about that. I only wonder, is this something I want to actually do.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Calculating Scarcity in Market Items
A small number of my readers will be happy to learn that I'm replacing parts of my trade pricing table with excel's vlookup feature. I have found a practical application for it and I'm incorporating the function.
One problem I have had with the trade system is the question of availability. It is all well and good to have things with prices that vary from place to place, but that still leaves the question, "How many can I buy?" Or, for that matter, if there is anything on the shelf at all.
I have tried a number of methods for this over the year, one of which is still a part of the system as it is located for patreon supporters right now. But it is based on random numbers and I must admit, for some things, random numbers just suck. It was because of random numbers that I conceived by sage abilities system as things you can absolutely do vs. things that you absolutely cannot do. There are some things that still incorporate random numbers, but the principle of knowledge is not one of them. I know that the Serbians were massacred and driven out of their homeland during World War I. There's no random chance that I will forget that.
Of late, I've figured out a way to get the random chance out of the availability of items. Though it drastically flattens the likelihood of finding a given object, or how many are available, because the number of items is so large and the algorithm is hard to predict, that is only noticeable to the designer. Eventually, the players will grasp the idea for some items, but I doubt they would for the whole list of goods and services that can be purchased.
It works like this. Imagine what it's like to buy things in a general store. You want to buy something very common like a torch and you find there's a big basket of them. But then you want a flint to light that torch and it turns out there's just one left. Or the store sold the last one this morning and you're out of luck.
That's what I'm reaching for. That common items will always be there, or virtually always; and less common items will tend to be missing from the shelf marked "telescope" or "silver holy symbol." Unless, of course, the player happens to be in a town where telescopes are made. Then there will be a basket-full.
I'll just trust here that readers are vaguely aware of my trade system. Every time I want to talk about it there's too much to explain and I have already been down that road. Still, basically there are a set of references that I express to the fourth significant digit. The number of references for any given object, from extraordinarily rare gems to general foodstuffs ranges from 0.0025 to 20.0000.
I'm beginning with the premise that if we're at a particular market, say Stavanger in Norway where the online party is, a total references of >1 for that object means that every possible version of that object is available. If Stavanger's shipbuilding industry is >1 reference, then ships of every size can be purchased or built from scratch at that port. Of course, the boat might not actually be in the harbor, but an agent in Stavanger can get it for you in a period reasonable with the 17th century, say a month or two.
From there, we create a series of tiers. >1 reference equals Tier 1. Dividing that number by four, 0.25 - 0.9999 references equals Tier 2. Dividing it again by four, 0.0625 - 0.2499 equals Tier 3 and 0.01563 - 0.0624 equals Tier 4.
We then rate every object that is sold on a scale of 1 to 4 "sets." Set 1 includes anything that is grossly common: ordinary stone, iron bars, a cloak, chickens, torches, a stay at an inn, ordinary wine and beer, whatever. Things we absolutely expect to always find in any market town. Set 2 is one up the scale: things that are a little less common but could still be expected to be found in any civilized society: a holy symbol, a metal candelabra, butter and cheese, hard boots as opposed to soft ones, books, a vial of salve for wounds, a stay at a nicer inn, etcetera. Set 3 would mean low level luxuries; the sort of thing that peasants would never buy but would find its way into a merchant's household: porcelain, stained glass, a rare liqueur, a fur coat, a particularly nasty poison, a carved oaken bureau, a pet war dog and so on. Finally, Set 4 would include every rare thing that conceivably existed.
For Set 4 things to be found, the number of references would have to equal the Tier 1 level. At Tier 2, at best we would find Set 3 objects. At Tier 3, no better than Set 2. Finally, at Tier 4, only Set 1 objects would exist. If the number of references isn't high enough for Tier 4, nothing of that particular good or service is available. If we're so far from the makers of weapons that less than 2% of a reference exists, then no, there's nothing here, not even a dagger. You'll have to make due with a club you find somewhere.
I know it sounds to some people that the Tier number should equal the Set number, and that's fine for them if that's how they want to do it. It's just reversing the scale.
I like that this system narrows the import reach for objects that ought to be unusual, while maintaining commonality in areas where the object is actually made. It may be hard to find a fur coat in Italy, but in Russia everyone is wearing them, even though they are a set 3 object. You may have the money to buy everything in existence: but if it isn't on the shelf because it is never imported (its just too far away), then there's no point in waiting to see if something will come in next week. No one ever brings it here because it isn't wanted.
This gives me ideas for how to manage the starting question, how many are there - but I haven't quite solved that one yet. I'm patiently working on creating a page that gives everything a set number, then compares that with the automatically generated tier system ~ which is where vlookup is coming in handy. Yes, it was a good suggestion and now that I'm starting to get used to it, I'll be using the function more often. I'd like to thank those readers who poked me about it and to promise them that yes, even an ornery grognard can change.
I should be able to update the pricing table on the private drive for patreon donations in a week or two: sooner if readers clamor for a beta version that's only partially made.
One problem I have had with the trade system is the question of availability. It is all well and good to have things with prices that vary from place to place, but that still leaves the question, "How many can I buy?" Or, for that matter, if there is anything on the shelf at all.
I have tried a number of methods for this over the year, one of which is still a part of the system as it is located for patreon supporters right now. But it is based on random numbers and I must admit, for some things, random numbers just suck. It was because of random numbers that I conceived by sage abilities system as things you can absolutely do vs. things that you absolutely cannot do. There are some things that still incorporate random numbers, but the principle of knowledge is not one of them. I know that the Serbians were massacred and driven out of their homeland during World War I. There's no random chance that I will forget that.
Of late, I've figured out a way to get the random chance out of the availability of items. Though it drastically flattens the likelihood of finding a given object, or how many are available, because the number of items is so large and the algorithm is hard to predict, that is only noticeable to the designer. Eventually, the players will grasp the idea for some items, but I doubt they would for the whole list of goods and services that can be purchased.
It works like this. Imagine what it's like to buy things in a general store. You want to buy something very common like a torch and you find there's a big basket of them. But then you want a flint to light that torch and it turns out there's just one left. Or the store sold the last one this morning and you're out of luck.
That's what I'm reaching for. That common items will always be there, or virtually always; and less common items will tend to be missing from the shelf marked "telescope" or "silver holy symbol." Unless, of course, the player happens to be in a town where telescopes are made. Then there will be a basket-full.
I'll just trust here that readers are vaguely aware of my trade system. Every time I want to talk about it there's too much to explain and I have already been down that road. Still, basically there are a set of references that I express to the fourth significant digit. The number of references for any given object, from extraordinarily rare gems to general foodstuffs ranges from 0.0025 to 20.0000.
I'm beginning with the premise that if we're at a particular market, say Stavanger in Norway where the online party is, a total references of >1 for that object means that every possible version of that object is available. If Stavanger's shipbuilding industry is >1 reference, then ships of every size can be purchased or built from scratch at that port. Of course, the boat might not actually be in the harbor, but an agent in Stavanger can get it for you in a period reasonable with the 17th century, say a month or two.
From there, we create a series of tiers. >1 reference equals Tier 1. Dividing that number by four, 0.25 - 0.9999 references equals Tier 2. Dividing it again by four, 0.0625 - 0.2499 equals Tier 3 and 0.01563 - 0.0624 equals Tier 4.
We then rate every object that is sold on a scale of 1 to 4 "sets." Set 1 includes anything that is grossly common: ordinary stone, iron bars, a cloak, chickens, torches, a stay at an inn, ordinary wine and beer, whatever. Things we absolutely expect to always find in any market town. Set 2 is one up the scale: things that are a little less common but could still be expected to be found in any civilized society: a holy symbol, a metal candelabra, butter and cheese, hard boots as opposed to soft ones, books, a vial of salve for wounds, a stay at a nicer inn, etcetera. Set 3 would mean low level luxuries; the sort of thing that peasants would never buy but would find its way into a merchant's household: porcelain, stained glass, a rare liqueur, a fur coat, a particularly nasty poison, a carved oaken bureau, a pet war dog and so on. Finally, Set 4 would include every rare thing that conceivably existed.
For Set 4 things to be found, the number of references would have to equal the Tier 1 level. At Tier 2, at best we would find Set 3 objects. At Tier 3, no better than Set 2. Finally, at Tier 4, only Set 1 objects would exist. If the number of references isn't high enough for Tier 4, nothing of that particular good or service is available. If we're so far from the makers of weapons that less than 2% of a reference exists, then no, there's nothing here, not even a dagger. You'll have to make due with a club you find somewhere.
I know it sounds to some people that the Tier number should equal the Set number, and that's fine for them if that's how they want to do it. It's just reversing the scale.
I like that this system narrows the import reach for objects that ought to be unusual, while maintaining commonality in areas where the object is actually made. It may be hard to find a fur coat in Italy, but in Russia everyone is wearing them, even though they are a set 3 object. You may have the money to buy everything in existence: but if it isn't on the shelf because it is never imported (its just too far away), then there's no point in waiting to see if something will come in next week. No one ever brings it here because it isn't wanted.
This gives me ideas for how to manage the starting question, how many are there - but I haven't quite solved that one yet. I'm patiently working on creating a page that gives everything a set number, then compares that with the automatically generated tier system ~ which is where vlookup is coming in handy. Yes, it was a good suggestion and now that I'm starting to get used to it, I'll be using the function more often. I'd like to thank those readers who poked me about it and to promise them that yes, even an ornery grognard can change.
I should be able to update the pricing table on the private drive for patreon donations in a week or two: sooner if readers clamor for a beta version that's only partially made.
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Lords of the Budgies
I'm not surprised that I didn't get more feedback for my post about Frank Mentzer. People who read this blog know that once I've begun to rant, it's not safe to approach too close, else I shall viciously rend the poor soul limb from limb.
That aside, I've given some thought to why I dislike, so vehemently, these creators of the game I love [deconstructing my own thoughts], the only game I play. There are so many others who see these fellows as great men, to whom they owe so much, because without them this game wouldn't exist ~ at least, not in the form it does now.
Though of course it doesn't exist in the form they created, except for a few; that form has been mashed and hashed and cut to pieces, only to be reassembled into various Frankenstein's monsters that roam everywhere. As such, I'm not sure what we're celebrating in what these men did, as clearly what they did was not enough to sustain the actual format they created for very long. Within six years of D&D cresting the wave, growing popular enough that it's presence made itself known to the media and the general public (about 1979), Gygax was gone from TSR. Four years after that, 2nd Edition was launched. One could argue that almost from the beginning of the appearance of real money, the game was a corpse for buzzards come to feed.
But this is not why I dislike this gang of creators. They were clearly out of their depth; none of them had any business acumen. None demonstrated a cold, practical sense about how games worked or the technical acumen necessary to sustain themselves in the industry. They were just guys doing something neat and different; mostly, they let themselves get caught up in the radical thrill of having a "job" that enabled them to play games. And they pursued their jobs with the zest of any worker who finds themselves in a similar situation ~ they rode the train, knowing that one day it had to hit something and crash, but why worry?
It's not the guys themselves that I despise. It is what they supposedly stood for. These were not bright guys. They did not have any special ability to turn a phrase or express themselves well; their thought processes are similar to those found in any university newspaper: the vague, stumbling expression of half-considered beliefs, defending social justice or the right of students to drink beer openly on the common (since it's private property). They meant well, of course, but in fact they had a tiger by the tail and not one of them had a real notion of the game's potential. They saw it as a simple game, no better and no worse than the Avalon Hill games they played already, just another way to while away the time on a random evening.
I think the evidence for that is that none of them moved on. Readers won't understand what I mean by that, thinking that most of them moved on from designing games to writing fiction novels or going to cons, or creating other games, etcetera. That's not what I mean at all. These were university educated men; supposedly creative, imaginative, celebrity-worthy fellows, due great respect and the outpouring of love upon their deaths. But aside from chancing into being a component in the chance-creation of something much bigger than themselves, what did they do?
Please don't misunderstand me. Most of us will never "do" anything of great purpose, unless it is to fight in a war or participate in the production of some composite piece of art, like a film or a festival ~ but again, these are things much bigger than ourselves. Celebrity is owed to people who do something of their own accord; while the status of immortality is owed to people who do it more than once. Or, who arguably sustain something against all real opposition for a long time.
That is why no one outside the role-playing community knows who Mentzer, Holmes, Moldvay or Arneson are. Even inside the community, these guys were only sustained because we, the players, were so damn obsessed with the game we perpetrated a sustainable community that could usefully beckon these fellows to come forward and serve as icons ~ well, pets, really. Beyond being alive, none of them had the acumen to hold the game together by sheer force of will or capability. None were able to defend their ideals indefatigably against their critics. None kept making new and profound changes that took the game forward to great heights.
When times got tough in the 1980s, they all crawled away like dogs, tails between their legs, gratuitously begging to write awful pulpy fiction books to sustain a businessman's notion of what young, dumb game purchasers would buy. They traded on their names, not their abilities, not their abilities to innovate, not their collective superior inventive faculties, to produce the same dreck material they had been paid to create in the late 70s and early 80s, right through the 90s and 00s until meeting their actuarial ends. Same, same, same ... only a little worse each time, as we well know, for they are celebrated not for that great module they wrote in 1997 but for that thing they wrote in 1979.
Mentzer just happens to be one of these that is still alive: but looking at his recent failed attempt at a kickstarter, it is clear it was just going to be more of the same, more derivative re-tellings of two-dimensional settings and stories, plastered with the same artwork available everywhere on Google. In a computer age, when bookstores are dying and the tablet rules, it was Mentzer's idea to build his new Empyrea kickstarter and really well made 200-page tomes fashioned of good, high quality paper.
These were not bright guys. They were lucky guys. And in a way, they were very unlucky guys, depending on one's perspective and what they might have done if they had not sold their souls to stay in the game, whatever the cost. These are not guys who went to the cons thinking of how they were building their careers towards a greater future. These were guys going to the cons because they had nothing else. The adulation they got from the budgies (fans with bobbling, piercing, darting eyes) was the only thing that made these guys feel alive.
Some, like Mentzer, let it convince them that they were somehow important to the industry; that their word could make or break the careers of other people ~ and they made that threat to hundreds of people, in the hubris of feeling self-righteous. It was the budgies that made them feel that way; who tricked them, with their adoration, into feeling that they deserved that adoration ... but in fact, most of these guys are just lazy, dull, repulsive old men, sitting on cheap chairs and pretending they are thrones.
That aside, I've given some thought to why I dislike, so vehemently, these creators of the game I love [deconstructing my own thoughts], the only game I play. There are so many others who see these fellows as great men, to whom they owe so much, because without them this game wouldn't exist ~ at least, not in the form it does now.
Though of course it doesn't exist in the form they created, except for a few; that form has been mashed and hashed and cut to pieces, only to be reassembled into various Frankenstein's monsters that roam everywhere. As such, I'm not sure what we're celebrating in what these men did, as clearly what they did was not enough to sustain the actual format they created for very long. Within six years of D&D cresting the wave, growing popular enough that it's presence made itself known to the media and the general public (about 1979), Gygax was gone from TSR. Four years after that, 2nd Edition was launched. One could argue that almost from the beginning of the appearance of real money, the game was a corpse for buzzards come to feed.
But this is not why I dislike this gang of creators. They were clearly out of their depth; none of them had any business acumen. None demonstrated a cold, practical sense about how games worked or the technical acumen necessary to sustain themselves in the industry. They were just guys doing something neat and different; mostly, they let themselves get caught up in the radical thrill of having a "job" that enabled them to play games. And they pursued their jobs with the zest of any worker who finds themselves in a similar situation ~ they rode the train, knowing that one day it had to hit something and crash, but why worry?
It's not the guys themselves that I despise. It is what they supposedly stood for. These were not bright guys. They did not have any special ability to turn a phrase or express themselves well; their thought processes are similar to those found in any university newspaper: the vague, stumbling expression of half-considered beliefs, defending social justice or the right of students to drink beer openly on the common (since it's private property). They meant well, of course, but in fact they had a tiger by the tail and not one of them had a real notion of the game's potential. They saw it as a simple game, no better and no worse than the Avalon Hill games they played already, just another way to while away the time on a random evening.
I think the evidence for that is that none of them moved on. Readers won't understand what I mean by that, thinking that most of them moved on from designing games to writing fiction novels or going to cons, or creating other games, etcetera. That's not what I mean at all. These were university educated men; supposedly creative, imaginative, celebrity-worthy fellows, due great respect and the outpouring of love upon their deaths. But aside from chancing into being a component in the chance-creation of something much bigger than themselves, what did they do?
Please don't misunderstand me. Most of us will never "do" anything of great purpose, unless it is to fight in a war or participate in the production of some composite piece of art, like a film or a festival ~ but again, these are things much bigger than ourselves. Celebrity is owed to people who do something of their own accord; while the status of immortality is owed to people who do it more than once. Or, who arguably sustain something against all real opposition for a long time.
That is why no one outside the role-playing community knows who Mentzer, Holmes, Moldvay or Arneson are. Even inside the community, these guys were only sustained because we, the players, were so damn obsessed with the game we perpetrated a sustainable community that could usefully beckon these fellows to come forward and serve as icons ~ well, pets, really. Beyond being alive, none of them had the acumen to hold the game together by sheer force of will or capability. None were able to defend their ideals indefatigably against their critics. None kept making new and profound changes that took the game forward to great heights.
When times got tough in the 1980s, they all crawled away like dogs, tails between their legs, gratuitously begging to write awful pulpy fiction books to sustain a businessman's notion of what young, dumb game purchasers would buy. They traded on their names, not their abilities, not their abilities to innovate, not their collective superior inventive faculties, to produce the same dreck material they had been paid to create in the late 70s and early 80s, right through the 90s and 00s until meeting their actuarial ends. Same, same, same ... only a little worse each time, as we well know, for they are celebrated not for that great module they wrote in 1997 but for that thing they wrote in 1979.
Mentzer just happens to be one of these that is still alive: but looking at his recent failed attempt at a kickstarter, it is clear it was just going to be more of the same, more derivative re-tellings of two-dimensional settings and stories, plastered with the same artwork available everywhere on Google. In a computer age, when bookstores are dying and the tablet rules, it was Mentzer's idea to build his new Empyrea kickstarter and really well made 200-page tomes fashioned of good, high quality paper.
These were not bright guys. They were lucky guys. And in a way, they were very unlucky guys, depending on one's perspective and what they might have done if they had not sold their souls to stay in the game, whatever the cost. These are not guys who went to the cons thinking of how they were building their careers towards a greater future. These were guys going to the cons because they had nothing else. The adulation they got from the budgies (fans with bobbling, piercing, darting eyes) was the only thing that made these guys feel alive.
Some, like Mentzer, let it convince them that they were somehow important to the industry; that their word could make or break the careers of other people ~ and they made that threat to hundreds of people, in the hubris of feeling self-righteous. It was the budgies that made them feel that way; who tricked them, with their adoration, into feeling that they deserved that adoration ... but in fact, most of these guys are just lazy, dull, repulsive old men, sitting on cheap chairs and pretending they are thrones.
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