I have asked four players to come and participate in an online campaign. It was a rich and worthwhile evening last night in the way of communication, and my concerns about writing the nasty post yesterday were put to rest.
I was going to write about starting here, but I've decided to keep it on the campaign page. So players and interested parties can please go here for information about how to get started. A few notes, however.
My contention is that no person gets to choose their childhood or their beginnings, and therefore all background is rolled randomly. I contend that getting past the misery of your childhood is what makes people what they are, and thus creates character - so don't make plans about what you're all about until you find out what's made you the person you are. I recognize this goes against a lot of others who feel life should be a free-for-all in an RPG from the moment of birth, but I find most people tend to choose common, dull movie-plotted characterizations if given the chance (revenge and angst), and I feel the game is improved if the players are not left to their own devices in this way. So please concentrate on the strategic method (class) you wish to employ in tackling the evils and difficulties of the world.
Be warned about choosing a female character. One of my players in the online campaign started the campaign 6 months pregnant, and is just now due to give birth two weeks from the party's present activity. This can be both a good and a bad thing, and certainly offers the opportunity for a unique roleplaying experience ... but know what you're risking going in.
This seems enough for now. Interested viewers who have something to say, please post comments here. Players in the campaign, do not feel you need to create your blogger ID for commenting on the Character Creation post on the other blog ... in fact, stick to your normal ID for now, and save the character ID for the actual game. There is no comment moderation, so I will delete inappropriate comments from non-participants if they should forget to post them here.
Anything else I'll address as it comes up.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Monday, September 12, 2011
Exactly What We Have Come To Expect From The D&D Community
Total number of persons wanting to play in a proposed online campaign: 37
Actual number of emails or comments expressing an actual desire to play: 6
I contemplated on how best to handle this as things emerged over the weekend. To save face, I could say nothing. I could pretend more people applied than actually did. I could acknowledge those who did answer with gratitude, give them a place in my world and simply cover up the details. No one would know. My detractors would be left wondering if my popularity was greater than they wished for and those who responded might think they were chosen from a wide range of applicants. I could even lie and say they were.
But I am not interested in my public relations, nor am I much moved by the applications I did receive. Two seemed completely out to lunch, and four managed to repeat to me more or less the same principles I had expounded, with some small additions. No one, I'm afraid to say, particularly blew my socks off ... which is what I wanted, of course. It is what the gentle reader wants every time they open a new blog. I see no reason why I shouldn't hope for the same.
I am guessing from some comments that were made that I intimidated the majority of people. I gather that they felt I would be inflexible - despite my statements to the contrary - or that I would expect far more than they were able, or perhaps willing, to deliver. This is all well and good. My feeling is that if no prospective player can develop the wherewithal to produce an appeal that encourages me to run the game, then I should not feel obliged to be encouraged. I'm obviously NOT asking for anyone to beg me. Those who feel I am are infantile morons who have clearly not read anything I've bothered to write on the subject.
I am asking for inspiration. My only gain in playing the game online, as opposed to playing the game offline as I do, is to play with people who are gifted and amazing in their play. I expressed a desire to hear people say so. I did not hear this. I did hear from people who had no experience whatsoever. I was thus very, very disappointed.
My detractors will rush to talk about what a swelled head I have and how I am so very full of myself in regards to my importance in the community. They won't give credit for my honesty, nor my directness, nor the effort I made to have the so-called community stand up and meet me eye-to-eye. To the six people who responded, congratulations. To the two people who wrote to express precisely why they couldn't play, you have my congratulations also. In my opinion you are unusual among your peers in that you eight people have spines. I deeply respect that.
And I should make an exception to James C. and Chgowiz, who were given reason to believe they were shoe-ins.
As to the other 27 people who "want" to play, but really don't want to? Who could have saved me a lot of time and energy by answering "no" from the beginning and thus clarifying that there was no real desire out there for my online world? Fuck you. Fuck you very much.
Actual number of emails or comments expressing an actual desire to play: 6
I contemplated on how best to handle this as things emerged over the weekend. To save face, I could say nothing. I could pretend more people applied than actually did. I could acknowledge those who did answer with gratitude, give them a place in my world and simply cover up the details. No one would know. My detractors would be left wondering if my popularity was greater than they wished for and those who responded might think they were chosen from a wide range of applicants. I could even lie and say they were.
But I am not interested in my public relations, nor am I much moved by the applications I did receive. Two seemed completely out to lunch, and four managed to repeat to me more or less the same principles I had expounded, with some small additions. No one, I'm afraid to say, particularly blew my socks off ... which is what I wanted, of course. It is what the gentle reader wants every time they open a new blog. I see no reason why I shouldn't hope for the same.
I am guessing from some comments that were made that I intimidated the majority of people. I gather that they felt I would be inflexible - despite my statements to the contrary - or that I would expect far more than they were able, or perhaps willing, to deliver. This is all well and good. My feeling is that if no prospective player can develop the wherewithal to produce an appeal that encourages me to run the game, then I should not feel obliged to be encouraged. I'm obviously NOT asking for anyone to beg me. Those who feel I am are infantile morons who have clearly not read anything I've bothered to write on the subject.
I am asking for inspiration. My only gain in playing the game online, as opposed to playing the game offline as I do, is to play with people who are gifted and amazing in their play. I expressed a desire to hear people say so. I did not hear this. I did hear from people who had no experience whatsoever. I was thus very, very disappointed.
My detractors will rush to talk about what a swelled head I have and how I am so very full of myself in regards to my importance in the community. They won't give credit for my honesty, nor my directness, nor the effort I made to have the so-called community stand up and meet me eye-to-eye. To the six people who responded, congratulations. To the two people who wrote to express precisely why they couldn't play, you have my congratulations also. In my opinion you are unusual among your peers in that you eight people have spines. I deeply respect that.
And I should make an exception to James C. and Chgowiz, who were given reason to believe they were shoe-ins.
As to the other 27 people who "want" to play, but really don't want to? Who could have saved me a lot of time and energy by answering "no" from the beginning and thus clarifying that there was no real desire out there for my online world? Fuck you. Fuck you very much.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Dungeon Master's Manifesto
I have said before that the DM's purpose in the game is to present a world in which characters are free to run - that is, 'live' - and that the DM should not impose his or her personal belief system upon the players' actions, nor in any way compel the player to act according to the DM's wishes.
This is a resolution that I feel the DM must have. 1) Create a world. 2) Presuppose that while the world has inherent characteristics, those characteristics do not change once the players have begun to take actions. 3) The characters should be in charge of themselves. 4) It must be possible for the characters to change the world. 5) The DM must be indifferent to the effects or changes the characters choose to make.
These are the conditions under which I have always DM'd. What keeps my world from spinning out of control is the size and difficulty of the world, in that it has a great many forces which have an invested purpose in the status quo, who are apt to rise against anyone who challenges that status quo ... just as in the real world. While yes, the characters may make changes (and have), at lower levels it is likely that any severe change they are capable of making will have severe consequences. For example, if first level characters should decide to burn down a town, which it is in their power to do, they must expect that the powers that be would immediately begin playing a game of 'twenty questions' with an augury or similar spell in order to isolate who committed the crime. The party should expect fifty or more clerics asking, "Was the arsonist human? A foreigner? Tall? Scarred? Did the arsonist leave on the south road? On a horse? Today? Are they near the town of Saintonge? Are they Christian?" And so on. For as long as it takes, probably, depending on the amount of damage done. If necessary, a charm will be made that will steadily lead the complaintants to the arsonist ... and the characters should count on that and make preparations.
But this is not me, the DM, stipulating this. The expected response mirrors the response of such persons in the real world, in that people who commit atrocities are routinely hunted down and brought to justice. Because it happens in the real world, the players can maneuver their characters according to their own experiences with actual life ... which serves them well in keeping alive in the real world, and ought to serve them well in keeping them alive in D&D.
If the players should find a way to keep themselves from being discovered, perhaps with a magic item that protects them, then I as DM will end the search. I do not care that the town was burned to the ground. I have nothing invested in the town. I do not send clerics and soldiers after the party because I feel the party has somehow violated my world. Such things should be beneath me as DM. I have to have the indifference that allows me to think what the lower orders would do to the players, emotionlessly. My pleasure is observing the game, and making guesses as to what a logical outcome ought to be ... my pleasure is NOT in manipulating the game. When the party changes the game by some clever thought, I must reconsider the logic of my earlier guess, and change accordingly. I must adapt to the party's actions, just as the party adapts to the world. The less personal stake I have in the game, the freer the party is, and the better the game.
I will send a villain at the party; I will conjure a monster to stand in the party's way; I will have creatures who have been hurt by the party carry a grudge, and I will reward the party when the party shows compassion and kindness. In each of these actions is an ethical dilemma. How far can I go as DM in having the NPC carry a grudge? How powerful can the creature I conjure be? What do I define as compassion?
As best I can I will limit the NPC's ability to do anything by the NPC's abilities and authority. As best I can the monster will only be one that could reasonably be expected to appear, and in any case will appear at a distance that is reasonable ... with the understanding that the smaller the monster, the nearer the distance. I can only judge compassion by my own personal experience with it in the real world. My ability to do each of these things is tempered by who I am as a person - and as a person, this measures whether or not I am a good DM. If I behave badly as a DM again and again, so that my actions betray the initial manifesto found in the first paragraph of this post, then I am at fault, and the players are right to demand that my position on a matter be changed accordingly. It is my responsibility as a DM to put the game FIRST, and that the best game is one in which the players are involved, excited and happy. This is a difficult balancing act. But like any other thing, the measure of the craftsman is found nowhere but in the result.
I have this for perspective players: How does the above specifically relate to your style of play How does it offer opportunities to do things you would like to do. How would you take advantage of this arrangement, understanding that your stubborn self-interest is not held to be a bad thing in this construct?
Your answer, and the specificity of your answer, is the primary determination for playing in my online campaign. Remember that I am looking for proactive persons who are inclined to be comfortable describing their actions on a regular, ongoing basis - in other words, you should be the kind of person who likes to write and express yourself in words.
Answer in the comments section. Answer on your blog. Answer to my email address, alexiss1@telus.net (though I won't see it there until tonight). But answer before 9 p.m. eastern standard time, Sunday. If you're not checking this blog more often than that, you're probably not right for the campaign.
Other comments, whether or not you have any wish to play, are welcome on the above philosophy. It is something that needs to be discussed, and often, and I am certainly interested in doing so.
This is a resolution that I feel the DM must have. 1) Create a world. 2) Presuppose that while the world has inherent characteristics, those characteristics do not change once the players have begun to take actions. 3) The characters should be in charge of themselves. 4) It must be possible for the characters to change the world. 5) The DM must be indifferent to the effects or changes the characters choose to make.
These are the conditions under which I have always DM'd. What keeps my world from spinning out of control is the size and difficulty of the world, in that it has a great many forces which have an invested purpose in the status quo, who are apt to rise against anyone who challenges that status quo ... just as in the real world. While yes, the characters may make changes (and have), at lower levels it is likely that any severe change they are capable of making will have severe consequences. For example, if first level characters should decide to burn down a town, which it is in their power to do, they must expect that the powers that be would immediately begin playing a game of 'twenty questions' with an augury or similar spell in order to isolate who committed the crime. The party should expect fifty or more clerics asking, "Was the arsonist human? A foreigner? Tall? Scarred? Did the arsonist leave on the south road? On a horse? Today? Are they near the town of Saintonge? Are they Christian?" And so on. For as long as it takes, probably, depending on the amount of damage done. If necessary, a charm will be made that will steadily lead the complaintants to the arsonist ... and the characters should count on that and make preparations.
But this is not me, the DM, stipulating this. The expected response mirrors the response of such persons in the real world, in that people who commit atrocities are routinely hunted down and brought to justice. Because it happens in the real world, the players can maneuver their characters according to their own experiences with actual life ... which serves them well in keeping alive in the real world, and ought to serve them well in keeping them alive in D&D.
If the players should find a way to keep themselves from being discovered, perhaps with a magic item that protects them, then I as DM will end the search. I do not care that the town was burned to the ground. I have nothing invested in the town. I do not send clerics and soldiers after the party because I feel the party has somehow violated my world. Such things should be beneath me as DM. I have to have the indifference that allows me to think what the lower orders would do to the players, emotionlessly. My pleasure is observing the game, and making guesses as to what a logical outcome ought to be ... my pleasure is NOT in manipulating the game. When the party changes the game by some clever thought, I must reconsider the logic of my earlier guess, and change accordingly. I must adapt to the party's actions, just as the party adapts to the world. The less personal stake I have in the game, the freer the party is, and the better the game.
I will send a villain at the party; I will conjure a monster to stand in the party's way; I will have creatures who have been hurt by the party carry a grudge, and I will reward the party when the party shows compassion and kindness. In each of these actions is an ethical dilemma. How far can I go as DM in having the NPC carry a grudge? How powerful can the creature I conjure be? What do I define as compassion?
As best I can I will limit the NPC's ability to do anything by the NPC's abilities and authority. As best I can the monster will only be one that could reasonably be expected to appear, and in any case will appear at a distance that is reasonable ... with the understanding that the smaller the monster, the nearer the distance. I can only judge compassion by my own personal experience with it in the real world. My ability to do each of these things is tempered by who I am as a person - and as a person, this measures whether or not I am a good DM. If I behave badly as a DM again and again, so that my actions betray the initial manifesto found in the first paragraph of this post, then I am at fault, and the players are right to demand that my position on a matter be changed accordingly. It is my responsibility as a DM to put the game FIRST, and that the best game is one in which the players are involved, excited and happy. This is a difficult balancing act. But like any other thing, the measure of the craftsman is found nowhere but in the result.
I have this for perspective players: How does the above specifically relate to your style of play How does it offer opportunities to do things you would like to do. How would you take advantage of this arrangement, understanding that your stubborn self-interest is not held to be a bad thing in this construct?
Your answer, and the specificity of your answer, is the primary determination for playing in my online campaign. Remember that I am looking for proactive persons who are inclined to be comfortable describing their actions on a regular, ongoing basis - in other words, you should be the kind of person who likes to write and express yourself in words.
Answer in the comments section. Answer on your blog. Answer to my email address, alexiss1@telus.net (though I won't see it there until tonight). But answer before 9 p.m. eastern standard time, Sunday. If you're not checking this blog more often than that, you're probably not right for the campaign.
Other comments, whether or not you have any wish to play, are welcome on the above philosophy. It is something that needs to be discussed, and often, and I am certainly interested in doing so.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Blood In The Sandbox
Growing up a long time ago as I did, I watched television during a particular period in the 1970s during which immorality was paraded as a tease, only to be followed by the tromping heavy boots of morality. I refer specifically to the TV show Fantasy Island, which fits the trope perfectly for this post since it includes the word 'fantasy' and that's what I want to write about.
For those who may not know the show - I have no idea if it is in reruns, I don't subscribe to television - the episodes always began with the smooth and savvy Mr. Roarke explaining to the midget Tattoo the fantasies of two guests, both arriving on a plane to the Island as the credits ran. One of these fantasies would be quite innocent and benign, but the other would always have a dark element. Roarke's voice would deepen and leave the viewer with a suggestion that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
But when I say 'dark element,' I mean 1970s dark. These would be things such as a man wanting to cheat on his wife, or seeking revenge, or living the life of a 'vampire' - in the campy Hammer films sense, of course. And always, the shows would tease the villainy just so far, before things would go terribly wrong and force the fantasizer back onto the straight and narrow, as they realized their fantasies demonstrated a lack of character or some such. No one ever died, or was shot, no sex ever happened, no one ever did anything that was bad ... but the viewer was drawn in with the HOPE of seeing something bad, only to be bitchslapped by Roarke's moral intervention.
Even at the age of 14 when I saw this show I knew the principle was ridiculously wrong. I wanted people to wallow in these fantasies, since they sound very interesting ... much more interesting that the woman who only wanted to meet the father she had never known or the man who dreamed of being a star athelete. I recognize we have these fantasies, too, but since everyone in the real world thinks its okay to pursue them, it makes a very dull TV show. The creators knew the real pull was vice ... the vice they wouldn't give us because this was the 1970s.
It hasn't changed much. I catch pieces of television shows on the net, watching a season of this or that, and the rules are the same. Tempt the viewer with SOME vice, but don't let it run wild. the amount of vice we can show has increased and intensified (RE: True Blood), but it still has its element of 'this is bad vice' and 'this is good vice.' It's okay to bite the necks of your victims a little ... but don't lose control.
In the realm of television that makes sense, I suppose. There are all these innocent people who only want their fantasies served with meat and potatoes, who are little old grandmothers who still remember when films did not include swearing or blood, or who were scandalized by Fantasy Island 33 years ago. Frankly, however, I'm a little tired of having my fantasies regulated and restrained by grandmothers ... or by the Old Guard of RPG designers, for that matter, who seem to have similar tastes.
We are told that:
D&D must not appear to be about wallowing in the fantasies of evil because we would like our participation in this game to be accepted. We can't be accepted if you, a different participant, insist on slaughtering innocent townspeople or spending too much time enjoying the rewards for doing so. We would very much like it if you would stop. We would very much like it if you could continue to play the game as a group of 'Heroes' who rescue maidens and present a clean, pleasant image of yourselves as adventurers. Any other action on your part stains us all, and surely you recognize that if we are to continue enjoying the benefits of renting large convention centers for getting together, we depend on your cooperation.
More to the point, we are told:
Fantasy is not unrestrained violence. Fantasy is what we as an acceptable culture has defined it to be, that is, in the tradition of proper literary artists like Tolkein, Baum, Barrie, Howard, Lieber and Lewis. Lovecraft is all right as long as you keep the real nastiness behind closed doors, and of course Moorcock is okay as long as Jerry Cornelius isn't indulged too far. If you can be funny like Asprin or clever like Anthony or deep and thoughtful like Leguin that's even better. But let us have it clear: if it is too much like historical accuracy, we will wave our extended fingers, shake our heads slowly and cluck our tongues. That is NOT 'fantasy.' I hope that is clear.
What this leads to is thinking that Carcosa is an 'on the edge' influence on the hobby, as though no one alive has ever heard of H.R. Giger, or even Hieronymus Bosch for heaven's sake. As though there has been no long tradition extending back centuries describing the horrors and evils perpetrated by human beings on other human beings. As though we are all restricted in our play to approved sources, Appendix N and other limited compendiums of watered-down late twentieth century B-literature.
The sandbox is bigger, much bigger than that. And while Mr. Roarke disapproves and tries to intervene, a good half of us playing the game don't really give a shit what the other half thinks. We are going to go on being horrible awful people, however that stains the blessed robes of the frustrated elite that can't convince us that PR is more important that RP. They'll go on trying to spread the new, clean sand over the blood we've spilled, but the blood will always seep up and spoil their efforts.
Killing pretend, fictional creatures is fun.
For those who may not know the show - I have no idea if it is in reruns, I don't subscribe to television - the episodes always began with the smooth and savvy Mr. Roarke explaining to the midget Tattoo the fantasies of two guests, both arriving on a plane to the Island as the credits ran. One of these fantasies would be quite innocent and benign, but the other would always have a dark element. Roarke's voice would deepen and leave the viewer with a suggestion that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
But when I say 'dark element,' I mean 1970s dark. These would be things such as a man wanting to cheat on his wife, or seeking revenge, or living the life of a 'vampire' - in the campy Hammer films sense, of course. And always, the shows would tease the villainy just so far, before things would go terribly wrong and force the fantasizer back onto the straight and narrow, as they realized their fantasies demonstrated a lack of character or some such. No one ever died, or was shot, no sex ever happened, no one ever did anything that was bad ... but the viewer was drawn in with the HOPE of seeing something bad, only to be bitchslapped by Roarke's moral intervention.
Even at the age of 14 when I saw this show I knew the principle was ridiculously wrong. I wanted people to wallow in these fantasies, since they sound very interesting ... much more interesting that the woman who only wanted to meet the father she had never known or the man who dreamed of being a star athelete. I recognize we have these fantasies, too, but since everyone in the real world thinks its okay to pursue them, it makes a very dull TV show. The creators knew the real pull was vice ... the vice they wouldn't give us because this was the 1970s.
It hasn't changed much. I catch pieces of television shows on the net, watching a season of this or that, and the rules are the same. Tempt the viewer with SOME vice, but don't let it run wild. the amount of vice we can show has increased and intensified (RE: True Blood), but it still has its element of 'this is bad vice' and 'this is good vice.' It's okay to bite the necks of your victims a little ... but don't lose control.
In the realm of television that makes sense, I suppose. There are all these innocent people who only want their fantasies served with meat and potatoes, who are little old grandmothers who still remember when films did not include swearing or blood, or who were scandalized by Fantasy Island 33 years ago. Frankly, however, I'm a little tired of having my fantasies regulated and restrained by grandmothers ... or by the Old Guard of RPG designers, for that matter, who seem to have similar tastes.
We are told that:
D&D must not appear to be about wallowing in the fantasies of evil because we would like our participation in this game to be accepted. We can't be accepted if you, a different participant, insist on slaughtering innocent townspeople or spending too much time enjoying the rewards for doing so. We would very much like it if you would stop. We would very much like it if you could continue to play the game as a group of 'Heroes' who rescue maidens and present a clean, pleasant image of yourselves as adventurers. Any other action on your part stains us all, and surely you recognize that if we are to continue enjoying the benefits of renting large convention centers for getting together, we depend on your cooperation.
More to the point, we are told:
Fantasy is not unrestrained violence. Fantasy is what we as an acceptable culture has defined it to be, that is, in the tradition of proper literary artists like Tolkein, Baum, Barrie, Howard, Lieber and Lewis. Lovecraft is all right as long as you keep the real nastiness behind closed doors, and of course Moorcock is okay as long as Jerry Cornelius isn't indulged too far. If you can be funny like Asprin or clever like Anthony or deep and thoughtful like Leguin that's even better. But let us have it clear: if it is too much like historical accuracy, we will wave our extended fingers, shake our heads slowly and cluck our tongues. That is NOT 'fantasy.' I hope that is clear.
What this leads to is thinking that Carcosa is an 'on the edge' influence on the hobby, as though no one alive has ever heard of H.R. Giger, or even Hieronymus Bosch for heaven's sake. As though there has been no long tradition extending back centuries describing the horrors and evils perpetrated by human beings on other human beings. As though we are all restricted in our play to approved sources, Appendix N and other limited compendiums of watered-down late twentieth century B-literature.
The sandbox is bigger, much bigger than that. And while Mr. Roarke disapproves and tries to intervene, a good half of us playing the game don't really give a shit what the other half thinks. We are going to go on being horrible awful people, however that stains the blessed robes of the frustrated elite that can't convince us that PR is more important that RP. They'll go on trying to spread the new, clean sand over the blood we've spilled, but the blood will always seep up and spoil their efforts.
Killing pretend, fictional creatures is fun.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Liberalism
As these Civilization IV technologies progress, it becomes less and less a question of how the game is affected by their presence, and more so how the game continues in their absence. In no previous case more than Liberalism, which is at present the driving force of all our culture. Liberalism brought in its wake property rights, labor rights, the development of the modern democratic state, the separation of the church, the abolition of slavery, the pursuit of personal freedom and the pursuit of national freedom, human rights, the recognition of war crimes, universal healthcare and so on and so on ... those are just the biggies that come to mind first.
I don't propose to talk about how all this came into being. I recommend starting with either John Locke or Voltaire, progressing through Jean Jacques Rousseau (if you must), Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mills and then probably Sigmund Freud ... and then going back again and doing some serious reading, since all you've done at that point is dangle your feet. The very last thing I'm going to do in this savage and hostile blogging universe is make an attempt to describe to the gentle reader why you're an enlightened person and how that came to be ... as an enlightened person you're responsible for finding out these things yourself. All I am going to do here is talk about what an unenlightened person most likely was.
To begin with, largely guilt free. Robert Louis Stevenson proposed with his novel the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that a rational, 'modern' person without a conscience or a sense of guilt was quite probably a monster, terrorizing his way through the streets and pubs of 19th century London - depicted by Hollywood as imprisoning women and scaring them a lot. I am not proposing that the 14th century counterpart was the same hideous creature - familial ties and responsibilities went a long way towards keeping the average individual under social restraint - but I am proposing that the 'horrible' things that the 14th century individual saw or did in their lifetime was probably managed without huge amounts of guilt. Caving in someone's skull with a club for the purpose of 'fun' was seen quite differently then - depending upon the use the hapless owner made of that skull just prior to its bludgeoning.
Because you see, while guilt was not the constant companion of the medieval mind that it is of the modern counterpart, what did exist was a steady and absolute certainty - for most - that 'badness' would lead to the most awful consequences. That is, Damnation. This is why it was so important to get God's approval upon your upcoming actions, to be assured that the skull-caving you hoped to spend the afternoon doing was completely sanctioned. If it was, well, go at it me boy, cave what you can reach and bring back a pot of the brains for good measure.
Since obviously we tend to be spontaneous creatures, why did this not bring terrific amounts of guilt to the medievalite whenever they happened to spontaneously bludgeon a random fellow to death? Well, two reasons really. The first, if it really turned out to be someone who needed it after all, you could be forgiven after the fact ... which cleared you of any guilt absolutely, just as though you'd done the deed with getting the sanction first. And the second, if you by circumstance killed the wrong person, well, you could still get forgiven, but you'd also get very dead ... far too quickly to bathe in the glow of any after guilt.
I've been talking about murder through this to make the extreme point, but the truth is the standards hold for every kind of action across the board. If you steal, if you covet, if you sexually jump someone or what have you, it ultimately all comes down to being A) forgiven and B) killed. For most of history it didn't take much to get yourself killed by doing something wrong. For a lot of women in the middle ages, all they needed was to be widowed and have property ... a witches' property went immediately to the church that burned her first, so it was all out justice against anyone who could have that moniker hammered ... er, burned ... onto their person.
The nice thing about all this is that the force doing all the forgiving were themselves subject to being sanctioned in most any action they performed by themselves - like a 9/11 investigation commission. Clerics tended to get into trouble only when they stepped on the toes of other clerics ... or when they stepped on the toes of people other clerics were adamant to keep in power, like kings and so on. Provided they did neither, the money would nicely roll in and support all this lovely forgiving and these executions for citizen wrongdoing. The only real shame was so much of the money pouring in had to be channeled to other clerics higher up. It's an enlightening way of looking at the Reformation when you realize that Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and so on weren't half so interested in stopping the flow of cash into their own pockets as they were cutting off ties with the people to whom they were expected to give money. But that's really beside the point.
In this environment, where your immortal soul mattered far more than the property, rights, importance or humanity of your fellow earthly occupants (who were mostly going to hell due to their being not quite so pious as you), the distance between justification and skull caving was a lot shorter than one with which we'd be familiar. Once Henry V tells you that slaughtering the French is a holy act, supported by a group of bishops standing around him waiting for Henry to wrest money out of the hands of other bishops, it's very easy to lift that mace. When Caesarius of Heisterbach tells you to slaughter every person in Beziers, Catholic and Cathar alike, because "God will know his own," that is going to make an enormous amount of sense to you. God DOES know his own, doesn't he? There is nothing on this Earth more certain than that.
If this all seems strange or uncomfortable for you, or if it seems I'm not talking about liberalism at all, question how you yourself would handle being at Beziers on the 22nd of July, 1209, when the 20,000 inhabitants of the city were slaughtered, and if your priest giving you his blessing after the fact would have much influence on your thought process. The failure of that blessing to affect you IS the effect of liberalism ... an effect which your player characters, were they living in the 13th century, wouldn't be feeling.
Disgust, unquestionably. Doubt about quite a few things, oh yes, I'm sure of that. A certainty that life was fleeting and that it could disappear in the blink of an eye? Yes, that too, and not just from the occasional slaughter of 'innocents' - though no one was, by definition - but also from the terrifying and sudden onset of disease or the tenuous presence of enough food for all. All the more reason to throw one's lot in with the priests, who have it in their power to reassure you that this life is merely a passing thing, an antechamber for the next life.
I've read some rather silly things online about how magic would bring about a utopia of some such, with food and healing for all, and naturally a freedom from the ordinary sufferings of daily life ... and I wonder if these writers are able to recognize a human being when they see one. If the reader supposes for a moment that real magical power put into the hands of a person like Caesarius would bring about a age of universal happiness, you live in a liberal cocoon of truly impressive thickness. Why should any person with power directly aid any person without power, when the power itself makes the powerless immaterial? Liberalism came into the universal consciousness because the power of the ruling class was questioned, then ultimately seized in an horrific orgy of fear and hate - comparable, I might add, with the slaughter of Beziers. This lovely spreading of human privilege and freedom was planted in very bloody ground.
If Louis XVI of France and all his secular and religious attendents were not ready to surrender a fraction of their untold wealth for the purpose of feeding the peasants food the peasants had grown themselves, how does one imagine that Louis or anyone else would sit up for hours memorizing spells in order to vacation in the countryside distributing them? Even if a diseased person could be healed every day, it takes time and trouble to find these diseased persons, and the facts are the privileged class is not inclined to take much time or trouble for anyone. Truth be told, if the shitfuck who very nearly hits me everyday at the pedestrian crossing can't be bothered to stop and wait when the lights are blinking, what is the chance of his coming around to see me when I'm unwell? Perhaps, if I pour enough money into Louis' coffers, he might let me hang around his court, for I'd be paying him ... but I wouldn't count even then on having his cardinal cast spells for me that might be needed elsewhere by Louis before the day ends. Never mind giving them to the peasants. Those are the simple facts of life.
Characters in D&D, however, will always be acted out to be as liberal as their player puppeteers ... you puppeteers cannot help yourselves. You may think characters slaughtering the women or children of a town, or thieving, or raping women, or selling off slaves or whatever other nightmares you might conjure is a loathesome way to spend a Saturday night's running - but I propose that the characters themselves, free of your puppeteering, would find your perception of their world one of inexpressible weakness. They would view your pampered, fat greasy bodies with an eye that revealed you as hardly worth leaving alive - something their clerics would advocate were better killed than let to live and infect the minds of decent, god-fearing persons. Your characters would be certain they'd be forgiven for your deaths ... who in the world could miss squeamish, pathetic worms like yourselves?
I don't propose to talk about how all this came into being. I recommend starting with either John Locke or Voltaire, progressing through Jean Jacques Rousseau (if you must), Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mills and then probably Sigmund Freud ... and then going back again and doing some serious reading, since all you've done at that point is dangle your feet. The very last thing I'm going to do in this savage and hostile blogging universe is make an attempt to describe to the gentle reader why you're an enlightened person and how that came to be ... as an enlightened person you're responsible for finding out these things yourself. All I am going to do here is talk about what an unenlightened person most likely was.
To begin with, largely guilt free. Robert Louis Stevenson proposed with his novel the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that a rational, 'modern' person without a conscience or a sense of guilt was quite probably a monster, terrorizing his way through the streets and pubs of 19th century London - depicted by Hollywood as imprisoning women and scaring them a lot. I am not proposing that the 14th century counterpart was the same hideous creature - familial ties and responsibilities went a long way towards keeping the average individual under social restraint - but I am proposing that the 'horrible' things that the 14th century individual saw or did in their lifetime was probably managed without huge amounts of guilt. Caving in someone's skull with a club for the purpose of 'fun' was seen quite differently then - depending upon the use the hapless owner made of that skull just prior to its bludgeoning.
Because you see, while guilt was not the constant companion of the medieval mind that it is of the modern counterpart, what did exist was a steady and absolute certainty - for most - that 'badness' would lead to the most awful consequences. That is, Damnation. This is why it was so important to get God's approval upon your upcoming actions, to be assured that the skull-caving you hoped to spend the afternoon doing was completely sanctioned. If it was, well, go at it me boy, cave what you can reach and bring back a pot of the brains for good measure.
Since obviously we tend to be spontaneous creatures, why did this not bring terrific amounts of guilt to the medievalite whenever they happened to spontaneously bludgeon a random fellow to death? Well, two reasons really. The first, if it really turned out to be someone who needed it after all, you could be forgiven after the fact ... which cleared you of any guilt absolutely, just as though you'd done the deed with getting the sanction first. And the second, if you by circumstance killed the wrong person, well, you could still get forgiven, but you'd also get very dead ... far too quickly to bathe in the glow of any after guilt.
I've been talking about murder through this to make the extreme point, but the truth is the standards hold for every kind of action across the board. If you steal, if you covet, if you sexually jump someone or what have you, it ultimately all comes down to being A) forgiven and B) killed. For most of history it didn't take much to get yourself killed by doing something wrong. For a lot of women in the middle ages, all they needed was to be widowed and have property ... a witches' property went immediately to the church that burned her first, so it was all out justice against anyone who could have that moniker hammered ... er, burned ... onto their person.
The nice thing about all this is that the force doing all the forgiving were themselves subject to being sanctioned in most any action they performed by themselves - like a 9/11 investigation commission. Clerics tended to get into trouble only when they stepped on the toes of other clerics ... or when they stepped on the toes of people other clerics were adamant to keep in power, like kings and so on. Provided they did neither, the money would nicely roll in and support all this lovely forgiving and these executions for citizen wrongdoing. The only real shame was so much of the money pouring in had to be channeled to other clerics higher up. It's an enlightening way of looking at the Reformation when you realize that Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and so on weren't half so interested in stopping the flow of cash into their own pockets as they were cutting off ties with the people to whom they were expected to give money. But that's really beside the point.
In this environment, where your immortal soul mattered far more than the property, rights, importance or humanity of your fellow earthly occupants (who were mostly going to hell due to their being not quite so pious as you), the distance between justification and skull caving was a lot shorter than one with which we'd be familiar. Once Henry V tells you that slaughtering the French is a holy act, supported by a group of bishops standing around him waiting for Henry to wrest money out of the hands of other bishops, it's very easy to lift that mace. When Caesarius of Heisterbach tells you to slaughter every person in Beziers, Catholic and Cathar alike, because "God will know his own," that is going to make an enormous amount of sense to you. God DOES know his own, doesn't he? There is nothing on this Earth more certain than that.
If this all seems strange or uncomfortable for you, or if it seems I'm not talking about liberalism at all, question how you yourself would handle being at Beziers on the 22nd of July, 1209, when the 20,000 inhabitants of the city were slaughtered, and if your priest giving you his blessing after the fact would have much influence on your thought process. The failure of that blessing to affect you IS the effect of liberalism ... an effect which your player characters, were they living in the 13th century, wouldn't be feeling.
Disgust, unquestionably. Doubt about quite a few things, oh yes, I'm sure of that. A certainty that life was fleeting and that it could disappear in the blink of an eye? Yes, that too, and not just from the occasional slaughter of 'innocents' - though no one was, by definition - but also from the terrifying and sudden onset of disease or the tenuous presence of enough food for all. All the more reason to throw one's lot in with the priests, who have it in their power to reassure you that this life is merely a passing thing, an antechamber for the next life.
I've read some rather silly things online about how magic would bring about a utopia of some such, with food and healing for all, and naturally a freedom from the ordinary sufferings of daily life ... and I wonder if these writers are able to recognize a human being when they see one. If the reader supposes for a moment that real magical power put into the hands of a person like Caesarius would bring about a age of universal happiness, you live in a liberal cocoon of truly impressive thickness. Why should any person with power directly aid any person without power, when the power itself makes the powerless immaterial? Liberalism came into the universal consciousness because the power of the ruling class was questioned, then ultimately seized in an horrific orgy of fear and hate - comparable, I might add, with the slaughter of Beziers. This lovely spreading of human privilege and freedom was planted in very bloody ground.
If Louis XVI of France and all his secular and religious attendents were not ready to surrender a fraction of their untold wealth for the purpose of feeding the peasants food the peasants had grown themselves, how does one imagine that Louis or anyone else would sit up for hours memorizing spells in order to vacation in the countryside distributing them? Even if a diseased person could be healed every day, it takes time and trouble to find these diseased persons, and the facts are the privileged class is not inclined to take much time or trouble for anyone. Truth be told, if the shitfuck who very nearly hits me everyday at the pedestrian crossing can't be bothered to stop and wait when the lights are blinking, what is the chance of his coming around to see me when I'm unwell? Perhaps, if I pour enough money into Louis' coffers, he might let me hang around his court, for I'd be paying him ... but I wouldn't count even then on having his cardinal cast spells for me that might be needed elsewhere by Louis before the day ends. Never mind giving them to the peasants. Those are the simple facts of life.
Characters in D&D, however, will always be acted out to be as liberal as their player puppeteers ... you puppeteers cannot help yourselves. You may think characters slaughtering the women or children of a town, or thieving, or raping women, or selling off slaves or whatever other nightmares you might conjure is a loathesome way to spend a Saturday night's running - but I propose that the characters themselves, free of your puppeteering, would find your perception of their world one of inexpressible weakness. They would view your pampered, fat greasy bodies with an eye that revealed you as hardly worth leaving alive - something their clerics would advocate were better killed than let to live and infect the minds of decent, god-fearing persons. Your characters would be certain they'd be forgiven for your deaths ... who in the world could miss squeamish, pathetic worms like yourselves?
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
September Sixth
I almost forgot. I guess the actual beginning date isn't all that important, really.
It is 32 years since I started playing D&D, to the day.
It is 32 years since I started playing D&D, to the day.
Solutions To The Campaign
I meant to talk about addressing the six points in Friday's post, having had the weekend to think about them. So here goes.
1) Pace. The question is, why not simply assign an evening and run the game on skype or some such? I had considered that, but the fact is the time I have is usually bits and pieces during the day, and the time I do not have is a given evening, even once a month. Moreover, once a month, or even once every two weeks, doesn't provide me with a distraction on an ongoing basis ... which is something I really liked about the online campaign. The possibility of thinking through a particular problem once per day, and then enjoying being able to put it off if there was no immediate solution. Sometimes, I took a day or two to research something that I suddenly invented, and being online gave me the chance to do so on the fly. This I cannot really do during a real time session.
The slowness of the campaign was not, in itself, a problem. The problem that I saw was when a character would spend a week doing nothing of any special interest. I think this would be solved in great degree if the players had specific goals, thereby pushing them to come up with something for their characters to do which moved the game along. The journey into Switzerland and back did not seem to drag overmuch, except at points where I tried to get clever. My 'cleverness' is usually a problem in every game I play, whenever I propose a problem no one seems to be able to solve (the Serefina = frightened portion of the campaign). I am trying to stop myself from doing it.
In a way, doing it in the online campaign, where solving/not solving it took the whole day, I really began to understand what a bad thing this was of my gameplaying. I've been resolved to stop doing it ever since.
2) Missed Opportunities. I guess I'll have to put a much bigger red flag on top of everything. Rather than saying, "You see a cliff face that extends a thousand feet upwards from the road towards the mountain peaks," I'll have to say instead, "You see a cliff face, exactly the sort of habitat that you know kobalds really love to dwell in whenever there happen to be caves which cannot be seen from the road, extending upwards from the road to the mountain peaks, where dragons are often known to dwell."
It is kind of infantile, but whatever it takes to make the game move a bit more. Frankly, I hate this sort of thing ... the whole 'rumor' mill that players are supposed to tap into upon entering a town that fuels the adventure machine. On some level I really feel that if players want to stumble ignorantly and blindly through a world for session after session, then like people who aren't proactive in real life, they should just age and die. Maybe I'll institute a rule that says whenever players spend a day without any actual plan, a week or a month of game time goes by. (For my offline games, this might be one of those awful hours spent as a DM when the players all sit around saying, 'I don't know, what do you want to do?' ad nauseum). One way or the other, I can see pabulum-feeding may be in order.
3) Exhaustion. Since I'm not likely to cut down on my exposition, as this is an important part of the game for me, my only real solution to this is to pace myself a little better. Like Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, I may take every third week off or something when I am feeling pressured. Alternately, I may push for more hands on DMing ... maybe turning to a live interaction when a lot of information could be relayed more quickly, or when a question-answering session is in order. This would be spontaneous I think, and not an attendance requirement ... but it might help get things moving a bit better in places. Jeez, I suppose that means google + (shudder).
4) Lack of Engagement. Okay, this is the player's problem. The best I can do is toss people who are clearly not trying. I worried quite a lot about this, since it is cold and heartless, and therefore not comfortable for a big fuzzy teddy bear like me, but the poll more than clearly indicates that people would prefer cold and heartless where it comes to their games as opposed a forgiving attitude. There's probably a post I could write about how people don't want to work as a DM because the game is 'fun' but they're more than willing to be assholes when it comes to telling players how to act or pick up their feet. But I'm not going to write it today.
The best I can do beside this is to create a questionaire that selects people according to their willingness to write a lot, research shit that they maybe don't already know, answer questions about AD&D issues and sociological qualms they might have about being booted. Put the fear o' Gawd in'o 'em, an' flay 'em fust afore lettin' 'em in.
5) Timing. I'm sorry, but it is going to have to be full 24-hour access to a computer and the power to post on that computer. The game can drift into certain times of the day and certain habits, but there's just no way to play around someone who can't get on the computer for 10 hours of the day. Get a cell phone and learn to text, and then at least you can squeeze in a couple of lines here and there; make arrangements to get that information somehow online so it can be viewed by one of the other players who can be a proxy for you when you yourself don't have a computer. Call in by phone and spend hundreds of dollars if you have to, but make it so. If you have a job that is physical and you don't even see a computer for most of the day, you have my sympathy but it just isn't doable. We can manage around meetings, your workout, a bad day at the office, sex with your partner for five hours at a time and a dozen other issues, but absolute non-existence for two thirds of every day, including sleep? Sorry. Let me know when your circumstances change.
6) Lack of Purpose. This is the killer. I know not every player can have the same purpose, and most of you won't get to do what you want, but the rules are going to be as follows:
First, that you have some purpose you'd like to accomplish before playing.
Second, that you are absolutely willing to try somebody else's purpose.
In other words, have an idea, but don't get married to that idea. I'm going to need a party that all wants to do the same thing at the outset, so be prepared to negotiate. That's all I'm saying.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Those are the points. I'm still figuring out the questionaire, so any comments on that or any of the above points would be helpful.
1) Pace. The question is, why not simply assign an evening and run the game on skype or some such? I had considered that, but the fact is the time I have is usually bits and pieces during the day, and the time I do not have is a given evening, even once a month. Moreover, once a month, or even once every two weeks, doesn't provide me with a distraction on an ongoing basis ... which is something I really liked about the online campaign. The possibility of thinking through a particular problem once per day, and then enjoying being able to put it off if there was no immediate solution. Sometimes, I took a day or two to research something that I suddenly invented, and being online gave me the chance to do so on the fly. This I cannot really do during a real time session.
The slowness of the campaign was not, in itself, a problem. The problem that I saw was when a character would spend a week doing nothing of any special interest. I think this would be solved in great degree if the players had specific goals, thereby pushing them to come up with something for their characters to do which moved the game along. The journey into Switzerland and back did not seem to drag overmuch, except at points where I tried to get clever. My 'cleverness' is usually a problem in every game I play, whenever I propose a problem no one seems to be able to solve (the Serefina = frightened portion of the campaign). I am trying to stop myself from doing it.
In a way, doing it in the online campaign, where solving/not solving it took the whole day, I really began to understand what a bad thing this was of my gameplaying. I've been resolved to stop doing it ever since.
2) Missed Opportunities. I guess I'll have to put a much bigger red flag on top of everything. Rather than saying, "You see a cliff face that extends a thousand feet upwards from the road towards the mountain peaks," I'll have to say instead, "You see a cliff face, exactly the sort of habitat that you know kobalds really love to dwell in whenever there happen to be caves which cannot be seen from the road, extending upwards from the road to the mountain peaks, where dragons are often known to dwell."
It is kind of infantile, but whatever it takes to make the game move a bit more. Frankly, I hate this sort of thing ... the whole 'rumor' mill that players are supposed to tap into upon entering a town that fuels the adventure machine. On some level I really feel that if players want to stumble ignorantly and blindly through a world for session after session, then like people who aren't proactive in real life, they should just age and die. Maybe I'll institute a rule that says whenever players spend a day without any actual plan, a week or a month of game time goes by. (For my offline games, this might be one of those awful hours spent as a DM when the players all sit around saying, 'I don't know, what do you want to do?' ad nauseum). One way or the other, I can see pabulum-feeding may be in order.
3) Exhaustion. Since I'm not likely to cut down on my exposition, as this is an important part of the game for me, my only real solution to this is to pace myself a little better. Like Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, I may take every third week off or something when I am feeling pressured. Alternately, I may push for more hands on DMing ... maybe turning to a live interaction when a lot of information could be relayed more quickly, or when a question-answering session is in order. This would be spontaneous I think, and not an attendance requirement ... but it might help get things moving a bit better in places. Jeez, I suppose that means google + (shudder).
4) Lack of Engagement. Okay, this is the player's problem. The best I can do is toss people who are clearly not trying. I worried quite a lot about this, since it is cold and heartless, and therefore not comfortable for a big fuzzy teddy bear like me, but the poll more than clearly indicates that people would prefer cold and heartless where it comes to their games as opposed a forgiving attitude. There's probably a post I could write about how people don't want to work as a DM because the game is 'fun' but they're more than willing to be assholes when it comes to telling players how to act or pick up their feet. But I'm not going to write it today.
The best I can do beside this is to create a questionaire that selects people according to their willingness to write a lot, research shit that they maybe don't already know, answer questions about AD&D issues and sociological qualms they might have about being booted. Put the fear o' Gawd in'o 'em, an' flay 'em fust afore lettin' 'em in.
5) Timing. I'm sorry, but it is going to have to be full 24-hour access to a computer and the power to post on that computer. The game can drift into certain times of the day and certain habits, but there's just no way to play around someone who can't get on the computer for 10 hours of the day. Get a cell phone and learn to text, and then at least you can squeeze in a couple of lines here and there; make arrangements to get that information somehow online so it can be viewed by one of the other players who can be a proxy for you when you yourself don't have a computer. Call in by phone and spend hundreds of dollars if you have to, but make it so. If you have a job that is physical and you don't even see a computer for most of the day, you have my sympathy but it just isn't doable. We can manage around meetings, your workout, a bad day at the office, sex with your partner for five hours at a time and a dozen other issues, but absolute non-existence for two thirds of every day, including sleep? Sorry. Let me know when your circumstances change.
6) Lack of Purpose. This is the killer. I know not every player can have the same purpose, and most of you won't get to do what you want, but the rules are going to be as follows:
First, that you have some purpose you'd like to accomplish before playing.
Second, that you are absolutely willing to try somebody else's purpose.
In other words, have an idea, but don't get married to that idea. I'm going to need a party that all wants to do the same thing at the outset, so be prepared to negotiate. That's all I'm saying.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Those are the points. I'm still figuring out the questionaire, so any comments on that or any of the above points would be helpful.
Projection
I've had a long Labor Day weekend, invested mostly in furniture building - which I am bad at - and mapping India. I've made it to the southern tip and I've just finished mapping Lanka, which is Sri Lanka in modern parlance and Ceylon on English colonial maps. As it happens, in 1650 none of the island was controlled by the English, and was in fact in dispute between the Dutch and the Portuguese on the coast, and the Kingdom of Kandy in the interior. The Portuguese would hang on to portions of the island until 1650.
Lanka is officially the most southern part of the world that I have mapped. I am beginning to realize that there are certain flaws in the projection of using a flat hex map to create the half dome of the northern hemisphere, causing my world to be somewhat fatter around the equator ... or rather, that the hexes themselves at the equator are in fact only 13 and a third miles in diameter, while still technically 20 miles high. This was unavoidable, and in fact doesn't bother me in the least.
Its the same distortion that occurs on the map below, which makes Africa and the small part of South America much larger in comparison with Northern Asia than they have a right to be. Personally I can live with the distortion, since this is D&D and the principle aim is to create a game world, not to devise flight plans for real world aircraft.
It does come back to the argument I made before and before that my world is anything but 'perfect' or 'realistic.' What it remains is extremely workable and gratifying, and thus excellent for my purposes in D&D. If the party wants to go to Lanka, it is there ... with all the internet entries necessary to make it come alive.
The bigger problem is the Southern Hemisphere, in that it too is a flat disk like the one above, the two flat disks coming together at the equator. The players aren't supposed to be able to tell, naturally (this involves hand-waving), but on the map itself the reverse becomes difficult to show. Remembering that the map 'turns' every 60 degrees, the flip side on the northern view then becomes six 'leaves' that extend out from the center map towards the South Pole. A simple version shows below:
If you imagine the lightest ring is the equator, and the north pole is at the centre, then everything that is south of the equator diverges into six different points. With my actual map, the equator ring is 1,866 hexes in circumference (the actual Earth should be about 1,233), but the principle is the same.
If you're looking at a map somewhere in the middle of where one of the points meets the equator (on the larger version), it is easy to forget that the equator in the middle distorts the map. But where the map is at 30, 90, 150 degrees and so on, it is very evident.
However, the Southern Hemisphere can also be the center of the map, with the Northern broken into six points. This, obviously, is how I intend to represent it, since it is much easier for travel distances.
I wasn't going to go all into this, I was originally intending just to write one front paragraph and move onto other things, but what the heck. I ran into this on the weekend when I was preparing the map for the Maldives Islands, which extends south of India ... and to get the staggering right on the next ring of large hex maps (Lanka is split between H 14 and H 15), which would be 'I', I was sketching out the shape of the map for the Great Rift valley in Africa, which is on the 30th Meridian.
I get the sneaking suspicion, however, that there's something wrong with all this, and its been bugging me since Saturday. If someone wants to give me a poke and let me know what it is, don't hesitate. I think I've calculated something wrong in the projection split between the points ... but I honestly don't know what it is, IF it is anything at all. I'd like some reassurance that I've got it right, or some correction if its out there.
We all make mistakes.
UPDATE:
Kees de Kunder sent me the necessary correction to the map above:
I'll leave mine up so the difference can be noted ... and as proof positive of my lack of perfection. Thank you Kees.
Lanka is officially the most southern part of the world that I have mapped. I am beginning to realize that there are certain flaws in the projection of using a flat hex map to create the half dome of the northern hemisphere, causing my world to be somewhat fatter around the equator ... or rather, that the hexes themselves at the equator are in fact only 13 and a third miles in diameter, while still technically 20 miles high. This was unavoidable, and in fact doesn't bother me in the least.
Its the same distortion that occurs on the map below, which makes Africa and the small part of South America much larger in comparison with Northern Asia than they have a right to be. Personally I can live with the distortion, since this is D&D and the principle aim is to create a game world, not to devise flight plans for real world aircraft.
 |
| Distorted. |
The bigger problem is the Southern Hemisphere, in that it too is a flat disk like the one above, the two flat disks coming together at the equator. The players aren't supposed to be able to tell, naturally (this involves hand-waving), but on the map itself the reverse becomes difficult to show. Remembering that the map 'turns' every 60 degrees, the flip side on the northern view then becomes six 'leaves' that extend out from the center map towards the South Pole. A simple version shows below:
 |
| Only much, much bigger. |
If you're looking at a map somewhere in the middle of where one of the points meets the equator (on the larger version), it is easy to forget that the equator in the middle distorts the map. But where the map is at 30, 90, 150 degrees and so on, it is very evident.
However, the Southern Hemisphere can also be the center of the map, with the Northern broken into six points. This, obviously, is how I intend to represent it, since it is much easier for travel distances.
I wasn't going to go all into this, I was originally intending just to write one front paragraph and move onto other things, but what the heck. I ran into this on the weekend when I was preparing the map for the Maldives Islands, which extends south of India ... and to get the staggering right on the next ring of large hex maps (Lanka is split between H 14 and H 15), which would be 'I', I was sketching out the shape of the map for the Great Rift valley in Africa, which is on the 30th Meridian.
I get the sneaking suspicion, however, that there's something wrong with all this, and its been bugging me since Saturday. If someone wants to give me a poke and let me know what it is, don't hesitate. I think I've calculated something wrong in the projection split between the points ... but I honestly don't know what it is, IF it is anything at all. I'd like some reassurance that I've got it right, or some correction if its out there.
We all make mistakes.
UPDATE:
Kees de Kunder sent me the necessary correction to the map above:
I'll leave mine up so the difference can be noted ... and as proof positive of my lack of perfection. Thank you Kees.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Rethinking
I had never intended to wait two weeks before speaking about the poll, though I think I'll leave it up until it's done. Probably there won't be much movement on it after today. I think its funny that there are more people who would be willing to answer a questionaire in order to play than there are actually people interested in playing. A strict sociologist would have set up a number of questions, so I have no one to blame but myself. At the same time the poll answers some questions I've been curious about the last couple of months.
There were a number of problems with the last online campaign, which time and distance have helped me sort out in my head. I'll talk about them below:
1) Pace. The campaign moved very slowly. A single small event could take three to five days, while anything that was bigger in scope would take a month to play out. This was especially poor when nothing really was happening, such as when the party was travelling from place to place. Parties in my experience have a tendency to treat travel in the game as a sort of 'time out,' allowing for random encounters to get in the way and provide a little interest, but not particularly enjoying the whole "go here see this" kind of gaming. Online, this tended to sink into a state of great dullness, with a great deal of work for me as I described this thing, then the next thing, then the thing after that, without much value in it.
2) Missed Opportunities. As a tactic I like to provide a lot of description of things in order to make them seem more real, but if I press hard on this it can slow even an offline game down. I notice that my style of gaming requires players who can recognize clues in the description and act upon them. Such as, if I mention a cliff overlooking the town, it is an opportunity for exploring. If I mention an extended dockside, there are opportunities for smuggling. If the party runs into four of the king's soldiers in a casual situation, at an inn, say, it is an opportunity for doing them some kind of favor in exchange for access. But if the party only sees a cliff, a dockside or four soldiers, and never makes any connection of how they can be turned to the benefit, nothing happens. If players sit on the edge of the box and just look at the sand, or swirl the dry surface with their feet, nothing happens. A player has to dig into the soft, moist sand underneath ... and this often didn't happen in the online campaign.
3) Exhaustion. Between (1) and (2) I felt exhausted before the end of the campaign. I was tired of writing exposition, and I felt like I was going to have to plunk monsters right in front of the party to get others engaged. Problem was, even when I did this, the low level parties would simply move away to avoid getting killed. Which brings us to -
4) Lack of Engagement. I'm not clear why, but it seems too much emphasis was put on survival at first level than upon achievement. I am not opposed to caution, or care, but as I wrote at the time, there seemed to be a great deal of sheer cowardice on the part of many of the players in the campaign. They tended to see their imminent death in every potential action, as though I would simply step up and kill them without warning, on the slightest, silliest provocation.
This may have been the ominous quality I have as DM of presenting things in their harshest, least trustworthy appearance. If I describe a rock face, I'm almost certain to pick words that would suggest that rock face is upon the verge of collapsing any moment. By nature I tend to describe nature in its coldest possible form, since I firmly believe that beauty in nature is a deception we practice in order to hide all the death going on there. Right now, as the leaves begin to turn, people will get into their cars and drive hither and yon about the country to view the spectacular colors death yields ... and very few will remark or even consider it is due to a mass withering. For D&D, I like describing the world as a deadly place. Unfortunately, for the online campaign this seemed to convince people to treat their characters as though they themselves were about to be killed by said rock face.
While it would be interesting to play an online game that included my having Russian hitmen on a payroll who would show up at your house and off you permanently if your online character died, I haven't quite obtained the necessary diplomatic immunity this would entail. So I am, and was at the time, baffled by the degree of irrational cowardice I saw many of the players embrace rather than take a real risk with their character. Playing is a proactive sport.
5) Timing. Without question the more successful campaign was very much aided by the main players having access to their computers between noon and 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The campaign tended to die after 6 p.m., and players who could not get access to their computers except in the evening were hard put to stay 'in the beat' of the campaign's activity. To do so would have required a very rigorous effort to write their actions every day at a set time (say 8 p.m.) so they could be predicted ... but when this wasn't done it proved very inconvenient. For myself, I found that by 9 or 10 p.m. EST I no longer had any interest in the campaign at all that day, and did not want to sit down and write out more description or answers to questions that wouldn't have bothered me to do so earlier in the morning. When I knew that no answer would be immediately forthcoming - as it often was with events during the day, when I could answer a question and expect to get a response within 30 minutes - I just didn't care. And if I left the answer to the next morning, then I wouldn't hear from the evening person until 9 or 10 that night, if at all that day. This was absolutely brutal in the Greek campaign, and was certainly the reason for its death.
6) Lack of Purpose. I made the error at the beginning of all the campaigns in thinking that if I offered the new players an opportunity to pick their point of origin in my world, they would pick places they knew very well, and for which they would have specific goals in mind. For example, if I were asked what part of my existing world I would like to start in, I think I would ask to begin in Dalmatia, on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea. I would venture into the mountains there to kill or slaughter whatever beasts presented themselves, and probably the Turkish overlords as well, in order to raise the capital to purchase a ship in Ragusa; I would take steps to be recognized by Ragusa, Venice or Genoa as a trader, with merchant access to one of those cities, and then turn pirate to plunder whatever Ottoman shipping I could. I'd choose an island in Greece as a haven, slowly raising capital until I had enough to purchase a immense collection of books, which I would steadily have moved to Oslo or Sweden, with the intent to begin a great university there and to become a player in the government there. Why those places? I don't know, exactly. It just sounds like fun.
I wouldn't expect anyone to live out my fantasies. But I presumed that if a player wanted to start in any particular place, they would know the place well and begin moving towards improving their lot in life with their knowledge. This did not prove to be the case. Players tended to remain very passive, waiting for something to happen, which I then created in order to showcase some of my running styles. I showed how first levels could be pulled into a huge magical conflagration without killing them; I presented enemies which were not insurmountable foes; I created a quest that did not require entering a dungeon and getting a bauble; I set up factions and put the players in the middle. Most of the time this was a dismal failure.
Of course I blame myself, but only because I yielded and attempted to set up circumstances in which the players would play. I should have let them sit there at the Inn for months. The more I pampered them, the more they failed to create their own scenarios or move after their own dreams. It is hard not to railroad when the players sit and wait for you to build the tracks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These, then, where the worst problems. Personality conflicts occurred, but these are inevitable. The principle missing element was ambition. Offline, this can be accepted for awhile, and handled more easily. Online, with the game experiencing a necessary isolation, it was absolutely intolerable. Eventually it destroyed my interest in playing.
I wouldn't be interested in playing with a group of people who wanted to try things for a few weeks and then quit. The problem here IS the slowness of the campaign. It takes six weeks to accomplish which might be covered in one three hour session. If you see yourself playing four 6-hour sessions to get a good idea of what a person's world is, that's a year online.
Now, who wants to change their mind?
There were a number of problems with the last online campaign, which time and distance have helped me sort out in my head. I'll talk about them below:
1) Pace. The campaign moved very slowly. A single small event could take three to five days, while anything that was bigger in scope would take a month to play out. This was especially poor when nothing really was happening, such as when the party was travelling from place to place. Parties in my experience have a tendency to treat travel in the game as a sort of 'time out,' allowing for random encounters to get in the way and provide a little interest, but not particularly enjoying the whole "go here see this" kind of gaming. Online, this tended to sink into a state of great dullness, with a great deal of work for me as I described this thing, then the next thing, then the thing after that, without much value in it.
2) Missed Opportunities. As a tactic I like to provide a lot of description of things in order to make them seem more real, but if I press hard on this it can slow even an offline game down. I notice that my style of gaming requires players who can recognize clues in the description and act upon them. Such as, if I mention a cliff overlooking the town, it is an opportunity for exploring. If I mention an extended dockside, there are opportunities for smuggling. If the party runs into four of the king's soldiers in a casual situation, at an inn, say, it is an opportunity for doing them some kind of favor in exchange for access. But if the party only sees a cliff, a dockside or four soldiers, and never makes any connection of how they can be turned to the benefit, nothing happens. If players sit on the edge of the box and just look at the sand, or swirl the dry surface with their feet, nothing happens. A player has to dig into the soft, moist sand underneath ... and this often didn't happen in the online campaign.
3) Exhaustion. Between (1) and (2) I felt exhausted before the end of the campaign. I was tired of writing exposition, and I felt like I was going to have to plunk monsters right in front of the party to get others engaged. Problem was, even when I did this, the low level parties would simply move away to avoid getting killed. Which brings us to -
4) Lack of Engagement. I'm not clear why, but it seems too much emphasis was put on survival at first level than upon achievement. I am not opposed to caution, or care, but as I wrote at the time, there seemed to be a great deal of sheer cowardice on the part of many of the players in the campaign. They tended to see their imminent death in every potential action, as though I would simply step up and kill them without warning, on the slightest, silliest provocation.
This may have been the ominous quality I have as DM of presenting things in their harshest, least trustworthy appearance. If I describe a rock face, I'm almost certain to pick words that would suggest that rock face is upon the verge of collapsing any moment. By nature I tend to describe nature in its coldest possible form, since I firmly believe that beauty in nature is a deception we practice in order to hide all the death going on there. Right now, as the leaves begin to turn, people will get into their cars and drive hither and yon about the country to view the spectacular colors death yields ... and very few will remark or even consider it is due to a mass withering. For D&D, I like describing the world as a deadly place. Unfortunately, for the online campaign this seemed to convince people to treat their characters as though they themselves were about to be killed by said rock face.
While it would be interesting to play an online game that included my having Russian hitmen on a payroll who would show up at your house and off you permanently if your online character died, I haven't quite obtained the necessary diplomatic immunity this would entail. So I am, and was at the time, baffled by the degree of irrational cowardice I saw many of the players embrace rather than take a real risk with their character. Playing is a proactive sport.
5) Timing. Without question the more successful campaign was very much aided by the main players having access to their computers between noon and 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The campaign tended to die after 6 p.m., and players who could not get access to their computers except in the evening were hard put to stay 'in the beat' of the campaign's activity. To do so would have required a very rigorous effort to write their actions every day at a set time (say 8 p.m.) so they could be predicted ... but when this wasn't done it proved very inconvenient. For myself, I found that by 9 or 10 p.m. EST I no longer had any interest in the campaign at all that day, and did not want to sit down and write out more description or answers to questions that wouldn't have bothered me to do so earlier in the morning. When I knew that no answer would be immediately forthcoming - as it often was with events during the day, when I could answer a question and expect to get a response within 30 minutes - I just didn't care. And if I left the answer to the next morning, then I wouldn't hear from the evening person until 9 or 10 that night, if at all that day. This was absolutely brutal in the Greek campaign, and was certainly the reason for its death.
6) Lack of Purpose. I made the error at the beginning of all the campaigns in thinking that if I offered the new players an opportunity to pick their point of origin in my world, they would pick places they knew very well, and for which they would have specific goals in mind. For example, if I were asked what part of my existing world I would like to start in, I think I would ask to begin in Dalmatia, on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea. I would venture into the mountains there to kill or slaughter whatever beasts presented themselves, and probably the Turkish overlords as well, in order to raise the capital to purchase a ship in Ragusa; I would take steps to be recognized by Ragusa, Venice or Genoa as a trader, with merchant access to one of those cities, and then turn pirate to plunder whatever Ottoman shipping I could. I'd choose an island in Greece as a haven, slowly raising capital until I had enough to purchase a immense collection of books, which I would steadily have moved to Oslo or Sweden, with the intent to begin a great university there and to become a player in the government there. Why those places? I don't know, exactly. It just sounds like fun.
I wouldn't expect anyone to live out my fantasies. But I presumed that if a player wanted to start in any particular place, they would know the place well and begin moving towards improving their lot in life with their knowledge. This did not prove to be the case. Players tended to remain very passive, waiting for something to happen, which I then created in order to showcase some of my running styles. I showed how first levels could be pulled into a huge magical conflagration without killing them; I presented enemies which were not insurmountable foes; I created a quest that did not require entering a dungeon and getting a bauble; I set up factions and put the players in the middle. Most of the time this was a dismal failure.
Of course I blame myself, but only because I yielded and attempted to set up circumstances in which the players would play. I should have let them sit there at the Inn for months. The more I pampered them, the more they failed to create their own scenarios or move after their own dreams. It is hard not to railroad when the players sit and wait for you to build the tracks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These, then, where the worst problems. Personality conflicts occurred, but these are inevitable. The principle missing element was ambition. Offline, this can be accepted for awhile, and handled more easily. Online, with the game experiencing a necessary isolation, it was absolutely intolerable. Eventually it destroyed my interest in playing.
I wouldn't be interested in playing with a group of people who wanted to try things for a few weeks and then quit. The problem here IS the slowness of the campaign. It takes six weeks to accomplish which might be covered in one three hour session. If you see yourself playing four 6-hour sessions to get a good idea of what a person's world is, that's a year online.
Now, who wants to change their mind?
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Market Research First
I'm just running a small poll to see if results should indicate my seriously thinking about this. Found on the side bar, if the gentle reader can spare the time.
Please view Tao's Campaign if you need information on what I've done before.
Please view Tao's Campaign if you need information on what I've done before.
Replaceable Parts
My grandfather was born in the Pripet Marshes, the same marshes that split the Nazi invading forces in Operation Barbarossa, in 1886, in the south part of Belarus, or Byelorus as it was spelled then. Byelo is Russian for "white," and so he came from what is called White Russia, the literal translation of the country's name. He was only two generations before me, but his being quite old when my father was born (50) has meant that in the three generations between him and I there have been 125 years. That reaches back quite a ways.
My grandfather came to Canada at the age of 15, and thence dwelt in the wilds that then comprised the lands north of Toronto, that which is now the fringes of Algonquin park. What he did there is not well known to me; I have it on good authority that he did a lot of hunting right up to the point where Canada entered the First World War against the Kaiser. His hunting had given him a mastery, and he spent four years in the trenches of Europe as a sniper, one of those fellows who sits and waits and waits and sits until someone lifts his head up a little too high ...
After the war he drifted around at odd jobs, finally meeting my grandmother sometime in the late 1920s. They had three children ... my two aunts and my father, who was born in 1936. Not long after my father was born, my grandfather and my grandmother, who had never seen eye to eye on anything, separated. They were never divorced, but to the best of my knowledge they did not see each other again. But my father would visit my grandfather in the summers, and from him learned all about hunting and fishing, and the ways of the wilderness, and in this way some of that information was passed down to me.
As the decades passed, my grandfather became more and more reclusive, climbing higher and higher into the Canadian Rockies. Much of the land in Canada - more so at that time - is available for squatting, and that's what my grandfather became by the time I knew him. He lived in a little shack about the size of an office cubicle, 5,500 ft. above sea level, which had an iron stove he had hauled up himself and a bed. He grew fruit on trees he had planted. He fished in a kayak he had made himself. Once a year he would climb down into town where he would buy materials - not food - for his hobbies, and deliver his mail. He wrote articles about birds that were published in national magazines. He painted pictures which were sometimes locally shown, though my grandfather was never present. Beyond paper, canvas and some pigments for his oils, virtually everything he used in his daily activities he made himself, including the fishing line he used.
I mention all this because I believe it offers an insight that is nearly always lacking in the mind's eye of the players of D&D. Life was certainly hard. But more importantly, life was something that was managed almost universally by people who made for themselves everything that was needed. They fashioned their own clothes, tanned and cut their own leather, made their own wooden tools and even forged their own metal. An ordinary cotter could not hope to buy even a hammer head that was already made, but he could buy pieces that could be heated with charcoal he had made himself and beaten with stones until it adopted a useable shape. Perhaps not the clean, perfect edge of a manufactured craftsman, but serviceable in a community where there were no craftsman. And once that tool was made, it would cared for and passed from generation to generation, for two hundred years if need be, to be ultimately used by every family of the village.
We are such instruments of massive consumption that we can hardly reckon with an outlook like this. If the axle on a character's wagon breaks along a stretch of country road, naturally the character thinks to head for the next town, pay out a few coins and return with the replacement axle. It is viewed in exactly modern terms, only the missing gasoline that runs your car is replaced with the word axle and all goes on as before.
Only that was impossible. Without having the cart present, no person anywhere could make an axle to fit the cart. Even with the cart present, the carter can't simply fit the right axle in place and have you on your way. He would have to make a tailored axle to fit your tailored cart, and that would take him quite a lot of time. And no, he would not consent to come along with you to fix your cart twenty miles away.
Then what? Abandon the cart? We are so lock-stepped into the consumerist framework of mind that it doesn't occur to us that the characters would never have left the cart in the first place. They would never have thought, "get a new axle." They'd have made one. Then and there, with their own hands. It would not have occurred to them that they were unable to make an axle on their own ... not because they were naturally more proficient in that day and age, and more knowledgeable about such things, but because they had no template of a perfectly working axle in their minds to stop them from putting together an axle that would be - by our standards - a piece of shit.
When I say my grandfather made his own kayak, what immediately leaps to one's mind is a marvelously fashioned instrument lovingly crafted by my grandfather's hand. This conception is aided by museums, which present most every object from the past as a work of art, often clouding the issue by 'restoring' them to their past glory ... when in fact we have no certainty about what that glory might have been. And anything that wasn't a work of art didn't survive from the age of its construction, because over time it ruined with use. My grandfather's kayak was awful! It leaked ... just enough to make it uncomfortable for you and me, sitting in a cold lake, with our sensibilities, but not enough to sink it. My grandfather did not care. He could not make a better kayak with his abilities, and that didn't matter. Even into his 80s he was tough as nails, and if it got a little watery in the bottom while he sat and fished for four hours, what of it?
You and I, gentle reader, would attempt to make an axle for our cart only by absolute necessity ... and if we did make one that worked, we'd hate it with every turn as it bumped and ground along, with our minds full of what a perfect axle would feel like. This was not the conception of those living before the age of replaceable manufactured parts. They did not care. They had no 'perfect' axle to compare it with. This was the best axle they themselves could make, and if it jostled and shook, what of it?
It is not only that replaceable parts weren't available, it is also that the consumerist world they made possible had not yet come into existence. People often ask me about certain items on my equipment list, like clothes or tools, being irrationally expensive ... but in fact most people did not buy goods from town. Except that my grandfather could not make his own linen in the BC mountains, which he needed for paint canvas, or that he could not make his own paper for writing, he would have had little - if any - reason for coming down to civilization. His medieval ancestor in the Pripet marshes would not have, for there were no magazines to print articles, and no galleries to display his work, and no mail to distribute it to others. Even as a mountain man his life bore the stamp of the consumerist society.
(yes, aware of the pun)
I have been running the game for more than thirty years, and every player still thinks of no other means of obtaining goods except to buy them. Very rarely, if pushed into unusual circumstances, a player will fabricate something, but how often will they in the middle of town. Does a bard with very little starting income, staring at the frightening costs for instruments, think of buying a simple blade and whittling a pipe to play? No. The cheapest instrument is chosen from what is there and the silver is spent. A fighter knows a club is the cheapest weapon, but does the fighter ask me if he can make his own wooden shield? Does a thief haunt the local blacksmith for bits of metal and twist his own lockpick? Does a paladin buy red paint and mark his own clothing? No. Because in our minds it would look awful. Crusaders in every film, even those where the participants are covered in feces, still wear clothes where the seams are straight and every fold is perfectly tailored. The armor never has an explicit dent or bend in it. The squeaking from the cart remains at a carefully selected decibel so as not to disturb the dialogue. The coconuts have been neatly cut by a band saw.
We are trained to think this is normal. It isn't. It is modern, but it is far past normal when viewed from the perspective of human history. There are no replaceable parts. There are no uniforms, because nothing is uniform. But it is something you will have a great deal of trouble getting out of your head.
I am betting you won't be able to.
My grandfather came to Canada at the age of 15, and thence dwelt in the wilds that then comprised the lands north of Toronto, that which is now the fringes of Algonquin park. What he did there is not well known to me; I have it on good authority that he did a lot of hunting right up to the point where Canada entered the First World War against the Kaiser. His hunting had given him a mastery, and he spent four years in the trenches of Europe as a sniper, one of those fellows who sits and waits and waits and sits until someone lifts his head up a little too high ...
After the war he drifted around at odd jobs, finally meeting my grandmother sometime in the late 1920s. They had three children ... my two aunts and my father, who was born in 1936. Not long after my father was born, my grandfather and my grandmother, who had never seen eye to eye on anything, separated. They were never divorced, but to the best of my knowledge they did not see each other again. But my father would visit my grandfather in the summers, and from him learned all about hunting and fishing, and the ways of the wilderness, and in this way some of that information was passed down to me.
As the decades passed, my grandfather became more and more reclusive, climbing higher and higher into the Canadian Rockies. Much of the land in Canada - more so at that time - is available for squatting, and that's what my grandfather became by the time I knew him. He lived in a little shack about the size of an office cubicle, 5,500 ft. above sea level, which had an iron stove he had hauled up himself and a bed. He grew fruit on trees he had planted. He fished in a kayak he had made himself. Once a year he would climb down into town where he would buy materials - not food - for his hobbies, and deliver his mail. He wrote articles about birds that were published in national magazines. He painted pictures which were sometimes locally shown, though my grandfather was never present. Beyond paper, canvas and some pigments for his oils, virtually everything he used in his daily activities he made himself, including the fishing line he used.
I mention all this because I believe it offers an insight that is nearly always lacking in the mind's eye of the players of D&D. Life was certainly hard. But more importantly, life was something that was managed almost universally by people who made for themselves everything that was needed. They fashioned their own clothes, tanned and cut their own leather, made their own wooden tools and even forged their own metal. An ordinary cotter could not hope to buy even a hammer head that was already made, but he could buy pieces that could be heated with charcoal he had made himself and beaten with stones until it adopted a useable shape. Perhaps not the clean, perfect edge of a manufactured craftsman, but serviceable in a community where there were no craftsman. And once that tool was made, it would cared for and passed from generation to generation, for two hundred years if need be, to be ultimately used by every family of the village.
We are such instruments of massive consumption that we can hardly reckon with an outlook like this. If the axle on a character's wagon breaks along a stretch of country road, naturally the character thinks to head for the next town, pay out a few coins and return with the replacement axle. It is viewed in exactly modern terms, only the missing gasoline that runs your car is replaced with the word axle and all goes on as before.
Only that was impossible. Without having the cart present, no person anywhere could make an axle to fit the cart. Even with the cart present, the carter can't simply fit the right axle in place and have you on your way. He would have to make a tailored axle to fit your tailored cart, and that would take him quite a lot of time. And no, he would not consent to come along with you to fix your cart twenty miles away.
Then what? Abandon the cart? We are so lock-stepped into the consumerist framework of mind that it doesn't occur to us that the characters would never have left the cart in the first place. They would never have thought, "get a new axle." They'd have made one. Then and there, with their own hands. It would not have occurred to them that they were unable to make an axle on their own ... not because they were naturally more proficient in that day and age, and more knowledgeable about such things, but because they had no template of a perfectly working axle in their minds to stop them from putting together an axle that would be - by our standards - a piece of shit.
When I say my grandfather made his own kayak, what immediately leaps to one's mind is a marvelously fashioned instrument lovingly crafted by my grandfather's hand. This conception is aided by museums, which present most every object from the past as a work of art, often clouding the issue by 'restoring' them to their past glory ... when in fact we have no certainty about what that glory might have been. And anything that wasn't a work of art didn't survive from the age of its construction, because over time it ruined with use. My grandfather's kayak was awful! It leaked ... just enough to make it uncomfortable for you and me, sitting in a cold lake, with our sensibilities, but not enough to sink it. My grandfather did not care. He could not make a better kayak with his abilities, and that didn't matter. Even into his 80s he was tough as nails, and if it got a little watery in the bottom while he sat and fished for four hours, what of it?
You and I, gentle reader, would attempt to make an axle for our cart only by absolute necessity ... and if we did make one that worked, we'd hate it with every turn as it bumped and ground along, with our minds full of what a perfect axle would feel like. This was not the conception of those living before the age of replaceable manufactured parts. They did not care. They had no 'perfect' axle to compare it with. This was the best axle they themselves could make, and if it jostled and shook, what of it?
It is not only that replaceable parts weren't available, it is also that the consumerist world they made possible had not yet come into existence. People often ask me about certain items on my equipment list, like clothes or tools, being irrationally expensive ... but in fact most people did not buy goods from town. Except that my grandfather could not make his own linen in the BC mountains, which he needed for paint canvas, or that he could not make his own paper for writing, he would have had little - if any - reason for coming down to civilization. His medieval ancestor in the Pripet marshes would not have, for there were no magazines to print articles, and no galleries to display his work, and no mail to distribute it to others. Even as a mountain man his life bore the stamp of the consumerist society.
(yes, aware of the pun)
I have been running the game for more than thirty years, and every player still thinks of no other means of obtaining goods except to buy them. Very rarely, if pushed into unusual circumstances, a player will fabricate something, but how often will they in the middle of town. Does a bard with very little starting income, staring at the frightening costs for instruments, think of buying a simple blade and whittling a pipe to play? No. The cheapest instrument is chosen from what is there and the silver is spent. A fighter knows a club is the cheapest weapon, but does the fighter ask me if he can make his own wooden shield? Does a thief haunt the local blacksmith for bits of metal and twist his own lockpick? Does a paladin buy red paint and mark his own clothing? No. Because in our minds it would look awful. Crusaders in every film, even those where the participants are covered in feces, still wear clothes where the seams are straight and every fold is perfectly tailored. The armor never has an explicit dent or bend in it. The squeaking from the cart remains at a carefully selected decibel so as not to disturb the dialogue. The coconuts have been neatly cut by a band saw.
We are trained to think this is normal. It isn't. It is modern, but it is far past normal when viewed from the perspective of human history. There are no replaceable parts. There are no uniforms, because nothing is uniform. But it is something you will have a great deal of trouble getting out of your head.
I am betting you won't be able to.
Nagging Questions
I do hope to write another post later today, but for the moment I wanted to address a negative response someone - can't remember who - gave me about the complete lack of need for my trading tables in the MMORG world. They weren't needed, went the response. They've been created already, and exist right now in online games like EVE.
I am not familiar with MMORGs. I've never played one. I don't have any interest in playing one. But I know that some of my gentle readers have, and I would like to have some questions answered.
1) Do online MMORGs which make use of economic frameworks, like EVE, have the value and price of materials in those frameworks affected by the distance the miners, farmers and acquisitors of raw material wealth are from depots where those goods are sold?
2) Is the value and price of manufactured things participants in the game want to buy affected by the distance they are in the game from the source of the raw materials needed for manufacture?
3) Is it, rather, that all materials and manufactures acquired or paid for in the game have one single static price, regardless of where that material is obtained, or where that material is manufactured?
If (3) is correct, then NO, no existing economic system in an MMORG has anything like the system I've built for D&D, which means I do have something to sell. If (3) is not correct, please identify the game and provide me with information on how I can play it. I may need to take my first step into that culture.
Thank you.
I am not familiar with MMORGs. I've never played one. I don't have any interest in playing one. But I know that some of my gentle readers have, and I would like to have some questions answered.
1) Do online MMORGs which make use of economic frameworks, like EVE, have the value and price of materials in those frameworks affected by the distance the miners, farmers and acquisitors of raw material wealth are from depots where those goods are sold?
2) Is the value and price of manufactured things participants in the game want to buy affected by the distance they are in the game from the source of the raw materials needed for manufacture?
3) Is it, rather, that all materials and manufactures acquired or paid for in the game have one single static price, regardless of where that material is obtained, or where that material is manufactured?
If (3) is correct, then NO, no existing economic system in an MMORG has anything like the system I've built for D&D, which means I do have something to sell. If (3) is not correct, please identify the game and provide me with information on how I can play it. I may need to take my first step into that culture.
Thank you.
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