For the heck of it, I'm going to point out that the party in the online blog is about to start what might be an interesting online battle.
That is, unless they decide to give up their horses ...
This might also be a good time for anyone who may be following the online campaign to make any comments they've been holding inside, ask questions, etcetera, etcetera.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Drink This
"Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living--that you are still less likely to believe."
Socrates, Apology 37e-38a
We are given to understand that the context of these words were spoken as Socrates, condemned for things he did not do, was given the option of either exile (ostracization) or death (drinking of hemlock). I reproduce the whole quote here for one simple reason ... that Socrates himself did not believe that the ordinary individual - indeed, not even his own friends and students - would understand him when he said that the unexamined life was not worth living. Socrates was a 71-year-old man when he died. He had plenty of experience in how others responded to his arguments, and just what to expect from them when he made an argument.
Nothing has changed. Present the argument to an individual today, that they should sit down and at length examine their lives, and you will receive back a blank stare and incomprehension; at best, you may expect them to ponder for a moment, the briefest of motions mind, before asking you, "How?"
Suppose we consider a typical D&D event: the destruction of the big bad, in its lair, sitting upon a heap of treasure. Suppose as a DM I have you and others roll up characters of 15th level, and zing! pop! I drop you into the big bad's lair and the fight begins. You hack, you cast, you bring holy damnation upon the big bad and as a result you gain all its treasure.
Does this seem like a meaningful exercise to you? Is this something that sounds like it would please you, or fulfill you? Is it something you'd want to do?
If your answer is yes, then you may take comfort in the knowledge that you have just found the attitude you bear that has brought you all the unhappiness that it has in your life. It is time that you sat down and truly considered why it is you think the way you do, and how that thinking has brought you to the place it has.
For most of us, the answer would be a resounding "No." It would be an empty, meaningless way to spend an evening. It would be as meaningless as a host of reporters showing up at your door, along with the presenters of the Nobel Prize, altogether having the purpose of giving you that Prize for having accomplished the immortal task of picking the grunge out from between your toenails. The money might be nice, but you would very soon feel like a fool as you were asked questions, and thereafter for the rest of your life compared endlessly with people who had actually accomplished things.
Like real life, accomplishments in D&D are empty and worthless without the greater picture of how those accomplishments were achieved. The greatest ills in a game are not the number of characters that are killed, but the number of characters who carry toys and power they did not earn. Not because there is an unfairness about it, but because having a toy you did not earn is an empty, soul-sucking experience ... all the more empty for people who do not know that is what is wrong with the campaign they're running, or in which they're playing.
This is not an uncommon thing. The world is full of people living in the throes of hedonism, maniacally globbing up every bit of fun and pleasure they can from one moment to the next, concentrating their effort like a laser beam on avoiding any three-minute period of self-examination like the frigging plague. That is because three minutes without fun brings deep, abiding unhappiness. An hour without fun is a depression of epic proportions. And three days without fun can be all it takes to make suicide seem like a viable alternative.
People who play D&D from the angle that ten minutes of 'non-fun' is a great wrong not to be perpetrated against them are playing D&D for reasons that go much deeper than the game itself. They are avoiding their lives. They are grasping at straws to escape their lives ... and in that escape, they insist that all must be beautific and great, and that no obstacle can exist that cannot be overcome. They must be gods or the game does not give them the solace from reality they demand. They are not getting their fix. And you, O gentle DM with your world, are the reason they are not getting it. That is why they are angry. That is why they are screaming when the die comes up low. That is why they are sullen once their character has died. They are not in control of their own lives; they insist they must be in control of their character's lives. It is the only reason they play.
I do not doubt that this avoidance is the fuel that makes more than a few hundred play this game world-wide. I do not doubt that the considerable weakness of D&D to provide this sort of escapism is the reason it is not played by millions. D&D will never measure up with heroin. It will never offer the terrifying reality-separation to be found with skydiving or spelunking. It is an extremely crappy sort of avoidance strategy, and for that reason it will never, ever be popular with the great masses of people. Successful avoidance strategies, by definition, must be available everywhere; they must be simple and direct; they must be immediately effective; and they must work when the participant is alone.
Liquor, for example.
Your player - or you yourself if that is the case - screaming at the die, is an unusual sort of person. They possess the peculiar mind-set makes this game an escape. They are in a very tiny minority of individuals.
We are not, however, all invested in this game for these reasons. We are not all fearful of examining our lives. We are not all bent upon escapism. Some who play the game play it because of the opportunity it gives to examine our lives further. To put our personalities into a laboratory, as it were, and run tests on it, and compare the results of those tests with our ordinary, everyday behavior. If we suffer loss in our lives, how does that compare with the loss of our characters? If we are ambitious in our lives, how are we able to be ambitious with our characters? How do they play off each other. How does the imagination I put towards my world reflect the imagination I put towards my other art, or my social responsibilities, or my interactivity with other persons?
For the smallest number of players of the game, characters are not measured by their successes, or by how they differ from we ourselves, but by the means by which our imaginations work within frameworks we do not encounter everyday. I do not, for example, kill monsters on my way to work. I would much rather not live in a world where that was necessary. But the process of killing monsters, and the way it tests my ingenuity, is very much a process of my mind examining strategies I don't get to play out otherwise. And playing out strategies in my mind, regarding my competitors, my writing, my sex life and so on, is the way I self-examine every element of my life. I examine with gusto, because it is in examining that I determine where I am, where I'm going and why I'm going there.
If my world is going to be useful in that regard, for me or for my players ... if it is going to be a laboratory of any value towards that purpose ... then the one thing it cannot be is disproportional and erratic. It must operate according to fundamentally particular principles which are the same from session to session, from adventure to adventure, and from campaign to campaign. The players, when the sit down to play, must know what to expect. They must have rules they can rely upon. They must be able to judge accurately the scope of their actions and the limitations they have. Only in that way can they measure themselves against the world I create, just as they measure themselves against the world none of us created.
The reason worlds like this go on, and on, and on, is because the examined D&D life IS worth living. It is worth sacrificing moments in the real world for. It is not replaceable by liquor, or skydiving, or heroin. There's no self-examination in any of these things, for hedonism is the manner in which self-examination is avoided.
There are elements of this game that rise magnificently beyond hedonism. These cannot be comprehended escapism any more than life can be. The very argument of escapism - to escape from life - is the manner in which fools doom themselves. There is no escape. This was the point Socrates made. It is the point I am making.
But he and I are alike in one other way. I don't expect the listener to believe me, either.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
25 Years Ago
As I wrap up the public half of my day, I wanted to say something about what day it is. This is the 15th of November, 2011, and as such it is 25 years, today, that I got married to my first wife Michelle.
I was with Michelle for just over 12 years, and so we did have a tenth anniversary together, before her long illness finally separated us.
But as it happens, just three weeks ago I celebrated my tenth anniversary of being together with my present partner Tamara ... so that would have been my second time. And somehow I managed to do them both in the same 25-year period.
It is a strange, strange world. They have both loved me very much, which has probably been stranger. I have loved them both very deeply. I could not help myself.
I was with Michelle for just over 12 years, and so we did have a tenth anniversary together, before her long illness finally separated us.
But as it happens, just three weeks ago I celebrated my tenth anniversary of being together with my present partner Tamara ... so that would have been my second time. And somehow I managed to do them both in the same 25-year period.
It is a strange, strange world. They have both loved me very much, which has probably been stranger. I have loved them both very deeply. I could not help myself.
The Saving Throw Experience
Something that has always bothered me, which came to mind during the last session I was running, is the stale quality of saving throws in AD&D. First and foremost, that they do not improve with each level, but rather improve in stages of three or four levels - and more importantly, that your saving throw versus a fifth level spell is the same as your save versus a first level spell.
It takes gobs of experience to throw a fifth level spell, and how annoying is it when you cast, say, a magic jar against some very low-level character and have it thrown off with the same chance of throwing off a charm person spell. Shouldn't the spell that takes longer to acquire have more oomph than a spell you have at the start?
What's worse is that by the time a party member is likely to use a magic jar against an enemy, the enemies will be much more powerful and have much lower saving throws than when that mage was first level and using charm person vs. orcs. Not that I'm saying I want to make higher level spellcasters more powerful, but we're talking a circumstance of diminishing returns for more difficult to acquire spells ... and the effect is to push casters away from spells that require saving throws.
Logically, a higher level spell ought to be tougher to save against than a lower level spell. Logically, a player ought to improve their saving throw at every level. So I'm proposing, as a template, a table something like this:
For comparison's sake, if we propose that a first level character's save vs. a particular type of attack (magic, death, paralyzation and so on) is 13 (marked in red), than the additional saving throws decending from that initial number is reflected by the table.
Of course, this would mean a separate table for each class and each type of attack ... but hey, I work on a computer, so I have the space. Overall, I think this would make a better saving throw 'experience.'
It takes gobs of experience to throw a fifth level spell, and how annoying is it when you cast, say, a magic jar against some very low-level character and have it thrown off with the same chance of throwing off a charm person spell. Shouldn't the spell that takes longer to acquire have more oomph than a spell you have at the start?
What's worse is that by the time a party member is likely to use a magic jar against an enemy, the enemies will be much more powerful and have much lower saving throws than when that mage was first level and using charm person vs. orcs. Not that I'm saying I want to make higher level spellcasters more powerful, but we're talking a circumstance of diminishing returns for more difficult to acquire spells ... and the effect is to push casters away from spells that require saving throws.
Logically, a higher level spell ought to be tougher to save against than a lower level spell. Logically, a player ought to improve their saving throw at every level. So I'm proposing, as a template, a table something like this:
For comparison's sake, if we propose that a first level character's save vs. a particular type of attack (magic, death, paralyzation and so on) is 13 (marked in red), than the additional saving throws decending from that initial number is reflected by the table.
Of course, this would mean a separate table for each class and each type of attack ... but hey, I work on a computer, so I have the space. Overall, I think this would make a better saving throw 'experience.'
Friday, November 11, 2011
Sometimes You're Out Of Control
Finally, when it comes to character freedom of action, no discussion on the use of the mind would be complete without something being said on mind control, which has a long and traditional history of use in both RPGs and fiction.
To start with, in D&D, we have items, monsters and spells that all enable the DM to control the player's actions. A party will never hesitate to use spells or potions and the like against monsters, and we all love to turn the monsters against themselves. In kind, a party encountering a magic user, a nixie or siren, among a wide host of other monsters, expects to suffer a bit from the charm spell. It isn't always pleasant, but there are plenty of opportunties for a DM to step in and tell the player characters what they have to do, because they been charmed, or suggested, or magic jarred, or what have you.
It isn't as though the whole mind control technique hasn't been employed for centuries to keep things interesting. Merlin being enchanted by Vivien. The fun and games of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mina Harker from Dracula. The Emperor Ming from Flash Gordon. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. McCoy and Sulu in Return of the Archons. The Penguin. The Imperius curse.
Over and over again, characters get overwhelmed by the dark, unforgiveable influence of the evil forces at work in the world. It isn't fun, but now and then you don't get to say what happens to your character ... and them's the breaks.
A DM, obviously, has to be very careful how this kind of scenario is played out. He or she can't simply rope a party by having a magician show up and turn everyone into mindless zombies. No, first a tale has to be told, which includes words like 'danger' and 'curse,' and preferably has some reference to the tendency of the evil entity/device to control the minds of people in contact with it.
Then, preferably, the party should have to willingly travel overland towards where the entity/device is, thus willingly making the choice to either ignore, or intelligently challenge the entity/device in its lair.
If, however, the lair is approached, and if the party has gotten there of their own free will, then the DM is fair to judge that Pandora's Box has indeed been opened. It's no use trying to stuff all the bad back into the box. It is too late. The DM is at that point perfectly justified in turning the party into zombies.
My personal feeling is, however, that the DM is also responsible for offering the party a way out. There has to be an end game that neutralizes the effect ... and fairly quickly, since otherwise the campaign is going to get awful frustrating and boring.
Mind control in a campaign is a difficult adventure to run. It involves trust - mostly, the players trusting that the DM isn't going to just fuck around with them for fun. Given the general behavior of a great many DMs, this is a very difficult trust to earn. Parties are notably gun shy. And that's why I say, be sure the party recognizes their part in making the mind control happen, and get them out as quick as you can.
And while the adventure is happening, tell your party to sit back and enjoy the ride as much as they can, with their hands inside the car, until the 'coaster comes to a complete stop.
To start with, in D&D, we have items, monsters and spells that all enable the DM to control the player's actions. A party will never hesitate to use spells or potions and the like against monsters, and we all love to turn the monsters against themselves. In kind, a party encountering a magic user, a nixie or siren, among a wide host of other monsters, expects to suffer a bit from the charm spell. It isn't always pleasant, but there are plenty of opportunties for a DM to step in and tell the player characters what they have to do, because they been charmed, or suggested, or magic jarred, or what have you.
It isn't as though the whole mind control technique hasn't been employed for centuries to keep things interesting. Merlin being enchanted by Vivien. The fun and games of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mina Harker from Dracula. The Emperor Ming from Flash Gordon. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. McCoy and Sulu in Return of the Archons. The Penguin. The Imperius curse.
Over and over again, characters get overwhelmed by the dark, unforgiveable influence of the evil forces at work in the world. It isn't fun, but now and then you don't get to say what happens to your character ... and them's the breaks.
A DM, obviously, has to be very careful how this kind of scenario is played out. He or she can't simply rope a party by having a magician show up and turn everyone into mindless zombies. No, first a tale has to be told, which includes words like 'danger' and 'curse,' and preferably has some reference to the tendency of the evil entity/device to control the minds of people in contact with it.
Then, preferably, the party should have to willingly travel overland towards where the entity/device is, thus willingly making the choice to either ignore, or intelligently challenge the entity/device in its lair.
If, however, the lair is approached, and if the party has gotten there of their own free will, then the DM is fair to judge that Pandora's Box has indeed been opened. It's no use trying to stuff all the bad back into the box. It is too late. The DM is at that point perfectly justified in turning the party into zombies.
My personal feeling is, however, that the DM is also responsible for offering the party a way out. There has to be an end game that neutralizes the effect ... and fairly quickly, since otherwise the campaign is going to get awful frustrating and boring.
Mind control in a campaign is a difficult adventure to run. It involves trust - mostly, the players trusting that the DM isn't going to just fuck around with them for fun. Given the general behavior of a great many DMs, this is a very difficult trust to earn. Parties are notably gun shy. And that's why I say, be sure the party recognizes their part in making the mind control happen, and get them out as quick as you can.
And while the adventure is happening, tell your party to sit back and enjoy the ride as much as they can, with their hands inside the car, until the 'coaster comes to a complete stop.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Anti-Strategy
Let me ask if you have never made an error in judgment. Obviously, you have. We all have. We date people we really should not date, and we ignore the warnings of our friends and trusted family members in order to date those people. We even get married when we shouldn't. We take jobs we know are going to be bad news, and we quit jobs in the heat of the moment, only afterwards to realize what a stupid thing that is to do. We skip completing assignments or procrastinate about them, only to find ourselves in the worst sort of place when these things become due and we're pulled up on the carpet to answer for what a crappy job we've done.
Why do we act this way? We know it is not in our best interest. Yes, its true that we want sex, or we need the money, or that the game is on or the crew is going to the bar tonight and working on a task means missing all that. But we also know that we should listen to our friends. We know we should do our jobs. We know that without money, we're fucked. So why can't we simply have the wisdom to tell the difference between what is important, and what is REALLY important?
I don't pretend to answer that. I do want to point out, however, that we are NOT always aware of what is best for us, and we do NOT always do things in our own best interests. We are at the mercies of our hormones, our comprehension of how boring the responsible action will be, or what we perceive we might be missing by acting smartly. We are not perfect. We are human beings.
But if you want to get a real fight going at a D&D table, propose that a player can't do something because their wisdom says their character is not capable of thinking the way they themselves are.
Players - and power players especially - are used to treating D&D as a strategy game like chess. No one would ever suggest you couldn't move your king's pawn to king 4 because the king's pawn has a wisdom of 9 and isn't feeling up to that right now. You don't have to roll against intelligence to find out if the king's horse can jump a pawn and leap to king's bishop 3. These things are simply not part of the game. It is a strategy game, not a wishy-washy bunch of crap about 'feelings' or interpersonal limitations ... so let's not have any of that crap in D&D.
Arguably, it might have been a mistake to incorporate wisdom, intelligence, or even charisma into a game that was bound to be played almost universally by strategists. If I am going to give credit to Gygax for any given thing, it is going to be the genius of incorporating a limitation into the game that would well and truly fuck strategists FOR EVER. Not that the strategists pay any attention, of course. They simply ignore the stats (unless something strategic is derived from them), and players with a 10 wisdom character play precisely the way that players with an 18 wisdom character do. Want to argue with the king? No problem. Don't want to sleep with the girl? Of course you don't have to. Get up and fight although you only have one hit point and you can't win - don't think about it. OF COURSE your 8 wisdom character wouldn't refuse. This is a strategy game, after all.
Except that it isn't, obviously. But still after forty years the word has not come down. People have no trouble not being able to do something because they're not strong enough. The limitations of our bodies are not OUR limitations. Or so we fool ourselves into believing.
A player in my online campaign recently said, regarding failing a wisdom check, "I'm just not used to not having control of my character for non-magical reasons." But of course he is. We all are. We make rolls all the time to determine if we can do something, and when we can't, we're used to not having that control. We would have preferred the die went our way, but ... oh well.
The point here is that we're not used to not having control of our character's thought processes ... because this is pure anathema to our sensibilities. We can take failing at a task. It is murderously hard to take failing at a task because we're not smart enough.
That is why we associate so many of the things at the start of this post with shame and guilt, and things we'd rather never talk about again. Moreover, RPGs are a way of living a life without shame, or guilt. We kill without guilt. We steal without guilt. We conquer the world without guilt. We're unashamed, loud, self-important bastards, bellowing at the bartenders and barmaids of the world without worry or concern for anyone's feelings, in particular our own.
And who the hell wants any of that emotional baggage in a D&D game?
Well, frankly, I do. Because it's real. It's the substance and source of what makes us who we are. Even the difficult bits where we fail at what we wish we were able to do. Our failings are a thousand times more interesting than our successes, and they make our successes wonderful. I'm not going to sacrifice that whole potential aspect of the game, which is what makes this game better and more important than chess.
My players are not chesspieces. They're alive.
Why do we act this way? We know it is not in our best interest. Yes, its true that we want sex, or we need the money, or that the game is on or the crew is going to the bar tonight and working on a task means missing all that. But we also know that we should listen to our friends. We know we should do our jobs. We know that without money, we're fucked. So why can't we simply have the wisdom to tell the difference between what is important, and what is REALLY important?
I don't pretend to answer that. I do want to point out, however, that we are NOT always aware of what is best for us, and we do NOT always do things in our own best interests. We are at the mercies of our hormones, our comprehension of how boring the responsible action will be, or what we perceive we might be missing by acting smartly. We are not perfect. We are human beings.
But if you want to get a real fight going at a D&D table, propose that a player can't do something because their wisdom says their character is not capable of thinking the way they themselves are.
Players - and power players especially - are used to treating D&D as a strategy game like chess. No one would ever suggest you couldn't move your king's pawn to king 4 because the king's pawn has a wisdom of 9 and isn't feeling up to that right now. You don't have to roll against intelligence to find out if the king's horse can jump a pawn and leap to king's bishop 3. These things are simply not part of the game. It is a strategy game, not a wishy-washy bunch of crap about 'feelings' or interpersonal limitations ... so let's not have any of that crap in D&D.
Arguably, it might have been a mistake to incorporate wisdom, intelligence, or even charisma into a game that was bound to be played almost universally by strategists. If I am going to give credit to Gygax for any given thing, it is going to be the genius of incorporating a limitation into the game that would well and truly fuck strategists FOR EVER. Not that the strategists pay any attention, of course. They simply ignore the stats (unless something strategic is derived from them), and players with a 10 wisdom character play precisely the way that players with an 18 wisdom character do. Want to argue with the king? No problem. Don't want to sleep with the girl? Of course you don't have to. Get up and fight although you only have one hit point and you can't win - don't think about it. OF COURSE your 8 wisdom character wouldn't refuse. This is a strategy game, after all.
Except that it isn't, obviously. But still after forty years the word has not come down. People have no trouble not being able to do something because they're not strong enough. The limitations of our bodies are not OUR limitations. Or so we fool ourselves into believing.
A player in my online campaign recently said, regarding failing a wisdom check, "I'm just not used to not having control of my character for non-magical reasons." But of course he is. We all are. We make rolls all the time to determine if we can do something, and when we can't, we're used to not having that control. We would have preferred the die went our way, but ... oh well.
The point here is that we're not used to not having control of our character's thought processes ... because this is pure anathema to our sensibilities. We can take failing at a task. It is murderously hard to take failing at a task because we're not smart enough.
That is why we associate so many of the things at the start of this post with shame and guilt, and things we'd rather never talk about again. Moreover, RPGs are a way of living a life without shame, or guilt. We kill without guilt. We steal without guilt. We conquer the world without guilt. We're unashamed, loud, self-important bastards, bellowing at the bartenders and barmaids of the world without worry or concern for anyone's feelings, in particular our own.
And who the hell wants any of that emotional baggage in a D&D game?
Well, frankly, I do. Because it's real. It's the substance and source of what makes us who we are. Even the difficult bits where we fail at what we wish we were able to do. Our failings are a thousand times more interesting than our successes, and they make our successes wonderful. I'm not going to sacrifice that whole potential aspect of the game, which is what makes this game better and more important than chess.
My players are not chesspieces. They're alive.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
More Intelligence: Back To Technology
Would that I had a little time to get a post written today. Oh wait, here it is.
Whatever the conclusions that came out of yesterday's post, with my proposing for all of ninety minutes the possibility of rewriting the combat tables and then rescinding them, I still find myself in the same basic quandary: How does a low intelligence differ from a high intelligence in principles of game play?
Granting for the time being (the next thirty years or so) that the effect isn't upon combat, what exactly is effected? Roleplay?
Okay, I've taken a few moments to stop laughing and get myself together. No, obviously not roleplay. No two people in RPGs can agree on any rule binding roleplay for three minutes at a time.
Frankly, I'm not concerned with whether intelligence 'conforms to scientific reality' or not. I just want a game system that is defined, clear, practical and allows for extrapolations to be made in world design and game play.
Consider, if the gentle reader will, that the lower orders of intelligence are fairly well defined. A zero-intelligence denotes no thought at all. A one-intelligence permits the conception of most animals ... with an instinctual thought structure based on seek food or flee.
Two-intelligence brings the lesser sort of animal hunters who, while associating in tribes, tend to attack singly or in not-so-organized groups (the lions bringing down an elephant in David Attenborough's Planet series is a good example). You can see it here.
A three-intelligence describes a small step up, not so much in terms of combat strategies, but more so as regards personal inter-relationships, such as among the lower apes.
The four-intelligence, or "semi-intelligent" by D&D standards, excellently describes the higher ape. So in that we have the brink of tool using culture ... where tools are used, but not specifically fabricated for use. This is a question of intelligence, since while you can teach an ape to use a specific tool, you can't teach it to understand how the tool works, or indeed expect it to understand why the tool is superior. It learns to use the tool by rote, and not by reason.
Logically, then, the five-intelligence or better creature steps into the realm of primitive tool fabrication and proper tribal organization. "Low" intelligence, so-called.
At this point I think I would have to argue against considering the matter one of intelligence at all. Simply throw out that appellation at this point, and define any intelligence higher than 4 as a question of technology, which can be separated. In effect, a 5 intelligence merely describes a 10 intelligence creature hundreds of thousands of years lacking in social and cultural development. We can leave any other discussion of intelligence on the shelf, so to speak, and simply not speak of it.
Once we do that, we can easily make a definition between a "low-intelligence culture" and a "human culture." Humans use metal tools. Humans have developed religion. Humans read & write. Humans have access to theoretical science. Lower cultures do not.
If you like, you can consider in a medieval setting that it wasn't easy for more advanced cultures, like Europe, to have a steady impact on less advanced cultures, like that of the Bantu or the Nentsis of the Arctic shore. Some jerk is going to rush at this point to bark about how the Bantu were actually very advanced, but this is a relative question. Does "very advanced" mean they knew how to grow food and pick sores from their bodies, or does "very advanced" mean the development of a printing press and subsequent literature. People have a tendency to ascribe the phrase "very advanced" to a wide variety of things.
An 'intelligence' scale (remember we put actual intelligence upon a shelf), balanced against a group of technologies, such as those to be found in, say, Civilization IV, which I've spent a lot of time writing about, might solve the whole problem. Certain technologies could be allocated to certain 'intelligence' ratings on a point system ... so that if a creature had a 7 intelligence, you could define just exactly what technologies that creature possessed and which it did not ... with the added benefit that two seven-intelligence cultures need not have the exact same technological advances.
Just throwing it out there.
Whatever the conclusions that came out of yesterday's post, with my proposing for all of ninety minutes the possibility of rewriting the combat tables and then rescinding them, I still find myself in the same basic quandary: How does a low intelligence differ from a high intelligence in principles of game play?
Granting for the time being (the next thirty years or so) that the effect isn't upon combat, what exactly is effected? Roleplay?
Okay, I've taken a few moments to stop laughing and get myself together. No, obviously not roleplay. No two people in RPGs can agree on any rule binding roleplay for three minutes at a time.
Frankly, I'm not concerned with whether intelligence 'conforms to scientific reality' or not. I just want a game system that is defined, clear, practical and allows for extrapolations to be made in world design and game play.
Consider, if the gentle reader will, that the lower orders of intelligence are fairly well defined. A zero-intelligence denotes no thought at all. A one-intelligence permits the conception of most animals ... with an instinctual thought structure based on seek food or flee.
Two-intelligence brings the lesser sort of animal hunters who, while associating in tribes, tend to attack singly or in not-so-organized groups (the lions bringing down an elephant in David Attenborough's Planet series is a good example). You can see it here.
A three-intelligence describes a small step up, not so much in terms of combat strategies, but more so as regards personal inter-relationships, such as among the lower apes.
The four-intelligence, or "semi-intelligent" by D&D standards, excellently describes the higher ape. So in that we have the brink of tool using culture ... where tools are used, but not specifically fabricated for use. This is a question of intelligence, since while you can teach an ape to use a specific tool, you can't teach it to understand how the tool works, or indeed expect it to understand why the tool is superior. It learns to use the tool by rote, and not by reason.
Logically, then, the five-intelligence or better creature steps into the realm of primitive tool fabrication and proper tribal organization. "Low" intelligence, so-called.
At this point I think I would have to argue against considering the matter one of intelligence at all. Simply throw out that appellation at this point, and define any intelligence higher than 4 as a question of technology, which can be separated. In effect, a 5 intelligence merely describes a 10 intelligence creature hundreds of thousands of years lacking in social and cultural development. We can leave any other discussion of intelligence on the shelf, so to speak, and simply not speak of it.
Once we do that, we can easily make a definition between a "low-intelligence culture" and a "human culture." Humans use metal tools. Humans have developed religion. Humans read & write. Humans have access to theoretical science. Lower cultures do not.
If you like, you can consider in a medieval setting that it wasn't easy for more advanced cultures, like Europe, to have a steady impact on less advanced cultures, like that of the Bantu or the Nentsis of the Arctic shore. Some jerk is going to rush at this point to bark about how the Bantu were actually very advanced, but this is a relative question. Does "very advanced" mean they knew how to grow food and pick sores from their bodies, or does "very advanced" mean the development of a printing press and subsequent literature. People have a tendency to ascribe the phrase "very advanced" to a wide variety of things.
An 'intelligence' scale (remember we put actual intelligence upon a shelf), balanced against a group of technologies, such as those to be found in, say, Civilization IV, which I've spent a lot of time writing about, might solve the whole problem. Certain technologies could be allocated to certain 'intelligence' ratings on a point system ... so that if a creature had a 7 intelligence, you could define just exactly what technologies that creature possessed and which it did not ... with the added benefit that two seven-intelligence cultures need not have the exact same technological advances.
Just throwing it out there.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Rethinking Intelligence
For a bit I'd like to write a bit about the intelligence of various humanoid races, without getting bogged down in the particulars of this race or that, but rather to concentrate upon the difference between what is a "low" intelligence and what is a "high" intelligence ... to get a handle on the various intelligence levels and what they might mean.
I don't suppose for a moment that Gygax and crew had any more idea of the differences between 'very intelligent' and 'extraordinarily intelligent' than do the people playing the game right now. They were convenient labels, they sounded like they were stacked in a logical order, and it was obviously presupposed that people would just esoterically accept the labels without any need for them to be defined. And indeed, they are not defined. What, for example, can a very intelligent creature NOT do that a highly intelligent creature can? Is it even a question of ability? Is it the speed at which a creature can think? And if so, how does that affect the game in any way?
There aren't any rules for it, so we know Gygax was pulling the whole framework out of his ass, or phoning it in if you prefer, dumping it into the book and then moving onto things that were scaled and made sense. I know a lot of players out there don't think its important, or don't care, but like any scientist I want those things scaled and measured and clearly understood as to what a 13 intelligence means as opposed to a 12 intelligence. I'm not satisfied with rolling the difference out, since intelligence is in fact not random. People with higher intelligence DO understand things intuitively that people with lower intelligence do not ... to the eternal chagrin of persons with lower intelligence.
Measuring understanding is, however, a very difficult science, and hasn't been understood yet with regards to actual intelligence ... and therefore it would be difficult to hang game rules on any study of the subject. Alas, we are limited in creating game rules to things that can be established in black and white terms: a 6 on a d6 is not a 5, cannot be mistaken for a five, and never will be a 5. This is the sort of game rule we need for intelligence. Not because a very intelligent creature isn't occasionally stupid, or because a stupid creature can't have moments of genius, but because in the wider sense, we are talking of cultural entities comprised of stupid creatures and genius creatures, and therefore there's something to be argued for statistical generalities.
For example: how is a Naga culture profoundly different from a Goblin culture. We know the nagas are smart and the goblins not so much, but what exactly does 'different' mean? How do we resolve what ought to be present in a naga culture? Or in any culture for that matter.
There is, of course, the pulling it out of the DM's ass technique, the tried and true method, forever defended and requiring absolutely no continuity or logic whatsoever. The lovely thing about this method is that it needs no defense, as illogic is in itself a kind of proof. If you are the sort that ballyhoos this method, and do so loudly and proudly, you really shouldn't be reading this post, or this blog for that matter. I'm not your sort of beer buddy. I'm sure your time could be better spent right now buying lottery tickets. Go get one and the rest of us will continue.
Since I can't measure comprehension in any way that is as absolutist as I want for the game, I'm pretty much in the realm of ability vs. non-ability, or knowledge vs. non-knowledge. It's really the realm of wisdom and not intelligence, but we generally suppose from fiction that a really smart culture possesses all sorts of cool and interesting technologies that a really backward culture doesn't have. Note, please, that we don't call them "dumb cultures." There is the presumption, always present, that a backward culture will one day be a forward culture, on the same track that we ourselves followed. In fact, we can thank Star Trek and other sources for hammering into our minds that every primitive culture is filled with people who are just as smart as we are, they just haven't sat in classrooms and been taught jet propulsion and gross anatomy.
There's a physiological precendent for this, of course - that being that we are substantially unchanged from the same biological construct, Cro-magnon man, who roamed the planet 150,000 years ago. We have the same brain, the same structure, the same built-in probable comprehension of languages and so on. We understand from our studies that if we could teleport a Cro-magnon baby from the distant past into our present, it would probably be fully capable of learning language and growing up just as any modern child. There are a lot of reasons to think this is true, but I'm not going to go into them; feel free to do some of your own reading.
So we are not really any 'smarter' than our distant ancestors, which argues that our civilization is just the happenstance of hitting upon technologies which have changed our outlook this way and that. Those technologies came very slowly for the first 140,000 years, but they piled upon each other and eventually led to processes in our culture that taught us how to seek technologies, no longer relying upon discovering them by accident.
An accidental technology would be something like the acquisition of fire. I don't say discovery, of course, because fire was around long before we were ... but at some point we know that the domestication of fire - the power to make fire at will, and not depend on gathering it from a random source - was probably hit upon by witnessing some particular event and reproducing that event. Unlike modern technologies, where we conceive of the technology and then actively bring it about without ever having any prior proof that it was possible to bring it about.
I digress into this because I'd like to step into the realm of humanoid species that were not cro-magnon man ... since we are, after all, talking about goblins and bugbears as opposed to humans. Our one obvious example is Neanderthal man, which had been in existence for some 400,000 years prior to the arrival of Cro-magnon. We have a long cultural history of perceiving that the Neanderthal was dumber than we were. It was supposed for several hundred years that we wiped them out because we were smarter, but it is understood now that we probably intermarried with them and that all of us today possess a fair quantity of Neanderthal genes - arguably, some more than others.
It is not as though Neanderthals were without technologies of their own. Prior to the Cro-magnons appearing, they developed tools, weapons, techniques and cultures all their own. There's no doubt from the evidence that Cro-magnons were superior in these things, but since we already perceive that technology is a result of circumstance and development, and not necessarily intelligence, there is a little proposal to make here.
First, however, let's point out that the speed at which technologies were witnessed and reproduced was certainly much faster with the Cro-magnon species. The Neanderthals had 400,000 years to accomplish what they accomplished, and we managed what we have in only 150,000. So we were obviously more observant and quicker at picking up nature's ball than were the Neanderthals.
But suppose there had never been any Cro-magnons. Suppose that the Neanderthals had another million years or so to pick up the ball, so to speak. It's not an unreasonable proposition. Can we really argue that Neanderthals wouldn't have eventually learned how to be rocket scientists?
Perhaps it would have taken much, much longer. Perhaps Neanderthal universities would require ten or twenty years of steady training to bring Neanderthal children up to scale ... and perhaps Neanderthal doctors would only practice for ten or fifteen years before having to retire. We can presume their lifespans were longer, like ours became longer, but perhaps all the training it took would shorten the professional years of practice.
From this perspective, aren't we saying that a goblin can do as much as a naga, given its time of existence? Perhaps goblins are just 'dumb' because they were only created a few millenia ago, whereas naga have been around for 25,000 years. And perhaps humans aren't quite as smart as a naga, but they've had 125,000 years longer to learn how to do stuff. And as we know, it's those last five hundred years that really make the difference.
Consider that every humanoid race smarter than your average dog is generally considered to have mastered the power of fire. You don't picture a bunch of bugbears sitting around a camp without a fire going, do you? Have you ever described a camp of 'intelligent' creatures at night without a fire? But of course there were such camps, for hundreds of thousands of years, in our own actual history.
This makes the argument that either A) every creature is smart enough to create fire, even if it means they were shown how to do so last week; and B) every creature has had the same amount of time to develop as a race that we have had. Either way, we're looking at a system of homogenous intelligence, where once the technology is created by one culture, it immediately becomes available to all the other cultures because we as DMs don't - or can't - perceive any difference. Goblins may be a little less organized in your combats, but they still use all the same weapons, have the same armor, gather food the same way and sit around the same fires that your much smarter elves sit around. There doesn't seem to be any problem in a goblin or a bugbear being able to manipulate technology once its put into their hands.
What I'm saying is that this is substantially wrong. Using a sword, for instance, is not just a matter of picking it up and swinging it. An ape can do that. Doesn't make the ape a swordsman. Swordplay is a complex intellectual pursuit that requires gauging a lot of factors besides your ability to swing. In other words, you might be able to put a sword in a bugbear's hand, but you shouldn't expect the bugbear to be able to parry with it, or set up combinations, or know about the intricacies of footwork and so on. It is a low intelligence creature. Even if you could teach it over ten years how to do those things, it would NEVER be smart enough to react to something in swordplay it had never seen before. It simply wouldn't have the intelligence to interpret what it was seeing and concoct a logical strategy against it. By the time a low intelligence creature could do all that, it would be dead. Remember, Cro-magnons are three times faster than Neanderthals.
The same ought to be true with creatures in the game who are smarter than us. They ought to be able to fight with swords at a skill level much higher than an ordinary person - or indeed do anything with a much higher ability. Their comprehension should be lightning-quick, the intricacies of their language much harder to grasp, their tools requiring a tasking multiplicity our brain-pans can't perform at the same rate. Oh, sure, you might eventually learn how to play their variety of chess ... but you'll never win if you're playing 'speed-chess' with them. You don't think that fast.
The thrust of all this writing comes down to this:
1) Virtually every technology in the game is equally spread among all races regardless of intelligence, and probably no one wants to change that.
2) Intelligence is speed of comprehension, and not the possession of technologies.
For that matter, intelligence is the possession of certain moralities, but that's another essay.
A smarter creature therefore ought to be able to use all the same existing technologies better ... and that is the scale that ought to be put into place. It shouldn't be that a naga or a bugbear has a better to hit table because it has more hit dice. Both should fight on to hit tables that are commensurate with their intelligence. And the same ought to be true with most die rolls. A smarter fighter should be able to do better with a grapple. He or she should be able to leap from a high place with less likelihood of dying. He or she should be able to take down a bigger, stronger opponent even if that other opponent is a higher 'level' ... which might be a case of a better to hit table for the lower level, smarter fighter and a lot of hit points for the higher level, dumber fighter. And that might be a very interesting - and quite socially common - contest.
Intelligence, not strength or dexterity, ought to be the MASTER stat.
But nobody bothered to make rules for it.
I don't suppose for a moment that Gygax and crew had any more idea of the differences between 'very intelligent' and 'extraordinarily intelligent' than do the people playing the game right now. They were convenient labels, they sounded like they were stacked in a logical order, and it was obviously presupposed that people would just esoterically accept the labels without any need for them to be defined. And indeed, they are not defined. What, for example, can a very intelligent creature NOT do that a highly intelligent creature can? Is it even a question of ability? Is it the speed at which a creature can think? And if so, how does that affect the game in any way?
There aren't any rules for it, so we know Gygax was pulling the whole framework out of his ass, or phoning it in if you prefer, dumping it into the book and then moving onto things that were scaled and made sense. I know a lot of players out there don't think its important, or don't care, but like any scientist I want those things scaled and measured and clearly understood as to what a 13 intelligence means as opposed to a 12 intelligence. I'm not satisfied with rolling the difference out, since intelligence is in fact not random. People with higher intelligence DO understand things intuitively that people with lower intelligence do not ... to the eternal chagrin of persons with lower intelligence.
Measuring understanding is, however, a very difficult science, and hasn't been understood yet with regards to actual intelligence ... and therefore it would be difficult to hang game rules on any study of the subject. Alas, we are limited in creating game rules to things that can be established in black and white terms: a 6 on a d6 is not a 5, cannot be mistaken for a five, and never will be a 5. This is the sort of game rule we need for intelligence. Not because a very intelligent creature isn't occasionally stupid, or because a stupid creature can't have moments of genius, but because in the wider sense, we are talking of cultural entities comprised of stupid creatures and genius creatures, and therefore there's something to be argued for statistical generalities.
For example: how is a Naga culture profoundly different from a Goblin culture. We know the nagas are smart and the goblins not so much, but what exactly does 'different' mean? How do we resolve what ought to be present in a naga culture? Or in any culture for that matter.
There is, of course, the pulling it out of the DM's ass technique, the tried and true method, forever defended and requiring absolutely no continuity or logic whatsoever. The lovely thing about this method is that it needs no defense, as illogic is in itself a kind of proof. If you are the sort that ballyhoos this method, and do so loudly and proudly, you really shouldn't be reading this post, or this blog for that matter. I'm not your sort of beer buddy. I'm sure your time could be better spent right now buying lottery tickets. Go get one and the rest of us will continue.
Since I can't measure comprehension in any way that is as absolutist as I want for the game, I'm pretty much in the realm of ability vs. non-ability, or knowledge vs. non-knowledge. It's really the realm of wisdom and not intelligence, but we generally suppose from fiction that a really smart culture possesses all sorts of cool and interesting technologies that a really backward culture doesn't have. Note, please, that we don't call them "dumb cultures." There is the presumption, always present, that a backward culture will one day be a forward culture, on the same track that we ourselves followed. In fact, we can thank Star Trek and other sources for hammering into our minds that every primitive culture is filled with people who are just as smart as we are, they just haven't sat in classrooms and been taught jet propulsion and gross anatomy.
There's a physiological precendent for this, of course - that being that we are substantially unchanged from the same biological construct, Cro-magnon man, who roamed the planet 150,000 years ago. We have the same brain, the same structure, the same built-in probable comprehension of languages and so on. We understand from our studies that if we could teleport a Cro-magnon baby from the distant past into our present, it would probably be fully capable of learning language and growing up just as any modern child. There are a lot of reasons to think this is true, but I'm not going to go into them; feel free to do some of your own reading.
So we are not really any 'smarter' than our distant ancestors, which argues that our civilization is just the happenstance of hitting upon technologies which have changed our outlook this way and that. Those technologies came very slowly for the first 140,000 years, but they piled upon each other and eventually led to processes in our culture that taught us how to seek technologies, no longer relying upon discovering them by accident.
An accidental technology would be something like the acquisition of fire. I don't say discovery, of course, because fire was around long before we were ... but at some point we know that the domestication of fire - the power to make fire at will, and not depend on gathering it from a random source - was probably hit upon by witnessing some particular event and reproducing that event. Unlike modern technologies, where we conceive of the technology and then actively bring it about without ever having any prior proof that it was possible to bring it about.
I digress into this because I'd like to step into the realm of humanoid species that were not cro-magnon man ... since we are, after all, talking about goblins and bugbears as opposed to humans. Our one obvious example is Neanderthal man, which had been in existence for some 400,000 years prior to the arrival of Cro-magnon. We have a long cultural history of perceiving that the Neanderthal was dumber than we were. It was supposed for several hundred years that we wiped them out because we were smarter, but it is understood now that we probably intermarried with them and that all of us today possess a fair quantity of Neanderthal genes - arguably, some more than others.
It is not as though Neanderthals were without technologies of their own. Prior to the Cro-magnons appearing, they developed tools, weapons, techniques and cultures all their own. There's no doubt from the evidence that Cro-magnons were superior in these things, but since we already perceive that technology is a result of circumstance and development, and not necessarily intelligence, there is a little proposal to make here.
First, however, let's point out that the speed at which technologies were witnessed and reproduced was certainly much faster with the Cro-magnon species. The Neanderthals had 400,000 years to accomplish what they accomplished, and we managed what we have in only 150,000. So we were obviously more observant and quicker at picking up nature's ball than were the Neanderthals.
But suppose there had never been any Cro-magnons. Suppose that the Neanderthals had another million years or so to pick up the ball, so to speak. It's not an unreasonable proposition. Can we really argue that Neanderthals wouldn't have eventually learned how to be rocket scientists?
Perhaps it would have taken much, much longer. Perhaps Neanderthal universities would require ten or twenty years of steady training to bring Neanderthal children up to scale ... and perhaps Neanderthal doctors would only practice for ten or fifteen years before having to retire. We can presume their lifespans were longer, like ours became longer, but perhaps all the training it took would shorten the professional years of practice.
From this perspective, aren't we saying that a goblin can do as much as a naga, given its time of existence? Perhaps goblins are just 'dumb' because they were only created a few millenia ago, whereas naga have been around for 25,000 years. And perhaps humans aren't quite as smart as a naga, but they've had 125,000 years longer to learn how to do stuff. And as we know, it's those last five hundred years that really make the difference.
Consider that every humanoid race smarter than your average dog is generally considered to have mastered the power of fire. You don't picture a bunch of bugbears sitting around a camp without a fire going, do you? Have you ever described a camp of 'intelligent' creatures at night without a fire? But of course there were such camps, for hundreds of thousands of years, in our own actual history.
This makes the argument that either A) every creature is smart enough to create fire, even if it means they were shown how to do so last week; and B) every creature has had the same amount of time to develop as a race that we have had. Either way, we're looking at a system of homogenous intelligence, where once the technology is created by one culture, it immediately becomes available to all the other cultures because we as DMs don't - or can't - perceive any difference. Goblins may be a little less organized in your combats, but they still use all the same weapons, have the same armor, gather food the same way and sit around the same fires that your much smarter elves sit around. There doesn't seem to be any problem in a goblin or a bugbear being able to manipulate technology once its put into their hands.
What I'm saying is that this is substantially wrong. Using a sword, for instance, is not just a matter of picking it up and swinging it. An ape can do that. Doesn't make the ape a swordsman. Swordplay is a complex intellectual pursuit that requires gauging a lot of factors besides your ability to swing. In other words, you might be able to put a sword in a bugbear's hand, but you shouldn't expect the bugbear to be able to parry with it, or set up combinations, or know about the intricacies of footwork and so on. It is a low intelligence creature. Even if you could teach it over ten years how to do those things, it would NEVER be smart enough to react to something in swordplay it had never seen before. It simply wouldn't have the intelligence to interpret what it was seeing and concoct a logical strategy against it. By the time a low intelligence creature could do all that, it would be dead. Remember, Cro-magnons are three times faster than Neanderthals.
The same ought to be true with creatures in the game who are smarter than us. They ought to be able to fight with swords at a skill level much higher than an ordinary person - or indeed do anything with a much higher ability. Their comprehension should be lightning-quick, the intricacies of their language much harder to grasp, their tools requiring a tasking multiplicity our brain-pans can't perform at the same rate. Oh, sure, you might eventually learn how to play their variety of chess ... but you'll never win if you're playing 'speed-chess' with them. You don't think that fast.
The thrust of all this writing comes down to this:
1) Virtually every technology in the game is equally spread among all races regardless of intelligence, and probably no one wants to change that.
2) Intelligence is speed of comprehension, and not the possession of technologies.
For that matter, intelligence is the possession of certain moralities, but that's another essay.
A smarter creature therefore ought to be able to use all the same existing technologies better ... and that is the scale that ought to be put into place. It shouldn't be that a naga or a bugbear has a better to hit table because it has more hit dice. Both should fight on to hit tables that are commensurate with their intelligence. And the same ought to be true with most die rolls. A smarter fighter should be able to do better with a grapple. He or she should be able to leap from a high place with less likelihood of dying. He or she should be able to take down a bigger, stronger opponent even if that other opponent is a higher 'level' ... which might be a case of a better to hit table for the lower level, smarter fighter and a lot of hit points for the higher level, dumber fighter. And that might be a very interesting - and quite socially common - contest.
Intelligence, not strength or dexterity, ought to be the MASTER stat.
But nobody bothered to make rules for it.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Big Enough To Fail
If you have a passing acquaintance with physics, and if you have the least knowledge of biological construction, you know already that giant creatures are flat out impossible, and that if they came into existence at the flick of a wand, they would collapse immediately under the weight of their own flesh.
There is a reason why insects or crustaceans are small, particularly on land. It is the nature of the exoskeleton, in which the structural integrity of the creature comprises an outer shell enveloping the meaty goodness. The bouyancy and pressurization of water will enable larger crustaceans to exist and retain their integrity, but the gentle reader will take note that one does not see four-pound lobsters clambering around, or 20-pound oysters or nestling upon dry land.
It is a simple mathematics problem. If we consider a beetle, for example. It is easy to find an example that might be one centimeter in length, and perhaps a total of one fifth of a cubic centimeter in size. If we suppose that the beetles mass is equal to one fifth of a gram as well, we can compare the beetle's length to its mass as a ratio of 5:1.
If we increase double the length of the beetle, we increase the overall surface of that beetle's shell by the square of that length. The larger beetle's skeleton is now four times larger than before. However, the mass of the body is cubed, and is now eight times larger that it was before. The larger beetle now weighs 1.6 grams. The ratio to its length to mass has changed dramatically, and is now 5:4.
As we continue to double the size of the beetle, the mass increases exponentially while the body size of the beetle increases only arithmetically. In other words, in very short order the beetle hits a size in which it cannot exist. This is why the largest beetles in the world are only 15 centimeters long.
It is no different with creatures with internal structures, like ourselves. If we double the height of a typical 200-lb. human, keeping all things in the same proportions, we find we have a giant that weighs 1,600 lbs ... with a far lesser percentage of that meat directly attached to the bones supporting the weight. Even if we propose that the bones are larger, and that the tendons supporting the muscles and attaching them to the bones are larger, we still find ourselves with massive amounts of flesh and organs which will simply tear free from the structure of the skeleton, reducing our giant a mass of gooey muck.
Now, what I am not saying is that there should be no giant monsters in D&D. Giants, along with huge crabs, ants the size of dogs, hornets the size of Volvos and so on are romantically fascinating things, and the game demands their existence. Rather, I am proposing that there must be some other justification for the presence of these huge versions of smaller, natural creatures. The obvious answer is magic.
We can suppose that there is some sort of 'magical integrity field' that enables the bones of a giant to support its massive size, or a rhinocerous beetle the size of a bus to scurry over the earth despite the comparison of its tiny legs to its necessary weight. Perhaps it is some sort of net, with invisible nodes that extend to each critical support point in the monster's body, sustaining that point and keeping it free of the inexorable pull of gravity. One might imagine having goggles that enable the viewer to see the magical 'tendons' extending throughout the giant creature's body.
Would this not, however, mean that if you chose to detect magic in the direction of a giant scorpion hiding in the bushes, the presence of the scorpion would be revealed? Shouldn't this be true with all such creatures? And if I should choose to dispel magic, shouldn't the body of the cyclops simply collapse, killing the creature? And what other ways might there be to magically affect his integrity field, once we have argued for its existence.
Which creatures would, and would not, have this field? A giant rat is no larger than a small dog. Certainly the reason there are no pig-sized rats in the real world is not because pig-sized creatures can't exist due to the skeletal-to-body mass ratio. So where does one draw the line, exactly. Where does "very large bear" end and "impossibly large bear" begin? When the bear is 1,500 lbs? 1,700 lbs? Do I need my Guinness book of records to tell me when the creature starts being 'magical?'
We could posit that large creatures are 'magical' but that they're a different kind of magical that isn't affected by the existing canon of mage spells. That seems like a bit of a hand wave to me, and in any case begs the question that if this magic integrity field exists, how come mages through the ages haven't researched to find spells that directly effect the field - never mind simply causing damage to the creatures, but rather simply obliterating the creature's ability to keep itself standing upon the earth's gravity well on its spindly little legs?
And while we're on the subject, perhaps the existence of giant creatures isn't regulated by a magical field? What if there's some other reason? I can't think of one and I'm open to suggestions. I know some of you out there will be thinking "smaller gravity well," which has long been the staple of science fiction novels. It won't work. At some point the limit is still met, and mass will still fail to hang off the bone. You've only changed the ratio limit.
The hand wave is the obvious solution. But are we really looking for solutions, or are we looking for new ways to tap into inconsistences that have been hand-waved to the point where we've forgotten a hand wave was necessary? Why shouldn't anti-giant creature magic be in some way be available? "A wizard did it" only preposes that a wizard can undo it.
There is a reason why insects or crustaceans are small, particularly on land. It is the nature of the exoskeleton, in which the structural integrity of the creature comprises an outer shell enveloping the meaty goodness. The bouyancy and pressurization of water will enable larger crustaceans to exist and retain their integrity, but the gentle reader will take note that one does not see four-pound lobsters clambering around, or 20-pound oysters or nestling upon dry land.
It is a simple mathematics problem. If we consider a beetle, for example. It is easy to find an example that might be one centimeter in length, and perhaps a total of one fifth of a cubic centimeter in size. If we suppose that the beetles mass is equal to one fifth of a gram as well, we can compare the beetle's length to its mass as a ratio of 5:1.
If we increase double the length of the beetle, we increase the overall surface of that beetle's shell by the square of that length. The larger beetle's skeleton is now four times larger than before. However, the mass of the body is cubed, and is now eight times larger that it was before. The larger beetle now weighs 1.6 grams. The ratio to its length to mass has changed dramatically, and is now 5:4.
As we continue to double the size of the beetle, the mass increases exponentially while the body size of the beetle increases only arithmetically. In other words, in very short order the beetle hits a size in which it cannot exist. This is why the largest beetles in the world are only 15 centimeters long.
It is no different with creatures with internal structures, like ourselves. If we double the height of a typical 200-lb. human, keeping all things in the same proportions, we find we have a giant that weighs 1,600 lbs ... with a far lesser percentage of that meat directly attached to the bones supporting the weight. Even if we propose that the bones are larger, and that the tendons supporting the muscles and attaching them to the bones are larger, we still find ourselves with massive amounts of flesh and organs which will simply tear free from the structure of the skeleton, reducing our giant a mass of gooey muck.
Now, what I am not saying is that there should be no giant monsters in D&D. Giants, along with huge crabs, ants the size of dogs, hornets the size of Volvos and so on are romantically fascinating things, and the game demands their existence. Rather, I am proposing that there must be some other justification for the presence of these huge versions of smaller, natural creatures. The obvious answer is magic.
We can suppose that there is some sort of 'magical integrity field' that enables the bones of a giant to support its massive size, or a rhinocerous beetle the size of a bus to scurry over the earth despite the comparison of its tiny legs to its necessary weight. Perhaps it is some sort of net, with invisible nodes that extend to each critical support point in the monster's body, sustaining that point and keeping it free of the inexorable pull of gravity. One might imagine having goggles that enable the viewer to see the magical 'tendons' extending throughout the giant creature's body.
Would this not, however, mean that if you chose to detect magic in the direction of a giant scorpion hiding in the bushes, the presence of the scorpion would be revealed? Shouldn't this be true with all such creatures? And if I should choose to dispel magic, shouldn't the body of the cyclops simply collapse, killing the creature? And what other ways might there be to magically affect his integrity field, once we have argued for its existence.
Which creatures would, and would not, have this field? A giant rat is no larger than a small dog. Certainly the reason there are no pig-sized rats in the real world is not because pig-sized creatures can't exist due to the skeletal-to-body mass ratio. So where does one draw the line, exactly. Where does "very large bear" end and "impossibly large bear" begin? When the bear is 1,500 lbs? 1,700 lbs? Do I need my Guinness book of records to tell me when the creature starts being 'magical?'
We could posit that large creatures are 'magical' but that they're a different kind of magical that isn't affected by the existing canon of mage spells. That seems like a bit of a hand wave to me, and in any case begs the question that if this magic integrity field exists, how come mages through the ages haven't researched to find spells that directly effect the field - never mind simply causing damage to the creatures, but rather simply obliterating the creature's ability to keep itself standing upon the earth's gravity well on its spindly little legs?
And while we're on the subject, perhaps the existence of giant creatures isn't regulated by a magical field? What if there's some other reason? I can't think of one and I'm open to suggestions. I know some of you out there will be thinking "smaller gravity well," which has long been the staple of science fiction novels. It won't work. At some point the limit is still met, and mass will still fail to hang off the bone. You've only changed the ratio limit.
The hand wave is the obvious solution. But are we really looking for solutions, or are we looking for new ways to tap into inconsistences that have been hand-waved to the point where we've forgotten a hand wave was necessary? Why shouldn't anti-giant creature magic be in some way be available? "A wizard did it" only preposes that a wizard can undo it.
Friday, November 4, 2011
My It's A Good Day, Isn't It?
I've been remiss this week in not posting here, as my online campaign has been going sensationally, full of intrigue and puzzling events, plus a few moments of raw terror. There's a part of me that thinks if I'm writing here, I'm not answering questions and presenting the next scene there, which seems wrong somehow. For example, I could be carrying forth the campaign right now.
And running D&D is sort of the point of it all, isn't it?
Still, I have a few things on my mind and I thought I'd address them. Yesterday I remade an acquaintance with an old film, one that is probably in my top fifty: not the sort of thing that usually appeals to nerds, but if you simply like a very good story, you can find Kind Hearts and Coronets here in its entirety. The film, while utterly ignored by the Oscars on account of being British and unsavory, brilliantly displays what a genius Alec Guinness was, and goes that first step for the uninitiated towards explaining why he detested the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi so much. If the gentle reader has already seen The Man in the White Suit, The Horse's Mouth, The Lavender Hill Mob, Last Holiday, Tunes of Glory and the Bridge on the River Kwai - along with at least ten other very worthy films - you're well aware of the man's impressive range, and why he quite probably before-the-fact viewed Kenobi as "phoning it in" for the cash. God knows why Guinness needed it at that time, but from all reports he regretted it for the rest of his life.
But then Star Wars is a piece of cinematic shit that took advantage of some new technology and an old, popular set of plot devices that have always served to amuse the groundlings, as Shakespeare called them. When I was twelve and first saw the film, I thought it was brilliant. When I was twenty and saw it again, I realized that growing up develops one's discrimination.
I say this full well knowing the number of man-boy nerds who will stamp their feet and pout and go around in another big circle about how I am full of myself and all, and don't appreciate 'fun' and blah blah blah. It is incomprehensible to many that a person simply could not like Star Wars because it is a bad movie, abounding with overused plot tropes and stock wooden characters who do not, any more, 'speak' to my view of life. To put it another way, it isn't 'fun' for me because it is terribly, awfully simple-minded. Visually it looks like a lot of people in really obvious costumes walking around on really obvious set pieces carrying bits of plastic and pointing them at each other like ten-year-old children. At ten, these things were fun of course, but I've long since come to a place where I need more than plastic toys to fire my imagination.
I'd also like to say that there's been time now to talk to the people who put forth the $100 to get a subscription to my game designs, and everyone seems very happy. I have no proof of this, of course, since this is the internet, and I'm not exposing people who don't want to be seen ... but I must comment on others who have made a great stomping, pouting show about how much money it is and what a pompous ass I am for daring to suggest that someone might spend one hundred dollars on whatever I happen to have created. This mind-boggling impossibility is without question measured against the money most people spend during a Friday night at the local bar or tavern, food and drinks included, or the thousands of people right now who are laying hundred dollar bets that a red jack and a seven will beat whatever's in the dealer's hand. Because obviously a hundred dollars is SO much money that data representing twenty years of work could never be its equal.
I don't know. The stomping and the pouting is such an important part of the internet, it's hard not to look at it once in awhile from a purely sociological point of view. A few weeks ago I called quite a number of people on this blog 'idiots,' capitalizing the letters for emphasis, which created a small trickle of other people cleverly capitalizing the word on other blogs while pointedly not using my name or defining the source. But naturally, everyone knew who was being talked about. I wonder if any of these people can understand how spectacular that is for me, to know that there are so many people who read this blog that an oblique reference to something I've written here can be ascribed and understood by others because they've read it here. Not that it makes any difference, mind, to anything except my ego. The world is the same world. The things we like are the same things. I go on making my world, my way, and other people buy it and enjoy it their way, and other people scoff and then move on with their little lives, and so on and so forth.
It is as though all of this doesn't make very much difference at all. It is as though it is all just a lot of strutting and fretting hours upon the stage, by IDIOTS, full of sound and fury ... well, you ought to know the rest of the quote. The Star Wars people can look it up on the internet.
Viewed from that angle, with little else to prop up the existence of some people, I am not surprised that blogging becomes a soul-destroying prospect, driving the blogger to despair and ultimately the decision to stop strutting and fretting altogether, and return to prospects in life that may offer gratification that is somewhat less than immediate and fleeting.
If I blogged only for the effect I could cause, I could quit now, having cheerfully proved what puppets some people are and how easy it is to get under their skin.
But that's not enough for me. That it is believed by some to be my whole purpose is not very surprising, given that people can only surmise the aspirations of others from their own limited imaginations. And given that their imaginations extend to the belief that Star Wars is a good film, I'm not surprised they miss me and my purpose by at least 12 parsecs (which is a distance, and not a measure of time).
I must explain what does make it for me. It isn't the arguments, that must be made for the sake of those who find themselves caught in so much dreck and wish for something better. It isn't the numbers on this blog, that climb steadily from month to month. It isn't the laughable attempts to evicerate me elsewhere that prove my influence. It isn't racking up another blog post here, although 755 is a nice, tidy sum to have already written.
It is, to wit, the frank creation of life and events going on over there on the other blog, the campaign the players assure me is full of fun and excitement. It is the powerful sense of achievement that comes from constructing another map, or from overcoming another obstacle in the creation of algorithms for the purpose of deepening my world, or from feeling just generally that art is in itself a marvelous means of achieving self-satisfaction.
I stop every once in awhile, upon having a really good day, and realize just how happy I am.
And running D&D is sort of the point of it all, isn't it?
Still, I have a few things on my mind and I thought I'd address them. Yesterday I remade an acquaintance with an old film, one that is probably in my top fifty: not the sort of thing that usually appeals to nerds, but if you simply like a very good story, you can find Kind Hearts and Coronets here in its entirety. The film, while utterly ignored by the Oscars on account of being British and unsavory, brilliantly displays what a genius Alec Guinness was, and goes that first step for the uninitiated towards explaining why he detested the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi so much. If the gentle reader has already seen The Man in the White Suit, The Horse's Mouth, The Lavender Hill Mob, Last Holiday, Tunes of Glory and the Bridge on the River Kwai - along with at least ten other very worthy films - you're well aware of the man's impressive range, and why he quite probably before-the-fact viewed Kenobi as "phoning it in" for the cash. God knows why Guinness needed it at that time, but from all reports he regretted it for the rest of his life.
But then Star Wars is a piece of cinematic shit that took advantage of some new technology and an old, popular set of plot devices that have always served to amuse the groundlings, as Shakespeare called them. When I was twelve and first saw the film, I thought it was brilliant. When I was twenty and saw it again, I realized that growing up develops one's discrimination.
I say this full well knowing the number of man-boy nerds who will stamp their feet and pout and go around in another big circle about how I am full of myself and all, and don't appreciate 'fun' and blah blah blah. It is incomprehensible to many that a person simply could not like Star Wars because it is a bad movie, abounding with overused plot tropes and stock wooden characters who do not, any more, 'speak' to my view of life. To put it another way, it isn't 'fun' for me because it is terribly, awfully simple-minded. Visually it looks like a lot of people in really obvious costumes walking around on really obvious set pieces carrying bits of plastic and pointing them at each other like ten-year-old children. At ten, these things were fun of course, but I've long since come to a place where I need more than plastic toys to fire my imagination.
I'd also like to say that there's been time now to talk to the people who put forth the $100 to get a subscription to my game designs, and everyone seems very happy. I have no proof of this, of course, since this is the internet, and I'm not exposing people who don't want to be seen ... but I must comment on others who have made a great stomping, pouting show about how much money it is and what a pompous ass I am for daring to suggest that someone might spend one hundred dollars on whatever I happen to have created. This mind-boggling impossibility is without question measured against the money most people spend during a Friday night at the local bar or tavern, food and drinks included, or the thousands of people right now who are laying hundred dollar bets that a red jack and a seven will beat whatever's in the dealer's hand. Because obviously a hundred dollars is SO much money that data representing twenty years of work could never be its equal.
I don't know. The stomping and the pouting is such an important part of the internet, it's hard not to look at it once in awhile from a purely sociological point of view. A few weeks ago I called quite a number of people on this blog 'idiots,' capitalizing the letters for emphasis, which created a small trickle of other people cleverly capitalizing the word on other blogs while pointedly not using my name or defining the source. But naturally, everyone knew who was being talked about. I wonder if any of these people can understand how spectacular that is for me, to know that there are so many people who read this blog that an oblique reference to something I've written here can be ascribed and understood by others because they've read it here. Not that it makes any difference, mind, to anything except my ego. The world is the same world. The things we like are the same things. I go on making my world, my way, and other people buy it and enjoy it their way, and other people scoff and then move on with their little lives, and so on and so forth.
It is as though all of this doesn't make very much difference at all. It is as though it is all just a lot of strutting and fretting hours upon the stage, by IDIOTS, full of sound and fury ... well, you ought to know the rest of the quote. The Star Wars people can look it up on the internet.
Viewed from that angle, with little else to prop up the existence of some people, I am not surprised that blogging becomes a soul-destroying prospect, driving the blogger to despair and ultimately the decision to stop strutting and fretting altogether, and return to prospects in life that may offer gratification that is somewhat less than immediate and fleeting.
If I blogged only for the effect I could cause, I could quit now, having cheerfully proved what puppets some people are and how easy it is to get under their skin.
But that's not enough for me. That it is believed by some to be my whole purpose is not very surprising, given that people can only surmise the aspirations of others from their own limited imaginations. And given that their imaginations extend to the belief that Star Wars is a good film, I'm not surprised they miss me and my purpose by at least 12 parsecs (which is a distance, and not a measure of time).
I must explain what does make it for me. It isn't the arguments, that must be made for the sake of those who find themselves caught in so much dreck and wish for something better. It isn't the numbers on this blog, that climb steadily from month to month. It isn't the laughable attempts to evicerate me elsewhere that prove my influence. It isn't racking up another blog post here, although 755 is a nice, tidy sum to have already written.
It is, to wit, the frank creation of life and events going on over there on the other blog, the campaign the players assure me is full of fun and excitement. It is the powerful sense of achievement that comes from constructing another map, or from overcoming another obstacle in the creation of algorithms for the purpose of deepening my world, or from feeling just generally that art is in itself a marvelous means of achieving self-satisfaction.
I stop every once in awhile, upon having a really good day, and realize just how happy I am.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Deactivating Characters
It may be that my particular technique of wringing emotions from a group of player characters may be disrupting to some player attempts at roleplaying ... and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
I perceive that my principle role as DM is to elicit an emotional reaction with any part of the game that might be on the table at a particular time. Things that are unknown should be concerning and even frightening. Combat should be thrilling and definitely scary as the hit points flutter away. Treasure and NPC recognition should be fruitful and promising, and should make a player's chest swell. Treason should make a player angry. Trickery should obtain disbelief ... and then more anger. Conquest should bring pride and ambition. And so on.
I like to believe I manage these emotions through the little events of the game, building them a bit here or there with a casual word at first, a few descriptive phrases, an NPC with an agenda and so on. I like to believe that these things are crafted so that whatever the adopted roleplaying 'stance' of a player's character, it will be the PLAYER who responds to the taunting, the insult or the proposition that is put on the table.
If it can be understood: as DM, I am not speaking to the characters. I can't speak to the characters. I have no idea how Boffo the Monk would respond to my manipulations ... but Boffo's puppeteer is going to hear whatever I say, and if I can get under the puppeteer's skin, Boffo will do what the puppeteer wants.
That is, even if the puppeteer thinks Boffo wouldn't.
And that is the thing. The player enters the campaign with some idea in mind of what their character will be interested in, and what their character would want, or what the character wouldn't do ... but none of that really matters. The character isn't real. The character is a mutable thing that will change its spots just as fast as the player wants. And if I dangle the right carrot in front of the player, those spots are gonna change.
I've made the point in the past (no idea where, sorry) that the characters I used to run as a player were fundamentally Me. And I know there are a lot of players out there who feel that's not what roleplaying is ... but really, when you get right down to it, when a particular NPC keeps getting in your way, and spoiling everything you try, and the only way to move forward is to say to hell with the characterization you've invented - you're going to move forward.
Hasn't always been true. I've been short-circuited. I've had players accept even death before changing. But I don't see that as a virtue of roleplaying. I see it as me failing to really get the emotional response I was going for.
Performance arts are fraught with failure. Sometimes the audience doesn't applaud. Sometimes they don't laugh. But you know you're on the right track when someone who came into the theatre certain that they'd do neither finds they can't help themselves. When they aren't 'themselves,' you know you're taking names and kicking ass.
I perceive that my principle role as DM is to elicit an emotional reaction with any part of the game that might be on the table at a particular time. Things that are unknown should be concerning and even frightening. Combat should be thrilling and definitely scary as the hit points flutter away. Treasure and NPC recognition should be fruitful and promising, and should make a player's chest swell. Treason should make a player angry. Trickery should obtain disbelief ... and then more anger. Conquest should bring pride and ambition. And so on.
I like to believe I manage these emotions through the little events of the game, building them a bit here or there with a casual word at first, a few descriptive phrases, an NPC with an agenda and so on. I like to believe that these things are crafted so that whatever the adopted roleplaying 'stance' of a player's character, it will be the PLAYER who responds to the taunting, the insult or the proposition that is put on the table.
If it can be understood: as DM, I am not speaking to the characters. I can't speak to the characters. I have no idea how Boffo the Monk would respond to my manipulations ... but Boffo's puppeteer is going to hear whatever I say, and if I can get under the puppeteer's skin, Boffo will do what the puppeteer wants.
That is, even if the puppeteer thinks Boffo wouldn't.
And that is the thing. The player enters the campaign with some idea in mind of what their character will be interested in, and what their character would want, or what the character wouldn't do ... but none of that really matters. The character isn't real. The character is a mutable thing that will change its spots just as fast as the player wants. And if I dangle the right carrot in front of the player, those spots are gonna change.
I've made the point in the past (no idea where, sorry) that the characters I used to run as a player were fundamentally Me. And I know there are a lot of players out there who feel that's not what roleplaying is ... but really, when you get right down to it, when a particular NPC keeps getting in your way, and spoiling everything you try, and the only way to move forward is to say to hell with the characterization you've invented - you're going to move forward.
Hasn't always been true. I've been short-circuited. I've had players accept even death before changing. But I don't see that as a virtue of roleplaying. I see it as me failing to really get the emotional response I was going for.
Performance arts are fraught with failure. Sometimes the audience doesn't applaud. Sometimes they don't laugh. But you know you're on the right track when someone who came into the theatre certain that they'd do neither finds they can't help themselves. When they aren't 'themselves,' you know you're taking names and kicking ass.
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