Astronomy

Given that this technology falls into the basic grouping of rifling, democracy and chemistry, I feel I must treat is as a sort of 'Mathematics II' ... in effect, the Isaac Newton edition.

The Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was first published in 1687, and was  a work of such mastery in mathematics and physics that it was understood even by those scientists of that age as a work of phenomenal importance.  It presented laws for motion and for universal gravitation, and became the foundation of all classical mechanics from that point forward.  It has been supposed that, should Newton not have published it, the entire history of science would have been pushed back by centuries.

I am not here to talk about the book.  It is way over my head, despite its having been written a dozen generations ago - and don't kid yourself, it is probably over your head also.  I understand the basic principles, the same principles most everyone understands:  that actions call for reactions, that objects display properties of inertia, that energy in a state of continuous dispersement, and that objects move in accordance with these laws as they are also effected by the mutual forces of gravitation.

The most important book you will never read.

What makes all this 'Astronomy' is the profound truth that Newton demonstrated the movements of the planets and the stars not with  a measuring device, but with the application of mathematical formulas.  He demonstrated that movement and inter-reaction between objects is not something that is comprehensibile to the senses, but that there is nevertheless truth beyond the senses.

When you find yourself in an argument with someone about how nothing in the universe can be proven to be true, beath that person to death with a copy of the Principia.  It's a pretty big book.  It will do the job nicely.

(Yes, I know that elements of the book were later proven to be false by physicists in the 20th century, notably Einstein, but we will pick that up when we discuss the technology 'Physics')

If I may go off on a tangent for a moment (ha ha) regarding the nature of truth and mathematics, once again digging into Plato's accounts of Socrates, it is time I made mention of the Pythagorean Theorum.  This is the very simple formula your grade 7 math teacher tried to beat into your head, that,

"in any right triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the area of the squares whose sides are the two legs (the two sides that meet at the right angle."

See?  Simple.


Nightmare fuel.

 What's important about this theory for this particular post is that no actual triangle in actual existence has this property.  No matter how qualified the builder, if you were to pull out a measuring device, to try to "prove" the truth of the Pythagorean theorum by physical measurement, you'd fail.  Your measuring device might convince you otherwise, but that would be a flaw in your measuring device, not the proof of a perfect 90 degree angle in stone or steel.

Nevertheless, the exactness of the formula, and the presence of perfect triangles between every particle of matter that exists, supersedes what your senses - or your measuring devices - can prove.  The Pythagorean theorum IS true ... no matter what you imagine the universe to be.  That is what is astounding about mathematics.

Newton was able to describe the movements of stars he could never see move, and predict the location of planets which were not previously conceived of, with pen and paper.  Newton did not create 'truth' ... he uncovered it.  The truth had been there all along, and if he had not done the uncovering, when the work was done by someone else, however many centuries that would have been the formulas would have been exactly the same.  And that is astounding too.

It means that no matter what extraterrestrial creatures may exist in the universe, or in what number, or with what basic biological make-up, when they construct rocket engines, they use the same Newtonian principles we do.  The exact same principles.  Think about that.

If that doesn't give you pause, you haven't really done enough thinking.

Conceiving the principles of astronomical physics prior to those principles being observed and demonstrated to have relevance is the foundation of mathematics ... and in a way, it is the foundation of magic, also.

Let us understand - magic, should such a thing exist, is a tool that exists apart from the principles of observation and your five senses.  It cannot be 'crafted' into existence; it is not an result that is achieved in the physical world.  It is a conception, and by that I mean that the truth of magic is uncovered, and not created.  A caster does not 'will' the cure light wounds into existence ... the caster circumscribes the laws of magic in a manner that enables the cure light wounds - which has been inherent in the wounded body since the body's injury - to overcome the apparent physical manifestation that has been observed.

I feel that isn't very clear, and it is full of conjecture on my part, since - obviously - I don't have the benefits of a Principia Supernatura ... which would be convenient, I must confess.  What I'm hoping to get across is this:  that although magic is not measurable, it nevertheless must function according to very specific Laws.  In turn, the comprehension of these laws is not necessarily something that comes from demonstration or training.

One can imagine spellcasters sitting in a classroom teaching them the basics of magic in a very different manner than the Hogwartzian method.  After all, when your math teacher tells you to conceive of two trains leaving Chicago and Pittsburgh on the same track, he or she does not ask you to take a flight to Chicago to watch the train leave.  No, you are taught the fundamentals of math, so that when the day comes that you need to calculate how many porn magazines you can buy with your first paycheck at McDonalds, that math is there and ready to hand.

Many of the students at Hogwartz took actual classes.

Magic ought to be seen the same way.  Once you have the fundamentals of how your brain needs to be wrapped around the intrisic properties of magic, you ought to spontaneously be able to produce magic at will.  Small stuff at first, since the big stuff requires a greater complexity in manipulating the quantifiers or qualifiers that make magic happen.  But then it is conceivable that, upon reaching third level, you've overcome the mental block that stopped you from manipulating those quantifiers, and boom, yes, without training, you now CAN cast a second level spell.  The block was never about being shown, step by step, how to cast invisibility.  Casting invisibility is not making a chair.  It is solving a quadratic equation that has stumped you for some time now.

If we accept that premise, than it follows that no matter what race casts magic, no matter what corporeal existence they have or what plane of existence they occupy, the magic will always be the same because the principle is inherent in the magic, and not the caster.

Not where you would expect Astronomy to go, right?  Fact is, 'Astronomy' as most people understand it is an observational past-time.  For Astronomers, the technology is not in the observation, but in the calculation.  Thinking along those lines, 'casting' is less a physical activity than a mental one.  To cast is to infuse the non-apparent reality into the apparent reality ... and thus retain the substance of a whole reality, one with elements which everyone can see, and with elements only the caster can see.

The weirdness of treants appearing out of thin air only seems impossible to the layman.  To the spellcaster, those treants were there all along.  The trick is to make them appear.

The Hating of Faults

It is humourous that a common argument proposed as a standard panacea in Dungeons and Dragons is equally applied as a panacea in the actual world.  This argument usually goes, to wit, that a character who has faults at a low level, will learn from experience, i.e. the gaining of levels, to overcome these faults, and will thereby cease to be harried from them.

For example, if it happens that a character has a low wisdom, it is all very understandable that the character be naive and rather simple where it comes to the matters of the world at a low level, but after the character has travelled far and wide, and after the character has defeated monsters and met kings and saved princesses, and after the character has had followers and raised castles and organized kingdoms, it just doesn't make sense for them to still be considered bound by their low wisdom.  After all, they have experience now, and experience ought to counter that particular weakness.

Bunkum, balderdash and bullshit.  Not only it the argument utterly unsound, it was an argument demonstrated to be unsound 2300 years ago, in text, by a man more brilliant than you and I, that being Plato, writing about a still more brilliant man, Socrates.

Now, look, and try to understand this.  Experience is not all its cracked up to be.  The clearly corrupt people running the countries of the world, Greece and Italy and America, have a great deal of experience, gained on battlefields and in the halls of power, and its quite clear they have a tremendous lack of any common sense at all when it comes time to defend themselves in front of a microphone.  If you will tout the great god experience, take yourself around to any retirementment home run by the state and examine for yourself the benefits of long experience.  Sit down with a wealthy man and try to talk about anything but money.  Sit down with a drug tourist who has been to Mexico and Thailand and Morocco, and see what great experience has wrought in that wisdom.  Take a glance at the tens of millions of cars upon the road, driven by people who have driven cars all their lives, and ask yourself if all that accumulated experience has caused those drivers to behave rationally or in their own interest.  Experience is NOT wisdom.

We have a tendency to delude ourselves with the belief that the repetition of any activity is in some way a means to gain knowledge about that activity.  Any repetition without reflection upon the activity, as most people want for, being unreflective souls in general, does not confer greater knowledge of that activity.  Without insight, repetition only creates an habitual nature.

As a young boy I was able to beat much older opponents at chess, despite their having played at chess for all of their long lives.  Was it luck?  Did the pieces just happen to move in my favor?  Of course not.  Did those opponents have experience?  Oh, of course yes.  But winning at chess does not depend on how long you've played, or what experience you have.  It depends upon how well you think.

If we argue that every person who has banged in the sack and raised children, or who has fought in a war, or who has achieved a difficult bit of status such as a degree, or who has achieved notariety, is necessarily an enlightened person because they have achieved experience, then why are there wars?  Why does poverty continue unabated?  Why do successful and experienced people still break the law, and why do they get caught?  Why is it that they still have faults resultant from their poor decision making?

Because obviously experience is NOT a panacea for a poor wisdom.  In fact, it must be argued that continued experience justifies the loathsome behavior of people who have achieved success despite that behavior.  Did George Bush turn over a new leaf upon becoming President, or did he carry forward the cronyism he learned in Yale and at his father's knee.  Was not his corruption and his blatant ignorance and his tendency to lie bolstered and upheld by his success?  If this is true, and experience taught George Bush to be what he is, why don't we all behave likewise?  Why do we behave in ways that George Bush would not have, since his eventual success clearly proves that he is lacking in faults and that his behaviour ought to be considered the equivalent of an 18 wisdom?

If you have a fault, and you succeed, you will NOT see that behavior as a fault.  Others will, most certainly.  But you will not.  And if your character has a fault, in the game, your character will NOT see it as a fault.  Your character will behave, no matter what level of success he or she happens to achieve, as an intrinsic part of their being.

Players do not generally understand this.  The disconnect is obvious.  The player is not the character.  The player runs the character, but this does not mean that the player is the character.  The player's goal is to obtain experience.  The character's faults are an obstacle towards obtaining that experience.  Therefore, the character's faults are something to be dearly argued against.

If those faults prove particularly difficult, so that the player's pursuit for power and glory will chafe against them constantly, the player will grow to hate those faults and will not consider them intrinsic to the character.  Ergo, the player will grasp at any straw that will discount those faults.  The player will argue that those faults should no longer apply ... for whatever reason the player can think of.

If a human being in the actual world perceives a fault in themselves, they will seek to discount that fault in any dealing they have with the world.  If they succeed in spite of their faults - those faults being greed, or a tendency to anger, or lust or pride or what have you - that person will delude themselves to believe that the fault never existed.  They will even stand up in a public place and declare the fault to be a virtue, and to argue vehemently that it MUST be a virtue, for how otherwise could this person possibly rise to a place of such prominence?

That faults often, by their very nature, contribute to the gaining of power and wealth, is naturally immaterial.

The player's desire to rid their character of faults, and the person's desire to rid themselves of faults, results from the same instinct.  We want to be a success.  We do not want to fail.  We refuse to accept our own failings.  We demand these failings be rescinded, or that we be absolved from them, because we do not like faults.  We like our talents.   If we could have characters made up entirely of talents, we would be absurdly happy.

The fact that continued survival and success does not automatically promote our talents while causing our faults to evaporate is deeply, deeply wrong.  There is no person living who does not think that we, none of us, should be entitled to become fault free before we die.  It isn't FAIR that we have to live with these faults all of our lives.

How to Work

This should sound familiar.  A moment of inspiration hits, and the idea forms that you should create something:  a new world and the gazetteer to go with it, a new set of tables, a deep and wide dungeon or a fortress full of critters and traps.  The project is exciting.  Settling into it is fun.  You're full of anticipation for the end result.

But a few days set in.  You've put in a score of hours.  You begin to see how big a project this is.  You keep at it a week or more longer, and feel good that you've made headway ... but every new feature you add seems to lead to more features, and more and more, and the whole time the thing is getting to be a drudge.  You try to keep at it but you're legitimately bored with it now.

You put it down, thinking you'll come back to it, and you never do.

I've just finished a big project, and I know this feeling very well.  Believe me, the same effect comes when you work on a novel, even when you write it as fast as Nonowrimo wants you to.  I love the beginning of a project, and I love the end of a project, but I hate the middle.  At the beginning, everything is new and interesting, and I've never tried this before and that seems really different.  At the end, I can taste the finish, and I find myself relishing the labor as I get the last details in place.

But the middle ... oh, the middle.  God, what an awful thing is the middle.

I have a couple of strategies that work for me to get me through the middle parts of a project.  Some of these might help with the boredom of working on a project that never, ever seems to end.

1)  Even a little bit of work is a good thing.

Let's start from the moment you put the project on the shelf.  The real killer, as we know, is that you don't pick it up again: in part, because it still seems immense and impossible to finish; and in part because your last memories of the project were of how boring it was.  You convince yourself that you can't finish it, and you don't want to finish it.  So there's no point in working on it at all.

... So you don't.  You leave it on the shelf, and shudder mildly every time you think about it.

It would be nice to have it finished.  Oh well.

First thing, you've got to stop thinking about the end of the project.  There's a surprising thing that can happen when you pick that project up again.  Though you think it can't be finished, once you start in on it again, ostensibly to just work for an hour or so, you'll get interested.  For a few days it will offer some of that fascination that got you started on the project in the first place.  You'll have a few new ideas, you'll implement them, and the project will progress for awhile.  Yes, you'll get bored with it again.  But if you pick it up every few months or so, and give it a couple of days each time, you'll start to see it develop.  In time, it won't seem impossible any more.

2)  Don't restart!

I cannot stress this enough.  I really, really can't stress this enough.  The true project killer is the never ending urge to think that restarting a project makes it better.  It doesn't.  It just covers the same ground you've covered already, in a different way.  It only seems better because its NEW.  But soon it won't be new, you'll tire again and you'll have accomplished nothing but a circle.

When you pick up that project again, you've got to remember how you looked at it the first time.  If you have a new idea for an old project, incorporate it.  If it can't be incorporated in the old thought process, it really isn't as good an idea as you think it is.  Good ideas are flexible.  If you have to kill all the work you've done before to make your new idea happen, you're in a condition of delusion.

That's very, very hard to believe, I know.  Would be artists dwell under this delusion all of their lives.  They never finish a book, or a symphony, or a play, because over and over again they romanticize the conception of beginning ANEW.  And that's all they ever do.  They begin.  And begin and begin and begin.

What you must do is train your memory to grasp that which excited you last month, or last year, and see why it isn't actually the junk you think it is now.  You have to trust yourself.  You were a pretty bright person last year.  You had great ideas.  Now give yourself some credit and figure out now how to make that other person's great idea work.

3)  Stagger the steps.

If its a BIG project, there will be a multiplicity of stages that can be worked upon.  For this I have to give an example.

My mapping and trading system requires a number of stages for it to come together.  To make the map, I needed the elevations for the hexes.  Once I had those elevations, I had to add them to a hex map.  There needed to be cities, and the size of the cities had to be determined, so I research the cities.  The cities then need to be added to the hexes.  After this the map can be made.  Then the roads on the map need to be drawn.  The roads on the map determine the distance between trading cities.  A map has to be made of those distances.  A spreadsheet recording the distances is created.  What the trading cities produce has to be researched.  The various things have to be organized on a spreadsheet.  A spreadsheet that fits the distances between the cities to the products produced by those cities gives a scarcity for products in each city.  That scarcity is applied to a table that determines the prices of materials and services.  Pieces of equipment are calculated according to how much material and service is required to make them.

Each stage along this journey (each sentence above) is a different project.  I don't try to research every city in the world before adding some of them to a map.  I don't try to research every product made everywhere in the world before grouping them on a spreadsheet.  I do a little of this, and then a little of that.  When I am bored with researching cities, I make some maps.  When I am bored with maps, I calculate some distances.  When I'm bored with calculating distances, I create pieces of equipment.  Then I go back to earlier stages and work on those.  Steadily, by tackling the sections of the project piecemeal, I make progress.  A little here.  A little there.  And Italy gets finished.  And India gets finished.  And so on.

4)  Have many projects going

And of course there comes a point when I am sick to death of everything to do with trade in toto.  So I go work on monsters.  And then I work on upgrading spell descriptions.  I work on character background generation spreadsheets.  And then I work on figuring out treasure distribution.  And so on.  And because I don't throw out the baby as I go back to these projects, they get a little more complicated.  They get a little deeper.  They evolve a little more.  They grow.  They get BIG.

5)  Identify things you've never worked on, and give those a try

This is perhaps the most important.  You've got to try to solve problems you've never tried to solve before.  Not because you will necessarily succeed, but because problem solving it like working a muscle.  The harder the problem, the more you get out of your failure.  The attempt will cause you to reconsider how or why other things you've thought couldn't be done, CAN be done.

Failure isn't important because you learn from failure.  Failure is important because, with repeated failures, you get used to failure and it ceases to be a threat.  "Okay, it didn't work.  Yeah, so?  Of course it didn't work, look what I was trying to do!  But now, if you think about this thing I was trying, and you apply it to this other thing ..."

You can spend all your life ripping yourself up because you failed something.  But hell, you fail enough things and failure will no longer stop you from doing anything.  You get used to it.  You adapt.  Then you overcome.

If you find yourself in a position where you're thinking, "Shit, I can't do that," you've let failure get the best of you.  It's important to come to a place in your head where you think, "Shit, I can't do that now ... give me a bit, and I'll try something else."

So try.  Try and don't backpeddle.  Don't restart.  Switch around with what you're doing, and try to see the big picture.  Do as much as you can and shrug it off when you're bored.  The time will come when you know you'll pick up that project again, when you're in the mood.

This is how things actually get finished.

Metaphysics and More Wild Magic

I am glad to say I have been writing like crazy, and have almost made it through my first week of stories.  Six stories in six days.  And two science fiction in the lot.

The other day, during the running, as I was harrying my party into insanity with five rust monsters (mine also have a mouth that does 1-10 damage), I attacked two party members with two d20s, rolled simultaneously.  They both came up natural 20s.  Much gnashing of teeth among the party, as that means both front people in the corridor were to suffer double-damage.  I picked up the dice again to see if I would roll another 20 and get triple damage, and preceeded to throw two natural 19s.  Just awesome.

As ever, the players made the standard joke about numerology, which I've pointed out in the past is NOT bogus in my world, but is an actual science ... which means that odd or unusual results, such as the two doubles I rolled, mean something.  What it means is subject for interpretation.

Since no one in my party understands numerology, I don't have to produce an explanation.  But if they had chosen to understand it, I would have to come up with something.

I know this sounds strange - is numerology a spell?  An ability?  How do you get it?

It's a house rule.  To begin with, you have to be a mage or an illusionist.  As a mage, its assumed you've read a lot of books, and you have knowledge of things that have interested you, or which happened to interest your teacher.  I let the player pick and choose what, specifically, they know about ... and if they pick 'numerology,' they know something about that subject.

As they go up levels, they get new interests, so a player can up their proto-knowledge of numerology by gaining an 'insight' and thus now 'understand' (it's a levelling thing, we all know how that works).  So that's how you start to make things difficult for me, the DM.

The gentle reader might recollect I wrote something about wild magic a year ago.  This is magic that operates outside of the principles of spellcasting, and in effect can't be 'controlled' by the user.  Wild magic ignores all limitations of time, space or energy, and can behave erratically or poignantly.  It can't be predicted, but it can be perceived ... and in the perceiving, it is in fact set into motion.

For example.  A numerologist sees the pair of 20s turn up, and sees the pair of 19s turn up, and either produces for themselves an explanation (that sounds good to me, the DM), or I produce an explanation.  In either case, a 'good' interpretation is one I'm prepared to play out in the game ... that is, it has features I can see working into the campaign as a narrative ... or even the better term, as 'exposition.'

Let's suppose the numerologist in the party jumps on the idea of a bigger pair and a smaller pair, and declares that "Two pairs of beings shall enter our lives, and they shall be the same, but different."  This sounds good to me, and I am at once rationalizing how a pair of greater cyclops and a pair of lesser cyclops managed to get themselves into a situation in northern Germany, or wherever the hell the party is.

In effect, the double die-roll 'conjures' the cyclops foursome, quod erat demonstrandum, by wild magic.  Either the player or I throw out a few words of explanation, and time and space refold so that in fact these two cyclops have been pursuing the party to get back the little tin cup the party picked off a gnome peddlar's cart twelve days ago.  The cyclops have been looking for the gnome for a month or more, because the cup has properties that make it appear non-magical in this plane, but practically an oceangoing vessel on Tartarus.  And it used to belong to their mother.

That this all took place partly in the past is irrelevant.  Wild magic pays no attention to time.  It reorders the universe the moment it makes itself evident - by dice rolls (numerology) or by pulling a tarot card, or casting rods, or reading tea leaves, or working out someone's astrological chart.  As soon as the event is noticed, the interpretation of the event recreates my world.

Now, you could argue that your characters don't know that dice are being thrown for their lives, and obviously can't see 20s or 19s.  However, from their perspective, the profound double strike by the rust monsters, and the duplicate way in which the strikes happen in 'character vision,' can only be interpreted by people down on the ground as something truly profound and unique.  "Two!" cries the numerologist.  "Two creatures, attacking the same way, having the same effect!  Cause and effect!  We shall encounter ... two sets of two, and they shall be angry!"

It's really all very simple.

A Few Character Generations

Hooray.  I 'finished' the character generation spreadsheets last night, though of course I will eventually upgrade them, deepen them and increase their complexity.  Probably I will start by creating a separate NPC-generation sheet, with additional details for levels gained ... but for the moment, I am happy and I can now go on to other projects.

In the meantime, I'll generate some characters and show off how the page looks so far:

I debated with myself at length about the legitimacy of including items such as "stoutly equipped as a man."  The beauty category also includes dropping features on characters such as pimples, a weak chin, a fragile frame and freckles (it occurs to me, I'd forgotten to add stuttering; oh well, next time).  Is it fair to force a nerd to play a roleplaying game where his character's appearance actually isn't an improvement?

Poor 28-year-old with her bald patch, her large breasts and her low forehead.   Kind of brings the 9 charisma into light, doesn't it?  But then, that +3 with a sling is a nice addition.  I should add that the age for an elf won't satisfy a lot of people.  I've said it before, but it's easier to have a planetary history when the elves don't remember personally shaking hands with Charlemagne.  Gentle readers may disagree.  Of course, any one with some time could get in back of the excel spreadsheet and change it to suit themselves (pretty easy, actually).

You may also notice there are no character details like spells or thieving abilities on these.  This is just their background, things they've learned or picked up, mistakes they've made, chance bits of luck, natural talents, their general health and so on.  This thief, you've got to love that bit under reflexes & coordination.  In actual fact, you have to have an 18 dex to even have a chance of getting this, and even then it's only one in 20.  Nice to have for a thief though, eh?  And yes, I was thinking of Big Trouble in Little China when I worked it in.

These do reflect a lot of rules I apply to my world: the 'field of knowledge,' for instance, which would be one of the fields found in the sage tables of the DM's Guide (tailored a bit for my world).  Those may not be of use to you, but you're free to take them out or ignore them.  This character, obviously, isn't going to use a bow for a weapon, but they'll probably be popular in the market place.

Last one.  Picture Woody Strode:

Looks like 18 strength to me.

I like that the player has no actual money, but does have 'credit' ... that is, can borrow up to 750 g.p. on 6-8% interest.  Obviously, the player can screw the lender and run off, but up until this time the character has always been good about paying their debts.  I should also explain about the Tendency and interests:  once the character has entered combat, there's no need to roll under wisdom to keep at it.  The roll only conveys that the character tends to be hesitant about jumping in and hacking away.  Quite a different combat behavior - obviously certain people wouldn't like it (the power character in my offline world got saddled with it for his paladin - and boy, does he hate it!)

I generated these in just a few minutes.  There's a lot of ideas for character development both for PC's and NPC's, and plenty of opportunity for ribaldry at the table too, I can assure you.  The generation of these stats has long been a much-looked-forward-to part of my world.  So nice to have it in an instantly generated-and-printable format.

What the heck, here's another fighter:

A Hard Proposal

I am feeling good today.  I have a goal towards writing a short story a day through the month of December, and my first one is conceived and written already.  The online campaign has been put on hiatus until after the Christmas holidays (I miss it already), and I am just stretching out now and thinking about stuff, not feeling any pressure.  That's a fairly unusual feeling for me.

Last night I conceived of something I would call 'The 10,000 Word Post.'  I was wondering what that might be.  Over the years I have tackled a lot of different blogging propositions.  On an old blog I used to have, I had written fifty posts in fifty days.   Then I had decided to write 50 posts in one day.  That was really something.  They're all gone now, so perhaps I should tackle that again for this blog.

What I have not done is write 10,000 words on a given subject in the space of one day.  I have some critics who tell me that a blog post ought to be short and sweet and to the point, but I question that.  How many gentle readers would like me to cut off this subject right here, right now?  If I just said, okay, I'll write 10,000 words some time, probably on D&D, would you rather I said it and stopped ... or would you rather I just kept going.

I don't know about the reader, but when I look at my favorite blogs on a given day, I'm never satisfied with just a few hundred words.  I want more.  I want to be able to sit back and read for a half hour or so.  I want the subject to be gotten into in depth and intricately.  I see enough bland programming filtered down from sources I have to read in order to have money.  When I read something for pleasure, I want lots of it.

Jeez, I love Jon Stewart.

So then, 10,000 words.  You know, I think when other people conceive of these blog post propositions, they are mostly concerned with getting other people to try them out.  Take that ridiculous A to Z proposition people tackle every year.  Hell, it's only 26 letters, and its not like you can't invent a justification for writing something about Q or X.  Not very hard.  But then, it's best for it not to be hard if your goal is to make other people do it.

I don't think about these things that way.  I wouldn't ever expect someone else to try 50 posts in a day.  I wouldn't ask anyone to produce a 10,000 word blog post.  These are things I make myself do, just to see if I can do it.

That's not 10,000 blathering words about nothing.  I wouldn't think it was that hard to write 10,000 skipping words about your family, or your childhood, or a rambling mess that jumped from topic to topic until coming to the end and announcing, "Well, by my count that's ten thousand words, thanks!"

No, I am proposing 10,000 words written in a tight format, with a beginning and an end, and a circular framework so the whole thing hangs together - and makes a point.  Hopefully, so that the whole thing is written in a manner that it can be read comfortably, pleasurably, without noticing the time or feeling exhausted.  Obviously, that can't apply to everyone.  The world is chock FULL of Herman Cain's.  Two paragraphs and they're already bleating, "Get on with it already!"

But seriously, no writer in the world writes for those kind of people.  No writer in the world ever has.  We writers have a perspective that words are a good thing, and that reading is something we grew up loving to do.  We have the patience and the time to swallow four or five pages of introduction (unlike your standard editor), and with age and experience, we gain the patience to swallow a whole lot more.  We don't need a murder to take place in the first fifty pages of Anna Karenina (Ha, two mentions in two weeks!) in order to feel its is worth reading.  It's okay that Somerset Maugham spends a hundred and fifty pages counting his money and his angst in Of Human Bondage.  We're not screaming at him "to get on with it."  There's a fundamental principle of life being outlined here, and we're aware of it.  We are, in fact, fascinated with it.  We don't want it expurgated.

Still, while Maugham had no trouble writing a hundred and fifty thousand words about a young man's struggle with happiness, the question arises:  What part of D&D is worth a ten thousand word essay?

Offhand, probably anything if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it.  Problem with that is that many of those ordinary parts of D&D - disliking or liking alignment, treasure distribution, experience gathering, encounter tables, character classes and so on - have been picked to death and most people already have calcified opinions about what is and is not true.  You're almost certain to lose your audience - even a bright, interested audience - in the first thousand words.

Upon the second hand there's the prospect of writing 10,000 words on something really new:  a combat system, or an elaborate system for carrying forth seagoing, underwater or aerial adventuring.  The essay then becomes a systematized list, each section of the post describing this, and then this, and then this.  Shipboard things, and then storms, and then combat, and then putting the ship into port, and then probably the Traveller standby of a quick trade system to manage buying and selling.  Boom, no problem, 10,000 words.

I've done as much myself.  There were six Conflict! posts that I wrote last summer, and if I cobbled them altogether they'd probably top the mark.  If not, I could rewrite them now, spend a little more time with examples and previously missed details, or details I glossed over, and bring the whole thing in at 10,000 words or more.  But somehow I think that would be cheating.  An 'orientation' post is too simple.  The work isn't in the writing, its in the game design, and if the game design isn't up to snuff, it doesn't matter how many words you hang on it.

No, for me, it's got to handle three basic principles, the same principles of philosophy:  1) what we ought to know; 2) how ought we to conduct ourselves; 3) and how ought the community to be organized.

I write a lot of posts about these things.  Some of these posts are quite probably seen as dusty and dry; some of them I know have proved to be quite popular.  I believe myself that these are the most important posts that CAN be written, for at heart I am a philosopher and when all is said and done, when the books are closed and we have settled down for a chat about the subject material, these are the questions that are fundamentally unanswerable. 

It is inherent on the net that certain subjects, more mundane subjects as it were, do not have fixed answers, and are subjects for flame wars:  "Decker was a Replicant" - "Christopher Nolan is a better director than James Cameron" - "Goodfellas should have won Best Picture" ... and so on.  These things represent a sort of philosophy.  They propose a picture of the world, namely what everyone 'ought' to know, and the proponents of this or that position being hammering away at the suppositions and core points of the argument until everyone in every part of the world is sick to death of the subject.

Obviously there are a great many who, tired of these arguments, propose that we should never have arguments of this kind, ever again.  Art teachers and Literary professors in particular, their places of work being filled with young people unleashed upon a subject with no clear definition of "good" and "bad" - and yet proporting nonetheless to raise their students to some kind of critical standard - are forced eventually to just point and say, "Shut up you nits, it's good because smarter people than you will ever be have said so."

It doesn't really solve the issue, but it brings about some much needed silence.

Because the issue cannot be solved, it is rich with possible angles at which the issue can be viewed.  It is rich enough that a single position, reflected upon and argued from all the possible angles, can yield up the necessary 10,000 words.  And it is central enough to the position of every living person of this life can relate in some way to the problems therein.  If your writer is clear enough, and imaginative enough, even the most neophyte of readers can find themselves drawn into the subject.  Remember that Descartes, Locke, Mills, Sartre and god help us even Foucault were popular writers in their day, selling many, many books to young people seeking to grasp the fundamentals of living.

Some groan and look skyward at the mention of philosophy, but we are bound to it whatever our feigned boredom with the topic.

If we will not write a post about ordinary things in the game; and we will not write an elaborate point-by-point tour of a complex element of the game; we are forced to write about the game itself.  What do you need to know?  How ought players play?  How ought a DM manage a game?  It doesn't matter that there is no fixed answer to these questions.  We want to know anyway.

Character Background Generator

This past week I have been working extensively and hard on completing my Character Background Generation spreadsheet.  This thing has been in progress for more than a year and I am within about twelve hours of completing it.  Discounting height and weight, with two features generated per character stat, features for appearance based upon both human and non-human races, and secondary skills included, I conservatively estimate 294 quintillion possible combinations.  No, that is not a mathematical error.  We are talking 2.94 x 10 to the 20th power.  No joke.

Obviously, duplicate results will come up.  If your dexterity is generally at the same level as my dexterity, there's a 1 in 100 to 400 chance that we will each get one feature that lines up for both of us.  The chance that we will get three features, or four, that gets more than a little unlikely.

A lot of people are farmers.  There's a pretty good chance both of us will be descended from farmers.  There is a very unlikely chance we will both be descended from blacksmiths.  There's about a 1 in 60,000 chance we will both have had fathers who were explorers.  And there's something like a 1 in 6,000,000 chance that we will both have fathers who were in authority over very small region, like Luxembourg or Malta.

But your chance of having a father like that is only about 1 in 6,000.  If you did, the chances are that you'd have an older brother, or that your father would still be inconveniently alive.  The chance that your father would be in authority over a fairly big region, like Sardinia or Saxony, that's a little more unlikely - like about 1 in 2,000,000.  But it's possible.

The spreadsheet as it stands reflects previous tables that I've used for years, only now it generates everything automatically, so it can be printed as soon as its created.  The generation is virtually zero time.  It can be done again and again, and it can be done for NPCs as quickly and easily as for characters.  You need description, profession, the NPC's relationship to others, family, wealth, special abilities, etcetera etcetera?  It's all here.

Bingo.  You just press a button.

Mind you, this isn't a simple slap-dash group of tables.  Granted, the excel file isn't in my gargantuan category - its only 160 KB - but there are 12 tabs covering everything from possible diseases to a men-at-arms generator.

More importantly, I intend to work on this thing probably forever.  There's really no end to the additions I could add to it, particularly if I separate the Player Character generator from a newly created NPC generator, which would A) emphasize the sorts of information you need for NPCs and B) include additional modifiers for NPCs who were above first level.  At the moment, the emphasis is on getting a player started with their new character.  But this idea could go so much farther.

As it is now, if you have any ability to operate in excel, you could make changes yourself, and easily.  And you could use me as a resource for updates (and back-ups, if you inadvertantly changed something and wrecked some programming, and didn't have a back up, I could send you the original).  Not to mention that if you had an idea, and it was a good one, you could pitch it to me and I'd incorporate it myself - I always want more ideas.

Finally, for programmers, its all excel ... so you know, and I know, that lends itself to the simplest of programming, if you wanted to take it out of the friendly program.  Just one thing - try to sell it without giving me a percentage, and I'll sue.  Other than that, maybe we could work out an arrangement and both get rich with this thing.  You may be a programmer, but believe me, I am the idea man.

And though this may be almost finished, I haven't had my last one.

This program alone, given all the crap generators you have seen over the many years you have been playing, is worth the $100 of a subscription.  And you get (drum roll) so much more.

So buy.  As the man said, I'm letting you know what you're getting.

The Authorities

I am putting more energy to other things this week, getting myself ready for a fanatical effort I fully expect to fail at ... but that's not important right now.  The online campaign is going gangbusters, and sometimes it just feels good to play, you know, rather than just talk about D&D.  After all, that is all this blog is.  Talking.  The real work is being done next door - and I'm astounded at the general lack of interest.

But anyway, something came up that inspired this post, so I thought I'd make a few clarifying statements.

The town guardsmen consists of a group of individuals whose purpose is primarily to promote and defend the interests of the general town - which means, fundamentally, to protect the money.  Nobody in a medieval town really cares if you beat up a vagrant, or a prostitute, or any other member of the town who is seen as a scourge or a parasite.  Even in the present day its hard to get cops motivated to look for a hooker's killer - that pig farmer in Vancouver is a good example.  In the medieval world, there was virtually little or no force to stop you from doing it ... so long as you didn't do it openly and in public, since there has long remained an adage that if you'll kill a hooker in a bar fight, you might kill anyone.  Best to remove you from the general populace.  But the town guard don't care about the squabbles between the poor, if no one gets hurt.  They'll stand to the side and watch, but they won't get involved unless a rich person tells them to.

The idea that the town guard investigates crime, or does anything more than stop people from committing it at the given moment, is pretty much an anachronism.  When someone commits a murder, and flees town, there's no artist's rendering being sent about to the other towns warning them of such and such a killer, with such and such a bounty on their heads.  This was a matter that rose out of an entirely different culture, one that won't arise for many years, due to the development of national governments and mutual business corporations, and the globalism that started forthwith in the early 18th century.

Of course, screw over the wrong mage and you might get recognized anywhere ... but that's not the town guard.  The town guard will watch you run over the far hill and that's the last they'll think of you.  You won't be back for revenge - the town guard don't own anything.

The town watch, on the other hand, is very like the mafia.  They really don't care who kills who, as long as their clients, being some part of the business community represented by a guild, aren't harmed.  Kill a prostitute?  No problem.  Kill a prostitute by shoving dough in her mouth in a baker's shop?  You're in big fucking trouble.

It's bad for business, isn't it?  In the meantime, the watch isn't wandering the streets 'protecting' them like the 'Angels' do ... they're making sure no one else is getting a piece of the pie.  A sneak thief breaking into a shop is taking money out of the hands of the watch as surely as the shopkeeper - and the watch isn't going to take that thief to prison.  That thief is going to get a last look from a deep hole somewhere, just before the stone is put back in place.  Permanently.

Moreover, the watch doesn't care about anyone who isn't directly connected to their clients.  You want to beat up a city council member opposed to guild privileges?  The watch will help.  But you don't see city fathers like that wandering around, not with out their -

Retinue.  These are private guards who are there just for the lord, noble or official in whose pay they reside.  Sometimes the town will pay for someone's retinue, but the town doesn't want them getting distracted and chasing pick pockets.  That's not their role.  Their role is to get Joe council member from the council to his palace of a house, without his being hassled by persons on the street.  Which means you don't have to break the law around these authorities.  You just have to be in the way.

This is all different from the reeve.  In England, the Shire reeve, or the Sheriff.  The reeve's primary purpose is to make sure that people living in the rural countryside contribute the hours and days of labor they owe to the local lord ... and in later times, they'd be called forth if you failed to pay your rent.  In order to keep the lord's manor in good stead, sometimes it was necessary to bust some heads, particularly anyone not obeying the law (that is, the noble's word of command).  The reeve would spend a lot of time in the village associate with the local castle, since that's where the people who did the largest part of the labor directly for the lord lived: the carpenters, masons, millers, brewers, bakers, candle-makers and so on.  Farmers too, but they tended not to work immediately upon the noble's residence, so if they didn't show up in the field, the reeve was less likely to notice.

On the other hand, the hayward would notice immediately.  This would later evolve into what we think of as the village warden, the person who looks after the countryside and keeps everything in order there, stopping poachers and such.  The hayward looked after the forests, yes, and did keep out poachers ... but he watched over the shepherds, the herders, the farmers who tilled the land, and any one else who worked on public lands for any period of time.  Roughly half your time as a medieval farmer was spent looking after your own land, so you could eat.  The other half, you worked for the lord, and you worked under the hayward's careful guidance.

If you're in a rural setting, then, and you commit some action against the source of labor or against the lord's holdings themselves, you would find yourself dealing either with the reeve or with the hayward.  And let me explain: they weren't nice about it.  Probably they wouldn't kill you.  It was probably enough just to hamstring you, or if not your hamstrings your ankles.

Then the pigs, or the hounds, could have you.

The whole manor, and sometimes multiple manors, were looked after by the steward.  This would typically be a hireling standing in stead for the lord, when the lord was not present ... and he would be judge and executioner all at once.  The reeve and the hayward, when they had their doubts about you, would bring you before the steward, and he'd decide your fate.  Sometimes the steward was the head of his own retinue, which for the manor represented a sort of local police force - sometimes, and sometimes not, separate from the reeve or the hayward's personal helpers (try to imagine a bunch of sadistic young men).  The steward's men would get interested in anyone who seemed to take a little too much interest in the lord's affairs - really, that was all you needed to do.  Ask too many questions.

That should provide a general idea of what kind of 'police' your facing.  It's good to remember that the primary way to avoid arrest is to placate the authorities.  It doesn't have as much to do with breaking the law as you might think.

Rifling

I'm afraid this post isn't going to be very good.  It's difficult to relate rifling to D&D, for while the development had great consequences upon the future of warfare after the technology was implemented en masse, I'm afraid the lack of the technology wasn't something that people went around noticing or writing psychological treatises about.  It would have been nice to have something written by Kepler or Torricelli about what a darn pain it was - a socially relevant pain, that is - that the guns on the battlefield didn't fire straight, but alas if it's out there it's in either German or Italian, and no one has quoted it yet in the shot of my ears.

So the lack of rifling and its influence on D&D is somewhat obvious.  There was no rifling and D&D more or less exists without guns that fire straight.

We can't call it quits there, unfortunately.  This is the sort of problem that's going to come up again and again as the technologies become more and more advanced.  We're dedicated towards writing them right through to the end, so we'll just have to get proficient and digging out the pertinent details and do the best we can.

It must be said that, more or less, D&D exists without guns.  Most persons are happy to run campaigns that take place in a sort of ethereal historical situation, in which there are no guns, or various other chemical technologies ... though of course there's experimentation and social development and extremely heavy armor of the kind that wasn't developed until the 15th century: a sort of potpourri of selected technological developments.  There's nothing wrong with this, of course.  My pedantic nature feels the need to point out that this potpourri is mostly the result of poor scholarship and a lot of misunderstandings about historical developments of weapons and social interaction, but I'm not saying you can't consider the ignorance a blessing and just enjoy the fact that so many disparate elements of human history are tumbled together into the D&D fantasy system.

I'm not demonizing the ignorance.  I'm just saying, it's there.

Willy nilly, I think we all keep and toss out the elements of things that most suit our peculiar natures.  The D&D world, by necessity, has in it a thousand discontinuities even before you get to the historical dissonance - what with magic, monsters, actual gods and so on, we're not talking about any sort of realistic portrayal of anything.  I mean shit, how do I argue my 17th century world is anything like Earth when more than half of Russia is occupied by goblins, orcs and hobgoblins, with an existing Greek and Hindu pantheon of gods fighting it out on planes of existence drawn completely from my own imagination and mixed in with the endless hodgepodge of mythological beasts and places?  I can't.  D&D is not real.  It's important - like any dramatic invention - that it FEELS real, but we're obviously not saying that it is.

So when the question of rifling comes up, and any of a number of other alien-to-D&D technologies, like plastics and satellites and fusion, we're certainly NOT saying you can't toss them into the pot and stir them around to suit your needs.  Hell, who says there can't be a race of intelligent warthogs with opposable thumbs from the Plane of Excrete whose attempt to enslave the prime material plane for their shit production isn't aided by muskets with rifling?  Could be.  What is the party to do, as they face these dangerous hogs with swords and magic?  The best they can, that's what.

Thus the onus is upon me to talk about the difference between firearms without rifling and firearms with, and the possible social consequences that could be installed in your world to make things more interesting.

What I have along those lines is this:

Prior to the development of rifling, there was only a certain amount you could do to ensure you were killing your enemy with gunfire.  You lined your men up, you got as close to the enemy as you dared (30 yards or so, which is still a great deal farther away than you needed for swords), kept your men as calm as you could and got them to fire as often as possible.  It was understood by some commanders early on that having all your men fire at the same time produced a terrific shock effect upon the enemy, which tended to scare the enemy away, thus winning the battle without having to keep firing endlessly into each other without results ... which did happen.

The ball in a musket, even in skilled hands, would bounce against the interior of the barrel and could come out in virtually any direction - which meant that your line had to be pretty straight if you didn't want to kill your own men in the back at close range.  And because the time it took to reload could be as much as 30 or 40 seconds, it was possible for the enemy to simply drop their guns (this is before bayonets) and rush at you, particularly if the ground was level.  You will remember from high school that you used to run the hundred yard dash in about 14 to 16 seconds (or a bit less), so you know that it doesn't take an eon to cover 30 yards, even if that distance is covered with thick vegetation and the occasional fallen body.

Thus it was necessary to have men whose purpose was to stand with pikes and keep you at bay while the musketeers loaded as fast as they could.  This was aided by the flintlock musket, which increased the distance between armies to slightly less than a hundred yards - giving you MORE time to load, which was much more important than aiming.  Armies had learned by the 1590s, when the flintlock came into general usage, that you needed your men to form ranks, where the men at the back were loading like crazy and the front men firing ... then running to the rear.  This enabled a murderous rate of fire that did much to end the rush-across-the-battlefield tactic - though generals refused to believe that for the next 350 years.

By the time of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Dutch gunners had broken down the principles of loading a musket into 45 separate actions, which if followed perfectly and in the right order could enable a trained man to load his gun up to 40% faster than untrained men.  This was the principle reason Gustavus ripped through Germany in the Thirty Years War - more men firing, less time loading, meant he had more effective men on the combat field than his enemy at any one time, since less of them were standing around doing nothing.

Still, without rifling, the weapons themselves were tremendously unreliable.  More shots meant greater effectiveness, but aiming was not something you could rely upon.  Greater 'skill' with a weapon meant you could load it quickly.  It did not mean you could necessarily hit the enemy you were aiming at.  Of course, if you loaded faster, you got more chances to hit him.

Rifling made the difference.  By causing the bullet to spin as it left the barrel, you gave the missile stability, and stability meant a well trained could hit with his weapon as well as load.  And this produced a marked change in how you trained your soldiers.

In the 17th century, you trained them to load quickly and produce as much fire as possible.  They had to be calm so they could concentrate on loading ... if you misloaded a weapon, it would blow up in your face and give you trouble.  Alternately, if you got the steps in the wrong order, you clumsily had to go back and get them right, which meant fouling up the whole rank standing behind you, as they waited for you to get your shit together.

By the 19th century, the calmness still needed to be there - but not because it took a long time to load.  Breechloading had come into being, and you could ready your weapon in very little time.  However, standing on the battlefield and hitting your opponent well and true could mean forcing yourself to be calm and aim while bullets whizzed around you.

In any mass battle - the American Civil War, for instance - most of the combatants were largely untrained, and unable to take full advantage of the remarkable weapon the rifle had become.  But a well-seasoned, trained troop of men who could stand calmly facing you without firing while they aimed - while you blasted the air as fast as you could - would cut you down like wheat.  Again and again the elite British troops proved this tactic.

This calmness had a peculiar effect upon the society, perpetrated by men who had experienced war fought in this fashion.  They did not 'bat an eye' at many a hard question or need that might arise.  They did not view hesitation as a virtue.  They did not view the habit of questioning every decision, or pining for lost opportunities, or self-doubt, as virtues.  These are not virtues on the battlefield.  They were not seen as virtues in ordinary life.

If you wonder why or how men could be as callous as they were in bygone eras, consider that this was a callousness that was acquired during explosions, with friends and enemies torn apart by bullets, in holocausts of fire and blood.

Compare this, if you will, to what it must have been like to hold a sword, and not a pistol, and stand three feet from a fellow with an axe, and nowhere to run between you.  Consider how hard this must have made these men who survived these ordeals ... and how matter-of-factly they took the matter of burning witches in towns, or incarcerating villains, or mass executions of blasphemers.  Apply the calm exterior of the British rifleman with the calm exterior of the Viking raider, and ask yourself why they should for a moment feel anything for the woman and her child who are split open by the held axe.  And then ask, if you should have lived in this time, according to these principles, amid others who had adopted the same behavior as yourself, how hard you would bring the battle against warthogs who wanted your shit.

Pretty hard, I think.

The Habits of Children

Last night, I searched vainly for my copy of Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz, intending to read it for the first time in what must be 20 years, just so I'd be quicker on the draw when someone asks me to spontaneously to compare Dorothy with Luke Skywalker ... and realized I'd have to buy a new copy, since I've clearly given my old copy away to someone.  I tend to do that with books.

And then perdustin took a big poke at me this morning on his blog, and pushed me into having to say something on the subject right here and now, for which I really wasn't prepared.  I launched into a comment that wasn't very nice (when am I?) and was pleased and astounded to get back a lucid, rational reply.  I have new respect for perdustin; I shall have to quit riding the guy.

But I did intend to buy a copy of The Wizard of Oz today.  I'm not reading much of any importance right now anyway, just literary commentary on the 20th century novel.  Reading Baum's work again would be a better use of my time.

I don't know how many of the people who read this blog and find my opinion somewhat calcified understand that my opinion is changing all the time.  I don't mean it's flopping around like Mitt Romney campaign schedule, I mean that I am acquiring new information on a constant basis, which is then being applied to old information I have previously acquired, in order to form new opinions.  They do not simply spawn from nothing.

Someone in the comments field - unpublished - called me a solipsist the other day ... which is a convenient non-argument to make whenever you don't have an actual argument.  You can call any liberal artist, anytime, under most conditions, a solipsist.  All rational arguments, by their very nature, "sound" rational.  You can't argue that what someone says must be solipsism because it sounds rational.  You must ALSO prove why it isn't.

I see a lot of the first kind of argument - the name calling, "you must be wrong because you must be" argument, but lord I dearly love the actual intellectual cut down.  Tedankhamen had a brilliant point to make yesterday in the comments section.  He really made his point solidly.  Unfortunately for the naysayers, however, that point wasn't contradicting me.

Sorry, I'm waffling a bit here ... I'm getting around to pointing out that in the midst of the comments and the general discussion, I made a kind of connection with why this whole hero thing is such a tender subject with regards to the gentle readers.  I 'clued in,' as it were.

Following up on a comment of my own, I had said: "... one of the things about becoming an adult, and therefore a learned person, is the realization that the heroes you were taught about when you were a little child was just a lot of bullshit."

And some five minutes after I wrote that, I realized myself that a lot of players of this game want to be the bullshit heroes of their childhood stories, because they're desperate to relive their childhoods.  This is like a revelation for me.  You see, it isn't an attitude I share.  I don't consider the times I was a child to be the best of times.  I don't consider literature for children to be the height of literature.  I mean, The Wizard of Oz is a great book, it's clearly genius, but it isn't Anna-fucking-Karenina.  It doesn't touch the fascination I have for Thucydides' History of the Pelopponesian War.  It just doesn't measure up to the really heavy, brilliant stuff, sorry.  And while I suppose playing on the level of The Wizard of Oz might be fun and all, it's kind of simple-simon compared to playing on the level of Dafoe's Moll Flanders.

Because you see, being an adult and having money and the power to remake my world how I wish is about a billion times more satisfying than playing tag in my parent's backyard.  Oh, sure, tag was fun, it was a riot and all, but the reason I don't play tag now is because - well - it just doesn't measure up.  It isn't that I'm old and jaded and too tired to play tag.  It isn't that I'm so sour inside that I can't remember what it was like to be bright-eyed like a child.  It's because the real satisfying things of the great big world kind of kicked the ordinary playtimes of childhood right out on their motherfucking asses.

Playtime, and the hero-worship of playtime, isn't complicated enough for me.  It isn't living up to the hype.  The real challenge is a world where the only heroes are deluded, fucked-up people who don't know they're not heroes - just like Cervantes' Don Quixote.  That was, after all, the point of the book:  that to be a hero, you have to be so fucking far out to lunch that you think windmills are dragons, and you think peasants are princesses.  Like Quixote, this will make you famous far and wide, but you'll never be famous for what you think you're famous for - which won't matter, since you have the brain of a sponge.

But sorry, for me windmills are windmills, and how much more amazing is a windmill than a dragon, anyway?  Have you ever built a windmill?  Do you have a tenth of a conception of just how mindbogglingly terrific they are?  Probably not.  Too busy pretending they're dragons, I suppose.

So I will be forever at odds with many of my readers in my perception of D&D, because I see it as a game that enables adults to be adults, and others see it as a game that enables adults to be children.

Which, I suppose, explains why so many people are ashamed to speak of playing the game in public, or why so many people who have watched players play are a little ashamed to find themselves at tables with squabbling children.  Perhaps the game shouldn't become all that popular ... we have enough infantile habits around as it is.

Oh well.  Here's a Gahan Wilson cartoon:

Oh Yeah, You're A Hero

Perhaps when you come down to it, the matter is a question of how you define a 'Hero.'   If we are to take the ancient Greek word, heros, there's plenty to justify player character actions as fitting that definition.  The Greek heroes were petty, infantile, selfish, greedy, intransigent, boastful, inconstant, arrogant, squabbling and utterly lacking in loyalty or a sense of duty.  So yes, if we must go back far enough, I'm willing to concede that your characters are 'heroes.'

This was not the ideal presented to me in my youth, through the eyes of children's authors, fairy tales and Hollywood films and TV.  Without question, a lot of those depictions, say of El Cid or King Arthur and His Knights, were dead wrong.  When you read Le Morte d'Arthur, you find out what a randy bunch of humping lords were the sitters at the Round Table, and any honest account of history will tell you El Cid was a mercenary bastard without much sense of mercy or compassion.  But still, when I talk of 'heroes' and get responses, I don't hear the gentle readers advancing arguments like, "You don't know what you're talking about - heroes are self-serving money-grubbing pricks, and that's what our character's are!"

No, it sounds to me as though the argument is that the characters ARE what the fanciful 20th century painted up for children's viewing - the noble King Arthur and the loyal Robin Hood.  Or if the reader prefers, the courageous Dorothy, the inquisitive but ever-considerate Alice, and the constant Wendy.  Creatures without a single sin, without even the temptation of sin, struggling against villains and foes far beyond their ken, but certainly conveniently dispatched of once a good pail of water comes to hand.

Naturally, there can be no real discussion of 'heroes' without a point or two made about 'anti-heroes,' who are all the rage of Hollywood in the here and now.  I'm not talking about the other Alice, who today fights Zombies constructed by the Umbrella Corporation ... selflessly, I might add, but then her lack of any need for comfort might be explained by her genetic enhancement.  No, I mean any character played by Jason Statham, or a variety of cookie-cutter actors just like him, who are allowed to butcher and kill and slaughter and maim, as long as they don't keep any of the money they grab afterwards.  Anti-hero and ordinary hero rules are the same: you DON'T get rich doing this.

Let me qualify that.  Ol' Jimmy Bond doesn't take his cut from the barrels of money he gathers as he executes his enemies.  He doesn't go out and buy a lot of shit to ramp up his killing potential.  He's given gadgets by the powers that be that enhance his natural proclivities, but he doesn't BUY them.  Alice the construct finds a shot gun or a blade and such, but she doesn't have ye olde Wallymart to buy stuff from ... if she doesn't have it, she doesn't NEED it.

What I'm saying is that if your conception of a hero is someone who slaughters orcs, then brings back the cash to upgrade your character, you're NOT a hero.  You're a selfish dick who enjoys killing in order to subsidize your material lifestyle.

Those orcs stole that money from someone, and now you're stealing that money from the orcs.  But it is STOLEN money.  You're a thief ... unless you hand that money over to the local village, and that means all of it, every last fucking copper piece.  You don't need money.  You're a fucking hero.

Oh, and for the most part you don't need toys, either.  All Quixote needed was a few pieces of junk he thought was armor.  He had heart.  He had his faith.  That was all HE needed to go into combat, and if you're an honest-to-god hero too, you don't need all this crappy junk slowing you down.  Armor is for people worried about their own lives, and you're not.  God will look after your life, and he'll take you when he's ready.  In the meantime you need to be as fast on your feet as possible if you're going to grab that maiden before the jaws close.  If you're moving half-speed because you're in plate, you're not a fucking hero.

People have very interesting - and inaccurate - ideas of what makes 'selflessness' actually selfless.  But this kind of delusion is pretty standard.  The other day I caught the end of Platoon, which is just the sort of anti-hero non-hero delusion that runs rife through our culture.  The movie, right down to the final scene, is just whine-whine-whine about the suffering struggles of American soldiers, supposedly the good against the bad, as ALL of them invade a foreign country for trying to govern itself.  Oh, sure, we can feel awful and sorry for the poor innocent Vietnamese, but fuck those guilty Vietnamese, defending their country and all, what a bunch of assholes, don't they see I'm trying to win an Oscar here?

Sorry.  If you enter into an orc lair, and kill orcs because they're orcs, and take their money to buy armor so the next orcs you kill find it harder to hit you, you're not a fucking hero.

Though no doubt you THINK you are.  Villains always do.

Subscriptions Are What They Are

People are telling me that the reason my subscribers are not appearing is because I'm not doing enough hard selling.


Selling is not my favorite thing. Urging people to buy against their will, or coming up with reasons for them to buy against their will, has always seemed sleazy and underhanded. It would be like hitting the little 'Adsense' button on the blog ... even though I'm getting constant messages now that I could be earning money with the present traffic here.

However, I will acquiesce to my friends who want to see me do well. Here is a list of the new material I sent out to subscribers this month:

A Character Generation table
Population Demographics for the D&D professions, along with typical inhabitants
The publisher file for my Conflict Cards
Updates on maps and other previous files.
Vegetation and political versions for some maps.
The Publisher file for the Stable conflict on my Campaign blog.
The Publisher file showing how I made the shadows on my combat simulation last Spring.
A spellbook calculator
A thieving skills calculator
A character skills calculator

As I said, my subscribers are happy.

Join them. It's only a hundred dollars. You've spent a hundred dollars on really stupid things before.