Most people in roleplaying get their start through modules and generated content for good reason. Just now, there isn't any other way to start. The module format is so pervasive that finding a world that does not use some sort of pregenerated content is vitually impossible - and new DMs follow in the ways of the DMs they've had the chance to play under.
it's interesting that, having noted the above, the greatest mass of prefabricated ware for RPG's is oldware. Five years, ten years ... even thirty-plus years old, still used in whatever rehashed form the DM must. The Keep on the Borderland first came to my attention when I was in high school, which was a very long time ago, I can assure you. It gets instant recognition in the Community. It couldn't get more accolades heaped upon it if it were written by Dickens.
Forty years of prefab oldware creates one hell of a populist sentiment, to use Beedo's words. The "populism" accumulates as pressure on new DMs to fall in with the established format: begin by running a module, and someday you'll get good enough as a DM that you'll be ready to ... adapt modules for future runnings.
What else can an established DM tell a neophyte? World creation and sandbox gaming is not something you fall out of bed at 15 and just start doing ... well, it isn't something most players start doing. Particularly since most of them will never SEE it being done. Most will have their first experiences with a DM firmly clutching prefab oldware in hand, reading from (or having memorized) the text, extolling the virtues of what a GREAT module this is, and probably the GREATNESS of the store from which is was purchased, and perhaps the GREATNESS of the designers. Young players are quite easily impressed with such things. Young players take such pronouncements as proof of fact when later on they 'graduate' from Player to DM, getting their own copies of the oldware and waving it under the noses of noobies like they themselves used to be "... and the spirit of time is transferred across the universe to a new defender, and the power of evil is contained for another generation ... and a new Tarakian is born to protect the next."
Or some such justification.
As such, the new players never have any reason to question the books as they are handed down from on high. I'd guess that a considerable number of those defending the prefab method do so from a perspective of one part of logic mixed with twelve to fourteen parts of teenage nostalgia. THEY played "First Quest" with their very first adventure ever, and cue the teardrops staining their cheeks and cue the quivering lips as they remember that shining moment that enlightened their formerly dreary lives. "Don't take our memories away!" screams the subtext, followed by an insistence that they can buy whatever they want because this is a free country.
It is free. And in this free country people contribute all kinds of mediocrity to the general malaise that permeates the dull, mouldering tapestry that universal expression provides. I don't buck the trend. There's little point in trying to teach a pig how to waltz. You get nowhere and it annoys the hell out of the pig. All I want to be able to do is stand next to the couple dozen people (if there are that many on the internet) while I point and say, "look at that fucking bunch of pigs over there." I don't expect any of them to learn anything.
I was lucky. MY first experience with the game when the prefab crap was just coming into existence, and I played my first five years of this game with people who had tried (successfully or unsuccessfully) to run their own campaigns. MY first experience with D&D was with someone who had made his world from scratch, who eschewed modules, and who spat on corporatism ... until he reached middle age, that is, and ultimately did very well as the vice-president of West Coast distribution of Magic, the Gathering. At least, that's what he told me he was doing when I last saw him, which was sometime in the age before the common Internet ... and he could have been lying out his ass. I can't find the guy's name associated with the game anywhere on the net now.
I digress.
I didn't play a module in any game until I did so in a Traveller campaign ("Prison Planet") a fellow was running, and it took me about an hour to find a loophole that ended with me strafing the planet in a stolen navy ship screaming into the com-link, "I'M A MODEL PRISONER!" It was kind of fun. It was mostly fun making the ref of that game look like a bleeding idiot, which we did quite a lot. Poor Irwin. He never could take anyone's advice where it came to running prefab shit or his own.
Again, I digress.
I suppose that not finding modules very interesting to play in (when they were obvious railroads or death traps), or rather easy to get on the other side of (when they were loose and role-play oriented), did eventually combine with a changing universe in the 1980s when more and more new players in the game rushed out to the store to buy their drugs before sitting down with a piece of paper and a brain. True, many of those people would have run a much worse campaign than they could buy prefab; but buying prefab guaranteed they'd never run anything better.
Thinking about the nostalgia of youth and a person's first prefab experience, and the nostalgia that entails, let me point out that a long, long time ago I sucked on a tit once, too. I won't argue that I don't have a certain nostalgia for the owner of that tit. Still, I'm not much interested in sucking my mamma's tit now.
That whole weaning off phase - the one that takes some folks way too many years, when you start seeing your mother as a person and not the facilitator of all your dreams, can take awhile. It's often loaded with moments of embarrassment, and failure, and dispair. The world is mighty unforgiving of everyone's inadequacies, and it sure is easier to rush back home to that tit when things get hard (heh heh).
Mamma WOTC understands. Mamma kiss it better. Mamma'll get out that big ol' tit and give babykins what he needs. And don't forget, babykins ... Mamma knows best.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
D.I.Y.
While JB on his blog wallows about trying to nail down the Building of a Better D&D (I don't think he's got it, myself), I'd like to address an ignored comment from this post here, from scadgrad:
"Not only does the resultant fallacy completely ignore the role of the DM (as JB points out), but more importantly it IGNORES the crunch/tweaking outside of actual game time that occupies much of the modern day player's experience as they "customize" their perfect build."
The emphasis is my own. And this needs emphasis. This one phrase says more about the commercialism of the last 40 years than does ten million words written about editions and skills and attacks of opportunity. If we are going to stick a post in the ground and identify WHERE D&D WENT WRONG, the post should be firmly hammered into the middle of scadgrad's observation.
On a typical week I run about five to seven hours of D&D, depending on how focused my groups are - this includes the online campaign, and does not include time spent during a running chatting about things that are not D&D, bathroom breaks and time half the crew spends outside having a smoke. Seven hours of PURE D&D running a week, that's about as good as it gets.
On an a-typical week, over Christmas, through the time in summer I usually take off as the parties scatter on vacation, I get in NO running time whatsoever. But D&D does not stop, oh no! D&D, for me, never stops.
That's because I work on D&D between 20 and 60 hours a week, every week, summer and winter, diligently, consistently, and with great relish. I can testify that my party players work on their characters during these off times as well - not nearly as much as I do, but upon rewrites, construction designs, artwork and so on they probably each put in between 2 and 10 hours a month.
But as scadgrad says ... does anyone in the industry give a shit?
No, they don't. They don't because they adopted a business model that made sense to them: "People should be able to sit down, anytime, anywhere, and without any pre-planning whatsoever, be able to run a game on the spot. We will make that possible!"
Prepackaging. Prefabrication. Conformity. A great landscape of uniform, bland preformed cookie-cutter adventures, with all the latitude that corporate consciences and imaginations can provide: to the extent that the market itself has become dogmatic in their thinking, ruled by factions laid down by editions and public relations hype.
We have products. We have everything we need to sit down as READ off pages to our players, defining their fun for the evening, defining our slotted, factory purposed roles in the great corporate game plan. Anyone can be a DM! Anyone can play! Play anywhere! Play anytime! Play! Play! Play!
But most of all, Buy, Buy, Buy.
Where are the tools that lets the amateur make his own world? "Fuck boy, we don't sell tools, we sell GAMES. Buy this one and be a vampire! Buy this one and be a superhero! Buy this one and be a Lovecraftian God! Don't waste time making your own world. We have thousands of worlds on our shelves. Rush on down and pick up the one that FITS YOU PERSONALLY!
Oh, I know there are many who do buy, and who swear by these products, and who dance around pitching their glories to other people. But I can't help thinking at the core of my being, every time I read or hear about anyone buying anything prepackaged for "their" world (if it can be called that): what a poor, deluded cripple; what a shame they still haven't learned how to do it themselves.
Not fair, I know. So not fair. So self-righteous. So pretentious. Who am I to say a person shouldn't buy an "imaginitive, marvelous product?"
I'll tell you: I'm a DM who does it himself.
See, I just haven't seen this imaginitive product yet. That's really the crux of it. I hear tell over and over about these wonderful products that the manufacturers create ... and then I go down to my local game store, this massive two story building that's been selling roleplaying games for literally 35 years, where there ARE thousands of games on the shelves, where the books can be opened and read and looked over at will, where the staff doesn't harrass you if you hang around for hours and hours (seriously!) ... and in all the hours I have spent there, over all the years that I've spent there, I still have yet to find one product that isn't in truth a piece of glorified shit.
Honest. I open up these books and start reading down their lists of skills or their outlines for what this fantasy world tries to be about, and all I see is cheap, crass, crummy, hackneyed, cliche regurgitated garbage written in high school English. All the art I see is high-school binder art. I know I'm supposed to see so much more than this, but I guess its just that I'm comparing these written words to the words written by all the world's writers, and not those who write in roleplaying games. I guess its because I'm comparing the art to the art produced by all the world's artists, and not just the artists of roleplaying games. I guess I just can't compress my measuring tools into this small a space. I guess its that I don't find myself limited by what OTHER people think D&D ought to be.
Because you see, my experience as a DM isn't based on how players reacted to the Tomb of Horrors when I ran it. Or how they reacted to Third Edition when we switched. Or what my players think about Paizo or White Wolf or S/W. My experience as a DM is based upon how my players reacted to MY world. MINE. Do you understand? When something went wrong, I didn't put my booties on and rush down to the store to buy something better! I sat at my computer at my table and I fixed it. Me. I did the fucking work. And I learned how to do the fucking work, because I didn't farm it out. I didn't lean on a crutch. I didn't spend my time looking for a tit to suck. I worked. I designed, and then I redesigned, and then I redesigned again. I did it and did it and did it MYSELF, all by myself, and now I've gotten so fucking good at it that everything the manufacturers print looks like incomprehensible shit to me.
See, all these cripples buying all this shit? I don't think they know a damn thing. I don't think they've ever HAD to know a damn thing. They've been on the tit too long. And I think that all of us who have for the last forty years been doing it ourselves KNOW this. And I think that yes, it does make us feel superior.
But only because we are.
"Not only does the resultant fallacy completely ignore the role of the DM (as JB points out), but more importantly it IGNORES the crunch/tweaking outside of actual game time that occupies much of the modern day player's experience as they "customize" their perfect build."
The emphasis is my own. And this needs emphasis. This one phrase says more about the commercialism of the last 40 years than does ten million words written about editions and skills and attacks of opportunity. If we are going to stick a post in the ground and identify WHERE D&D WENT WRONG, the post should be firmly hammered into the middle of scadgrad's observation.
On a typical week I run about five to seven hours of D&D, depending on how focused my groups are - this includes the online campaign, and does not include time spent during a running chatting about things that are not D&D, bathroom breaks and time half the crew spends outside having a smoke. Seven hours of PURE D&D running a week, that's about as good as it gets.
On an a-typical week, over Christmas, through the time in summer I usually take off as the parties scatter on vacation, I get in NO running time whatsoever. But D&D does not stop, oh no! D&D, for me, never stops.
That's because I work on D&D between 20 and 60 hours a week, every week, summer and winter, diligently, consistently, and with great relish. I can testify that my party players work on their characters during these off times as well - not nearly as much as I do, but upon rewrites, construction designs, artwork and so on they probably each put in between 2 and 10 hours a month.
But as scadgrad says ... does anyone in the industry give a shit?
No, they don't. They don't because they adopted a business model that made sense to them: "People should be able to sit down, anytime, anywhere, and without any pre-planning whatsoever, be able to run a game on the spot. We will make that possible!"
Prepackaging. Prefabrication. Conformity. A great landscape of uniform, bland preformed cookie-cutter adventures, with all the latitude that corporate consciences and imaginations can provide: to the extent that the market itself has become dogmatic in their thinking, ruled by factions laid down by editions and public relations hype.
We have products. We have everything we need to sit down as READ off pages to our players, defining their fun for the evening, defining our slotted, factory purposed roles in the great corporate game plan. Anyone can be a DM! Anyone can play! Play anywhere! Play anytime! Play! Play! Play!
But most of all, Buy, Buy, Buy.
Where are the tools that lets the amateur make his own world? "Fuck boy, we don't sell tools, we sell GAMES. Buy this one and be a vampire! Buy this one and be a superhero! Buy this one and be a Lovecraftian God! Don't waste time making your own world. We have thousands of worlds on our shelves. Rush on down and pick up the one that FITS YOU PERSONALLY!
Oh, I know there are many who do buy, and who swear by these products, and who dance around pitching their glories to other people. But I can't help thinking at the core of my being, every time I read or hear about anyone buying anything prepackaged for "their" world (if it can be called that): what a poor, deluded cripple; what a shame they still haven't learned how to do it themselves.
Not fair, I know. So not fair. So self-righteous. So pretentious. Who am I to say a person shouldn't buy an "imaginitive, marvelous product?"
I'll tell you: I'm a DM who does it himself.
See, I just haven't seen this imaginitive product yet. That's really the crux of it. I hear tell over and over about these wonderful products that the manufacturers create ... and then I go down to my local game store, this massive two story building that's been selling roleplaying games for literally 35 years, where there ARE thousands of games on the shelves, where the books can be opened and read and looked over at will, where the staff doesn't harrass you if you hang around for hours and hours (seriously!) ... and in all the hours I have spent there, over all the years that I've spent there, I still have yet to find one product that isn't in truth a piece of glorified shit.
Honest. I open up these books and start reading down their lists of skills or their outlines for what this fantasy world tries to be about, and all I see is cheap, crass, crummy, hackneyed, cliche regurgitated garbage written in high school English. All the art I see is high-school binder art. I know I'm supposed to see so much more than this, but I guess its just that I'm comparing these written words to the words written by all the world's writers, and not those who write in roleplaying games. I guess its because I'm comparing the art to the art produced by all the world's artists, and not just the artists of roleplaying games. I guess I just can't compress my measuring tools into this small a space. I guess its that I don't find myself limited by what OTHER people think D&D ought to be.
Because you see, my experience as a DM isn't based on how players reacted to the Tomb of Horrors when I ran it. Or how they reacted to Third Edition when we switched. Or what my players think about Paizo or White Wolf or S/W. My experience as a DM is based upon how my players reacted to MY world. MINE. Do you understand? When something went wrong, I didn't put my booties on and rush down to the store to buy something better! I sat at my computer at my table and I fixed it. Me. I did the fucking work. And I learned how to do the fucking work, because I didn't farm it out. I didn't lean on a crutch. I didn't spend my time looking for a tit to suck. I worked. I designed, and then I redesigned, and then I redesigned again. I did it and did it and did it MYSELF, all by myself, and now I've gotten so fucking good at it that everything the manufacturers print looks like incomprehensible shit to me.
See, all these cripples buying all this shit? I don't think they know a damn thing. I don't think they've ever HAD to know a damn thing. They've been on the tit too long. And I think that all of us who have for the last forty years been doing it ourselves KNOW this. And I think that yes, it does make us feel superior.
But only because we are.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Latitude
From the 10,000 word post:
"A preferred setting will be that which allows as much latitude for your players as is reasonably possible."
Latitudo is a Latin word, meaning extent, width or size, and came into popular usage in the late 14th century in description of the "breadth" of the known world. So when I say that the game requires "latitude," I mean that it requires living space.
I do not mean merely that the boundary of your world must be a hard distance to walk in a lifetime - though that doesn't hurt. I mean also that your world needs facets within it that make living possible. Most of these facets exist within the original books of the game, though they are for the most part expressed very simply. Your world needs to contain places within it that are of great convenience to the players; places which they can come to recognize, and which fit together logically so that the players can adapt themselves. It helps to think of the world as a set of player 'rights' ... things the player is entitled to expect upon joining your world.
Players have a right to resupply. This requires a town, and probably lots of towns, full of food, weapons, tools & equipment, healing centres, informational bureaus, men-at-arms ... and most of all, 'friendlies.' The player needs to be able to settle in a place which has a relative degree of consistency, and someone there the player can tell his or her troubles to. A sympathetic ear. A helping hand. Someone who can buy their stolen junk and who can encourage them to go out and get more junk. When you are setting up your towns, think about what it is like to live in a place where people get to know you and trust you. Don't just imagine a lot of surly, unhappy NPC's ... stuff into your town a few people who are able to like the party, and hail them as they return. A party should be made to feel welcome once in awhile.
Players have a right to security. If you want a good, long-term game, you can't harangue your players night and day like a boot sargeant, kicking them out of every bed they try to sleep in or assassinating them at every opportunity. If you want moments of danger to have effectiveness, you have to mix them up with moments of safety. This is not to say that every place will always be safe, all the time ... but give a party a break. Let them crawl HOME, let them lick their wounds, and let them sort themselves out and gather their shit again. Letting a party breath will aid them in a sense of purpose, and will encourage them to 'get through this bad time' with a sincere, real goal in mind. If they truly feel they have a home, then getting back there will mean something. Don't take that away from a party.
Players have a right to danger. Having made the point above, now I must make this point also. The players have the right to seek danger and to find it, if they're so inclined. Said danger ought to include in it a measured increase, such that it takes several deliberate steps on the player's part to get his or herself into a real pickle. This is what's patently wrong with the touch-a-wall-and-die concept of D&D. It has the effect of making a player little more than a zero or a one on the DM's ledger. There's no GRAY area ... and worse, there's no "You got yourself into this, you damn fool, now get yourself out." By letting a party see the danger coming, and letting them choose to meet that danger, you shift the responsibility of having that danger kill the party from your shoulders onto the party's shoulders. This is incredibly important for a good game. I cannot stress this enough. If a party is going to have any latitude of play, it has to incorporate a responsibility for their actions - and the possibility of redressing that possibility!
You see, the touch-a-wall-and-die scenario does indeed retain some sort of responsibility. Not a very meaningful one: the whole "You touched a wall? What kind of idiot are you?" moral stream of thinking is somewhat lacking in real drama. But the damning part is that there is no repentance. If the player never touched the wall, there's no knowledge of successfully averting a 'stupid' action (and it's hardly practical for a player to avoid touching every wall in the universe); if the player successfully saves, then the die made the difference, NOT the player; and if the player dies, what has the player learned: To not touch walls. This is a very dumb lesson. It certainly wouldn't cut much ice with Aesop.
Danger must be a step-by-step process by which the player hazards his life by moving forward into something that simultaneously looks both 'dangerous' and 'manageable.' That is the knife edge that sells the play. (1) Indiana Jones opens the door and starts down the passage; it is, after all, just a passage. (2) The floor is crunchy, so he lights a taper - and sees there's about a million bugs; but they're just ordinary bugs, and they're not biting him, so he keeps going. (3) He finds a secret door, but it's just an empty room, so there's no reason not to go in ...
And so on.
Players have a right to reward. There a lot of DMs who fail to grasp this. They've read a word or two from Grandfather Gygax and they insist that sometimes monsters ought not to have treasure. And I agree with that. But I didn't say 'treasure,' I said 'reward.' If the players kill a dangerous giant wolverine whose been terrorizing the local people, of course the wolverine has no treasure. It's a dumb animal. It might have a hide worth selling, but probably not after its been hacked with swords - and 'wolverine' fur, while warm, isn't known for its luxury.
However ... the PEOPLE are going to be happy about it, aren't they? And while they may not have a lot of coin, they are going to overflow with good will. That promises a place of safety, and it promises notariety, and it promises other opportunities at danger and greater reward. It is a fool of a DM who thinks the only recompense to a party's action is treasure. Fame, loyalty and, best of all, good will are extravagant rewards. Don't discount them when you consider the party's ledger.
Let me add this: if you can't figure out how to make a party's feat translate into a reward of this kind, you're not doing your job. Someone should find out what's been done, and that someone should be believed. NPC's are not just cut-outs for your towns - they're the best part of your world.
In Conclusion,
As you are constructing your world on paper, keep these four things in mind.
Draw out places of resupply: towns, villages, hamlets, ordinary houses, an army post, a manor house with its attendant peasants, mining camps, outposts or a crossroads inn. Supplement this with travelling peddlers, caravans, an ordinary adventurer ready to trade - anything that lets the party have an opportunity to better their situation in between dangers. No matter how deep the wilderness, or how off the beaten track they are, there's some logical way of letting them get at least enough to stay alive. It doesn't mean you have to have an omnipresent mega-mall Box Store following the players around on four legs, but it does mean you'll have to be a little clever when they're out of food, out of weapons, out of healing salve and out of pocket. This is YOUR responsibility, O DM. Figure out something that will let them keep going.
Set down places where bad shit doesn't happen, and let the players find them. Defensible caves or uninhabited (possibly weakly inhabited) deserted fortifications where the party can hole up for a few days; a farmer's community not being hourly attacked by beasts of every kind; a town where the party can get a meal in a tavern that doesn't include bullies, pickpockets, aggressive bartenders or knife-wielding bar wenches (is there any other kind?). Sometimes, you know, a bar is just a bar. Sometimes, the wench who sleeps with the Ranger doesn't have VD, and isn't shilling for her assassin boyfriend. Sometimes, just sometimes, a gesture of help really is a gesture of help. People can be considerate, warm, giving, generous and legitimately friendly. Taverns can actually want a stranger's money, and will actually return ale just for the purposes of business. Not every interaction has to include an ulterior motive.
Set out places of danger, and make them reasonably evident, and reasonably avoidable. Yes, of course occasionally you'll want to ambush a party, but warn the party first that bandits do tend to inhabit those roads. Let the party get itself in deeper ... they'll want to! You won't have to dangle much of a carrot in front of their nose. You will, on the other hand, have to make these places of danger seem practical, convenient, and sufficiently lucrative to the party's sense of success. There's no point in making them seem (on the surface) unimaginably dangerous, or indecently hard to get to. Moreover, they shouldn't waste the party's time ... when they reach the danger, let them experience the danger. Don't baffle them or hold them up with empty, purposeless rooms. Carry the party to the matter at hand without unnecessary delay.
And finally, as I say. Make it worth their while after the fact. Reward them.
With a little practice, you'll start seeing how to design your world on the ground to let them take the best advantage of these things. Your world will only get better from there.
"A preferred setting will be that which allows as much latitude for your players as is reasonably possible."
Latitudo is a Latin word, meaning extent, width or size, and came into popular usage in the late 14th century in description of the "breadth" of the known world. So when I say that the game requires "latitude," I mean that it requires living space.
I do not mean merely that the boundary of your world must be a hard distance to walk in a lifetime - though that doesn't hurt. I mean also that your world needs facets within it that make living possible. Most of these facets exist within the original books of the game, though they are for the most part expressed very simply. Your world needs to contain places within it that are of great convenience to the players; places which they can come to recognize, and which fit together logically so that the players can adapt themselves. It helps to think of the world as a set of player 'rights' ... things the player is entitled to expect upon joining your world.
Players have a right to resupply. This requires a town, and probably lots of towns, full of food, weapons, tools & equipment, healing centres, informational bureaus, men-at-arms ... and most of all, 'friendlies.' The player needs to be able to settle in a place which has a relative degree of consistency, and someone there the player can tell his or her troubles to. A sympathetic ear. A helping hand. Someone who can buy their stolen junk and who can encourage them to go out and get more junk. When you are setting up your towns, think about what it is like to live in a place where people get to know you and trust you. Don't just imagine a lot of surly, unhappy NPC's ... stuff into your town a few people who are able to like the party, and hail them as they return. A party should be made to feel welcome once in awhile.
Players have a right to security. If you want a good, long-term game, you can't harangue your players night and day like a boot sargeant, kicking them out of every bed they try to sleep in or assassinating them at every opportunity. If you want moments of danger to have effectiveness, you have to mix them up with moments of safety. This is not to say that every place will always be safe, all the time ... but give a party a break. Let them crawl HOME, let them lick their wounds, and let them sort themselves out and gather their shit again. Letting a party breath will aid them in a sense of purpose, and will encourage them to 'get through this bad time' with a sincere, real goal in mind. If they truly feel they have a home, then getting back there will mean something. Don't take that away from a party.
Players have a right to danger. Having made the point above, now I must make this point also. The players have the right to seek danger and to find it, if they're so inclined. Said danger ought to include in it a measured increase, such that it takes several deliberate steps on the player's part to get his or herself into a real pickle. This is what's patently wrong with the touch-a-wall-and-die concept of D&D. It has the effect of making a player little more than a zero or a one on the DM's ledger. There's no GRAY area ... and worse, there's no "You got yourself into this, you damn fool, now get yourself out." By letting a party see the danger coming, and letting them choose to meet that danger, you shift the responsibility of having that danger kill the party from your shoulders onto the party's shoulders. This is incredibly important for a good game. I cannot stress this enough. If a party is going to have any latitude of play, it has to incorporate a responsibility for their actions - and the possibility of redressing that possibility!
You see, the touch-a-wall-and-die scenario does indeed retain some sort of responsibility. Not a very meaningful one: the whole "You touched a wall? What kind of idiot are you?" moral stream of thinking is somewhat lacking in real drama. But the damning part is that there is no repentance. If the player never touched the wall, there's no knowledge of successfully averting a 'stupid' action (and it's hardly practical for a player to avoid touching every wall in the universe); if the player successfully saves, then the die made the difference, NOT the player; and if the player dies, what has the player learned: To not touch walls. This is a very dumb lesson. It certainly wouldn't cut much ice with Aesop.
Danger must be a step-by-step process by which the player hazards his life by moving forward into something that simultaneously looks both 'dangerous' and 'manageable.' That is the knife edge that sells the play. (1) Indiana Jones opens the door and starts down the passage; it is, after all, just a passage. (2) The floor is crunchy, so he lights a taper - and sees there's about a million bugs; but they're just ordinary bugs, and they're not biting him, so he keeps going. (3) He finds a secret door, but it's just an empty room, so there's no reason not to go in ...
And so on.
Players have a right to reward. There a lot of DMs who fail to grasp this. They've read a word or two from Grandfather Gygax and they insist that sometimes monsters ought not to have treasure. And I agree with that. But I didn't say 'treasure,' I said 'reward.' If the players kill a dangerous giant wolverine whose been terrorizing the local people, of course the wolverine has no treasure. It's a dumb animal. It might have a hide worth selling, but probably not after its been hacked with swords - and 'wolverine' fur, while warm, isn't known for its luxury.
However ... the PEOPLE are going to be happy about it, aren't they? And while they may not have a lot of coin, they are going to overflow with good will. That promises a place of safety, and it promises notariety, and it promises other opportunities at danger and greater reward. It is a fool of a DM who thinks the only recompense to a party's action is treasure. Fame, loyalty and, best of all, good will are extravagant rewards. Don't discount them when you consider the party's ledger.
Let me add this: if you can't figure out how to make a party's feat translate into a reward of this kind, you're not doing your job. Someone should find out what's been done, and that someone should be believed. NPC's are not just cut-outs for your towns - they're the best part of your world.
In Conclusion,
As you are constructing your world on paper, keep these four things in mind.
Draw out places of resupply: towns, villages, hamlets, ordinary houses, an army post, a manor house with its attendant peasants, mining camps, outposts or a crossroads inn. Supplement this with travelling peddlers, caravans, an ordinary adventurer ready to trade - anything that lets the party have an opportunity to better their situation in between dangers. No matter how deep the wilderness, or how off the beaten track they are, there's some logical way of letting them get at least enough to stay alive. It doesn't mean you have to have an omnipresent mega-mall Box Store following the players around on four legs, but it does mean you'll have to be a little clever when they're out of food, out of weapons, out of healing salve and out of pocket. This is YOUR responsibility, O DM. Figure out something that will let them keep going.
Set down places where bad shit doesn't happen, and let the players find them. Defensible caves or uninhabited (possibly weakly inhabited) deserted fortifications where the party can hole up for a few days; a farmer's community not being hourly attacked by beasts of every kind; a town where the party can get a meal in a tavern that doesn't include bullies, pickpockets, aggressive bartenders or knife-wielding bar wenches (is there any other kind?). Sometimes, you know, a bar is just a bar. Sometimes, the wench who sleeps with the Ranger doesn't have VD, and isn't shilling for her assassin boyfriend. Sometimes, just sometimes, a gesture of help really is a gesture of help. People can be considerate, warm, giving, generous and legitimately friendly. Taverns can actually want a stranger's money, and will actually return ale just for the purposes of business. Not every interaction has to include an ulterior motive.
Set out places of danger, and make them reasonably evident, and reasonably avoidable. Yes, of course occasionally you'll want to ambush a party, but warn the party first that bandits do tend to inhabit those roads. Let the party get itself in deeper ... they'll want to! You won't have to dangle much of a carrot in front of their nose. You will, on the other hand, have to make these places of danger seem practical, convenient, and sufficiently lucrative to the party's sense of success. There's no point in making them seem (on the surface) unimaginably dangerous, or indecently hard to get to. Moreover, they shouldn't waste the party's time ... when they reach the danger, let them experience the danger. Don't baffle them or hold them up with empty, purposeless rooms. Carry the party to the matter at hand without unnecessary delay.
And finally, as I say. Make it worth their while after the fact. Reward them.
With a little practice, you'll start seeing how to design your world on the ground to let them take the best advantage of these things. Your world will only get better from there.
Monday, February 6, 2012
D&D and My Father
I thought the cathedral might get a few more comments, but I suppose it is what it is, and there's very little to say about it. Myself, I continue to be astounded by just how large it is, in relation to a human being. I'd love to have an all out free-for-all battle take place there, with hundreds of persons fighting simultanously in a dozen rooms ... but that's just me.
I found myself thinking about how such things can easily be seen as 'wasting my time.' I remember my father, just about the time I graduated High School, having with me that talk fathers have about their sons going to university, and particularly mentioning how I would come to see, "As you get older" in his words, that D&D was a useless waste of time ... and that naturally I would learn to focus my attention on important things. It's a little bit funny. I am right now just about the age my father was when he gave me that chat - so I can fairly argue that I have all the benefits of his perspective when he denounced D&D as time-wasting. I have to say, my father was somewhat deluded.
Now, this isn't just a thrown out phrase about not liking my father. I mean exactly that word: deluded. There have been a couple of times that I've mentioned my father on this blog - I don't see much mention of fathers or mothers around the community, so that's rare. Just now I'm feeling a bit nostalgic, so if the gentle reader has the time, let me tell you a bit about him (and some of this might repeat stuff from elsewhere).
He grew up among farmers and he was descended from farmers, but he was not one. His divorced mother, who died when I was 12, was a one-room schoolhouse teacher who moved about from small town to small town in the 1930's and 40's. Some of these 'small towns' had less than 100 people in those days, places like Barrhead and Dixon and Markerville, for anyone who might happen to know mid-country Alberta. His mother was a no-nonsense, sharp-nosed woman, as they used to say, who was both intolerant of ignorance and extremely bright. I got to know her in my teens from the notes she wrote copiously in the textbooks that were bequeathed to my father, which sat upon shelves unread except by yours truly. Funny how you can get to know people after they're dead.
She drove my father with a stick towards an education, and it worked. He eventually left Alberta for the United States, being unable to get a 'worthwhile' Engineering degree here in the 1950s, and attended the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. For those of you who may not know, this was and is a prestigious school in the field of Engineering. My father experienced all the classic parts of pre-hippie university life - fraternities, pranks, girls, ballrooms, boarding houses and ultimately finding and meeting my mother ... but that's another story.
My father graduated with honors from the School of Mines, and thereupon was set upon the path of "important things." But let me back up a bit.
In the meantime, and between time, of going to university, my father worked a variety of occupations that helped set his mind in the path of responsibility. Two occupations in particular - the first was that of a roughneck, meaning that he built and took part in running oil derricks during his summers in Alberta. This is back when derricks were still made of wood, and were insanely dangerous places, much more so than now. The other job my father took, one particular summer, was fighting forest fires in the Rocky Mountain country.
So you see, my father was no pansy.
When he stepped out of university, he was offered a job with the Gulf Oil Company, which used to be a big, big player. It's long gone now. My father worked for Gulf for 42 years, right up to his retirement. He was offered management positions, but he turned them all down. The only thing he ever wanted to be was an engineer ... and that's what he was, and is ... though now the only engineering he does is a pet project he works on to keep his mind active. He's shown it to me, explained it all in detail (the technical stuff way over my head, naturally) ... and it has no real application. His words, not mine.
Now all this ought to sound quite impressive. My father has a wall full of plaques and awards and notations and so on, all testament to the achievements he's managed throughout a lifetime. Probably his biggest contribution to the oil industry was a little project that was dropped on his desk in 1974 ... a little thing called "enhanced recovery." This was an idea some geniuses thought of, suggesting you could pump water or gas or even oil into a field where the pressure had dropped off, and make that field productive again. You see, as you pump from an oil field, you rely on the pressure of the earth on that field to push the liquid up the pipe ... steadily, that pressure drops off, and you wind up with a lot of unrecoverable oil beneath the ground that can't be obtained. However, by pumping gas into the field, that pressure climbs, the oil resumes flowing out and you increase the field's production by some percentage points. Believe me, worldwide, a few percentage points is a LOT of oil.
No one believed in this in the 1970's, and the other engineers in my father's department called it "enchanted recovery." Back then, he and one other fellow consisted of the entire research team on the idea.
Now, of course, the idea has since revolutionized the industry.
But I will tell you something: I very much doubt my father had anything to do with that. Not because he didn't make his small contribution, but because I understand how business works now. These things carry the stamp of inevitability. There were probably hundreds of people working on it in 1975, and probably thousands by 1977. And as that number increases, the contribution by any one person means less and less - particularly when you consider that if my father hadn't made whatever contribution he made, someone would have made it.
That sounds harsh, I know. Its a fact of business and even science that we rarely want to accept as reality. We all want to believe that we're important. Otherwise, we are just wasting our time. But of course, my father wasn't wasting his time. He was paid well for the time he spent.
What's funny about this whole game of "important things" and "time wasting" is where my father is now. He's turning 76 in about a month, and he really is in a strange place, for him. See, he has a massive amount of intellect, and absolutely nowhere to spend it. He works on this project of his, but he does it in a state of such isolation that its impossible to see it as anything different than just "wasting his time."
Oh, now, don't jump on me. It's his time to waste, and he's entitled to that. I'd be the first person to argue it. I'd like to see my father put his work on the internet, and write a blog about it, but he won't do that because, well, he won't. If you have a father past 70, you know how that is. I only question the whole "important things" argument he made himself 29 years ago, to me. You see, time is tricky. The whole world simply moved on and right over my father's so-called "life of importance," the same way it is moving over my life and your life. In our 40s we make our lives out to be so DAMNED important ... but in reality we're all just sitting at our jobs and making the wheels turn in order for the pay we get. The same way anyone else who happened to have our job would do. Do you remember my father's wall of accolades? It sounds very impressive, but I've been in other engineers' studies in other engineers' homes - and guess what. If you keep at any job you're going to accumulate those same plaques and statues. And when you are 76, you can do your best to look at them proudly ... but to do that you'll have to forget that the people who gave those to you are gone from the "important" world themselves, and no one remembers anything about anything you ever did. The works you wrote and the time you spent, that all just goes away. This is true even if you're Shakespeare, and you were alive four centuries ago. Steadily, patiently, less and less people remember who you were, until no one does.
What amuses me about all of this is how my father believed when he was 47 that there was only one path, one accepted route to "important things" ... when in fact, nothing is really important when you gain any perspective on it. Or, at least, no single individual is. People talk about what a horror it would have been had there never been a Shakespeare, and I only think that if that were true, we'd all be getting together this evening to see a good Ben Johnson play, or maybe Christopher Marlowe. Or perhaps some fellow named Karl Schwartz would have astounded the world in the 1630s by putting together an incredible collection of really brilliant works. They might even have been better - who can say?
But of course that's nothing compared to the tens of thousands of would-be Schwartzes who actually produced crap beyond anyone's capacity to remember ... and no one wants to be forgotten like Karl Schwartz was forgotten. We all want to feel "important." And when we see our children marching down a disastrous road, obsessing over something we don't understand (as my father with his background couldn't possibly), and which we are CERTAIN is a phenomenal waste of time, we sit our children down and explain to them that they need to get their head out of this wasting of their time and into something that we do understand. We do this with only the best of intentions.
But you see, my father was deluded. He was brainwashed by the schoolmarm and the university and the frathouse and the oil company into thinking that "important" meant making contributing to a particular industry and making money at it ... but he wasn't prepared for the world he lives in now. He doesn't really understand what's going on, or why the younger people around him are behaving as they are behaving. This isn't unusual, of course, for someone his age ... but it always seems strange to me. Someone as smart as he is ought to be able to figure this out - but his life never gave him the tools.
Such as understanding why I might not "grow out of" D&D. Turns out, for me, D&D was not as unimportant as it was to him. Yes, it will never make money for me the way engineering made money for him ... but I think that what I've lacked in money I've made up for in companionship, and fun, and comprehension about the world. I am nothing like my father. I don't expect to be 76 and uncomprehending. So far, I haven't really had a lot of surprises about what it would be like to be 47. I honestly didn't think I'd live this long, and that's probably the strangest thing. But I think I can, with an open mind, get a good grasp on 76 before I get there.
We'll see, of course.
I found myself thinking about how such things can easily be seen as 'wasting my time.' I remember my father, just about the time I graduated High School, having with me that talk fathers have about their sons going to university, and particularly mentioning how I would come to see, "As you get older" in his words, that D&D was a useless waste of time ... and that naturally I would learn to focus my attention on important things. It's a little bit funny. I am right now just about the age my father was when he gave me that chat - so I can fairly argue that I have all the benefits of his perspective when he denounced D&D as time-wasting. I have to say, my father was somewhat deluded.
Now, this isn't just a thrown out phrase about not liking my father. I mean exactly that word: deluded. There have been a couple of times that I've mentioned my father on this blog - I don't see much mention of fathers or mothers around the community, so that's rare. Just now I'm feeling a bit nostalgic, so if the gentle reader has the time, let me tell you a bit about him (and some of this might repeat stuff from elsewhere).
He grew up among farmers and he was descended from farmers, but he was not one. His divorced mother, who died when I was 12, was a one-room schoolhouse teacher who moved about from small town to small town in the 1930's and 40's. Some of these 'small towns' had less than 100 people in those days, places like Barrhead and Dixon and Markerville, for anyone who might happen to know mid-country Alberta. His mother was a no-nonsense, sharp-nosed woman, as they used to say, who was both intolerant of ignorance and extremely bright. I got to know her in my teens from the notes she wrote copiously in the textbooks that were bequeathed to my father, which sat upon shelves unread except by yours truly. Funny how you can get to know people after they're dead.
She drove my father with a stick towards an education, and it worked. He eventually left Alberta for the United States, being unable to get a 'worthwhile' Engineering degree here in the 1950s, and attended the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. For those of you who may not know, this was and is a prestigious school in the field of Engineering. My father experienced all the classic parts of pre-hippie university life - fraternities, pranks, girls, ballrooms, boarding houses and ultimately finding and meeting my mother ... but that's another story.
My father graduated with honors from the School of Mines, and thereupon was set upon the path of "important things." But let me back up a bit.
In the meantime, and between time, of going to university, my father worked a variety of occupations that helped set his mind in the path of responsibility. Two occupations in particular - the first was that of a roughneck, meaning that he built and took part in running oil derricks during his summers in Alberta. This is back when derricks were still made of wood, and were insanely dangerous places, much more so than now. The other job my father took, one particular summer, was fighting forest fires in the Rocky Mountain country.
So you see, my father was no pansy.
When he stepped out of university, he was offered a job with the Gulf Oil Company, which used to be a big, big player. It's long gone now. My father worked for Gulf for 42 years, right up to his retirement. He was offered management positions, but he turned them all down. The only thing he ever wanted to be was an engineer ... and that's what he was, and is ... though now the only engineering he does is a pet project he works on to keep his mind active. He's shown it to me, explained it all in detail (the technical stuff way over my head, naturally) ... and it has no real application. His words, not mine.
Now all this ought to sound quite impressive. My father has a wall full of plaques and awards and notations and so on, all testament to the achievements he's managed throughout a lifetime. Probably his biggest contribution to the oil industry was a little project that was dropped on his desk in 1974 ... a little thing called "enhanced recovery." This was an idea some geniuses thought of, suggesting you could pump water or gas or even oil into a field where the pressure had dropped off, and make that field productive again. You see, as you pump from an oil field, you rely on the pressure of the earth on that field to push the liquid up the pipe ... steadily, that pressure drops off, and you wind up with a lot of unrecoverable oil beneath the ground that can't be obtained. However, by pumping gas into the field, that pressure climbs, the oil resumes flowing out and you increase the field's production by some percentage points. Believe me, worldwide, a few percentage points is a LOT of oil.
No one believed in this in the 1970's, and the other engineers in my father's department called it "enchanted recovery." Back then, he and one other fellow consisted of the entire research team on the idea.
Now, of course, the idea has since revolutionized the industry.
But I will tell you something: I very much doubt my father had anything to do with that. Not because he didn't make his small contribution, but because I understand how business works now. These things carry the stamp of inevitability. There were probably hundreds of people working on it in 1975, and probably thousands by 1977. And as that number increases, the contribution by any one person means less and less - particularly when you consider that if my father hadn't made whatever contribution he made, someone would have made it.
That sounds harsh, I know. Its a fact of business and even science that we rarely want to accept as reality. We all want to believe that we're important. Otherwise, we are just wasting our time. But of course, my father wasn't wasting his time. He was paid well for the time he spent.
What's funny about this whole game of "important things" and "time wasting" is where my father is now. He's turning 76 in about a month, and he really is in a strange place, for him. See, he has a massive amount of intellect, and absolutely nowhere to spend it. He works on this project of his, but he does it in a state of such isolation that its impossible to see it as anything different than just "wasting his time."
Oh, now, don't jump on me. It's his time to waste, and he's entitled to that. I'd be the first person to argue it. I'd like to see my father put his work on the internet, and write a blog about it, but he won't do that because, well, he won't. If you have a father past 70, you know how that is. I only question the whole "important things" argument he made himself 29 years ago, to me. You see, time is tricky. The whole world simply moved on and right over my father's so-called "life of importance," the same way it is moving over my life and your life. In our 40s we make our lives out to be so DAMNED important ... but in reality we're all just sitting at our jobs and making the wheels turn in order for the pay we get. The same way anyone else who happened to have our job would do. Do you remember my father's wall of accolades? It sounds very impressive, but I've been in other engineers' studies in other engineers' homes - and guess what. If you keep at any job you're going to accumulate those same plaques and statues. And when you are 76, you can do your best to look at them proudly ... but to do that you'll have to forget that the people who gave those to you are gone from the "important" world themselves, and no one remembers anything about anything you ever did. The works you wrote and the time you spent, that all just goes away. This is true even if you're Shakespeare, and you were alive four centuries ago. Steadily, patiently, less and less people remember who you were, until no one does.
What amuses me about all of this is how my father believed when he was 47 that there was only one path, one accepted route to "important things" ... when in fact, nothing is really important when you gain any perspective on it. Or, at least, no single individual is. People talk about what a horror it would have been had there never been a Shakespeare, and I only think that if that were true, we'd all be getting together this evening to see a good Ben Johnson play, or maybe Christopher Marlowe. Or perhaps some fellow named Karl Schwartz would have astounded the world in the 1630s by putting together an incredible collection of really brilliant works. They might even have been better - who can say?
But of course that's nothing compared to the tens of thousands of would-be Schwartzes who actually produced crap beyond anyone's capacity to remember ... and no one wants to be forgotten like Karl Schwartz was forgotten. We all want to feel "important." And when we see our children marching down a disastrous road, obsessing over something we don't understand (as my father with his background couldn't possibly), and which we are CERTAIN is a phenomenal waste of time, we sit our children down and explain to them that they need to get their head out of this wasting of their time and into something that we do understand. We do this with only the best of intentions.
But you see, my father was deluded. He was brainwashed by the schoolmarm and the university and the frathouse and the oil company into thinking that "important" meant making contributing to a particular industry and making money at it ... but he wasn't prepared for the world he lives in now. He doesn't really understand what's going on, or why the younger people around him are behaving as they are behaving. This isn't unusual, of course, for someone his age ... but it always seems strange to me. Someone as smart as he is ought to be able to figure this out - but his life never gave him the tools.
Such as understanding why I might not "grow out of" D&D. Turns out, for me, D&D was not as unimportant as it was to him. Yes, it will never make money for me the way engineering made money for him ... but I think that what I've lacked in money I've made up for in companionship, and fun, and comprehension about the world. I am nothing like my father. I don't expect to be 76 and uncomprehending. So far, I haven't really had a lot of surprises about what it would be like to be 47. I honestly didn't think I'd live this long, and that's probably the strangest thing. But I think I can, with an open mind, get a good grasp on 76 before I get there.
We'll see, of course.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
A Cathedral as Dungeon
Just for fun, I've been putting together this map of the actual Sankt Paulus Cathedral in Munster, Westphalia, Germany. The image above has it superimposed over a hex map, the hexes having a 5' foot diameter. Sadly, because the Cathedral was bombed during World War II, I had to consider that changes that were made since 1650 (my world's existence) as accepted for the campaign's use. I've also made a few other changes to make it more 'game-worthy.'
For perspective, you can find a tiny dot to the left of the Altar Isle in the right center of the Nave. This is the size of an actual person.
Grey lines are stairs. Yellow blocks indicate windows emplaced into the stone. Two thin lines indicate doors. The central blue space amid the cemetery is a pond. Green spaces are outdoors.
Incidentally, this is the church used for this part of the online campaign.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Enough Fetish - Let's Play Instead
From the 10,000 word post, in reference to choosing a setting for a D&D campaign:
"No one appears for a football game in order to watch the field. The field is lacking as an entertainment medium. It's sole purpose is as a measuring device to determine who wins and who loses."
This, I felt, deserved a few words of its own.
Very often, in fetishizing a setting such as we read in books or see captured in a film, we tend to attribute a greater importance to that setting than it really deserves. This is the meaning of a 'fetish' - to take an ordinary object and embue it with supernatural power, such as a cross or a book. This supernatural fetish takes hold of a culture and continues to manifest itself in ridiculous traditions, such as having a President swear to be a good President with his hand resting on a Bible - as though the swearing itself means nothing if it is not supernaturally 'enforced' by the Bible's presence.
Consider a setting familiar to most gentle readers: Middle Earth.
Here we have a host of so-called 'well-known' places ... the Shire, Fanghorn, Mirkwood, the Lonely Mountain, Gondor and so on. We've read the books and watched the movies and we perceive we have a definite idea of what these places are like.
But remember that Rohan does not look like "Rohan," not really. Remember that what it looks like is New Zealand.
Fact is, as a setting rich with interesting places to see for D&D, it's actually pretty crappy. If you don't believe me, get out your copy of The Hobbit and then copy out everything the book says about the Misty Mountains. Don't embellish, just write out the actual descriptive words from the book. Good. Now how long did that take you? A couple of weeks? A day or two? Did it take as much as an hour?
The reality is, there's almost nothing, really. Tolkein knew he didn't have to extensively describe the mountains, because he was writing a book, and not an RPG setting. He knew his reader would fill in the greater details from the reader's familiarity with mountains in Norway, or Switzerland, or Poland, or America ... or New Zealand. That's why encyclopedias of Tolkein like this one are loaded with oblique references of what King Durin VI or Azog or Balin did that happened in the area of the Misty Mountains, but virtually not a thing about the mountains themselves. The mountains ARE mountains. There's nothing really special about them.
But is it different for an RPG? I'll tell you truly, no. I run the real world, and my setting does take advantage of a cultural reflection in people's minds of the Alps or the Urals or the Andes ... but most people have not spent great gobs of time in those places, and even if they have - we're still talking mountains here. I have lived most of my life in and around the Rocky Mountains, and though I've camped overnight hundreds of times around them, and tramped up and down their slopes in summer and winter, I can't make the mountains themselves interesting or exciting for very long, not to people sitting around a kitchen table.
The mountains aren't important. Middle Earth isn't important. If you think that by running Middle Earth you will be running a setting that is amazingly more interesting than a setting of your own cobbled-together imagination, you will be amazingly disappointed. We are talking about a big, empty map, with less words written about what's actually there than you'll find in the smallest pocket travel guide, and in the whole it won't matter. What will interest your party isn't the magic word "Rohan," but instead the seventeen orcs standing fifty feet away.
Settings are deathly dull, in case you didn't know. This is why a dungeon that presents empty room after empty room makes for a dismal night of running - even if the last room found is full of creatures and treasure. What you really want is a setting where EVERY room is full of some kind of creature, and some kind of treasure (informational, if not pecuniary), because living things that threaten or cooperate are only about ten thousand times more interesting than four walls with a door.
Advice like this will not stop would-be DMs from scratching out walls and doors, one juxtaposed with the next, ad nauseam, as though the shape of a hall or a room somehow in itself creates excitement and drama. In roleplaying this truly is a fetish - otherwise, how can you explain representations of a campaign environment like this:
Nevermind that a culture that would devise something like this would soon murder one another over arguments of who had to get up and walk half a mile to fetch the water for dinner, the actual contribution this set-up offers for dramatic momentum in a campaign is sincerely suspect. I know, oh I do know, that DMs swear vehemently by such maps. No fetishist in the world patiently carving stone into the shape of a woobie doll compares with a 17-year-old DM composing a map for a serious long-term dungeon crawl. But is this necessary? Are all the doors and the turnings and the choosings of lefts over rights and rights over lefts really conducive, or is it just habit? Wouldn't it be better if the party could get straight to the matter of fighting and bargaining and chasing and fleeing from the creatures themselves, who were spaced apart by simple straight passages that did not require 90 minutes of navigation? Or is it that the boring bits are a way for DMs to mock players who'd rather be going up levels than going down staircases?
Or as my offline party likes to say, "You have now gotten through the maze that allows you to reach the next maze."
So streamline your world. Make it less about your world and more about the people in it. A conversation with a wall is very, very boring. A conversation with seventeen orcs, MUCH more interesting.
"No one appears for a football game in order to watch the field. The field is lacking as an entertainment medium. It's sole purpose is as a measuring device to determine who wins and who loses."
This, I felt, deserved a few words of its own.
Very often, in fetishizing a setting such as we read in books or see captured in a film, we tend to attribute a greater importance to that setting than it really deserves. This is the meaning of a 'fetish' - to take an ordinary object and embue it with supernatural power, such as a cross or a book. This supernatural fetish takes hold of a culture and continues to manifest itself in ridiculous traditions, such as having a President swear to be a good President with his hand resting on a Bible - as though the swearing itself means nothing if it is not supernaturally 'enforced' by the Bible's presence.
Consider a setting familiar to most gentle readers: Middle Earth.
 |
| Some Americans can indicate the location of Rohan on a map more easily than they can Romania. |
But remember that Rohan does not look like "Rohan," not really. Remember that what it looks like is New Zealand.
Fact is, as a setting rich with interesting places to see for D&D, it's actually pretty crappy. If you don't believe me, get out your copy of The Hobbit and then copy out everything the book says about the Misty Mountains. Don't embellish, just write out the actual descriptive words from the book. Good. Now how long did that take you? A couple of weeks? A day or two? Did it take as much as an hour?
The reality is, there's almost nothing, really. Tolkein knew he didn't have to extensively describe the mountains, because he was writing a book, and not an RPG setting. He knew his reader would fill in the greater details from the reader's familiarity with mountains in Norway, or Switzerland, or Poland, or America ... or New Zealand. That's why encyclopedias of Tolkein like this one are loaded with oblique references of what King Durin VI or Azog or Balin did that happened in the area of the Misty Mountains, but virtually not a thing about the mountains themselves. The mountains ARE mountains. There's nothing really special about them.
But is it different for an RPG? I'll tell you truly, no. I run the real world, and my setting does take advantage of a cultural reflection in people's minds of the Alps or the Urals or the Andes ... but most people have not spent great gobs of time in those places, and even if they have - we're still talking mountains here. I have lived most of my life in and around the Rocky Mountains, and though I've camped overnight hundreds of times around them, and tramped up and down their slopes in summer and winter, I can't make the mountains themselves interesting or exciting for very long, not to people sitting around a kitchen table.
The mountains aren't important. Middle Earth isn't important. If you think that by running Middle Earth you will be running a setting that is amazingly more interesting than a setting of your own cobbled-together imagination, you will be amazingly disappointed. We are talking about a big, empty map, with less words written about what's actually there than you'll find in the smallest pocket travel guide, and in the whole it won't matter. What will interest your party isn't the magic word "Rohan," but instead the seventeen orcs standing fifty feet away.
Settings are deathly dull, in case you didn't know. This is why a dungeon that presents empty room after empty room makes for a dismal night of running - even if the last room found is full of creatures and treasure. What you really want is a setting where EVERY room is full of some kind of creature, and some kind of treasure (informational, if not pecuniary), because living things that threaten or cooperate are only about ten thousand times more interesting than four walls with a door.
Advice like this will not stop would-be DMs from scratching out walls and doors, one juxtaposed with the next, ad nauseam, as though the shape of a hall or a room somehow in itself creates excitement and drama. In roleplaying this truly is a fetish - otherwise, how can you explain representations of a campaign environment like this:
 |
| The people who dug these passages - did they want to spend every minute of their lives on their feet? |
Or as my offline party likes to say, "You have now gotten through the maze that allows you to reach the next maze."
So streamline your world. Make it less about your world and more about the people in it. A conversation with a wall is very, very boring. A conversation with seventeen orcs, MUCH more interesting.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Tailoring
From the 10,000 word post:
"Fundamentally, the first step is to present a setting. Without burying ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented, the principle purpose of the setting is to 'ground' the campaign in something tangible that can be incorporated into the player's imaginations. If the player cannot visualize the setting. or how to move or interact within that setting, then the setting is worthless to your game. Flogging a setting for the sake of novelty over the principles of interaction is a poor proposition, and will result in a sharp decrease of momentum once the novelty departs. Your setting cannot exist for the sake of itself - it exists to give the players identifying markers upon which to play. "
Very well, let us bury ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented.
Most obvious are settings which have come down from fiction authors, who have contrived lands and cities and gods and monsters which seem to fit perfectly with a D&D setting. Tolkein has conveniently provided us with descriptions of Middle Earth, so that players at the table can picture the Inn at Bree, or the White City, or the Lonely Mountain. The flavour, too, of the land is laid out so that each player at the table - who has read the books - can imagine how their characters might think or act in such a place. And the same can be said for the other vistas, neatly listed for you in the infamous Appendix N.
Then of course there are the pregenerated worlds, convenient for your use. These are even better than the post-fictional worlds, since the 'grittiness' doesn't depend upon a few mere books with inconvenient time spent on plots and characters that won't ultimately be useful to the DM. The Outer World, Greyhawk ... even Dragonlance ... these offer so much MORE detail for your use. Enough, in fact, that you may never get to read all the possible materials that might be of use to you - and a seemingly bottomless well is a good thing, yes?
Even better, if your players are equally familiar with the pregenerated setting, then they should be able to visualize it. Better still, if the infrastructure of that world is sound and consistent, your party will be able to judge their actions against what they think the consequences will be ... that will be reassuring for them, and will increase their willingness to take risks. Overall, that's good for the momentum of your campaign.
Why, then, should novelty be a poor proposition?
If you have travelled, or can conceive of travelling, to a vastly different culture, you can see the difficulty at once. Let us say that we snap our fingers and appear in the deepest corner of New Guinea, or in a heavily populated part Ulaan Bator in Mongolia. What are the social rules? How should we behave so as not to offend anyone? Are we in danger, or is this ultimately a safe place? Upon what am I to base my expectations when I attempt to address the residents, or ask for a place to stay, or even to buy things from the market?
A common tactic that many adopt when finding themselves faced with these questions is to bull their way through. Westerners are famous for stepping on toes and brazenly insulting locals by demanding that things be handled or taken for granted in the same way they are in rural Devonshire or suburban Ohio. This has led a great many people into situations of great distress ... but that's what embassies are for. Thankfully, there IS a Devonshire and an Ohio, where people understand why we might have acted the way we did.
But if we extend the question to a unique, isolated world scene that has popped out of a DM's imagination, what then? As a player, how am I to judge what is right and what is wrong?
Often, a DM will take the trouble to provide a long list of contrived social moraes and institutions, which the players are to imbibe and hopefully channel through their roleplay. The only thing is: creating an entire cultural milieu is an incredibly daunting task - just consider the length of the Bible, or the complete Upanishads and the Vedas besides. It's just not possible to create a new reality with a few pages of 'traditions,' based upon nothing more than the DM's imagination. Thus, whenever it's tried, the proposed novelty relies upon the crutches of the social system we ARE familiar with - only with the uncertainty of where the DM's conception ends and where the usual social values begin. Inevitably, the DM's vision fails and the world either dies on the vine, or the more familiar values assert themselves and take over.
There's a reason for this. Our social values, norms, virtues and what have you, exist because they have proven to endure the test of time ... and that test has been thousands upon thousands of years. Something that's been in existence for a few weeks in a DM's notebook can hardly stand against that. Parties will return to the only behavior they know how to exhibit - their own - and the world will either bend to that behavior or the world will die.
Every author and filmmaker learns through trial and folly that there are some realities that must be adhered to when presenting an alternative "reality" to a modern audience. Concepts like love, loyalty, right-and-wrong as we understand it, attitudes towards sexuality and family - these must be maintained or else your audience will depart. It does not matter if it makes no sense in the context of the story. If Spartacus fights the Romans, it must be for the sake of an American-style freedom. If the poles of good and evil are to be maintained, the men who fight against Mordor cannot be demonstrated to be fornicators and idolaters. There can be drinking, but it is happy drinking, and taverns are happy places. Such are the expectations of the audience.
Yes, there is a disconnect here. Our social expectations do include an amount of unpleasant, undesireable expectations - there are drunks in the world, and people do rise up against corrupt governments only to be as corrupt themselves. Good and evil are outdated, outmoded - even ridiculous - concepts to many of us. And still they won't work for your players, because that is not the game they want to play. Even if your world is dark and gritty, it is dark and gritty only where those things are on display to be stamped out and the world made better. Your players will still need fantasy and sunshine if they're going to keep playing.
What I am saying is that if you will have a GOOD world, that world will be recognizable. I don't mean it follows the pattern of what your players see on their commute to work each morning. I do mean that bad people will present themselves in the way you would expect bad people to do so ... perhaps lying in the beginning, perhaps apparently virtuous and well-meaning - but always with that moment of treachery that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what makes them who they are. And they will have familiar, appreciable motivations - greed, power, wrath, pride. These motivations will likely not fall into the lusting, perverse categories. Your players will not appreciate it.
Obviously this does not merely apply to people. Rivers should be expected to run from the mountains to the sea. The sea should be expected to have waves. Grass will grow, and clouds will roll across the sky, and rain will be composed of water. Oh, you can play around with these things ... but if you play too far from the norm, you will only exhaust your players. Your world will become a laughing stock, as the rivers flowing up into the mountains will inspire first jokes, then exhaustion. An uphill flowing river is a like a joke that is funny once. After awhile, it loses its novelty and just becomes an inconvenient, tired thing that the parties have to be reminded of again and again, because they've forgotten. You will smugly report that it is raining mustard again, and the party will stare at you with dull eyes and dull expressions. "Yes, so, what of it," will be their opinion.
You will not make a good world with gimmicks. That the mountains are grey or green or off-pink with purple edges will not make any difference in even the short run. You won't get anywhere populating your world with weird and unfamiliar denizens. Birds of different feathers and conceived breeds do not inspire the imagination, they shut it down. Your players will not ponder your concoctions any further than the questions, "can we kill it, can we eat it, can we sell it." And in answer to those questions, your birds might as well be eagles and mackaws. The human imagination ponders that with which it has already developed a fetish. People like penguins and turtles and panda bears because they have grown up in a world rich with references to those things. Your players will not get excited about your sznifloos, because they did not receive stuffed sznifloos for Christmas, years ago.
If you will insist on creating all these things to make your world uniquely your world, you are climbing an impossible hill that offers no view. You're not tapping into the ready-made reservoir of player emotions already held in their minds for creatures that do impress them. An ordinary hippopotomus may seem too mundane for your world - but everyone knows what they are, and everyone can guess what they would do when stumbling across one. What does one do with a sznifloo?
Stop and think. If you were a tailor, and a man entered to have a suit made for himself, would novelty be your primary concern? Or would it be to fit your customer excellently, so that as he moved about in the suit you had made, and felt its sleeves upon his arms, and the reassuring grasp of the fabric about his shoulders, he marvelled at what a good tailor you were. It is little understood by DMs that the actual world fits us rather like a good suit - with food that we can grow and eat, and animals we can domesticate or shepherd, and aspects we appreciate and adore. True, the world is a nasty, scary place - but we have been fashioned biologically for this world, and it is that biology that makes it such a good fit.
Take the clothes made by others - novelists and game designers - and make alterations as you will, or mark your fabric and create your conception from scratch ... but set aside your grandious conceptions of novel artistry, and concentrate instead on just being a damn good tailor.
"Fundamentally, the first step is to present a setting. Without burying ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented, the principle purpose of the setting is to 'ground' the campaign in something tangible that can be incorporated into the player's imaginations. If the player cannot visualize the setting. or how to move or interact within that setting, then the setting is worthless to your game. Flogging a setting for the sake of novelty over the principles of interaction is a poor proposition, and will result in a sharp decrease of momentum once the novelty departs. Your setting cannot exist for the sake of itself - it exists to give the players identifying markers upon which to play. "
Very well, let us bury ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented.
Most obvious are settings which have come down from fiction authors, who have contrived lands and cities and gods and monsters which seem to fit perfectly with a D&D setting. Tolkein has conveniently provided us with descriptions of Middle Earth, so that players at the table can picture the Inn at Bree, or the White City, or the Lonely Mountain. The flavour, too, of the land is laid out so that each player at the table - who has read the books - can imagine how their characters might think or act in such a place. And the same can be said for the other vistas, neatly listed for you in the infamous Appendix N.
Then of course there are the pregenerated worlds, convenient for your use. These are even better than the post-fictional worlds, since the 'grittiness' doesn't depend upon a few mere books with inconvenient time spent on plots and characters that won't ultimately be useful to the DM. The Outer World, Greyhawk ... even Dragonlance ... these offer so much MORE detail for your use. Enough, in fact, that you may never get to read all the possible materials that might be of use to you - and a seemingly bottomless well is a good thing, yes?
Even better, if your players are equally familiar with the pregenerated setting, then they should be able to visualize it. Better still, if the infrastructure of that world is sound and consistent, your party will be able to judge their actions against what they think the consequences will be ... that will be reassuring for them, and will increase their willingness to take risks. Overall, that's good for the momentum of your campaign.
Why, then, should novelty be a poor proposition?
If you have travelled, or can conceive of travelling, to a vastly different culture, you can see the difficulty at once. Let us say that we snap our fingers and appear in the deepest corner of New Guinea, or in a heavily populated part Ulaan Bator in Mongolia. What are the social rules? How should we behave so as not to offend anyone? Are we in danger, or is this ultimately a safe place? Upon what am I to base my expectations when I attempt to address the residents, or ask for a place to stay, or even to buy things from the market?
A common tactic that many adopt when finding themselves faced with these questions is to bull their way through. Westerners are famous for stepping on toes and brazenly insulting locals by demanding that things be handled or taken for granted in the same way they are in rural Devonshire or suburban Ohio. This has led a great many people into situations of great distress ... but that's what embassies are for. Thankfully, there IS a Devonshire and an Ohio, where people understand why we might have acted the way we did.
But if we extend the question to a unique, isolated world scene that has popped out of a DM's imagination, what then? As a player, how am I to judge what is right and what is wrong?
Often, a DM will take the trouble to provide a long list of contrived social moraes and institutions, which the players are to imbibe and hopefully channel through their roleplay. The only thing is: creating an entire cultural milieu is an incredibly daunting task - just consider the length of the Bible, or the complete Upanishads and the Vedas besides. It's just not possible to create a new reality with a few pages of 'traditions,' based upon nothing more than the DM's imagination. Thus, whenever it's tried, the proposed novelty relies upon the crutches of the social system we ARE familiar with - only with the uncertainty of where the DM's conception ends and where the usual social values begin. Inevitably, the DM's vision fails and the world either dies on the vine, or the more familiar values assert themselves and take over.
There's a reason for this. Our social values, norms, virtues and what have you, exist because they have proven to endure the test of time ... and that test has been thousands upon thousands of years. Something that's been in existence for a few weeks in a DM's notebook can hardly stand against that. Parties will return to the only behavior they know how to exhibit - their own - and the world will either bend to that behavior or the world will die.
Every author and filmmaker learns through trial and folly that there are some realities that must be adhered to when presenting an alternative "reality" to a modern audience. Concepts like love, loyalty, right-and-wrong as we understand it, attitudes towards sexuality and family - these must be maintained or else your audience will depart. It does not matter if it makes no sense in the context of the story. If Spartacus fights the Romans, it must be for the sake of an American-style freedom. If the poles of good and evil are to be maintained, the men who fight against Mordor cannot be demonstrated to be fornicators and idolaters. There can be drinking, but it is happy drinking, and taverns are happy places. Such are the expectations of the audience.
Yes, there is a disconnect here. Our social expectations do include an amount of unpleasant, undesireable expectations - there are drunks in the world, and people do rise up against corrupt governments only to be as corrupt themselves. Good and evil are outdated, outmoded - even ridiculous - concepts to many of us. And still they won't work for your players, because that is not the game they want to play. Even if your world is dark and gritty, it is dark and gritty only where those things are on display to be stamped out and the world made better. Your players will still need fantasy and sunshine if they're going to keep playing.
What I am saying is that if you will have a GOOD world, that world will be recognizable. I don't mean it follows the pattern of what your players see on their commute to work each morning. I do mean that bad people will present themselves in the way you would expect bad people to do so ... perhaps lying in the beginning, perhaps apparently virtuous and well-meaning - but always with that moment of treachery that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what makes them who they are. And they will have familiar, appreciable motivations - greed, power, wrath, pride. These motivations will likely not fall into the lusting, perverse categories. Your players will not appreciate it.
Obviously this does not merely apply to people. Rivers should be expected to run from the mountains to the sea. The sea should be expected to have waves. Grass will grow, and clouds will roll across the sky, and rain will be composed of water. Oh, you can play around with these things ... but if you play too far from the norm, you will only exhaust your players. Your world will become a laughing stock, as the rivers flowing up into the mountains will inspire first jokes, then exhaustion. An uphill flowing river is a like a joke that is funny once. After awhile, it loses its novelty and just becomes an inconvenient, tired thing that the parties have to be reminded of again and again, because they've forgotten. You will smugly report that it is raining mustard again, and the party will stare at you with dull eyes and dull expressions. "Yes, so, what of it," will be their opinion.
You will not make a good world with gimmicks. That the mountains are grey or green or off-pink with purple edges will not make any difference in even the short run. You won't get anywhere populating your world with weird and unfamiliar denizens. Birds of different feathers and conceived breeds do not inspire the imagination, they shut it down. Your players will not ponder your concoctions any further than the questions, "can we kill it, can we eat it, can we sell it." And in answer to those questions, your birds might as well be eagles and mackaws. The human imagination ponders that with which it has already developed a fetish. People like penguins and turtles and panda bears because they have grown up in a world rich with references to those things. Your players will not get excited about your sznifloos, because they did not receive stuffed sznifloos for Christmas, years ago.
If you will insist on creating all these things to make your world uniquely your world, you are climbing an impossible hill that offers no view. You're not tapping into the ready-made reservoir of player emotions already held in their minds for creatures that do impress them. An ordinary hippopotomus may seem too mundane for your world - but everyone knows what they are, and everyone can guess what they would do when stumbling across one. What does one do with a sznifloo?
Stop and think. If you were a tailor, and a man entered to have a suit made for himself, would novelty be your primary concern? Or would it be to fit your customer excellently, so that as he moved about in the suit you had made, and felt its sleeves upon his arms, and the reassuring grasp of the fabric about his shoulders, he marvelled at what a good tailor you were. It is little understood by DMs that the actual world fits us rather like a good suit - with food that we can grow and eat, and animals we can domesticate or shepherd, and aspects we appreciate and adore. True, the world is a nasty, scary place - but we have been fashioned biologically for this world, and it is that biology that makes it such a good fit.
Take the clothes made by others - novelists and game designers - and make alterations as you will, or mark your fabric and create your conception from scratch ... but set aside your grandious conceptions of novel artistry, and concentrate instead on just being a damn good tailor.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
More Drama
Ah, there has been a bit of drama, and the drance has appeared everywhere, buzzing about and sucking gluttonously at all the shit that's dropped in the last twenty-four hours.
This morning my wife and I agreed that Drance, for me, is my own personal Paul Lazzaro. Some of you might not understand what I mean; some of you might recognize the name, but in the time since High School you've forgotten all about Slaughterhouse Five. I have a quote from the movie, not the book - the movie is a fair simplification of Vonnegut's vision, and will serve to make the point here:
Somehow, I see that scene playing out in about thirty years.
The internet is a strange place. It is full of people who you'd cross the street before thinking about walking right by them. It is full of people who stink on busses for lack of deodorant, and who scream crazily at coffee shop vendors over a few cents change, and who regularly cut pedestrians off at traffic lights. And these people step onto the net, and create a nick for themselves, and try to pass as ordinary, worthy citizens. It is their chance, so they reason, to be finally accepted and respected as worthy persons, which they perceive themselves to be ... but as it is in their lives, they've done nothing on the internet to earn that worthiness - nothing at all, except to create a nick. For all they can see, that nick is a license to sit in a balcony and shoot at the people for whom the crowd has come.
If the only evidence I gave of my person on the internet was slapping around people and screaming at the mob, I would very rightly be despised. But what the mob cannot understand - what the mob will never understand - is that I have done more on this blog these past three years than scream at people. I have written funny; I have written clever; I have written a ton of carefully backed arguments. I have run a campaign that is a mass of labor and creativity. I have given more evidence of my value than the mere nick I have chosen. If there are those out there who cannot, or will not, understand why it is that people continue to defend me, or read me, or link to me, let them remember that I have not just spent my time eating the shit that drama creates.
Listen, Dungeon Masters, and those of you who are youngest. You will always find yourself in a position where some player has taken something you've said so much to heart that they are now screaming at you in your dining room to 'get fucked,' while you are screaming at them to 'get out.' After it happens, you're going to feel the shakes of adrenaline. You're going to question yourself and your players, wondering if you are a good DM or not. You're not going to have a clear idea of why the whole stupid drama played out at all. You said something, then they said something, and then suddenly the drama was full-blown. And ten minutes after it was over, you'll wish it hadn't happened, whatever it was that did happen.
If you'll give me a moment, I'll explain it. It is called real life. You, the DM, have gotten off your job on a Friday night, or you have just spent all day Saturday fighting crowds at the mall or weeds in the back yard, or shovelling snow for the fourth time from your damn huge driveway. You're exhausted, you're pressed for time, you want to run your world more than anything and you're downing coffee and other caffeine drinks to keep going. Your players, too, they've had their rough days, and they're doing likewise. And all of you, jacked up on drinks and concentrating your whole attention on this one fucking night being the only goddamn decent five hours in your otherwise shitty week, are under pressure. You're under a lot of pressure - more than you know.
And foolishly, you've hinged all that pressure, and all that energy you've poured into your bodies chemically, on die rolls. It's what you've chosen to do. And when those rolls don't go right - and inevitably, they won't - those hinges are going to strain and tear ... and this is going to be made worse when the tear happens in just such a way that you're reminded of your real life, or the DM or a player reminds you of someone or something that you have to deal with unhappily in your real life.
The reminder doesn't have to be conscious. The human mind is chock full of unconscious triggers. There's a thousand moments of stress that we all deal with and handle, that we don't want to deal with and handle when we're having 'fun' around a table throwing dice. But that moment comes, and our minds do start to deal with it, and all of the sudden we're screaming mad - and we don't know why.
After the fact. After the moment. Then we know. We can sit down and piece it out and realize we did this for those reasons and that for these reasons and suddenly it all seems really stupid and unimportant. We have a moment of comprehension that only we ourselves truly grasp.
Sometimes, these moments end friendships that never needed to end. Sometimes, we can pick up the pieces and fix it. Now and then, it just takes a handshake. "Sorry buddy. That was stupid. I don't know why I was being such an idiot."
But then, there's the internet. The wonderful, marvelous, I-wouldn't-want-to-live without it internet. The internet and its built-in fan base, screaming just because it needs to scream. It's numerous souls have also had their shitty weeks, only they don't have any five hours to play the game, or dice to roll. Or the games and the dice they have aren't enough to shed off the fucking misery of their lives. So they go looking for the flash of anger that others feel, and feed off that anger for all its worth. They need that anger. Desperately. It is their moment to shine - to post comments to perceived compatriots who are just like them, who are 'in the moment' of a misery just like their misery. And for as long as that misery lasts, the flies will share it with you, and commiserate on your unhappiness, and send you flowers and candy to remind you of just how important and valuable YOU are ... all in the hope that you will say to them the thing they really, really need to hear to make their unproductive lives seem a little more important:
"Thank you guy. I really needed to hear that."
This morning my wife and I agreed that Drance, for me, is my own personal Paul Lazzaro. Some of you might not understand what I mean; some of you might recognize the name, but in the time since High School you've forgotten all about Slaughterhouse Five. I have a quote from the movie, not the book - the movie is a fair simplification of Vonnegut's vision, and will serve to make the point here:
Billy Pilgrim (speaking to a crowd): "You see in Tralfamador, where I presently dwell, life has no beginning, no middle, and no end. For example, many years ago a certain man promised to have me killed. He's an old man now, living not far from here. He's read all the publicity associated with my appearance. He's insane. And tonight he'll keep his promise." (murmurs through the crowd) "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you've not understood what I have said." (Lazzaro appears on a high balcony with a rifle) "You see, it's time for you to go home - to your lives and your children. It's time for me to be dead for a little while. And then live again. I give you the Tralfamadorian greeting: Hello. Farewell. Hello. Farewell. Eternally connected, eternally embracing. Hello. Farewell." (Lazzaro shoots Billy; the crowd screams)
Somehow, I see that scene playing out in about thirty years.
The internet is a strange place. It is full of people who you'd cross the street before thinking about walking right by them. It is full of people who stink on busses for lack of deodorant, and who scream crazily at coffee shop vendors over a few cents change, and who regularly cut pedestrians off at traffic lights. And these people step onto the net, and create a nick for themselves, and try to pass as ordinary, worthy citizens. It is their chance, so they reason, to be finally accepted and respected as worthy persons, which they perceive themselves to be ... but as it is in their lives, they've done nothing on the internet to earn that worthiness - nothing at all, except to create a nick. For all they can see, that nick is a license to sit in a balcony and shoot at the people for whom the crowd has come.
If the only evidence I gave of my person on the internet was slapping around people and screaming at the mob, I would very rightly be despised. But what the mob cannot understand - what the mob will never understand - is that I have done more on this blog these past three years than scream at people. I have written funny; I have written clever; I have written a ton of carefully backed arguments. I have run a campaign that is a mass of labor and creativity. I have given more evidence of my value than the mere nick I have chosen. If there are those out there who cannot, or will not, understand why it is that people continue to defend me, or read me, or link to me, let them remember that I have not just spent my time eating the shit that drama creates.
Listen, Dungeon Masters, and those of you who are youngest. You will always find yourself in a position where some player has taken something you've said so much to heart that they are now screaming at you in your dining room to 'get fucked,' while you are screaming at them to 'get out.' After it happens, you're going to feel the shakes of adrenaline. You're going to question yourself and your players, wondering if you are a good DM or not. You're not going to have a clear idea of why the whole stupid drama played out at all. You said something, then they said something, and then suddenly the drama was full-blown. And ten minutes after it was over, you'll wish it hadn't happened, whatever it was that did happen.
If you'll give me a moment, I'll explain it. It is called real life. You, the DM, have gotten off your job on a Friday night, or you have just spent all day Saturday fighting crowds at the mall or weeds in the back yard, or shovelling snow for the fourth time from your damn huge driveway. You're exhausted, you're pressed for time, you want to run your world more than anything and you're downing coffee and other caffeine drinks to keep going. Your players, too, they've had their rough days, and they're doing likewise. And all of you, jacked up on drinks and concentrating your whole attention on this one fucking night being the only goddamn decent five hours in your otherwise shitty week, are under pressure. You're under a lot of pressure - more than you know.
And foolishly, you've hinged all that pressure, and all that energy you've poured into your bodies chemically, on die rolls. It's what you've chosen to do. And when those rolls don't go right - and inevitably, they won't - those hinges are going to strain and tear ... and this is going to be made worse when the tear happens in just such a way that you're reminded of your real life, or the DM or a player reminds you of someone or something that you have to deal with unhappily in your real life.
The reminder doesn't have to be conscious. The human mind is chock full of unconscious triggers. There's a thousand moments of stress that we all deal with and handle, that we don't want to deal with and handle when we're having 'fun' around a table throwing dice. But that moment comes, and our minds do start to deal with it, and all of the sudden we're screaming mad - and we don't know why.
After the fact. After the moment. Then we know. We can sit down and piece it out and realize we did this for those reasons and that for these reasons and suddenly it all seems really stupid and unimportant. We have a moment of comprehension that only we ourselves truly grasp.
Sometimes, these moments end friendships that never needed to end. Sometimes, we can pick up the pieces and fix it. Now and then, it just takes a handshake. "Sorry buddy. That was stupid. I don't know why I was being such an idiot."
But then, there's the internet. The wonderful, marvelous, I-wouldn't-want-to-live without it internet. The internet and its built-in fan base, screaming just because it needs to scream. It's numerous souls have also had their shitty weeks, only they don't have any five hours to play the game, or dice to roll. Or the games and the dice they have aren't enough to shed off the fucking misery of their lives. So they go looking for the flash of anger that others feel, and feed off that anger for all its worth. They need that anger. Desperately. It is their moment to shine - to post comments to perceived compatriots who are just like them, who are 'in the moment' of a misery just like their misery. And for as long as that misery lasts, the flies will share it with you, and commiserate on your unhappiness, and send you flowers and candy to remind you of just how important and valuable YOU are ... all in the hope that you will say to them the thing they really, really need to hear to make their unproductive lives seem a little more important:
"Thank you guy. I really needed to hear that."
Monday, January 30, 2012
Disappointed
Not everything in the world that you wish for pans out. I have unfortunately come to a position of impasse with JB of B/X Blackrazor, who only this week began running a character in my world. I'd like to say that this is not because of something that he said to me. I'd also like to say that this is not due to his wishing to break it off with me. I do not know what his wishes are. This impasse is something entirely of my own doing, and has more to do with my perception of what it is that defines a gentleman than it does whatever sort of player JB happens to be.
I write this preamble for the benefit of my other players, and those who would play with me, and no one else. I take the position that I have, which can be read on the comment threads of these two posts, here and here, because I firmly believe that the character of an individual is defined by the manner in which they approach opposition to their behavior. I believe there is a time to apologize. And I believe there is a time not to apologize. When the apology is given, it should be done unreservedly. When the apology is not given, the consequences should be accepted graciously. With regards to JB, I expected an apology. I did not ask for it, but I expected it just the same.
I do not like it when people apologize to me for things that don't matter. I am, however, intolerant when I fail to receive an apology for something I think does matter. JB demonstrated himself ready to apologize quite profusely about misunderstandings and minor errors and timing errors - but where it came to apologizing for open disrespect, no apology occurred.
I am old. I have found this is often the case.
The above said, and my reputation as an intolerant made marginally clearer, I would like to ask a question I asked in the second linked thread: Why is it that whenever players declare that they are 'playing in character' they invariably act like fucking jerks?
I suppose its because if they weren't being jerks, there wouldn't be any need to use the argument that they are acting 'in character' to justify their behavior.
But then it comes to mind, why in particular is it that people who claim not to be jerks in ordinary life, who act like jerks in D&D games, while arguing that they're being 'in character,' feel they need to have characters that are jerks in the first place?
Is it that there's a particular kind of person in the world who is not a jerk, who wants so much to be a jerk, that D&D is their big opportunity to do so? I know this is what television would have us believe - television shows from Our Miss Brooks forward have pitched this as a dramatic device hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. It makes for lively interaction between the actors, and serves to moralize about it one ... more ... time.
But here's the thing. Most of the people I know who are not jerks, aren't jerks because they actually feel that being a jerk is a bad thing. Even I think being a jerk is a bad thing. Oh yeah, I'm an asshole, and I write like an asshole ... but I have yet to do anything worse than blow a lot of air. I'm not actively trying to make my players jump through any hoops or actively mistreating them. I don't even wish JB any ill will ... I just don't want to run him in my world. This post is without question an insult to him - but you, gentle reader, and most everyone reading this will put all that down to Alexis being wrong about that, true? You're bound to put it down to Alexis blowing air, and for fuck's sake, you're probably right about that.
It boggles the mind, then, that someone would want to run in my world. I personally would like to know why someone who indicated that they would want to; who knew without a doubt how intolerant I could be; who in fact competed to run in that world - would then choose, as his DEFINING character trait, an intolerant, pushy, insistent, self-serving asshole.
Did it not occur that a player displaying this personality might run smack bang into the DM's personality?
Hey, let's point out the very obvious. Do you know what kind of 'in character' personality NO ONE in the whole wide world of RPGing likes in a player they have to run with? Just guess. Come on, you don't need me to say it, do you?
I have known games where EVERY player had this personality. Funny thing was, it wasn't 'in character' around those tables. Those guys actually were fucktards. They weren't pretending to be anything.
Well, that's the thrust of it. I'll just add a couple of words about what DMs should do when faced with players who reach for and channel this asshole personality as an 'in character' roleplaying choice:
Boot them.
I write this preamble for the benefit of my other players, and those who would play with me, and no one else. I take the position that I have, which can be read on the comment threads of these two posts, here and here, because I firmly believe that the character of an individual is defined by the manner in which they approach opposition to their behavior. I believe there is a time to apologize. And I believe there is a time not to apologize. When the apology is given, it should be done unreservedly. When the apology is not given, the consequences should be accepted graciously. With regards to JB, I expected an apology. I did not ask for it, but I expected it just the same.
I do not like it when people apologize to me for things that don't matter. I am, however, intolerant when I fail to receive an apology for something I think does matter. JB demonstrated himself ready to apologize quite profusely about misunderstandings and minor errors and timing errors - but where it came to apologizing for open disrespect, no apology occurred.
I am old. I have found this is often the case.
The above said, and my reputation as an intolerant made marginally clearer, I would like to ask a question I asked in the second linked thread: Why is it that whenever players declare that they are 'playing in character' they invariably act like fucking jerks?
I suppose its because if they weren't being jerks, there wouldn't be any need to use the argument that they are acting 'in character' to justify their behavior.
But then it comes to mind, why in particular is it that people who claim not to be jerks in ordinary life, who act like jerks in D&D games, while arguing that they're being 'in character,' feel they need to have characters that are jerks in the first place?
Is it that there's a particular kind of person in the world who is not a jerk, who wants so much to be a jerk, that D&D is their big opportunity to do so? I know this is what television would have us believe - television shows from Our Miss Brooks forward have pitched this as a dramatic device hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. It makes for lively interaction between the actors, and serves to moralize about it one ... more ... time.
But here's the thing. Most of the people I know who are not jerks, aren't jerks because they actually feel that being a jerk is a bad thing. Even I think being a jerk is a bad thing. Oh yeah, I'm an asshole, and I write like an asshole ... but I have yet to do anything worse than blow a lot of air. I'm not actively trying to make my players jump through any hoops or actively mistreating them. I don't even wish JB any ill will ... I just don't want to run him in my world. This post is without question an insult to him - but you, gentle reader, and most everyone reading this will put all that down to Alexis being wrong about that, true? You're bound to put it down to Alexis blowing air, and for fuck's sake, you're probably right about that.
It boggles the mind, then, that someone would want to run in my world. I personally would like to know why someone who indicated that they would want to; who knew without a doubt how intolerant I could be; who in fact competed to run in that world - would then choose, as his DEFINING character trait, an intolerant, pushy, insistent, self-serving asshole.
Did it not occur that a player displaying this personality might run smack bang into the DM's personality?
Hey, let's point out the very obvious. Do you know what kind of 'in character' personality NO ONE in the whole wide world of RPGing likes in a player they have to run with? Just guess. Come on, you don't need me to say it, do you?
I have known games where EVERY player had this personality. Funny thing was, it wasn't 'in character' around those tables. Those guys actually were fucktards. They weren't pretending to be anything.
Well, that's the thrust of it. I'll just add a couple of words about what DMs should do when faced with players who reach for and channel this asshole personality as an 'in character' roleplaying choice:
Boot them.
The Mill and The Cross
Let's talk a little porn.
Any medieval scholar must eventually wonder at the intensity with which Europe fetishized the death of one particular man of foreign extraction - an intensity which could be measured at a ratio of perhaps 10,000:1 against the fandom surrounding Star Wars or even the NFL. In the minds of the ordinary European, every element of the death was painstakingly examined and extrapolated: the actual death itself; the very words that were spoken; the behavior of every person present; the reason for the death; the arguments used for and against; the systematic application of torture before the event and the theological ramifications thereof, even with elaborations of mythological events coinciding with those of a mundane nature. This one death held European society in a sort of terrified, contemplative, contradicting ecstasy that lasted over a thousand years, and which still holds a dwindling few - comparatively - heartily in its grasp. This one death was - is - the very definition of the term 'passion.'
We hardly imagine what it was to the minds of our distant ancestors.
Over the weekend I caught the film, The Mill and the Cross, which every review you will find will tell you is "about" a painting by Pieter Bruegel, The Procession to Calvary. Calvary, for the uninitiated, is the hill upon which the aforementioned man died. I'd like to express my extreme distaste with reviewers, who live in the small-minded state of existence that leads them to believe that a film which takes place within a painting must be about the painting, and not ALSO about the thing the painting is about. It is as if to say that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is about the senate chamber, because it happens to take place there, or that The Shawshank Redemption is about prisons. But this is the sort of ignorant deconstructionalism I've come to expect from modern day reviewers of films, for whom the rims of the glasses upon their noses is a far-sighted observation - naturally a film of unusual purpose and design could achieve no better effect than the casting of pearls before swine. I have not for some time seen any movie so rashly misunderstood.
I would tell you, see this film. It has everything to do with a man's death, and nothing to do with the edifice that has built extensively and appallingly upon the man's death. The edifice itself, the worshipped entity that has proported to tell Europeans how to live, and then execute them when they do it less than well, is the villain in the 'canvas,' demonstrated eloquently in the work without any character's wagging finger. But I shall not be more precise than that in describing the 'edifice,' since I don't give a fig if the ordinary, uneducated, ignorant person knows what it is I refer to - the movie takes the same high road, and I shall not veer from the path.
But then, the director, Lech Majewski, is Polish, and clearly speaking to Europeans in this film and not to Americans, so I think it fair to say that his audience knows of what he speaks. Majewski does not bow to explain; he does not bow to moralize; he presents a tableau and an argument, and demands that the viewer should apply brain to problem. I did, and in doing so, watched the movie twice through.
I do not think that any film made has ever captured the sense or the flavour of my Dungeons and Dragons world so perfectly. I shall have to say that if there is a texture to my world, it is the texture to be found in this film - from the ordinary happenstance of people rising from beds to eat, to the setting out to do a day's work, to the fear and casual abuse perpetrated by authority upon the helpless and ordinary person. One does not "enter a picture" in watching this film, but into the very condition and state of living to be experienced in the 16th century.
I remain astounded.
Any medieval scholar must eventually wonder at the intensity with which Europe fetishized the death of one particular man of foreign extraction - an intensity which could be measured at a ratio of perhaps 10,000:1 against the fandom surrounding Star Wars or even the NFL. In the minds of the ordinary European, every element of the death was painstakingly examined and extrapolated: the actual death itself; the very words that were spoken; the behavior of every person present; the reason for the death; the arguments used for and against; the systematic application of torture before the event and the theological ramifications thereof, even with elaborations of mythological events coinciding with those of a mundane nature. This one death held European society in a sort of terrified, contemplative, contradicting ecstasy that lasted over a thousand years, and which still holds a dwindling few - comparatively - heartily in its grasp. This one death was - is - the very definition of the term 'passion.'
We hardly imagine what it was to the minds of our distant ancestors.
Over the weekend I caught the film, The Mill and the Cross, which every review you will find will tell you is "about" a painting by Pieter Bruegel, The Procession to Calvary. Calvary, for the uninitiated, is the hill upon which the aforementioned man died. I'd like to express my extreme distaste with reviewers, who live in the small-minded state of existence that leads them to believe that a film which takes place within a painting must be about the painting, and not ALSO about the thing the painting is about. It is as if to say that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is about the senate chamber, because it happens to take place there, or that The Shawshank Redemption is about prisons. But this is the sort of ignorant deconstructionalism I've come to expect from modern day reviewers of films, for whom the rims of the glasses upon their noses is a far-sighted observation - naturally a film of unusual purpose and design could achieve no better effect than the casting of pearls before swine. I have not for some time seen any movie so rashly misunderstood.
I would tell you, see this film. It has everything to do with a man's death, and nothing to do with the edifice that has built extensively and appallingly upon the man's death. The edifice itself, the worshipped entity that has proported to tell Europeans how to live, and then execute them when they do it less than well, is the villain in the 'canvas,' demonstrated eloquently in the work without any character's wagging finger. But I shall not be more precise than that in describing the 'edifice,' since I don't give a fig if the ordinary, uneducated, ignorant person knows what it is I refer to - the movie takes the same high road, and I shall not veer from the path.
But then, the director, Lech Majewski, is Polish, and clearly speaking to Europeans in this film and not to Americans, so I think it fair to say that his audience knows of what he speaks. Majewski does not bow to explain; he does not bow to moralize; he presents a tableau and an argument, and demands that the viewer should apply brain to problem. I did, and in doing so, watched the movie twice through.
I do not think that any film made has ever captured the sense or the flavour of my Dungeons and Dragons world so perfectly. I shall have to say that if there is a texture to my world, it is the texture to be found in this film - from the ordinary happenstance of people rising from beds to eat, to the setting out to do a day's work, to the fear and casual abuse perpetrated by authority upon the helpless and ordinary person. One does not "enter a picture" in watching this film, but into the very condition and state of living to be experienced in the 16th century.
I remain astounded.
Friday, January 27, 2012
The "Magical" Assassin
I have this fantasy where I have time to post something again on this blog - oh wait ... I seem to have time right now!
I want to talk about assassins.
It's true that a lot of campaigns won't allow them. I know that for some, it's the whole idea of a class dedicated to cold-blooded murder, and the squick related to that ... but for most, I think that's just a convenient excuse for a bigger issue: players don't know how to run them.
There are certain tropes that have built up over the years in D&D - mostly engendered by young people who did not understand very much about life, or about nuance - and one of the worst of these is that an assassin can simply walk up to someone, anyone, on the street, and 'assassinate' them. Even worse, there exists the idea that in the middle of combat, when the opponent misses, the player assassin declares, "I assassinate him!" Whereupon the 14-year-old DM answers, "Roll percentile die!"
This ridiculous scenario is fostered by the belief that assassins don't have much going for them. They have the same crappy hit points as a thief, they haven't got even the thieving abilities of a thief, they don't fight any better than a thief ... and it takes more X.P. per level to go up.
Jeez. Why would anyone run an assassin? Heck, better treat that assassination ability like an instantaneous reloadable magic spell that can be applied all the freaking time.
And that's what happens.
Part of the problem that 14-year-old players buy into that kind of bullshit is that the idea drifts upon the wind that assassins in D&D are something like the modern day syndicate Hit Man - a fellow who takes contracts for money. Gygaxian Logic dictated that a 'guild' had to be created where said contracts could be distributed out, where assassins could get together for coffee and cakes after the job, and of course the local officials are paid just to look the other way. So once again, there's another trope . . . the assassin stomping into your campaign and asking you straight up, "Hey, where's the assassins guild? How much do I pay them? Have they got any contracts for me?"
Like yes, what I'd really like to do now is have all my players squat motionless around a table while the assassin in the party spends the next four hours carefully hunting down the pre-generated victim, who obviously can't wait to die. Or, alternately, the five minute episode where the assassin picks up his contract, heads around to the bar where Pick the Needle is known to down drinks, dispatching him with a quick percentile roll before turning up again amidst the party counting his cool 200 g.p.
Can I just say: do we need more proof in this world that the originators of D&D were a bunch of really, really, flabbergastingly stupid pud-pounding morons?
But heck - I'm known to be biased about such things.
So basically, having gotten rather sick with the assassin schtick, DM's just settle the problem once and for all by denying the existence of assassins as a class. Sure, people still "assassinate" . . . but without the percentile roll.
My personal feeling is that the percentile roll is fine. I have no trouble with an imagined assassin having a solid biological understanding of the humanoid body, and being able to take advantage of that with a swift knife thrust, or a garrote, or what you like. I really don't mind this being a percentage, it's a works-or-not kind of roll.
But there has to be an infrastructure behind that roll that makes sense. The assassin HAS to surprise the victim - and the assassin HAS to do so at a distance that allows absolutely no time at all. It doesn't do any good to surprise the victim from seven feet away . . . unless the assassin is running flat out, and if so, a little surgery is going to be a little more difficult. In films, assassins who go for the throat NEVER miss . . . but in reality they would all the time. So we're talking adjustments - adjustments for weapons, adjustments for movement, adjustments for all kinds of circumstances. But I don't think those adjustments are easily managed by a few tables . . . there are too many circumstances. For myself, I tend to play it so that whenever the assassination set up isn't perfect, the assassination chance is halved, or quartered, depending on how many relevant details there are.
What's perfect? You're in the shadows; the victim steps out a few feet from you; the victim is distracted by a pocket watch or something in the sky - and you step out and kill him.
Now, if you make that happen as an assassin, I'll give you the experience points for assassination. But if you blunder around and don't think things through ... well fuck, who does? I have yet to have a player who really has the cold natured heart necessary to carry forth the process behind the assassination. I've been hammering on this point for quite a few years and for quite a few years I come up short. It doesn't really surprise me - on some level, I think that if you have a player at the table able to really think like a killer, you might have to wonder just what you're doing having this person in your house.
Still, that's how the assassin ought to approach it: "How do I put myself in the right place at the right time to murder that fellow once he is standing right next to me?" And the removal of obstacles is definitely the point. That's not as easy as it looks.
Moreover, players cannot 'join' an assassins guild. All guilds would be based on one high level assassin with followers. Players cannot, by definition, act as mindless followers for a non-player character . . . it would mean basically accepting that the DM was going to run your character for you. Therefore, the only assassin's guild the player can 'join' will be the one the player inevitably starts.
Which means, if the players want to have a contract to kill someone (plausible), they're going to have to figure out how to get one from an NPC non-assassin looking for an assassin. Good luck with that. I'd love to see a player really figure out how to do that ... it would really take some serious freakin' thinking. I know as a DM, I'm going to be picking any plan apart for the opportunity to send the guards in and catch the player - it better be a really good plan.
Still, anything's possible.
Inside the party, I can see benefits for the rational thinking assassin. Someone's harassing the party? The assassin will take care of it. That guard's in the way? The assassin will take care of it. Three guys are following the party? The assassin will take care of them. And so on. With forethought and planning, always. Never - absolutely never - by walking up to them, waving hello, and magically assassinating them.
I want to talk about assassins.
It's true that a lot of campaigns won't allow them. I know that for some, it's the whole idea of a class dedicated to cold-blooded murder, and the squick related to that ... but for most, I think that's just a convenient excuse for a bigger issue: players don't know how to run them.
There are certain tropes that have built up over the years in D&D - mostly engendered by young people who did not understand very much about life, or about nuance - and one of the worst of these is that an assassin can simply walk up to someone, anyone, on the street, and 'assassinate' them. Even worse, there exists the idea that in the middle of combat, when the opponent misses, the player assassin declares, "I assassinate him!" Whereupon the 14-year-old DM answers, "Roll percentile die!"
This ridiculous scenario is fostered by the belief that assassins don't have much going for them. They have the same crappy hit points as a thief, they haven't got even the thieving abilities of a thief, they don't fight any better than a thief ... and it takes more X.P. per level to go up.
Jeez. Why would anyone run an assassin? Heck, better treat that assassination ability like an instantaneous reloadable magic spell that can be applied all the freaking time.
And that's what happens.
Part of the problem that 14-year-old players buy into that kind of bullshit is that the idea drifts upon the wind that assassins in D&D are something like the modern day syndicate Hit Man - a fellow who takes contracts for money. Gygaxian Logic dictated that a 'guild' had to be created where said contracts could be distributed out, where assassins could get together for coffee and cakes after the job, and of course the local officials are paid just to look the other way. So once again, there's another trope . . . the assassin stomping into your campaign and asking you straight up, "Hey, where's the assassins guild? How much do I pay them? Have they got any contracts for me?"
Like yes, what I'd really like to do now is have all my players squat motionless around a table while the assassin in the party spends the next four hours carefully hunting down the pre-generated victim, who obviously can't wait to die. Or, alternately, the five minute episode where the assassin picks up his contract, heads around to the bar where Pick the Needle is known to down drinks, dispatching him with a quick percentile roll before turning up again amidst the party counting his cool 200 g.p.
Can I just say: do we need more proof in this world that the originators of D&D were a bunch of really, really, flabbergastingly stupid pud-pounding morons?
But heck - I'm known to be biased about such things.
So basically, having gotten rather sick with the assassin schtick, DM's just settle the problem once and for all by denying the existence of assassins as a class. Sure, people still "assassinate" . . . but without the percentile roll.
My personal feeling is that the percentile roll is fine. I have no trouble with an imagined assassin having a solid biological understanding of the humanoid body, and being able to take advantage of that with a swift knife thrust, or a garrote, or what you like. I really don't mind this being a percentage, it's a works-or-not kind of roll.
But there has to be an infrastructure behind that roll that makes sense. The assassin HAS to surprise the victim - and the assassin HAS to do so at a distance that allows absolutely no time at all. It doesn't do any good to surprise the victim from seven feet away . . . unless the assassin is running flat out, and if so, a little surgery is going to be a little more difficult. In films, assassins who go for the throat NEVER miss . . . but in reality they would all the time. So we're talking adjustments - adjustments for weapons, adjustments for movement, adjustments for all kinds of circumstances. But I don't think those adjustments are easily managed by a few tables . . . there are too many circumstances. For myself, I tend to play it so that whenever the assassination set up isn't perfect, the assassination chance is halved, or quartered, depending on how many relevant details there are.
What's perfect? You're in the shadows; the victim steps out a few feet from you; the victim is distracted by a pocket watch or something in the sky - and you step out and kill him.
Now, if you make that happen as an assassin, I'll give you the experience points for assassination. But if you blunder around and don't think things through ... well fuck, who does? I have yet to have a player who really has the cold natured heart necessary to carry forth the process behind the assassination. I've been hammering on this point for quite a few years and for quite a few years I come up short. It doesn't really surprise me - on some level, I think that if you have a player at the table able to really think like a killer, you might have to wonder just what you're doing having this person in your house.
Still, that's how the assassin ought to approach it: "How do I put myself in the right place at the right time to murder that fellow once he is standing right next to me?" And the removal of obstacles is definitely the point. That's not as easy as it looks.
Moreover, players cannot 'join' an assassins guild. All guilds would be based on one high level assassin with followers. Players cannot, by definition, act as mindless followers for a non-player character . . . it would mean basically accepting that the DM was going to run your character for you. Therefore, the only assassin's guild the player can 'join' will be the one the player inevitably starts.
Which means, if the players want to have a contract to kill someone (plausible), they're going to have to figure out how to get one from an NPC non-assassin looking for an assassin. Good luck with that. I'd love to see a player really figure out how to do that ... it would really take some serious freakin' thinking. I know as a DM, I'm going to be picking any plan apart for the opportunity to send the guards in and catch the player - it better be a really good plan.
Still, anything's possible.
Inside the party, I can see benefits for the rational thinking assassin. Someone's harassing the party? The assassin will take care of it. That guard's in the way? The assassin will take care of it. Three guys are following the party? The assassin will take care of them. And so on. With forethought and planning, always. Never - absolutely never - by walking up to them, waving hello, and magically assassinating them.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Rock-Paper-Scissors
The contest is very simple.
All persons will play at the same time. Because my comments are on moderate, each person can comment on this post with their choice. All persons will have a chance to comment before I publish all results for each round. Your first choice will be the only one I will accept - subsequent choices in a particular round will be ignored. It might be possible to finish this in one round, or it may take several.
To repeat. You, the players, will write one word on a comment: say, "scissors." When all persons have written one word (or willingly bowed out), I will publish and declare the winners for that round. Remaining winners will then compete in following rounds, if these are needed.
Calculating results:
The choice with the largest number of proponents will wipe out those one step down from that choice. Left over persons will survive, with the winners, to the next round.
Example: Three persons choose 'rock'; one person chooses 'scissors' and one person chooses 'paper.' In that round, rock destroys scissors, so that person is out. Both those who chose rock and that one who chose paper will survive to the next round.
If there the largest number occurs for two different choices, then the superior choice will destroy the other; left over persons will survive.
Example: Two persons choose 'rock' and two persons choose 'paper'; one person chooses 'scissors.' Paper will destroy rock, so those two persons are out; those choosing paper and scissors will survive to the next round.
If the largest group fails to kill anyone, then the second largest group will have considered to have killed all persons in the largest group.
Example: Four persons choose 'rock'; no one chooses 'scissors;' one person chooses 'paper.' In this round, the one person choosing paper destroys the four people choosing rock.
If all persons make the same choice, or if an equal number of players makes each of the three choices, then the round is void and repeated again.
Example: Everyone chooses 'rock.' The round is played over.
Example: With three persons left, one person each chooses 'rock,' 'scissors' and 'paper.' The round is played over.
If one person is chosen without having designated a second person, those still surviving will play for the second position.
If for some reason Alexis accidentally publishes some results too early, due to the nature of blogger, that round is void and will be played over.
Rounds are played until there is one final winner and one final loser. This may not be completed today. Please note, there is a hole in the middle of my day when I will be unavailable.
I will continue to publish comments which do not contain results. If I have missed something in my logic above, please inform me immediately, and I will rule.
JB, Imon Fyre, Oddbit, Wickedmurph, Arduin ...
You may begin.
All persons will play at the same time. Because my comments are on moderate, each person can comment on this post with their choice. All persons will have a chance to comment before I publish all results for each round. Your first choice will be the only one I will accept - subsequent choices in a particular round will be ignored. It might be possible to finish this in one round, or it may take several.
To repeat. You, the players, will write one word on a comment: say, "scissors." When all persons have written one word (or willingly bowed out), I will publish and declare the winners for that round. Remaining winners will then compete in following rounds, if these are needed.
Calculating results:
The choice with the largest number of proponents will wipe out those one step down from that choice. Left over persons will survive, with the winners, to the next round.
Example: Three persons choose 'rock'; one person chooses 'scissors' and one person chooses 'paper.' In that round, rock destroys scissors, so that person is out. Both those who chose rock and that one who chose paper will survive to the next round.
If there the largest number occurs for two different choices, then the superior choice will destroy the other; left over persons will survive.
Example: Two persons choose 'rock' and two persons choose 'paper'; one person chooses 'scissors.' Paper will destroy rock, so those two persons are out; those choosing paper and scissors will survive to the next round.
If the largest group fails to kill anyone, then the second largest group will have considered to have killed all persons in the largest group.
Example: Four persons choose 'rock'; no one chooses 'scissors;' one person chooses 'paper.' In this round, the one person choosing paper destroys the four people choosing rock.
If all persons make the same choice, or if an equal number of players makes each of the three choices, then the round is void and repeated again.
Example: Everyone chooses 'rock.' The round is played over.
Example: With three persons left, one person each chooses 'rock,' 'scissors' and 'paper.' The round is played over.
If one person is chosen without having designated a second person, those still surviving will play for the second position.
If for some reason Alexis accidentally publishes some results too early, due to the nature of blogger, that round is void and will be played over.
Rounds are played until there is one final winner and one final loser. This may not be completed today. Please note, there is a hole in the middle of my day when I will be unavailable.
I will continue to publish comments which do not contain results. If I have missed something in my logic above, please inform me immediately, and I will rule.
JB, Imon Fyre, Oddbit, Wickedmurph, Arduin ...
You may begin.
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