Let me write something more upbeat.
There is an age-old argument against leadership that likes to use the following story. The French Revolutionary is sitting in his house when he sees a crowd of people appear on his street outside, rushing along. At this point he says, "There are my people; I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
The story is meant to be an indictment of politicians who spend their time pandering to their constituents, while presumably believing in nothing themselves. And this sounds like a reasonable criticism. IF you care what others think, you haven't the courage of your own convictions, and therefore you're a wishy-washy, flip-flopping politician subject to whatever way the wind blows.
I disagree. I disagree because I believe it takes an amazing sort of ass to believe that the courage of one's convictions is automatically the best possible way to represent a lot of people while simulataneously ignoring what they tell you. I would rather have a politician that listened to the people, and led in the direction the people willed, than a politician that said, "Yes, I know you have needs and ideas, but I know better."
I think both types turn up as DMs. I think that there are DMs who do whatever the players want, and I think there are DMs who do what they themselves want, because they know better.
The argument for both politicians and for DMs is that the position suggests intelligence, motivation, education and ability. No one could be a politician without ability (so it is opined). The constituents don't have ability. If they did, they would be politicians. Comparably, the DM 'knows' more about the game than the players. If the players knew as much as the DM, they would be running their own games. Therefore, the players should shut up and let the DM run the game.
There are a lot of false arguments in the above, but going forward we'll just talk about how they apply to DMs.
The value in having a DM is that someone has got to have insight to the back-end of the events that are going on, who can pick the monsters and run the NPCs, while keeping information secret that will yield a good game. If a computer could do this, we wouldn't need - or want - a DM. Unfortunately, no one can do it as well as a human, so players tolerate DMs to fulfill that role.
DMs have a tendency to view this toleration only in terms of the gratitude it implies, and very often will go one step further and presume that players are naturally obsequious louts who can be bossed around at will. And so arises the theoretical nonsense that DMs are really the center of the game, and the players exist to service the DM's world, for worlds need players.
(this is something like Richard Dawkins argument that life is a process by which genetic codes reproduce themselves).
But ask yourself as a player. What sort of DM would you want to play with: a DM that views everything about the world as a gracious gift handed down from on high for the players to appreciate appropriately, as is their social position . . . or a DM who views the player's needs first and foremost, who builds the world in recognition that the DM is a representative of the player's wishes?
In the long run, if I were the first kind of DM, who demanded recognition for all my work, what sort of approval would I get from my constituents, er, players? I may have a great world, but being a pompous ass, exactly how much loyalty will I acquire? On the other hand, if I am the second kind of DM, where my players know that I'm designing the world to produce the very best response in answer to the input the players are giving, how important is it that my world is necessarily 'good'?
That is, wouldn't much of the goodness of the world be inherent in my treatment of the player's wishes? And wouldn't the selfish DM's world have to be very, very good to compensate for the fact that it was all about the DM's wishes?
A bunch of players have just turned up at my doorstep. Pardon me, I have to go find out what they want, so I can DM them.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Omissions
Last week, Jeffro posted the following about Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, and I took the event to task for its appeal to nobility in the face of the bloody-mindedness that had been the Civil War. Whenever someone points out to me something noble about that war, such as Chamberlain's defense of Little Round Top or pretty much anything to do with Stonewall Jackson, I find myself remembering Andersonville, Fort Pillow or the New York riots. But then, I am built that way, and knowing it gets me thinking about Slaughterhouse Five.
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is about Billy, who is unstuck in time, and thus simultaneously experiences different periods of his life without those things occurring in continuity. One of those events is the mass bombing of Dresden, between February 13 & 15, 1945, which in the story Billy survives, written that way by Vonnegut because the writer himself was imprisoned in Dresden after being captured during the Battle of the Bulge - and survived the bombing with others in an underground meat locker that the German guards called Schlachthof Funf, or 'slaughterhouse five.' Vonnegut's theme throughout the book is that fundamentally we survive as human beings because we remember the good and forget the bad things that happen to us.
I've always had trouble with that formula, but I don't deny it's what most people do, nor do I deny that it works. It is much, much easier for the South to remember the signing of peace between gentlemen than the 30 thousand something prisoners who died under horrific conditions in Andersonville. My mind, however, always goes to dark places.
It is the reason why I often do not get along with other historians, because it seems to me that historians more than anyone like to cherry pick the events of the past, particularly upon the subject of atrocities. George Santayana's words, that "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," is sadly quoted to much by people who do not know that Santayana also said, "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." I think truly the second quote hits closer to the mark. To it, I will add one of my own. The history we think we remember is a lie of omission.
Vonnegut's argument is that we do that because we would go crazy as a society if we lived too near the truth. Perhaps I'm only dark in my outlook because I never have been that close to the truth. I've never been in a war-zone. I've never seen people blown apart. I've never had a pistol pointed at my head. Every idea that I have about the horrors of anything are second hand, at best. The omission in my understanding of violent history is that I've never experienced any.
Perhaps that is why my dearest time is spent in one of two unreal dreams. I am either writing, or I am designing, things that haven't happened to people who don't exist, for the sake of an ersatz emotion for deaths that cannot occur. Perhaps it is my tendency to escape into a mock recreation of violence - rather than nobility - that drives the game world I fabricate and run. I feed my dark side while admitting that I would not want to do so by travelling to modern day Liberia, Zaire or Afghanistan. If I truly had a dark side, if my mind were truly driven towards comprehension and understanding, then surely the logical course of action would be to set aside the game and partake in the reality.
I omit that option, though, and cheat by getting upset over the brutal events of history. I am no different than those who cheat by swelling with pride over the noble events of history. It is two sides of a coin. I am simply remembering the other side. I only run a dark world, with dark people in it, because that is my particular fetish.
Doesn't make me better. Only makes me different.
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is about Billy, who is unstuck in time, and thus simultaneously experiences different periods of his life without those things occurring in continuity. One of those events is the mass bombing of Dresden, between February 13 & 15, 1945, which in the story Billy survives, written that way by Vonnegut because the writer himself was imprisoned in Dresden after being captured during the Battle of the Bulge - and survived the bombing with others in an underground meat locker that the German guards called Schlachthof Funf, or 'slaughterhouse five.' Vonnegut's theme throughout the book is that fundamentally we survive as human beings because we remember the good and forget the bad things that happen to us.
I've always had trouble with that formula, but I don't deny it's what most people do, nor do I deny that it works. It is much, much easier for the South to remember the signing of peace between gentlemen than the 30 thousand something prisoners who died under horrific conditions in Andersonville. My mind, however, always goes to dark places.
It is the reason why I often do not get along with other historians, because it seems to me that historians more than anyone like to cherry pick the events of the past, particularly upon the subject of atrocities. George Santayana's words, that "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," is sadly quoted to much by people who do not know that Santayana also said, "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." I think truly the second quote hits closer to the mark. To it, I will add one of my own. The history we think we remember is a lie of omission.
Vonnegut's argument is that we do that because we would go crazy as a society if we lived too near the truth. Perhaps I'm only dark in my outlook because I never have been that close to the truth. I've never been in a war-zone. I've never seen people blown apart. I've never had a pistol pointed at my head. Every idea that I have about the horrors of anything are second hand, at best. The omission in my understanding of violent history is that I've never experienced any.
Perhaps that is why my dearest time is spent in one of two unreal dreams. I am either writing, or I am designing, things that haven't happened to people who don't exist, for the sake of an ersatz emotion for deaths that cannot occur. Perhaps it is my tendency to escape into a mock recreation of violence - rather than nobility - that drives the game world I fabricate and run. I feed my dark side while admitting that I would not want to do so by travelling to modern day Liberia, Zaire or Afghanistan. If I truly had a dark side, if my mind were truly driven towards comprehension and understanding, then surely the logical course of action would be to set aside the game and partake in the reality.
I omit that option, though, and cheat by getting upset over the brutal events of history. I am no different than those who cheat by swelling with pride over the noble events of history. It is two sides of a coin. I am simply remembering the other side. I only run a dark world, with dark people in it, because that is my particular fetish.
Doesn't make me better. Only makes me different.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Replacing Work
I find myself at odds.
This last weekend I spent most of my available time re-writing the 10,000 word How to Play a Character post ... realizing, naturally, that the post on the blog is sort of in the ball park but is in fact an awful lot of shit posing as advice. An awful lot. But this is how writing is. In retrospect, all the works of genius that we think we've written turn out to be just so much crap (if it doesn't, then I don't want to ever read anything you've written), so we rework it, rewrite it, clarify the bumpy parts and do a better job. Good work is sometimes done off the cuff ... but good writing is a lot of good work done over and over again.
The question is, in reworking the How to Play post for the essay book, should I: a) delete the original post from the blog; b) leave the blog as is; or c) update the blog to reflect the book version.
Sorry, I should explain about the essay book, for those who don't know. In the interest of raising additional money for printing costs, I'm taking up Tim Brannan's suggestion of putting together some of the good blog posts from the past into an essay book, obviously updating and improving the writing. This I am doing.
I don't think option (c) above would hurt my sales. I know that many of you out there plan to buy the book just to support me, while many of the people I would be selling the book to have never heard of the blog. It has the beauty of hiding my errors and making me look like a better writer.
(b), however, has the beauty of exposing my errors and proving that not only am I not perfect, no one has to be in order to be a better DM, or a better writer. Plus it offers the opportunity to be genuine. Which I like. Still, people could read the original and think, "Wow, the essay book must be awful," a fair assessment from how bad I think that original blog post is, now that I've looked closely at it.
(a), deleting it completely, is the really cheap option. The business model option, to be honest, the option that Monsanto would do because corporations think along the lines of, if you take it away people are more likely to pay for it. I don't like option (a). At all. I include it because someone is going to suggest it, and because I want to express my awareness that the option exists. I frankly don't think the option is a good one.
The same three options exist, of course, for any other former blog post I'm going to work on. I've identified six I plan to include; I need two more, which I haven't quite decided upon. The Steamy Sex post, though very popular, will not be one of them. I did consider it.
I'll have to decide upon some precedent for all of them.
This last weekend I spent most of my available time re-writing the 10,000 word How to Play a Character post ... realizing, naturally, that the post on the blog is sort of in the ball park but is in fact an awful lot of shit posing as advice. An awful lot. But this is how writing is. In retrospect, all the works of genius that we think we've written turn out to be just so much crap (if it doesn't, then I don't want to ever read anything you've written), so we rework it, rewrite it, clarify the bumpy parts and do a better job. Good work is sometimes done off the cuff ... but good writing is a lot of good work done over and over again.
The question is, in reworking the How to Play post for the essay book, should I: a) delete the original post from the blog; b) leave the blog as is; or c) update the blog to reflect the book version.
Sorry, I should explain about the essay book, for those who don't know. In the interest of raising additional money for printing costs, I'm taking up Tim Brannan's suggestion of putting together some of the good blog posts from the past into an essay book, obviously updating and improving the writing. This I am doing.
I don't think option (c) above would hurt my sales. I know that many of you out there plan to buy the book just to support me, while many of the people I would be selling the book to have never heard of the blog. It has the beauty of hiding my errors and making me look like a better writer.
(b), however, has the beauty of exposing my errors and proving that not only am I not perfect, no one has to be in order to be a better DM, or a better writer. Plus it offers the opportunity to be genuine. Which I like. Still, people could read the original and think, "Wow, the essay book must be awful," a fair assessment from how bad I think that original blog post is, now that I've looked closely at it.
(a), deleting it completely, is the really cheap option. The business model option, to be honest, the option that Monsanto would do because corporations think along the lines of, if you take it away people are more likely to pay for it. I don't like option (a). At all. I include it because someone is going to suggest it, and because I want to express my awareness that the option exists. I frankly don't think the option is a good one.
The same three options exist, of course, for any other former blog post I'm going to work on. I've identified six I plan to include; I need two more, which I haven't quite decided upon. The Steamy Sex post, though very popular, will not be one of them. I did consider it.
I'll have to decide upon some precedent for all of them.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Building a Market
Because I work in an extraordinarily normal setting, in a building with extraordinarily normal business-people (white males aged 25 to 50, white females aged 20 to 35), I had to make up my mind early about whether or not I was going to mention that I was working on a book ... considering the content of that book. If we want to talk about conservative central regarding whether or not anyone around role-plays, well, they've heard of it. Some of their kids do. They don't really get it. For them, particularly the higher-status types, 'role-play' is that thing you do where a team of people on retreat try to cross a mock stream in the foyer of the company's hotel through cooperation. It isn't what people would call 'a good time.'
My decision was do more than admit what I was doing, but to deliberately call attention to it. If I'm asked by someone, "How are you doing" - that absolutely everybody asks - I tell them, straight out. Full title, all the content, etc., as if they're going to understand what I'm saying. And I get some interesting responses.
The first group absolutely has no idea what I'm talking about. They've never heard of role-playing, they don't know what a 'player' is, much less a DM or D&D. This people are utterly, completely clueless, and it is really quite marvelous that they still exist. Incidentally, they also tend to be among the better paid lower-level executives in the 20-30 age range. These are people who went straight from the prom-planning committee and fraternities/sororities into business school and employment with daddy/mommy's brother/friend/ex-college roommate. There's no table at Las Vegas that gives odds on role-playing, so these people don't know what it is. Real pity, though, as these people also have a lot of money that is virtually worthless to them.
The second group includes the largest portion - they've heard of role-playing, most often D&D, on television or other media. About it, they know nothing. Their eyes show a tiny bit of fear as you talk, as they are completely clueless and anyone knowing something they don't know is a bit upsetting. Understand, these are sheltered, sheltered people. They don't go to clubs, they have families, mostly with kids in the infant to ten range, and their lives are mostly taken up with school, events, holidays and social clubs to which they belong. Anything outside that zone of comfort tends to upset them, which explains why things like extra taxes and pet registrations give them the night tremors. I must admit, I take a sort of pleasure in going on with them a bit over-long as they're taking pains to be polite, but one hopes they might someday meet someone, or have a child someday, that will also play, and they will remember I'm out here and that I am the master. So goes networking.
The third group is more interesting. Not only have they heard of gaming, they've actually seen it. They haven't played, and they know just enough to know that it is something I ought to be ashamed of. That's even better to see in their eyes than fear. Once again, they're polite (though a little more abrupt, because they've been haranged before by role-players), and every once in awhile they'll ask something like, "So, do you talk about various games, that kind of thing?" I have to love that, since then I can launch into the fact that no, no games, but an in-depth evaluation of how to obtain emotional responses from groups of people through dramatic presentation, reading people as you do so, dealing with stress among large groups and how otherwise to handle groups to encourage them to feel motivated and interested, etc. That usually gets a sort of glazed-eye response, followed by quick excuses and a need to get away from the 'crazy person,' that being me. It must be remembered, if I were writing an advanced account of the Ghibelline-Guelph conflicts in Florence and Tuscany circa 14th-15th centuries, the response would be about the same. The same rule applies - these people might meet someone who plays.
Now, the fourth group used to play. And conversations there go as expected, depending on what game they used to play and how much they remember. Usually not much. In six months of talking straight with business people, I've met exactly one fellow like this. He's in IT.
The fifth group should be people who are playing now, but there are no people I've met who are playing now. That doesn't mean they don't exist ... I can only speak for the monkey sphere that's closest to me, some 150, perhaps 200 people, who run across my path now and them in some capacity or other.
This is why occasionally on the blog I make some point about people being largely ignorant about role-playing. I doubt there are more than two or three dozen people in my entire building, of about 4,000, who have ever played DDO or even Warhammer ... these people have money, and they spend their weekends skiing, playing golf, drinking heavily, etc. They don't videogame. I know this because when in a media discussion, about the media, or about the state of the media industry comes up, it is very plain that no one has a clue. It's quite profound to see. Yes, there are people in the world who do not know that video-games are a big deal. A rather frightening number of people, actually. Who have money, and who have control over a LOT of money.
Food for thought.
I intend to go on telling people what I'm doing. Every kind of person. I can't build a market by relying only upon the market someone else built.
My decision was do more than admit what I was doing, but to deliberately call attention to it. If I'm asked by someone, "How are you doing" - that absolutely everybody asks - I tell them, straight out. Full title, all the content, etc., as if they're going to understand what I'm saying. And I get some interesting responses.
The first group absolutely has no idea what I'm talking about. They've never heard of role-playing, they don't know what a 'player' is, much less a DM or D&D. This people are utterly, completely clueless, and it is really quite marvelous that they still exist. Incidentally, they also tend to be among the better paid lower-level executives in the 20-30 age range. These are people who went straight from the prom-planning committee and fraternities/sororities into business school and employment with daddy/mommy's brother/friend/ex-college roommate. There's no table at Las Vegas that gives odds on role-playing, so these people don't know what it is. Real pity, though, as these people also have a lot of money that is virtually worthless to them.
The second group includes the largest portion - they've heard of role-playing, most often D&D, on television or other media. About it, they know nothing. Their eyes show a tiny bit of fear as you talk, as they are completely clueless and anyone knowing something they don't know is a bit upsetting. Understand, these are sheltered, sheltered people. They don't go to clubs, they have families, mostly with kids in the infant to ten range, and their lives are mostly taken up with school, events, holidays and social clubs to which they belong. Anything outside that zone of comfort tends to upset them, which explains why things like extra taxes and pet registrations give them the night tremors. I must admit, I take a sort of pleasure in going on with them a bit over-long as they're taking pains to be polite, but one hopes they might someday meet someone, or have a child someday, that will also play, and they will remember I'm out here and that I am the master. So goes networking.
The third group is more interesting. Not only have they heard of gaming, they've actually seen it. They haven't played, and they know just enough to know that it is something I ought to be ashamed of. That's even better to see in their eyes than fear. Once again, they're polite (though a little more abrupt, because they've been haranged before by role-players), and every once in awhile they'll ask something like, "So, do you talk about various games, that kind of thing?" I have to love that, since then I can launch into the fact that no, no games, but an in-depth evaluation of how to obtain emotional responses from groups of people through dramatic presentation, reading people as you do so, dealing with stress among large groups and how otherwise to handle groups to encourage them to feel motivated and interested, etc. That usually gets a sort of glazed-eye response, followed by quick excuses and a need to get away from the 'crazy person,' that being me. It must be remembered, if I were writing an advanced account of the Ghibelline-Guelph conflicts in Florence and Tuscany circa 14th-15th centuries, the response would be about the same. The same rule applies - these people might meet someone who plays.
Now, the fourth group used to play. And conversations there go as expected, depending on what game they used to play and how much they remember. Usually not much. In six months of talking straight with business people, I've met exactly one fellow like this. He's in IT.
The fifth group should be people who are playing now, but there are no people I've met who are playing now. That doesn't mean they don't exist ... I can only speak for the monkey sphere that's closest to me, some 150, perhaps 200 people, who run across my path now and them in some capacity or other.
This is why occasionally on the blog I make some point about people being largely ignorant about role-playing. I doubt there are more than two or three dozen people in my entire building, of about 4,000, who have ever played DDO or even Warhammer ... these people have money, and they spend their weekends skiing, playing golf, drinking heavily, etc. They don't videogame. I know this because when in a media discussion, about the media, or about the state of the media industry comes up, it is very plain that no one has a clue. It's quite profound to see. Yes, there are people in the world who do not know that video-games are a big deal. A rather frightening number of people, actually. Who have money, and who have control over a LOT of money.
Food for thought.
I intend to go on telling people what I'm doing. Every kind of person. I can't build a market by relying only upon the market someone else built.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Misers and Non-Problems
How long it seems since I have written purely about D&D here. Yet every waking minute it seems I write about nothing else. The DM, the DM, the DM, those are my waking thoughts, and about the DM I write and write.
A few days ago John Arendt of Dreams in the Lich House talked about The Vast Wealth of Dungeons, and I have from time to time been thinking about it. The presupposition is, of course, that the DMG gives the 'right' amount of experience necessary to go up a level, or the 'right' amount of experience for monsters that are to be killed, such as saying that if I need 2,000 x.p. as a fighter, and I expect to get that strictly from killing goblins (speaking the Dungeon Master's Guide here, sorry to the later edition readers), that I must kill 137.931034 goblins to reach second level, on average. If I don't want to kill all those goblins, of course I can supplement the experience with gold I find, an average of something like 123 g.p. per 10 goblins, or something like that, if we're basing the numbers on the treasure table generated by the Dungeon Generator in the index.
But what does any of that matter? Why even state definitively that the fighter needs 2,000 experience? Several people at the Lich House talked about using silver instead of gold, and giving experience for silver (which I did myself once, in the game I ran through the 80s), but why not simply give experience for very, very rare gold and cut the actual amount of experience down to 200, or 20? It is only a ratio after all. The important thing isn't how much experience in round numbers is necessary, but how the experience compares from class to class or level to level. If the fighter needs 20 x.p. to get to second level, and to get 1 x.p. requires finding a gold piece that's 1/100th as common as it is in ordinary D&D, or 1 x.p. requires killing an opponent of equal or greater strength (or a group of opponents of approximately equal strength), the system works precisely the same. And it gets rid of all that gold choking up the hallways of dungeons. Remember, the number "2,000" was just pulled out of the gamemaker's ass. It wasn't written in stone and given to Father Abraham upon his departing Mesopotamia.
We have a strange habit of seeing problems that aren't really problems, they are merely issues of scale. If the scale of coin is an unworkable issue for your campaign, than simply change the scale. Does it really matter how much gold exists in the world? Is that a creditable issue? If it is the weight of all that gold that bothers you, remember that gold coins in the Roman era weighed only 7 grams. That's a quarter of a troy ounce, or 64 coins to the pound. Of gold. And a pound of gold doesn't take very much space, you may believe that. The specific gravity of gold is 19.3. These small coins didn't seem to confuse the Romans at all and weren't, of course, made entirely of gold ... they were somewhat less dense than 19.3 grams to the cubic centimeter. Still, gold was mixed with other dense metals, silver and copper. So you see, you could get a lot more into a sack than the rather silly 200 that's named in AD&D. Having 10,000 gold just doesn't take up as much space as you think.
And what difference does it make if a suit of armor costs 5 gold, 50 gold or 5,000 gold? Don't you think that a theater-goer of 1945, who used to pay eight cents to see a movie, would think you were silly for spending twenty dollars? The cost of things is entirely relative. You don't make something more 'realistic' by supposedly removing the inflationary price of things. Where do you begin considering where the 'inflation' started? Silent movies used to be a penny. It was inconceivable that a movie would ever cost eight cents.
Much of your perception of 'too much gold' or 'dungeons filled with gold' are only prejudices, not actual game problems. As game problems, they are painfully easy to solve. The difficulty isn't how much wealth exists or how much coin, it's how much coin does he, an admiral, have compared to her, the madam of a successful brothel? How much gold do 50 orcs have compared to three minotaurs? Those are actual problems. The distribution of coin compared to the relative difficulty in acquiring it. If we're going to offer a bit of brain sweat, let's apply it there.
Let me just end with a small addendum, about those out there who might think, regarding the post from earlier today, that I'm wrong to put a cute girl on a T-shirt to make an impression. What exactly is this, an image of Ava Gardner from the 1954 film, The Barefoot Contessa ... bad thinking?
It is an awful shock, but people like beautiful people. All the insistence of others that we shouldn't has little weight where it comes to encouraging people to buy something. Moreover, I like Ava Gardner in this movie. I like the movie as well, and strangely feel the need to review what it says about wealth and success and purpose often. But the reality is that I am biologically designed to find Ava Gardner attractive. Her appearance in this film, which is about the attractiveness of a woman who nevertheless eschews her attractiveness, came about because film-makers at the time recognized that human nature is a better selling tool than guilt or finger-wagging.
Whatever you wish to do with the coin of your world, comprehend that biologically players are also inclined to like gold and to want to pour it over themselves, and feel they have a lot of it, because it makes them happy. And if you will take a stance that insists that your players be ascetics, you've got to realize that you're going against nature. In the long run, you're going to lose that fight.
One has to wonder, why would you be such a miser with something that costs you nothing?
A few days ago John Arendt of Dreams in the Lich House talked about The Vast Wealth of Dungeons, and I have from time to time been thinking about it. The presupposition is, of course, that the DMG gives the 'right' amount of experience necessary to go up a level, or the 'right' amount of experience for monsters that are to be killed, such as saying that if I need 2,000 x.p. as a fighter, and I expect to get that strictly from killing goblins (speaking the Dungeon Master's Guide here, sorry to the later edition readers), that I must kill 137.931034 goblins to reach second level, on average. If I don't want to kill all those goblins, of course I can supplement the experience with gold I find, an average of something like 123 g.p. per 10 goblins, or something like that, if we're basing the numbers on the treasure table generated by the Dungeon Generator in the index.
But what does any of that matter? Why even state definitively that the fighter needs 2,000 experience? Several people at the Lich House talked about using silver instead of gold, and giving experience for silver (which I did myself once, in the game I ran through the 80s), but why not simply give experience for very, very rare gold and cut the actual amount of experience down to 200, or 20? It is only a ratio after all. The important thing isn't how much experience in round numbers is necessary, but how the experience compares from class to class or level to level. If the fighter needs 20 x.p. to get to second level, and to get 1 x.p. requires finding a gold piece that's 1/100th as common as it is in ordinary D&D, or 1 x.p. requires killing an opponent of equal or greater strength (or a group of opponents of approximately equal strength), the system works precisely the same. And it gets rid of all that gold choking up the hallways of dungeons. Remember, the number "2,000" was just pulled out of the gamemaker's ass. It wasn't written in stone and given to Father Abraham upon his departing Mesopotamia.
We have a strange habit of seeing problems that aren't really problems, they are merely issues of scale. If the scale of coin is an unworkable issue for your campaign, than simply change the scale. Does it really matter how much gold exists in the world? Is that a creditable issue? If it is the weight of all that gold that bothers you, remember that gold coins in the Roman era weighed only 7 grams. That's a quarter of a troy ounce, or 64 coins to the pound. Of gold. And a pound of gold doesn't take very much space, you may believe that. The specific gravity of gold is 19.3. These small coins didn't seem to confuse the Romans at all and weren't, of course, made entirely of gold ... they were somewhat less dense than 19.3 grams to the cubic centimeter. Still, gold was mixed with other dense metals, silver and copper. So you see, you could get a lot more into a sack than the rather silly 200 that's named in AD&D. Having 10,000 gold just doesn't take up as much space as you think.
And what difference does it make if a suit of armor costs 5 gold, 50 gold or 5,000 gold? Don't you think that a theater-goer of 1945, who used to pay eight cents to see a movie, would think you were silly for spending twenty dollars? The cost of things is entirely relative. You don't make something more 'realistic' by supposedly removing the inflationary price of things. Where do you begin considering where the 'inflation' started? Silent movies used to be a penny. It was inconceivable that a movie would ever cost eight cents.
Much of your perception of 'too much gold' or 'dungeons filled with gold' are only prejudices, not actual game problems. As game problems, they are painfully easy to solve. The difficulty isn't how much wealth exists or how much coin, it's how much coin does he, an admiral, have compared to her, the madam of a successful brothel? How much gold do 50 orcs have compared to three minotaurs? Those are actual problems. The distribution of coin compared to the relative difficulty in acquiring it. If we're going to offer a bit of brain sweat, let's apply it there.
Let me just end with a small addendum, about those out there who might think, regarding the post from earlier today, that I'm wrong to put a cute girl on a T-shirt to make an impression. What exactly is this, an image of Ava Gardner from the 1954 film, The Barefoot Contessa ... bad thinking?
It is an awful shock, but people like beautiful people. All the insistence of others that we shouldn't has little weight where it comes to encouraging people to buy something. Moreover, I like Ava Gardner in this movie. I like the movie as well, and strangely feel the need to review what it says about wealth and success and purpose often. But the reality is that I am biologically designed to find Ava Gardner attractive. Her appearance in this film, which is about the attractiveness of a woman who nevertheless eschews her attractiveness, came about because film-makers at the time recognized that human nature is a better selling tool than guilt or finger-wagging.
Whatever you wish to do with the coin of your world, comprehend that biologically players are also inclined to like gold and to want to pour it over themselves, and feel they have a lot of it, because it makes them happy. And if you will take a stance that insists that your players be ascetics, you've got to realize that you're going against nature. In the long run, you're going to lose that fight.
One has to wonder, why would you be such a miser with something that costs you nothing?
Roll 'Em
Because we are setting up a fundraiser in June to pay for printing costs and the price of travelling to Toronto this August, we are looking for additional things to sell. My daughter commissioned this T-shirt design, which we plan to have on sale within six weeks. Let me know what you think of it, and make a suggestion or two about what catchy expression it needs:
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Bad Bubble! Bad Bad Bad!
If you're finding lately that people are giving you a hard time for your interest in role-playing games, or if you worry about how socially leprous they are, or whether or not you feel free to comment about them in the public space where you work or play, then you should have a close look at this:
This is a screenshot from a pro-anorexia website, in which people with eating disorders join together to share tips, give support and discuss their day-to-day activities in order to jointly pursue the practice of remaining true to their disorder. Please take note, this is not for people who want to stop being anorexic. This is for people who love it, who don't want to stop doing it, and who want to talk to others about that. The general discussions forum on the website that I took the above image from lists 821,176 replies at the time of this writing. 3 replies came in over the time it took to write this paragraph.
What must be recognized is how this differs powerfully from the liberal sensibilities message that permeates the society, which rails that people must not take part in any sort of destructive activity, including self-destructive. These people do not care. They do not care about your opinion nor mine regarding activities they embrace.
I wish I could find an online group of role-players who were that dedicated about their passion.
Because I'm not a journalist, but a blogger, and I have no institution to which I must genuflect in order to write this post, I don't have to now provide a packaged sort of phrase about the morality of the above. I have been a journalist. I may again be a journalist, if a job ever materialized again for me in this paper-dead culture. But I don't consider myself a journalist right now, and thank you, I don't want to be one. That is because, partly for reasons I gave last Wednesday, journalism is a corrupt, institutionalized information-delivery system whose cracks have begun to show.
I do not know about the reader, but recently I have begun to notice how mythological the depiction of journalism is of late. Here I am thinking of journalists as they appear in shows like Kevin Spacey's House of Cards or Antoine Fuqua's collapsed vehicle Boss ... in which journalists are still depicted as though this were the 1970s All the President's Men and not the modern ridiculousness of the New York Times, the lately corrupt and dead News of the World, or television's Fox News or CNN, where speculation and idiocy have replaced investigative journalism. No one, anywhere, has the budget or the time or even the inclination for investigative journalism, which is more than evident in the total lack of useful foreign news that can be gotten from a North American vendor (I am including the Canadian press and media in this). It is terribly convenient for drama to still imagine an editor who can throw on a coat and rush out to talk to a source, but it is silly in the extreme. No one does this any more, and anyone who tried would quickly be fired.
I include Aaron Sorkin here with his completely out-of-date The Newsroom, which is a sometimes painful so-called political drama show where everyone ACTS like the world still works like it did in 1965, while simultaneously LAMENTING that the world does not work like it did in 1965. It is a bizarre mix of cognitive dissonance, both of the writer and anyone who is apparently funding the show, to an audience clearly out of touch with the internet - but then, I said yesterday that television hates the internet.
Because I am not a journalist, I don't have to justify any of the above except to say, 'my opinion.' The only value my opinion has is that it strikes a chord with people, who presumably are nodding their heads as they read along. I am, therefore, preaching to the choir ... but there are worse places to preach.
One thing that the media really, really hates is the 'bubble.' That is, the one you live in, where you only read the things that interest you, or that you agree with. This is bad for you, very bad. Mostly because it means you won't be listening to the advertising that funds the media, because the very WORST thing about the bubble is that you're not interested in buying things you don't like, either. Basically, the media can't reach you, they can't preach to you, they can't program you and they can't put a bug in your ear to waste your money on their products.
This is bad for them, very bad.
It does mean, however, that you'll spend your morning, or your evening, floating around a lot of free content on the net that has been written today about D&D and other things that fascinate you, instead of watching a lot of bad programming and reading a lot of bad journalism that doesn't fascinate you. Oh, the bad, bad bubble.
When someone tells you that something is bad for you, the first thing you should wonder is what are they selling?
This is a screenshot from a pro-anorexia website, in which people with eating disorders join together to share tips, give support and discuss their day-to-day activities in order to jointly pursue the practice of remaining true to their disorder. Please take note, this is not for people who want to stop being anorexic. This is for people who love it, who don't want to stop doing it, and who want to talk to others about that. The general discussions forum on the website that I took the above image from lists 821,176 replies at the time of this writing. 3 replies came in over the time it took to write this paragraph.
What must be recognized is how this differs powerfully from the liberal sensibilities message that permeates the society, which rails that people must not take part in any sort of destructive activity, including self-destructive. These people do not care. They do not care about your opinion nor mine regarding activities they embrace.
I wish I could find an online group of role-players who were that dedicated about their passion.
Because I'm not a journalist, but a blogger, and I have no institution to which I must genuflect in order to write this post, I don't have to now provide a packaged sort of phrase about the morality of the above. I have been a journalist. I may again be a journalist, if a job ever materialized again for me in this paper-dead culture. But I don't consider myself a journalist right now, and thank you, I don't want to be one. That is because, partly for reasons I gave last Wednesday, journalism is a corrupt, institutionalized information-delivery system whose cracks have begun to show.
I do not know about the reader, but recently I have begun to notice how mythological the depiction of journalism is of late. Here I am thinking of journalists as they appear in shows like Kevin Spacey's House of Cards or Antoine Fuqua's collapsed vehicle Boss ... in which journalists are still depicted as though this were the 1970s All the President's Men and not the modern ridiculousness of the New York Times, the lately corrupt and dead News of the World, or television's Fox News or CNN, where speculation and idiocy have replaced investigative journalism. No one, anywhere, has the budget or the time or even the inclination for investigative journalism, which is more than evident in the total lack of useful foreign news that can be gotten from a North American vendor (I am including the Canadian press and media in this). It is terribly convenient for drama to still imagine an editor who can throw on a coat and rush out to talk to a source, but it is silly in the extreme. No one does this any more, and anyone who tried would quickly be fired.
I include Aaron Sorkin here with his completely out-of-date The Newsroom, which is a sometimes painful so-called political drama show where everyone ACTS like the world still works like it did in 1965, while simultaneously LAMENTING that the world does not work like it did in 1965. It is a bizarre mix of cognitive dissonance, both of the writer and anyone who is apparently funding the show, to an audience clearly out of touch with the internet - but then, I said yesterday that television hates the internet.
Because I am not a journalist, I don't have to justify any of the above except to say, 'my opinion.' The only value my opinion has is that it strikes a chord with people, who presumably are nodding their heads as they read along. I am, therefore, preaching to the choir ... but there are worse places to preach.
One thing that the media really, really hates is the 'bubble.' That is, the one you live in, where you only read the things that interest you, or that you agree with. This is bad for you, very bad. Mostly because it means you won't be listening to the advertising that funds the media, because the very WORST thing about the bubble is that you're not interested in buying things you don't like, either. Basically, the media can't reach you, they can't preach to you, they can't program you and they can't put a bug in your ear to waste your money on their products.
This is bad for them, very bad.
It does mean, however, that you'll spend your morning, or your evening, floating around a lot of free content on the net that has been written today about D&D and other things that fascinate you, instead of watching a lot of bad programming and reading a lot of bad journalism that doesn't fascinate you. Oh, the bad, bad bubble.
When someone tells you that something is bad for you, the first thing you should wonder is what are they selling?
Monday, April 7, 2014
The Miserable Plight of Producers Who Know Best
Right now, I would sincerely, very sincerely, like to write something on agile design, but as that is just too damn close to where I am in the book right now, I have to let that go.
The regular reader will have noticed that I haven't written a straight post since last Wednesday, and it would be fair to assume that that's because I've been busy and I haven't had time and that I've been putting my resources towards other things and so on. That would be total bullshit, but it's a fair assumption.
The real issue would be that since Wednesday, I have been unable to stop thinking of new ways to write Wednesday's post again. I am myself still geeking out over the philosophical premise I advanced ... and if I had written a post yesterday or Friday or any time before now, I would have hammered on the points I'd already made to no real purpose.
The best I can manage at this time is to discuss something else Clay Shirky said just five months ago, while talking about agile design and the crash and burn of Obama's .gov website for health care. It was regarding the expectation of producing a program for the general public that would be perfect for launch-day, and how the idea that 'failure is not an option' is an idea that no engineer would embrace, as depicted in the film Apollo 13. The error was that the government withheld everything about the .gov launch until the last possible moment, with the expectation that it would be 'perfect' upon launch, and of course it wasn't. Public tests were not made, the disaster was augmented by the President's poor choice of speech on the day of the launch and the whole thing proved to be an unmitigated mess ... primarily because it was envisioned as something that would happen all at once, and thus make a sweeping change.
The alternative that Shirky argues, and indeed that most any engineer would argue, is that the process needs to be halted - however painful that is - as often as it needs to be halted, that failure IS an option, indeed, an expectation, and that ad hoc dates need to be suspended over the course of the product being made right. As Shirky says, would you rather jump from the first floor forty times, or from the 40th floor once. Too often, we're still thinking of product launches in terms of jumping from the 40th floor and hoping that we'll fly.
The reader should, from that, be able to conceive of the post that then goes on to talk about how the game world needs to be constructed in dimensions of one first-floor addition at a time, instead of trying to make the whole world at once and launch it, but I already said, I'm not talking about agile design. Instead, I'm going to make Shirky's point again, pedantically, because damn it that's where I am right now.
The problem is, I think, that people perceive the launch of anything in the way that performances are prepared. The cast is gathered, they're taught their lines, the scenes are blocked and the various aspects of the production are created and finished for Opening Night. Before the curtain goes up, there is great tension from the need to give a perfect performance. That is because everyone knows, from Hollywood if from no place else, that if the critics don't like the performance, the show will close and everyone will have to go back to dishwashing or drywalling.
It is actually a lot of shit, and particularly funny shit in the fact that Hollywood and the movies repeatedly portrays the theatrical stage in these terms mainly because the stage is competition. It is, incidentally, the same reason that television and the movies are so repeatedly ridiculous about their depiction of the internet and computer games - there's a financial reason to downplay, for the audience, any reason to be interested in those obviously dumb and ridiculous things. Movies and their portrayal of theatre is no different.
Remember that the movies are all about doing it until you get it right. Thus it seems poignant to point out that theatre is obviously a lot less practical, because you can't do another take and if you don't do it perfect, the critics close you down and you all go home.
Plays in the good old days did not, however, actually open on Broadway (though they do now, which is probably why so many of them are so crappy). What they used to do was open in Cincinnati, or Cleveland, or Buffalo, where presumably the hicks lived, and where the show and its cast could be tested. Plays, particularly comedies, take more than rehearsing to an empty house to sort out and reach their peak quality. Timing, staging, the reliability of the performers and so on are things that can take months to smooth out ... and the best place to do that was in some reasonably sized city where an audience could be obtained as guinea pigs for an expected number of bad performances while things were improved. Once everyone in Buffalo said the play was crap, the idea was then to move on and insult everyone in Peoria, Indianapolis and Schnectady, until the play started to get some positive local reviews in time for it to move to either Philadelphia or Boston, the last stop before it hit New York.
So, in effect, plays were, like computer programs, tested first, until they were finally put on stage in the only city that really mattered. New York mattered because people came from all over the country, and from across the Pond, to visit New York, where they would take in a play. People did not come from all over the country to see a play in Kalamazoo, so it didn't matter if the play bombed there.
Here's what I'm saying, that will not be included in the book. If you're going to make a world, than what you want to do is drag your world over to some venue, preferably in Utica, because its a funny sounding name for a city, and have a bunch of people who don't matter, and about whom you don't give a fuck, play in it and give you feedback. Then, make changes. That's the critical part. Make Changes. When people in Syracuse or Waterbury didn't laugh at the neck-tie scene in the 2nd Act, they changed the necktie scene or they got rid of it. They didn't say, "Well, the neck-tie scene worked in my opinion, the people of Waterbury just don't understand quality theatre." Well, some people said that. People who then went on to become plumbers and car salesmen after their producing careers ended in a sad, miserable, empty-theatre mess.
But, I know, the reader is not going to do that. Because if there's any argument that's out there that will never change, it is that DMs know best. Even if the table empties of players. The DM always knows best.
The regular reader will have noticed that I haven't written a straight post since last Wednesday, and it would be fair to assume that that's because I've been busy and I haven't had time and that I've been putting my resources towards other things and so on. That would be total bullshit, but it's a fair assumption.
The real issue would be that since Wednesday, I have been unable to stop thinking of new ways to write Wednesday's post again. I am myself still geeking out over the philosophical premise I advanced ... and if I had written a post yesterday or Friday or any time before now, I would have hammered on the points I'd already made to no real purpose.
The best I can manage at this time is to discuss something else Clay Shirky said just five months ago, while talking about agile design and the crash and burn of Obama's .gov website for health care. It was regarding the expectation of producing a program for the general public that would be perfect for launch-day, and how the idea that 'failure is not an option' is an idea that no engineer would embrace, as depicted in the film Apollo 13. The error was that the government withheld everything about the .gov launch until the last possible moment, with the expectation that it would be 'perfect' upon launch, and of course it wasn't. Public tests were not made, the disaster was augmented by the President's poor choice of speech on the day of the launch and the whole thing proved to be an unmitigated mess ... primarily because it was envisioned as something that would happen all at once, and thus make a sweeping change.
The alternative that Shirky argues, and indeed that most any engineer would argue, is that the process needs to be halted - however painful that is - as often as it needs to be halted, that failure IS an option, indeed, an expectation, and that ad hoc dates need to be suspended over the course of the product being made right. As Shirky says, would you rather jump from the first floor forty times, or from the 40th floor once. Too often, we're still thinking of product launches in terms of jumping from the 40th floor and hoping that we'll fly.
The reader should, from that, be able to conceive of the post that then goes on to talk about how the game world needs to be constructed in dimensions of one first-floor addition at a time, instead of trying to make the whole world at once and launch it, but I already said, I'm not talking about agile design. Instead, I'm going to make Shirky's point again, pedantically, because damn it that's where I am right now.
The problem is, I think, that people perceive the launch of anything in the way that performances are prepared. The cast is gathered, they're taught their lines, the scenes are blocked and the various aspects of the production are created and finished for Opening Night. Before the curtain goes up, there is great tension from the need to give a perfect performance. That is because everyone knows, from Hollywood if from no place else, that if the critics don't like the performance, the show will close and everyone will have to go back to dishwashing or drywalling.
It is actually a lot of shit, and particularly funny shit in the fact that Hollywood and the movies repeatedly portrays the theatrical stage in these terms mainly because the stage is competition. It is, incidentally, the same reason that television and the movies are so repeatedly ridiculous about their depiction of the internet and computer games - there's a financial reason to downplay, for the audience, any reason to be interested in those obviously dumb and ridiculous things. Movies and their portrayal of theatre is no different.
Remember that the movies are all about doing it until you get it right. Thus it seems poignant to point out that theatre is obviously a lot less practical, because you can't do another take and if you don't do it perfect, the critics close you down and you all go home.
Plays in the good old days did not, however, actually open on Broadway (though they do now, which is probably why so many of them are so crappy). What they used to do was open in Cincinnati, or Cleveland, or Buffalo, where presumably the hicks lived, and where the show and its cast could be tested. Plays, particularly comedies, take more than rehearsing to an empty house to sort out and reach their peak quality. Timing, staging, the reliability of the performers and so on are things that can take months to smooth out ... and the best place to do that was in some reasonably sized city where an audience could be obtained as guinea pigs for an expected number of bad performances while things were improved. Once everyone in Buffalo said the play was crap, the idea was then to move on and insult everyone in Peoria, Indianapolis and Schnectady, until the play started to get some positive local reviews in time for it to move to either Philadelphia or Boston, the last stop before it hit New York.
So, in effect, plays were, like computer programs, tested first, until they were finally put on stage in the only city that really mattered. New York mattered because people came from all over the country, and from across the Pond, to visit New York, where they would take in a play. People did not come from all over the country to see a play in Kalamazoo, so it didn't matter if the play bombed there.
Here's what I'm saying, that will not be included in the book. If you're going to make a world, than what you want to do is drag your world over to some venue, preferably in Utica, because its a funny sounding name for a city, and have a bunch of people who don't matter, and about whom you don't give a fuck, play in it and give you feedback. Then, make changes. That's the critical part. Make Changes. When people in Syracuse or Waterbury didn't laugh at the neck-tie scene in the 2nd Act, they changed the necktie scene or they got rid of it. They didn't say, "Well, the neck-tie scene worked in my opinion, the people of Waterbury just don't understand quality theatre." Well, some people said that. People who then went on to become plumbers and car salesmen after their producing careers ended in a sad, miserable, empty-theatre mess.
But, I know, the reader is not going to do that. Because if there's any argument that's out there that will never change, it is that DMs know best. Even if the table empties of players. The DM always knows best.
Suicide Girls
I learned yesterday that someone I trust was backstage at a Suicide Girls concert over the weekend, and that in talking to them she learned that there are a couple of D&D enthusiasts in the troop. My Advanced Guide was mentioned and this blog was, I'm told, immediately found and bookmarked ... which would explain the mysterious jump in page views I saw Friday night.
I am feeling very good about the future just now.
Hm. Are they reading this now, I wonder? I hope so. I think they're great.
I am feeling very good about the future just now.
Hm. Are they reading this now, I wonder? I hope so. I think they're great.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Crowdbouncing II
It would be best to think of this as more of the last post; I am still on about the same things.
In the Clay Shirky video I posted this morning, he talks about the manner in which wikipedia came into existence as an alternative to a web encyclopedia that was supposed to be called 'Newpedia' ... which would be a researched, fact-checked information tool that would have articles that were a trustworthy source of information. And this, too, relates to the 'old way' of doing things.
The old way of thinking says that we absolutely should never, ever print anything that isn't corroborated and TRUE, because if we do people trying to base what they know on what we say will be misled and that will lead to disastrous consequences. If you're led to think, for example, that swimming right after you eat won't lead to cramps, then you'll go swimming, get a cramp, and die. For that reason, fact-checking is a critical, no-nonsense business and people who don't take fact-checking seriously should be held at the same level as murderers who have committed manslaughter. You can believe that in the newsmedia where I worked, that was precisely the attitude.
The problem is, of course, that bad information still slipped through. Swimming after eating doesn't produce cramps, except that a certain number of people are going to get cramps while swimming, and a certain number of those cramp-getting people are going to get those cramps right after eating, so it will seem like there is a connection there. The same connection was made when people screamed that silicon implants caused breast cancer, because some women with implants got cancer right after getting the implants. As it happened, the incidence of cancer didn't actually increase, but the invention of the implant allowed an association to be made that had never existed before (because there were no implants in existence), and people - news media included - rushed at that association at full muster.
The thing about news media, and I've mentioned this before, is that it relies on corroboration of facts by asking experts if something is true. If you can find two experts (or three, or four, or however many you need depending on the splash the story will make) who both have credibility to agree on a story, then you have corroboration and you can print that story. The problem is, if it happens that all your experts are screwed up because they all read a report ten years ago that has long since been proved false, but they still believe it, you will have no trouble corroborating your story no matter how many people you need. And thus bullshit gets printed.
Now, the belief in getting things RIGHT before moving forward has permeated through the culture, to the point where if someone in the public eye gets something wrong, that someone deserves to be vilified for not first fact-checking whatever it was they said - with the addendum that if someone admits they don't know something that everyone is expected to know, we can vilify for that too.
Then along comes Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't pre-suppose that the content will be right when it's published ... but instead relies on people fixing it after the fact. It includes the simple rationale that sometimes we're wrong, and then we're educated, and then we're as right as the people who were right from the beginning. It doesn't matter that we were wrong before - that's in the past and it's meaningless. What matters is what we believe now.
This is one of the reasons I'm not worried about saying something today that disagrees with something I said three years ago. So what? We're all wrong about things. There's a whole archive about getting lyrics wrong. We go our little way, we think we're right - heck, we're even so damn sure we argue with other people and shout them down because damn it, we know. Then we find out we didn't, and we're a bit sheeping, and we move on.
Having an opinion does not mean that for the rest of your life you must be shackled to that opinion. That might perhaps be a reason why people are unwilling to change - because they'll still have to pay the price for being wrong anyway. Right up to my mother's death she continued to believe that the basement window got busted because I was playing ball in the backyard - though I told her that I'd kicked in it when I was 15 because I was locked out and I needed the report that I'd left on my bed if I didn't want to fail 10th grade Biology. Even though I told her, my mother had been telling herself the other story for so long that the next time that window came up, she still believed it was a baseball. (It all seems so silly anyway. So what if I had failed that class? It's hard now even to imagine why I was so desperate, but I was 15 and full of hormones).
We think a group of thoughts, then the world changes, and we change, and we think different thoughts, and some of those different thoughts are going to be captured in blog posts we wrote years ago. Who the hell knows what I will think ten years from now. All I can be sure of is that I'll have reason to believe the things I'll believe then, that I don't believe now.
I tell the reader; it doesn't matter what you've done, or what you've failed at, or what you believed. It matters what you do going forward. Yes, you'll make mistakes; but the internet offers changes to those mistakes, just like wikipedia, and once the changes are made, it won't matter what the page used to say.
The only thing that will matter is what you believe now.
In the Clay Shirky video I posted this morning, he talks about the manner in which wikipedia came into existence as an alternative to a web encyclopedia that was supposed to be called 'Newpedia' ... which would be a researched, fact-checked information tool that would have articles that were a trustworthy source of information. And this, too, relates to the 'old way' of doing things.
The old way of thinking says that we absolutely should never, ever print anything that isn't corroborated and TRUE, because if we do people trying to base what they know on what we say will be misled and that will lead to disastrous consequences. If you're led to think, for example, that swimming right after you eat won't lead to cramps, then you'll go swimming, get a cramp, and die. For that reason, fact-checking is a critical, no-nonsense business and people who don't take fact-checking seriously should be held at the same level as murderers who have committed manslaughter. You can believe that in the newsmedia where I worked, that was precisely the attitude.
The problem is, of course, that bad information still slipped through. Swimming after eating doesn't produce cramps, except that a certain number of people are going to get cramps while swimming, and a certain number of those cramp-getting people are going to get those cramps right after eating, so it will seem like there is a connection there. The same connection was made when people screamed that silicon implants caused breast cancer, because some women with implants got cancer right after getting the implants. As it happened, the incidence of cancer didn't actually increase, but the invention of the implant allowed an association to be made that had never existed before (because there were no implants in existence), and people - news media included - rushed at that association at full muster.
The thing about news media, and I've mentioned this before, is that it relies on corroboration of facts by asking experts if something is true. If you can find two experts (or three, or four, or however many you need depending on the splash the story will make) who both have credibility to agree on a story, then you have corroboration and you can print that story. The problem is, if it happens that all your experts are screwed up because they all read a report ten years ago that has long since been proved false, but they still believe it, you will have no trouble corroborating your story no matter how many people you need. And thus bullshit gets printed.
Now, the belief in getting things RIGHT before moving forward has permeated through the culture, to the point where if someone in the public eye gets something wrong, that someone deserves to be vilified for not first fact-checking whatever it was they said - with the addendum that if someone admits they don't know something that everyone is expected to know, we can vilify for that too.
Then along comes Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't pre-suppose that the content will be right when it's published ... but instead relies on people fixing it after the fact. It includes the simple rationale that sometimes we're wrong, and then we're educated, and then we're as right as the people who were right from the beginning. It doesn't matter that we were wrong before - that's in the past and it's meaningless. What matters is what we believe now.
This is one of the reasons I'm not worried about saying something today that disagrees with something I said three years ago. So what? We're all wrong about things. There's a whole archive about getting lyrics wrong. We go our little way, we think we're right - heck, we're even so damn sure we argue with other people and shout them down because damn it, we know. Then we find out we didn't, and we're a bit sheeping, and we move on.
Having an opinion does not mean that for the rest of your life you must be shackled to that opinion. That might perhaps be a reason why people are unwilling to change - because they'll still have to pay the price for being wrong anyway. Right up to my mother's death she continued to believe that the basement window got busted because I was playing ball in the backyard - though I told her that I'd kicked in it when I was 15 because I was locked out and I needed the report that I'd left on my bed if I didn't want to fail 10th grade Biology. Even though I told her, my mother had been telling herself the other story for so long that the next time that window came up, she still believed it was a baseball. (It all seems so silly anyway. So what if I had failed that class? It's hard now even to imagine why I was so desperate, but I was 15 and full of hormones).
We think a group of thoughts, then the world changes, and we change, and we think different thoughts, and some of those different thoughts are going to be captured in blog posts we wrote years ago. Who the hell knows what I will think ten years from now. All I can be sure of is that I'll have reason to believe the things I'll believe then, that I don't believe now.
I tell the reader; it doesn't matter what you've done, or what you've failed at, or what you believed. It matters what you do going forward. Yes, you'll make mistakes; but the internet offers changes to those mistakes, just like wikipedia, and once the changes are made, it won't matter what the page used to say.
The only thing that will matter is what you believe now.
Crowdbouncing
The last entrepreneurial venture that I embarked upon was a reader's theatre performance I organized in 2001, to raise money to cover the cost of living over that summer. There was an internet at the time, but it was far less connected that it is today; I did not know about blogs, I don't believe even myspace existed (if it did, I never saw it) and there was definitely no you-tube. As such, I was still doing things in the "old way," which means going with your gut, managing the meagre amount of market research you could with no money, advertising in the print media if at all, and getting people to hawk for the performance using the phone.
The old way sucks.
I cannot figure out why people continue to embrace print media. I've earned literally more than two hundred thousand dollars working for and selling to the print media, and I don't miss it. I haven't bought a newspaper in years, I absolutely have no intention of buying any advertising in it for this upcoming summer and I'm glad not to have to work with web presses (which I commissioned work from all through the 90s). I had an argument with a printer just the other day who is still doing things the "old way," who got upset with me when I asked why his prices couldn't compete with Lulu and Amazon online. He must be running his print business as a hobby.
What I really love about the present day is the marketing opportunities. God damn, I love free marketing. In the old days, if I had an idea for something - say, a button - I'd have to ask a few friends, a sales rep I might know, maybe an editor, people who were at least connected to sales somehow. Now, I can just put the button idea up on face-book, or here:
... and bad or good, I get instant response.
I think there's something very powerful about being able to think through everything in the public eye. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the public, or even allow your vision to be distracted, but you can get a lot of insight - or confirmation - from others. I wouldn't call it 'crowdsourcing,' however, since I'm not looking for the ideas to come from the crowd. It is really more like crowdbouncing ... and I think it's the most important entrepreneurial tool that's come around with the internet.
There's just one thing, however. You have to be prepared to 1) look stupid; and 2) get abuse. I don't think 'take' abuse is the right word, because I'm not inclined to take it, or give it any respect, but yes, fact is the abuse is going to come.
It also means that if you're going to crowdbounce your world on your blog, you've got to be a lot more clear about what you mean to do, and how you mean to do it. And being clear takes a lot of work. More to the point, you're going to make a lot more errors when you try to be clear, because you're nailing down more specifically what you hope to do. As an example, when I first put together the post that went through all my maths for my trade system (oft linked), I made something like 20 errors. They're not errors I make in excel, but trying to write them out, and be clear, in a 4,000+ word post, I wound up getting confused and making mistakes. Okay. It was embarrassing, but not crippling, and as the mistakes were pointed out I went back and fixed the post and sorted each one out until people stopped finding mistakes. I crowdbounced that puppy and now I refer back to it all the time.
The same thing goes for the occasional typos that turn up, or sentences that don't quite make sense. I'm typing around 50 words a minute while I'm inventing, and going back to change a word or two, and errors happen. The bullies of the internet would like to believe that pointing these errors out is proof positive that I or you or anyone is an idiot or at least a bad writer, but the fact is, pointing out my errors is editing. Editing is a normal, healthy part of writing. Editors are also hard to come by. Hell, I wish I could put my entire book up on my blog and ask all the readers here to edit the living shit out of it. Find those pesky missing words that always seem to get dropped from my text, find the errors, find the non-sequitors and mirror words like flaunt vs. flout, so I can FIX them in the text and put out a solid text in a week or so, without having to pay some freaking editor $500+ to take five weeks at it. Unfortunately, doing that, who would then buy the book?
But my world, your world, we're not selling those things, so we should feel free to draw them out down to the silliest level, to show other people what we're doing, and get back criticism. Sometimes I think I should just always have the camera running while I'm working on my world - provided I don't have to explain exactly what I'm doing - just to make a record of how long I am at doing this shit, and how patient I have to be. That's a bit over the top. I can easily spend forty hours a week working on a map or two, and that's hardly compelling video. How hard up would the gentle readers have to be to need that?
I'm only saying, there's always room for improvement, and having the whole world at the doorstep to say how is a good thing.
Clay Shirky in the video below makes some salient points about the sort of criticism that works. Have a look; he makes a clear distinction between what makes for valuable criticism, and what doesn't.
I want to emphasize this statement from Shirky, however: "The most important resource you've got is your own ability to change your mind." To do that, you have to create opportunities for your mind to be changed. In the old days, that meant going to the library, opening books, and reading. And while the internet has removed the first part of that sequence, and made the opening part easier, and increased the likelihood of finding a book that will change your mind, you're still limited by that process to what you happen to read. If the page title isn't something that compels you, then you'll never read that page, and your mind will never be changed by that article.
The benefit to having the internet is that ANYONE can butt their way into your consciousness and say, "You're wrong, let me tell you why." It also means that there will be a lot of people who will butt in and say, "You're wrong, stop what you're doing." This second group of people have to be ignored for the sake of the first group. You want people to grab you by the collar, you want people to slap you and say, HEY, what the hell were you thinking when you wrote this - don't you know about [blank]? So long as the second part of the statement is there, so long as they have [blank] to show you, then there's a real possibility that you'll realize you have been wrong ... AND you know what you have to follow up with and what you have to read in order to be right.
The problem with criticism is that all too often, the critics understand the first part, but they don't have the second. They know you're wrong, but they don't know how or why or where you have to go in order to get the right answer. Some of them will try to explain why you're wrong, but without a logical argument, it soon becomes clear they're talking from feelings or anecdotal results they've gotten, which has a lot more to do with who they are than it does with what they know.
Parsing though cloudbounced comments isn't easy, but it is definitely worth it. Particularly if you're not wrong. I put up that button idea on my facebook, and four people responded with liking it. Facebook is terrific that way. It understands that people want to be able to 'like' something without committing themselves to a comment. Just as people on this blog often write, "I don't have anything to add, and I feel silly just saying I like a thing."
I tell you, I have come to a lot of understandings in the last six years of blogging. I've had my wars with bullies, I've been a bully, I've made enemies, I've made friends, I've been the monkey dancing and my writing has improved vastly, mostly from having to again and again explain my thoughts as clearly as possible. I've gotten older, too, in that time, and I've had the opportunity to speak to more really smart people in the last six years than I had in the 16 before that. I have a little more wisdom than I had.
I am less sure that I'm right. Often, I think I must be, but I am realizing that getting further and further from what books can tell me about this game, or anything else I might write, I'm less and less sure of myself. This recent Advanced Guide; there is nothing like it out there. I can't find it, at any rate. So I feel like I'm ... out in space, if that makes any sense. I try to talk to people about it, and I find I can't even do that. Each of the excerpts I've compiled on the blog say much more in context ... but I can't begin to explain the context without pushing the book out and saying read this.
Researching it, writing it, defending parts of it, is making ME a better DM. There's no question about that. I'm far more conscious about things I do, than I was before.
An argument I've been making, largely off line, is that we do address criticism or explanations in all the wrong ways. Something I've become acutely conscious of in creating the book isn't in saying, "You're doing it wrong, do it this way." Inherently, some will read large parts of the book that way, but it's not the direction I'm taking. The bigger problem in explaining how to DM better, I think, is that we have no idea why what we're doing is working.
I think most DMs with experience, who are still at it after eight to ten years, have adjusted and figured out how to run a good game. I believe that's got to be true, or else there just isn't a reason for them to still be doing it. There are too many distractions in the world that pull people away from play; if a game is out there, and it's been ongoing for a year, that's an incredible achievement in a world where just about everything that's out there is a distraction. I think we have to acknowledge that, and think along lines that incorporate that reality into what's doing in the game world.
At the same time, I would wager that most of those DMs can't really explain what they're doing well enough to make it valuable for someone else. I believe that the constant argument, "there's no one right way to play D&D" is really an expression of our mutual frustration at not feeling that we're able to learn much from the way someone else plays. Not because we can't - but because there's no format, no framework, no language that yet exists to tell us HOW to learn. Without that positive frame, what we have is a belief in confrontation ... far too much emphasis on being told that we're doing something wrong, and too little emphasis on what we're doing right, and how easy it is to change our minds and fix things when that's crowdbounced back at us.
It isn't just a question of saying, "You run a good world." What's needed is to be able to explain, "You run a good world, and here's why I think what you're doing is working." That isn't there. I don't see that anywhere on the net. I don't hear anyone making that argument.
We've got to start by looking at ourselves and trying to look past the strategy, the planning and tactics, the tools or our technology or our overall vision, and at the base structure of what we're doing. How are we addressing other people at the table. How are we modifying our voice to make things better understood. How are we helping new players or answering questions or making concessions about our visions for the greater good, and most importantly how are we communicating those things to others.
People need to stop being fearful or embarrassed or uncertain or polite about giving positive comments. Positive comments aren't about feeding ego, they're not about being sycophantic or approving - they are about providing road signs that say, "You're going the right direction." Most of us out here aren't sure we are. We're spinning out the words and the points in the "old way," without the marketing feedback we want, that makes blogging worthwhile, hoping we're hitting our target and not knowing if we are.
There are easy ways to help. If you liked the post, say why. If the idea seems right, say that the writer is going in the right direction. If that's too much, google+ the damn page. Yes, google is an evil empire, but its a tool if you're too embarrassed to say why you like something. We all hate the negativity of the internet. You have a simple set of resources to inject positivity. Use them.
The old way sucks.
I cannot figure out why people continue to embrace print media. I've earned literally more than two hundred thousand dollars working for and selling to the print media, and I don't miss it. I haven't bought a newspaper in years, I absolutely have no intention of buying any advertising in it for this upcoming summer and I'm glad not to have to work with web presses (which I commissioned work from all through the 90s). I had an argument with a printer just the other day who is still doing things the "old way," who got upset with me when I asked why his prices couldn't compete with Lulu and Amazon online. He must be running his print business as a hobby.
What I really love about the present day is the marketing opportunities. God damn, I love free marketing. In the old days, if I had an idea for something - say, a button - I'd have to ask a few friends, a sales rep I might know, maybe an editor, people who were at least connected to sales somehow. Now, I can just put the button idea up on face-book, or here:
DMs Do It
While Running
I think there's something very powerful about being able to think through everything in the public eye. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the public, or even allow your vision to be distracted, but you can get a lot of insight - or confirmation - from others. I wouldn't call it 'crowdsourcing,' however, since I'm not looking for the ideas to come from the crowd. It is really more like crowdbouncing ... and I think it's the most important entrepreneurial tool that's come around with the internet.
There's just one thing, however. You have to be prepared to 1) look stupid; and 2) get abuse. I don't think 'take' abuse is the right word, because I'm not inclined to take it, or give it any respect, but yes, fact is the abuse is going to come.
It also means that if you're going to crowdbounce your world on your blog, you've got to be a lot more clear about what you mean to do, and how you mean to do it. And being clear takes a lot of work. More to the point, you're going to make a lot more errors when you try to be clear, because you're nailing down more specifically what you hope to do. As an example, when I first put together the post that went through all my maths for my trade system (oft linked), I made something like 20 errors. They're not errors I make in excel, but trying to write them out, and be clear, in a 4,000+ word post, I wound up getting confused and making mistakes. Okay. It was embarrassing, but not crippling, and as the mistakes were pointed out I went back and fixed the post and sorted each one out until people stopped finding mistakes. I crowdbounced that puppy and now I refer back to it all the time.
The same thing goes for the occasional typos that turn up, or sentences that don't quite make sense. I'm typing around 50 words a minute while I'm inventing, and going back to change a word or two, and errors happen. The bullies of the internet would like to believe that pointing these errors out is proof positive that I or you or anyone is an idiot or at least a bad writer, but the fact is, pointing out my errors is editing. Editing is a normal, healthy part of writing. Editors are also hard to come by. Hell, I wish I could put my entire book up on my blog and ask all the readers here to edit the living shit out of it. Find those pesky missing words that always seem to get dropped from my text, find the errors, find the non-sequitors and mirror words like flaunt vs. flout, so I can FIX them in the text and put out a solid text in a week or so, without having to pay some freaking editor $500+ to take five weeks at it. Unfortunately, doing that, who would then buy the book?
But my world, your world, we're not selling those things, so we should feel free to draw them out down to the silliest level, to show other people what we're doing, and get back criticism. Sometimes I think I should just always have the camera running while I'm working on my world - provided I don't have to explain exactly what I'm doing - just to make a record of how long I am at doing this shit, and how patient I have to be. That's a bit over the top. I can easily spend forty hours a week working on a map or two, and that's hardly compelling video. How hard up would the gentle readers have to be to need that?
I'm only saying, there's always room for improvement, and having the whole world at the doorstep to say how is a good thing.
Clay Shirky in the video below makes some salient points about the sort of criticism that works. Have a look; he makes a clear distinction between what makes for valuable criticism, and what doesn't.
I want to emphasize this statement from Shirky, however: "The most important resource you've got is your own ability to change your mind." To do that, you have to create opportunities for your mind to be changed. In the old days, that meant going to the library, opening books, and reading. And while the internet has removed the first part of that sequence, and made the opening part easier, and increased the likelihood of finding a book that will change your mind, you're still limited by that process to what you happen to read. If the page title isn't something that compels you, then you'll never read that page, and your mind will never be changed by that article.
The benefit to having the internet is that ANYONE can butt their way into your consciousness and say, "You're wrong, let me tell you why." It also means that there will be a lot of people who will butt in and say, "You're wrong, stop what you're doing." This second group of people have to be ignored for the sake of the first group. You want people to grab you by the collar, you want people to slap you and say, HEY, what the hell were you thinking when you wrote this - don't you know about [blank]? So long as the second part of the statement is there, so long as they have [blank] to show you, then there's a real possibility that you'll realize you have been wrong ... AND you know what you have to follow up with and what you have to read in order to be right.
The problem with criticism is that all too often, the critics understand the first part, but they don't have the second. They know you're wrong, but they don't know how or why or where you have to go in order to get the right answer. Some of them will try to explain why you're wrong, but without a logical argument, it soon becomes clear they're talking from feelings or anecdotal results they've gotten, which has a lot more to do with who they are than it does with what they know.
Parsing though cloudbounced comments isn't easy, but it is definitely worth it. Particularly if you're not wrong. I put up that button idea on my facebook, and four people responded with liking it. Facebook is terrific that way. It understands that people want to be able to 'like' something without committing themselves to a comment. Just as people on this blog often write, "I don't have anything to add, and I feel silly just saying I like a thing."
I tell you, I have come to a lot of understandings in the last six years of blogging. I've had my wars with bullies, I've been a bully, I've made enemies, I've made friends, I've been the monkey dancing and my writing has improved vastly, mostly from having to again and again explain my thoughts as clearly as possible. I've gotten older, too, in that time, and I've had the opportunity to speak to more really smart people in the last six years than I had in the 16 before that. I have a little more wisdom than I had.
I am less sure that I'm right. Often, I think I must be, but I am realizing that getting further and further from what books can tell me about this game, or anything else I might write, I'm less and less sure of myself. This recent Advanced Guide; there is nothing like it out there. I can't find it, at any rate. So I feel like I'm ... out in space, if that makes any sense. I try to talk to people about it, and I find I can't even do that. Each of the excerpts I've compiled on the blog say much more in context ... but I can't begin to explain the context without pushing the book out and saying read this.
Researching it, writing it, defending parts of it, is making ME a better DM. There's no question about that. I'm far more conscious about things I do, than I was before.
An argument I've been making, largely off line, is that we do address criticism or explanations in all the wrong ways. Something I've become acutely conscious of in creating the book isn't in saying, "You're doing it wrong, do it this way." Inherently, some will read large parts of the book that way, but it's not the direction I'm taking. The bigger problem in explaining how to DM better, I think, is that we have no idea why what we're doing is working.
I think most DMs with experience, who are still at it after eight to ten years, have adjusted and figured out how to run a good game. I believe that's got to be true, or else there just isn't a reason for them to still be doing it. There are too many distractions in the world that pull people away from play; if a game is out there, and it's been ongoing for a year, that's an incredible achievement in a world where just about everything that's out there is a distraction. I think we have to acknowledge that, and think along lines that incorporate that reality into what's doing in the game world.
At the same time, I would wager that most of those DMs can't really explain what they're doing well enough to make it valuable for someone else. I believe that the constant argument, "there's no one right way to play D&D" is really an expression of our mutual frustration at not feeling that we're able to learn much from the way someone else plays. Not because we can't - but because there's no format, no framework, no language that yet exists to tell us HOW to learn. Without that positive frame, what we have is a belief in confrontation ... far too much emphasis on being told that we're doing something wrong, and too little emphasis on what we're doing right, and how easy it is to change our minds and fix things when that's crowdbounced back at us.
It isn't just a question of saying, "You run a good world." What's needed is to be able to explain, "You run a good world, and here's why I think what you're doing is working." That isn't there. I don't see that anywhere on the net. I don't hear anyone making that argument.
We've got to start by looking at ourselves and trying to look past the strategy, the planning and tactics, the tools or our technology or our overall vision, and at the base structure of what we're doing. How are we addressing other people at the table. How are we modifying our voice to make things better understood. How are we helping new players or answering questions or making concessions about our visions for the greater good, and most importantly how are we communicating those things to others.
People need to stop being fearful or embarrassed or uncertain or polite about giving positive comments. Positive comments aren't about feeding ego, they're not about being sycophantic or approving - they are about providing road signs that say, "You're going the right direction." Most of us out here aren't sure we are. We're spinning out the words and the points in the "old way," without the marketing feedback we want, that makes blogging worthwhile, hoping we're hitting our target and not knowing if we are.
There are easy ways to help. If you liked the post, say why. If the idea seems right, say that the writer is going in the right direction. If that's too much, google+ the damn page. Yes, google is an evil empire, but its a tool if you're too embarrassed to say why you like something. We all hate the negativity of the internet. You have a simple set of resources to inject positivity. Use them.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Function
"Desirably, a DM creates a world based upon a vision they have. My friend John, I remember, had created a milieu in which the land comprised of large masses of stone, miles across, that floated in an undefined airy space. The players could remain where they were, isolated, or they could glide to other ‘rocks,’ a risky venture involving riding the air currents either upwards or downwards.
"This sounds compelling, but what I’ve described is as far as John’s imagination took him. The coolness of the idea was not followed by a well-formed structure that gave the rocks coherence. Individually, the rocks bore too much resemblance to one another, so we quickly began to resist risking our lives only to leap to another place that was pretty much the same as what we were standing on. John’s vision failed because while the idea was appealing, there wasn’t enough function incorporated into the world’s formulation.
"That is why, before making a world, we must understand what function the world will serve. We need a motive – one that is stronger than merely providing a ground upon which the characters will stand. There are a wide number of factors we want to consider, such as size, movement, uniformity of space, density of features and population, strangeness, aggressiveness and special interests. We want to know how large the world will be. We’ll need to establish how movement will take place, by what means and with what tools, systems or beasts of burden, along with the difficulties in the terrain or space that will matter. There’s the question of how uniform the world will be in its design. Different parts of the world could be relatively homogenous, or they could be radically different, even metaphysically different. Cultural norms can vary. The ethics of one group of citizens could be wildly different from those a mere county away. We need to ask ourselves if the various cultures and entities live in closely packed groups, or scattered … and if the features of the world are themselves stacked one atop another, or whether it’s a twenty-day journey just to see something new. We should have a clear idea of how strange the world is … in terms of physics, biology, geology and so on. Perhaps the inhabitants of the world are affected by climate or physical forces quite differently than we are. The world, therefore, should be established as either predominantly natural, supernatural, or a mix of the two. Then yes, there is the matter of aggressiveness – the world could be benign in nature, or deliberately designed with the kill dial set to 11. Finally, there’s the question of what the players might be especially interested in: the world might be based on pirating, zombie fighting, the investigation of vice, political oppression, rebelling against an empire, surviving for just another day in a distopian landscape, adhering to a fine-tuned social system and so on. This last, in particular, should meet with the party’s expectations, if the world is going to survive.
"In mulling over these questions, we’re questing for a cause-and-effect relationship between the world’s creation and the manner in which the players will react to that world. Rather than simply making a world and insisting with argument that the players view that world with a particular emotion – say, with awe – the better practice would be to design the function of the world so as to invoke awe automatically. No one needs to tell the buyer that the appeal of a lava lamp is in how it looks; if the world is going to inspire awe, it must be awe inspiring.
"Function, then, is always incorporated into the world with an eye towards the desired behavior of the player.
"Consider my own world. I have already described it as immense. The purpose of the world’s immensity is to convey a feeling of subordination … the players view the world as far too vast to ever be ruled – or even explored – within the player’s lifetime. Thus the players, seeing great armies squatted upon empires stretching their dominions over millions of square miles, and tens of millions of occupants, cannot help feeling a certain insignificance where it comes to history and events. I could as easily have produced a very small world, that in turn would have trasmitted feelings of claustrophobia and restraint. I could have then filled that world tightly with people, so that the party felt robbed of any privacy. Alternately, I could have contrived a world full of open, empty spaces, where the denizens lived in isolated communities … so isolated that the party would soon discover that no matter where they went, they would always be provided with a fresh start once they went there. It might take a long, long time to pull up stakes and begin again, but that option would have been open to them.
"I did not create either of those worlds, but I could have.
"It was my decision to choose cultures and forms of inhabitation that the party would find familiar – and therefore comforting—so that although the world would be incomprehensible as a whole, small parts of the world could act as safe havens. Because the world was full of familiar people with familiar motivations, the party would be able to relate to them. I might have created peoples that were terrifying, or who behaved erratically, so that the party had to treat the natives xenophobically, never knowing for sure who they could trust or who might be an enemy. The inhabitants might have been fanatics, encouraging the party to either embrace their cause, or risk being seen as enemies. The whole world might demand the party ‘pick a side,’ with concommitant rewards and consequences being inherent no matter what decision they made."
*I do go on to talk more in the book about function, and how my world addresses it, but I felt this was sufficient to get across the purpose of function for the present. The book will be available for purchase in July, 2014.
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