Because it bears similarity to the context of the last post, I'm just watching (now listening) to John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. I've felt compelled to write a post, having just passed this scene:
Now, let's put that in a D&D context. The player, possessing a +5 holy sword, which makes him king, from a position of certain success in the battle, instead hands the sword over to the enemy, then kneels in the water, with his hands below the surface. Name the RPG player willing to do this!
I think there will be many who will say, having seen the scene, not actually playing in a campaign with a +5 sword, "Sure, I'd do that." I doubt, however, that they would. It is almost impossible to imagine this, in any context . . . but take a moment as a DM and decide what you'd do faced with this.
Play the moment out as the movie does? Is that fair? Given that the player may have seen the movie, are we being counted upon to cave and recreate the scene? "Oh, he won't kill me ~ not after bravery like this!"
At the same time, what sort of moronic, jerk-ass, insufferable bastard of a DM would hack the player to death for daring to risk so much?
There is no right answer. We use dice for things like this ~ presuming that we can either make a reasonable decision as to what the odds should be or accept the die roll once it hits the table.
I think we have to admit that a moment like this, should it turn up in a campaign, tests the mettle of both the DM and the player. As well it should.
In any case, we come back around to the expectations of how both monsters and NPCs should react when faced with something unusual from a player.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Monday, October 17, 2016
Breaking the Mold
In the last post, I was asked about the details of the party's adventure and I gave a long answer. I didn't finish the story, which I said was long, so I thought I would do that now and use it to make a point about monsters.
Let's start with the kelpie I introduced to the party, which I said was different from the Fiend Folio. The FF describes the kelpie appearing "as a beautiful human woman in order to lure men into deep waters" . . . which of course is done with a charm ability.
Come on. Did we really need another version of this monster? Shit, the folio was printed in '81 and this was already such an awful cliche that the writers should have been taken out and bitch-slapped for every version of this they added to the book. What the hell is it that makes game creators think that DMs need to constantly be charming the party into a near death experience?
When I was 15 and stupid, I did try a few of these scenarios, what with nixies and dryads and whatever the hell else. They all sucked. It's the same experience for the party every time: some people make save, some don't, those that make it save those that fail. Listening to a DM read out random rules from a random splat-book would be more interesting.
Yet these are potentially interesting monsters, if the DM can get the hell away from the obvious dumb-monster response. Saturday's kelpie in my game was friendly, novel, unexpected and compelling. No one made a move to kill it (which would have been disastrous for the party) - and for a long time into the future players will talk about the kelpie and remark on its behaviour and someday that will set up another kelpie with a very different agenda. Rest assured, that agenda isn't going to be charming the party and killing them. It will be more interesting than that.
Consider. The solution to the party's dilemma came out of another monster that also behaved differently than its cliched description.
About nine months ago the party was negotiating their way through the Sahara Desert, through a particularly magical part of the landscape. The party is 7th to 11th level so things have to be more interesting now. As chance would have it, they came across a creature that wasn't exactly demonic, but had characteristics that suggested such.
So the thief in the party, Nommi, decided to sneak up on it. I have stealth rules that enable thieves to roll 3d6 and then subtract their level from the result. The number is the distance in five foot hexes that the thief closes to before the target becomes aware. The target's level is also taken into account if the target has thief-like attributes. If the thief is within two to three hexes, depending on the amount of armor the thief is wearing, and if the target then rolls against surprise and fails, the thief can backstab. The rules work the same with an assassin.
In this case, Nommi rolled ridiculously low and ended up with a result of zero. Thus he slipped right up behind the entity ~ and at that moment, discovered that he was in a position to back-stab a djinn. I rolled a 1 on a d6 and the djinn was surprised.
The thief decided . . . um, no. On the whole, it sounded like a really, really bad idea. So the thief said, "Hello," and the djinn jumped and spun around. And at that point, the djinn laughed.
The djinn congratulated the thief and remarked on the thief's skills and there was a great exchange as they made friends. And in gratitude, the djinn granted the party a wish, which the party used, asking to have the McGuffin put into their possession at once.
Unfortunately for the party, this was an icicle of perpetual cold, which created a frozen sphere of about a quarter mile in diameter and affected weather within a thirty-mile radius. Once the icicle was put in their possession, they were now inside the freeze radius, helplessly frozen inside. They didn't know this is what the McGuffin did.
The djinn was very sorry and did help the party's back up of henchmen come and spend four months of game time rescuing the party (or rather, trying to rescue the party). But that is all another story.
The point is that the djinn and Nommi did become friends ~ and Nommi was one of the party aboard the wrecked ship talking to the kelpie. So, in a flash of inspiration, they called the djinn and got the information they wanted. They did not have the power to compel the djinn to grant a wish, but the djinn does still know a lot of things and was willing to say so.
Now, I know a lot of DMs would make the djinn very tight-lipped and miserable, and would demand that any information the djinn might give would have to be the result of a wish. But how straight-jacketed is that? How much more interesting is it that the party has a djinn as a friend? A friend, I'll add, who was willing to tell where the djinn's lamp was located ~ which is, again, another story, and another potential adventure someday if the party pursues it.
Things get interesting when DMs get out of the box and begin using these creatures like the intelligent beings they're meant to be - and stop with the most obvious, most annoying angles on their abilities and powers. Just because a kelpie can charm the party doesn't mean the kelpie wants to. Maybe the kelpie has other needs or interests. Maybe the kelpie is just friendly.
Let's start with the kelpie I introduced to the party, which I said was different from the Fiend Folio. The FF describes the kelpie appearing "as a beautiful human woman in order to lure men into deep waters" . . . which of course is done with a charm ability.
Come on. Did we really need another version of this monster? Shit, the folio was printed in '81 and this was already such an awful cliche that the writers should have been taken out and bitch-slapped for every version of this they added to the book. What the hell is it that makes game creators think that DMs need to constantly be charming the party into a near death experience?
When I was 15 and stupid, I did try a few of these scenarios, what with nixies and dryads and whatever the hell else. They all sucked. It's the same experience for the party every time: some people make save, some don't, those that make it save those that fail. Listening to a DM read out random rules from a random splat-book would be more interesting.
Yet these are potentially interesting monsters, if the DM can get the hell away from the obvious dumb-monster response. Saturday's kelpie in my game was friendly, novel, unexpected and compelling. No one made a move to kill it (which would have been disastrous for the party) - and for a long time into the future players will talk about the kelpie and remark on its behaviour and someday that will set up another kelpie with a very different agenda. Rest assured, that agenda isn't going to be charming the party and killing them. It will be more interesting than that.
Consider. The solution to the party's dilemma came out of another monster that also behaved differently than its cliched description.
About nine months ago the party was negotiating their way through the Sahara Desert, through a particularly magical part of the landscape. The party is 7th to 11th level so things have to be more interesting now. As chance would have it, they came across a creature that wasn't exactly demonic, but had characteristics that suggested such.
So the thief in the party, Nommi, decided to sneak up on it. I have stealth rules that enable thieves to roll 3d6 and then subtract their level from the result. The number is the distance in five foot hexes that the thief closes to before the target becomes aware. The target's level is also taken into account if the target has thief-like attributes. If the thief is within two to three hexes, depending on the amount of armor the thief is wearing, and if the target then rolls against surprise and fails, the thief can backstab. The rules work the same with an assassin.
In this case, Nommi rolled ridiculously low and ended up with a result of zero. Thus he slipped right up behind the entity ~ and at that moment, discovered that he was in a position to back-stab a djinn. I rolled a 1 on a d6 and the djinn was surprised.
The thief decided . . . um, no. On the whole, it sounded like a really, really bad idea. So the thief said, "Hello," and the djinn jumped and spun around. And at that point, the djinn laughed.
The djinn congratulated the thief and remarked on the thief's skills and there was a great exchange as they made friends. And in gratitude, the djinn granted the party a wish, which the party used, asking to have the McGuffin put into their possession at once.
Unfortunately for the party, this was an icicle of perpetual cold, which created a frozen sphere of about a quarter mile in diameter and affected weather within a thirty-mile radius. Once the icicle was put in their possession, they were now inside the freeze radius, helplessly frozen inside. They didn't know this is what the McGuffin did.
The djinn was very sorry and did help the party's back up of henchmen come and spend four months of game time rescuing the party (or rather, trying to rescue the party). But that is all another story.
The point is that the djinn and Nommi did become friends ~ and Nommi was one of the party aboard the wrecked ship talking to the kelpie. So, in a flash of inspiration, they called the djinn and got the information they wanted. They did not have the power to compel the djinn to grant a wish, but the djinn does still know a lot of things and was willing to say so.
Now, I know a lot of DMs would make the djinn very tight-lipped and miserable, and would demand that any information the djinn might give would have to be the result of a wish. But how straight-jacketed is that? How much more interesting is it that the party has a djinn as a friend? A friend, I'll add, who was willing to tell where the djinn's lamp was located ~ which is, again, another story, and another potential adventure someday if the party pursues it.
Things get interesting when DMs get out of the box and begin using these creatures like the intelligent beings they're meant to be - and stop with the most obvious, most annoying angles on their abilities and powers. Just because a kelpie can charm the party doesn't mean the kelpie wants to. Maybe the kelpie has other needs or interests. Maybe the kelpie is just friendly.
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Old Thinking
So, with my game running last night, I was asked if I would let a new player join. This was Jim, the same fellow I talked about with this post after that Edmonton Expo. It was going to be a complicated procedure, as Jim has been playing 3.5 for fifteen years and can be said to be deeply steeped in the game play mechanics and headspace of that edition. Introducing him to my Frankenstein-structured campaign did not turn out to be easy.
I like Jim a lot, but he turned out to be one of these players who goes "In 3.5 it works this way" and "In 3.5 you can do this" and "There's this skill in 3.5 that says . . ." ~ I'm sure that many DMs know the litany. It took quite a lot of repeating that we were not playing 3.5 and bringing him back to the point to get his character rolled up ~ not just from me but from everyone playing. I must point out that I have a bunch of converts to my system and they weren't appreciating the comparison any more than I was.
But then things started to go our way once I introduced Jim to the character background generator. Jim hasn't read my blog more than a few times so he had absolutely no experience with anything like this and it really caught him by surprise. The detail that it offered, describing everything from his family background to the color of his hair and eyes, the way his character walked (charisma effect) and much more intrigued him.
Then he was introduced to the equipment table. I have about 1,500 items on my equipment table, so at first sight it is extraordinarily daunting. Moreover, it is organized in a very jumbled manner, deliberately. As I explained last night, we don't find things when we go shopping in alphabetical order and during the time of the Renaissance, there was no such thing as Walmart. Jim found himself describing the equipment organization used in the 3.5 books but now it wasn't because those books were more thorough or imaginative, but because actually having to think, "What sort of shop would sell torches?" had him scrambling for answers. My world isn't easy and this was his first introduction to that.
See, if equipment is jumbled, it is more likely for a player to waste money on what is immediately seen while forgetting to look for things that aren't seen. With such a huge number of possible things to buy, all arranged so that there aren't more than 30 things on the screen at any one time, it is hard to just "know" what to buy. This, I feel, more closely relates to the way we are as humans. This is why grocery stores are arranged to make us buy things we don't need, while all the things we need are farther away and harder to find.
Then I explained that it is 12 copper pieces to a silver piece and 16 silver pieces to a gold piece. That sent him off explaining how in 3.5 everything is in nice round numbers, 10s and 100s, and I pointed out that metric wasn't invented and anyway, it's medieval thinking and I don't intend to suck up to players who must have everything in base-ten. Forcing players to think through difficulties makes them more likely to make mistakes. I like mistakes. It gives something for players to learn from.
Well, all this had Jim floundering a bit ~ but he's a smart guy and he was working it out. Then the turning point came: he discovered that my campaign doesn't use alignment.
At that point, for Jim, the heavens opened up, the sun shone . . . and throughout the rest of last night's game, everything he said about 3.5 was negative. Exhaustively negative.
The closing argument, however, came right at the end of the session. Having played through a part of the adventure that involved minor problem solving, a conversation with a friendly kelpie (very not Fiend Folio) and a nuanced dilemma (nothing I need to talk about here), all of which took about two hours and a minimum of die rolling, with considerable group involvement, a little fear, some laughter and a tremendous sense of accomplishment. The running was short because of catching up, new rules, introducing the new player and so on. Anyway . . . we used the last half hour to help some of the players catch up on their sage abilities.
Jim got introduced to the methodology of the sage ability system. Now, some of my readers may not be familiar with this, but like I explained to Jim, the principle is this: what we know, what we can do, is not a random die roll. It is a point of knowledge, it can be done repeatedly and as often as we wish. It is so completely different from the crap that was invented for 3.0 and expanded for 3.5 that it simply smashed Jim's game sense.
This is a fellow who has played 3.5 for fifteen years . . . and he is telling me by the end of one night of playing that 3.5 sucks compared to this system I'm showing him. A system he hasn't had a chance to play and has barely seen used. A system he can't wait ~ as a first level character ~ to try.
I feel quite smug about this.
Why is it that when I take five months off, the night I start again I have every player who was there five months ago right in the room, on the spot, ready to play? Because my game is hard and enduring. Becuase I don't have idiotic demands of people. Because alignment fucking sucks. Everyone knows it. Seriously, they know it, but for some unholy dumbfuck reason people cling to it year after year, thinking it's going to make the game "better" in some unimaginable way ~ like the logic that rubbing shit on a window will make the sun shine in brighter.
We run games telling players what to think and how to act, then we spoon-feed them when they complain that they have to do grade four math, like multiplying a number by 12 or 16, with fucking calculators, for the love of sweet Christmas. We give them ridiculous super-powers called 'feats' so that they can swing a giant's weapon or roll endlessly to detect every unseen thing in the universe instantly. GET RID OF THIS SHIT! It's moronic, it's insane, it's killing the game with stupid-friendly simple-minded easy-peasy elements that would bore a nine-year-old.
But, people won't. They'll go on using it, because it is in the rules. Rules that were obviously made by committee, designed to please the lowest common denominator of moron, to up sales and guarantee the fewest possible complaints that might imaginably keep a corporate executive up at night fearing a buyers' remorse.
Sorry, I am a bit stoked. I ran my game last night . . . and in retrospect, it went damn better than pretty well. I converted a heathen, I've got the party pumped again and the game is totally on track for the next running.
I'm just saying the game should be hard as nails. Really, really bleak and grim. Coldly bitter, unkind, strict, thick-skinned, obdurate and damned exacting. It shouldn't be silly or facile. It shouldn't include elements that tell grown adults what to do with themselves. Grown adults can make up their own damn minds.
I like Jim a lot, but he turned out to be one of these players who goes "In 3.5 it works this way" and "In 3.5 you can do this" and "There's this skill in 3.5 that says . . ." ~ I'm sure that many DMs know the litany. It took quite a lot of repeating that we were not playing 3.5 and bringing him back to the point to get his character rolled up ~ not just from me but from everyone playing. I must point out that I have a bunch of converts to my system and they weren't appreciating the comparison any more than I was.
But then things started to go our way once I introduced Jim to the character background generator. Jim hasn't read my blog more than a few times so he had absolutely no experience with anything like this and it really caught him by surprise. The detail that it offered, describing everything from his family background to the color of his hair and eyes, the way his character walked (charisma effect) and much more intrigued him.
Then he was introduced to the equipment table. I have about 1,500 items on my equipment table, so at first sight it is extraordinarily daunting. Moreover, it is organized in a very jumbled manner, deliberately. As I explained last night, we don't find things when we go shopping in alphabetical order and during the time of the Renaissance, there was no such thing as Walmart. Jim found himself describing the equipment organization used in the 3.5 books but now it wasn't because those books were more thorough or imaginative, but because actually having to think, "What sort of shop would sell torches?" had him scrambling for answers. My world isn't easy and this was his first introduction to that.
See, if equipment is jumbled, it is more likely for a player to waste money on what is immediately seen while forgetting to look for things that aren't seen. With such a huge number of possible things to buy, all arranged so that there aren't more than 30 things on the screen at any one time, it is hard to just "know" what to buy. This, I feel, more closely relates to the way we are as humans. This is why grocery stores are arranged to make us buy things we don't need, while all the things we need are farther away and harder to find.
Then I explained that it is 12 copper pieces to a silver piece and 16 silver pieces to a gold piece. That sent him off explaining how in 3.5 everything is in nice round numbers, 10s and 100s, and I pointed out that metric wasn't invented and anyway, it's medieval thinking and I don't intend to suck up to players who must have everything in base-ten. Forcing players to think through difficulties makes them more likely to make mistakes. I like mistakes. It gives something for players to learn from.
Well, all this had Jim floundering a bit ~ but he's a smart guy and he was working it out. Then the turning point came: he discovered that my campaign doesn't use alignment.
At that point, for Jim, the heavens opened up, the sun shone . . . and throughout the rest of last night's game, everything he said about 3.5 was negative. Exhaustively negative.
The closing argument, however, came right at the end of the session. Having played through a part of the adventure that involved minor problem solving, a conversation with a friendly kelpie (very not Fiend Folio) and a nuanced dilemma (nothing I need to talk about here), all of which took about two hours and a minimum of die rolling, with considerable group involvement, a little fear, some laughter and a tremendous sense of accomplishment. The running was short because of catching up, new rules, introducing the new player and so on. Anyway . . . we used the last half hour to help some of the players catch up on their sage abilities.
Jim got introduced to the methodology of the sage ability system. Now, some of my readers may not be familiar with this, but like I explained to Jim, the principle is this: what we know, what we can do, is not a random die roll. It is a point of knowledge, it can be done repeatedly and as often as we wish. It is so completely different from the crap that was invented for 3.0 and expanded for 3.5 that it simply smashed Jim's game sense.
This is a fellow who has played 3.5 for fifteen years . . . and he is telling me by the end of one night of playing that 3.5 sucks compared to this system I'm showing him. A system he hasn't had a chance to play and has barely seen used. A system he can't wait ~ as a first level character ~ to try.
I feel quite smug about this.
Why is it that when I take five months off, the night I start again I have every player who was there five months ago right in the room, on the spot, ready to play? Because my game is hard and enduring. Becuase I don't have idiotic demands of people. Because alignment fucking sucks. Everyone knows it. Seriously, they know it, but for some unholy dumbfuck reason people cling to it year after year, thinking it's going to make the game "better" in some unimaginable way ~ like the logic that rubbing shit on a window will make the sun shine in brighter.
We run games telling players what to think and how to act, then we spoon-feed them when they complain that they have to do grade four math, like multiplying a number by 12 or 16, with fucking calculators, for the love of sweet Christmas. We give them ridiculous super-powers called 'feats' so that they can swing a giant's weapon or roll endlessly to detect every unseen thing in the universe instantly. GET RID OF THIS SHIT! It's moronic, it's insane, it's killing the game with stupid-friendly simple-minded easy-peasy elements that would bore a nine-year-old.
But, people won't. They'll go on using it, because it is in the rules. Rules that were obviously made by committee, designed to please the lowest common denominator of moron, to up sales and guarantee the fewest possible complaints that might imaginably keep a corporate executive up at night fearing a buyers' remorse.
Sorry, I am a bit stoked. I ran my game last night . . . and in retrospect, it went damn better than pretty well. I converted a heathen, I've got the party pumped again and the game is totally on track for the next running.
I'm just saying the game should be hard as nails. Really, really bleak and grim. Coldly bitter, unkind, strict, thick-skinned, obdurate and damned exacting. It shouldn't be silly or facile. It shouldn't include elements that tell grown adults what to do with themselves. Grown adults can make up their own damn minds.
Saturday, October 15, 2016
Picking Up the Ball
My first running in five months . . . in a strange place . . . trying to remember where the thread of the campaign was and picking up the momentum again, getting the party immersed . . .
Went pretty well, apparently. I'm in a bigger room than I used to be in and I was able to pace. Reminded me of the years when I ran at the university in a big lecture theatre where we were able to use the table at the front of the class and the blackboard, so long as we kept it clean and wiped the board afterwards. In those days, I used to walk up the steps and preach my game to the ceiling, enjoying the acoustics. Frankly, until tonight I had forgotten that memory utterly. It had just slipped away from me. We only played in that space three, maybe four times.
I've played in many odd spaces. I've been able to control my own for years, only just recently lost it because of financial troubles. Playing in my daughter's space right now; she let me make it mine and it all worked out. I'm feeling a sigh of relief right now.
Glad to know the old boy still has it.
Went pretty well, apparently. I'm in a bigger room than I used to be in and I was able to pace. Reminded me of the years when I ran at the university in a big lecture theatre where we were able to use the table at the front of the class and the blackboard, so long as we kept it clean and wiped the board afterwards. In those days, I used to walk up the steps and preach my game to the ceiling, enjoying the acoustics. Frankly, until tonight I had forgotten that memory utterly. It had just slipped away from me. We only played in that space three, maybe four times.
I've played in many odd spaces. I've been able to control my own for years, only just recently lost it because of financial troubles. Playing in my daughter's space right now; she let me make it mine and it all worked out. I'm feeling a sigh of relief right now.
Glad to know the old boy still has it.
Friday, October 14, 2016
The Consequences of Heuristics
Concluding my remarks from this post and this post, the reader may remember that I ended by saying that a DM ought to combine both preparation ahead of time with on-the-spot decision-making, which I have described as using a heuristic. The word is unfamiliar, so once again I'll quickly say that a heuristic is a decision that is made from the hip, with minimal evaluation of the facts, heavily weighted by the individual's present mind set, biases and experience.
We've talked about how a heuristic can be a negative thing, based on weak or cliched information. We've also talked about how a heuristic can enable a DM's rapid response to game play that is flagging and requiring momentum. To that, I'll add that all DMs must be ready to think fast on their feet, given the amount of information that surrounds game play and the potentially pattern-breaking behaviour of innovative players. A DM can easily feel overwhelmed by all this and unable to make a patient, well-grounded conclusion. Heuristic decision-making is, therefore, a prerequisite of DMing.
But I stress that it is also a prerequisite of playing an RPG. Virtually every decision a player makes during the course of the game is made heuristically, without any warning as to what to expect and without the time to piece together a detailed assessment of the problem at hand. Even in the case where the players have time to plan an assault on a given lair or descend into a dungeon, where they can equip themselves and gear up mentally for the offensive, they still don't know what they're going to encounter before they do. The DM can take steps to select what can be prepared and what can be left to a heuristic, but the players don't have that luxury.
This gives the DM a tremendous advantage over the players. It also speaks to the DM's mindset where game-play is concerned. Arguably, DMs are the sort of people who are made uncomfortable by heuristic decision-making, who prefer the option of planning things out ahead of time. They are the sort of people who, when making a heuristic decision with unforseen and unpleasant ramifications, want the option of reworking the setting and experience in order to protect themselves. Players are necessarily subject to the consequences for their actions, being limited in the amount of power they have in a campaign. On the whole, players are stronger, more ready for the chain reaction of play, having less issue with the potential failure that can result from rapid-fire decision-making.
Yes, I am saying that DMs have the weaker personality. Or, if the reader prefers, the more defensive personality. Very rarely does a DM have to accept the mistake they've make and suck up the consequences. Like an eel, the DM can almost always shift the liability onto the players ~ who, often without complaint (or unaware), accept the burden and keep on going. I don't say that they accept the burden quietly ~ not remotely! ~ but they do keep moving forward.
So this brings us back to the decision to play D&D, or more specifically the reason why some choose to DM. The non-specific answer, "the game challenges me," is made more clear in that the game's challenge is in requiring a string of heuristic, off-the-cuff answers that promotes a feeling of stress and risk, resulting in an increased chemical rush of adrenaline and dopamine, particularly when the risk pays off and the character survives. Fundamentally, we're all just natural drug addicts.
The DM goes one step further in this process by extending the "game play" to quiet afternoons and evenings spent preparing the game in advance, boosting expectation and allowing the DM to "edge" for a longer period of expectation before the game actually occurs, knowing consciously or subconsciously that whatever happens, the system/structure/campaign can be adjusted to ensure the DM's deficiencies are minimized.
Take the time to write down four or five game-changing decisions that have resulted from the reader's involvement in recent games, then take the time to consider the motivation behind each of those decisions. In most cases, if the reader is honest, there won't be one. There will be a strong inclination to invent a motivation, to rationalize the moment the decision was made in some context that will offer logic or reason, but more probably the decision was make heuristically, without any plan or solid thought process in place. Resist the inclination to rationalize. Accept that hundreds of hours of game play have created an acceptable experience-based patterned response to in-game events that allows the reader, when participating, to simply "go with the flow" in the same detached way that we would watch a movie or participate in a football game.
Embrace this. Where a snap decision seems to have caused a misstep or resulted in the downfall of a character or the party, trust that the lesson has been learned and that your judgement next time will be improved. We know that when we have the time to examine something ahead of time, it may still go wrong. On the whole, we're doing fairly well to stay alive as long as we have in a situation where we're making split-second guesses against a die that may not support our chances for success.
Regarding DMs who may not be aware that they are unconsciously making decisions that re-route the campaign in order to protect themselves, I can only suggest that we should all stop doing this. It is very easy to do, it is very tempting to do; it is also loathsome and indefensible. Be aware, however, that we are doing this. We have the power to do it and corruption has a nature of slipping past undetected. So often, it is done without a moment's thought, utterly as a heuristic. It is only by going back and evaluating our performance, night after night, that we can recognize patterns where our behaviour comes short of legitimacy.
We've talked about how a heuristic can be a negative thing, based on weak or cliched information. We've also talked about how a heuristic can enable a DM's rapid response to game play that is flagging and requiring momentum. To that, I'll add that all DMs must be ready to think fast on their feet, given the amount of information that surrounds game play and the potentially pattern-breaking behaviour of innovative players. A DM can easily feel overwhelmed by all this and unable to make a patient, well-grounded conclusion. Heuristic decision-making is, therefore, a prerequisite of DMing.
But I stress that it is also a prerequisite of playing an RPG. Virtually every decision a player makes during the course of the game is made heuristically, without any warning as to what to expect and without the time to piece together a detailed assessment of the problem at hand. Even in the case where the players have time to plan an assault on a given lair or descend into a dungeon, where they can equip themselves and gear up mentally for the offensive, they still don't know what they're going to encounter before they do. The DM can take steps to select what can be prepared and what can be left to a heuristic, but the players don't have that luxury.
This gives the DM a tremendous advantage over the players. It also speaks to the DM's mindset where game-play is concerned. Arguably, DMs are the sort of people who are made uncomfortable by heuristic decision-making, who prefer the option of planning things out ahead of time. They are the sort of people who, when making a heuristic decision with unforseen and unpleasant ramifications, want the option of reworking the setting and experience in order to protect themselves. Players are necessarily subject to the consequences for their actions, being limited in the amount of power they have in a campaign. On the whole, players are stronger, more ready for the chain reaction of play, having less issue with the potential failure that can result from rapid-fire decision-making.
Yes, I am saying that DMs have the weaker personality. Or, if the reader prefers, the more defensive personality. Very rarely does a DM have to accept the mistake they've make and suck up the consequences. Like an eel, the DM can almost always shift the liability onto the players ~ who, often without complaint (or unaware), accept the burden and keep on going. I don't say that they accept the burden quietly ~ not remotely! ~ but they do keep moving forward.
So this brings us back to the decision to play D&D, or more specifically the reason why some choose to DM. The non-specific answer, "the game challenges me," is made more clear in that the game's challenge is in requiring a string of heuristic, off-the-cuff answers that promotes a feeling of stress and risk, resulting in an increased chemical rush of adrenaline and dopamine, particularly when the risk pays off and the character survives. Fundamentally, we're all just natural drug addicts.
The DM goes one step further in this process by extending the "game play" to quiet afternoons and evenings spent preparing the game in advance, boosting expectation and allowing the DM to "edge" for a longer period of expectation before the game actually occurs, knowing consciously or subconsciously that whatever happens, the system/structure/campaign can be adjusted to ensure the DM's deficiencies are minimized.
Take the time to write down four or five game-changing decisions that have resulted from the reader's involvement in recent games, then take the time to consider the motivation behind each of those decisions. In most cases, if the reader is honest, there won't be one. There will be a strong inclination to invent a motivation, to rationalize the moment the decision was made in some context that will offer logic or reason, but more probably the decision was make heuristically, without any plan or solid thought process in place. Resist the inclination to rationalize. Accept that hundreds of hours of game play have created an acceptable experience-based patterned response to in-game events that allows the reader, when participating, to simply "go with the flow" in the same detached way that we would watch a movie or participate in a football game.
Embrace this. Where a snap decision seems to have caused a misstep or resulted in the downfall of a character or the party, trust that the lesson has been learned and that your judgement next time will be improved. We know that when we have the time to examine something ahead of time, it may still go wrong. On the whole, we're doing fairly well to stay alive as long as we have in a situation where we're making split-second guesses against a die that may not support our chances for success.
Regarding DMs who may not be aware that they are unconsciously making decisions that re-route the campaign in order to protect themselves, I can only suggest that we should all stop doing this. It is very easy to do, it is very tempting to do; it is also loathsome and indefensible. Be aware, however, that we are doing this. We have the power to do it and corruption has a nature of slipping past undetected. So often, it is done without a moment's thought, utterly as a heuristic. It is only by going back and evaluating our performance, night after night, that we can recognize patterns where our behaviour comes short of legitimacy.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Further Heuristics
Let's continue the conversation from earlier today. My purpose in writing these essays is to help participants of RPGs to better understand their thinking processes, to make them more aware of the decisions that they are making while playing, in hopes that it will be possible for them to later assess what decisions they've made and examine them. When, specifically, did they take the step as DM that sent the game flying off in the wrong direction and how can they avoid doing it again - and when did they take that step in the right direction so they can repeat it. Of these two, the latter is most importantly the skill we want to obtain.
Just to keep everyone in the loop, I'll explain again that a heuristic is a guideline. This is at least one thing I will give to Gygax: he understood that, in many cases, the game's open perspective on human behavior and choice would produce circumstances that could not be predicted and for which rules could not be effectively invented. In the moment, at the time of a player's innovation, the DM would be compelled to think heuristically, to go with a gut instinct and make a ruling that would fit the situation. (It's hoped that, once this ruling is made, that it sets a precedent for further like circumstances that occur later in the campaign, but that is another post that I've already written).
In many situations, however, the very nature of the DM defies the possibility of creating a rule at all - because, of all things, the game demands flexibility. It is here in particular that the use of a heuristic is a great benefit to a DM. I'll give an example.
Usually, when I wake up in the morning, I have a cup of coffee. This is true in about 19 cases out of 20. I like coffee and when my world is working properly, I'm able to make coffee happen one way or the other. However, I am not like these people who say, "I cannot function without a cup of coffee." Coffee, for me, isn't a "rule." I can do without it just fine. Sometimes I don't have time to obtain coffee, sometimes I'm sick with a flu or cold and I would prefer tea, sometimes I get distracted. Coffee isn't necessary, it is a choice - and the fact that I tend to make it often doesn't eliminate the heuristic decision that I make about it each day.
I will give another example. When considering how many monsters to throw at a party for a given encounter, I'm not bound by any rule that says I must make the encounter "balanced." Not all situations that I expect the party to face will be balanced. Sometimes the party will outnumber their enemy; sometimes the enemy will outnumber the party. The decision that I make in choosing a number of monsters is heuristic; I'm not bound by any rule in the game that I know of. I am, however, bound by my experience and judgement to enable the party to assess the encounter in some way that gives them an option to survival. Thus, I would not create a situation where the monsters appeared immediately next to the party, out of the blue, without any suggestion that the party was in a dangerous place, with the monsters getting first action and then pounding the players into dust. That would be a BAD decision on my part and I wouldn't make it.
Presuming that someone will think of or suggest a situation where an assassin might do that to a specific party member, I will venture forth to say that this has happened twice in all my campaigns in the thirty-seven years of my experience. In the first instance, the assassin missed the kill and the player defended himself justly. In the second case, the assassin was the player's own assassin henchman, abandoned after dying, left unburied, only to rise as a revenant and successfully kill the PC. It was agreed by all present, including the victim, that the murder was understandable.
So I am saying, in choosing what sort of encounter the party occurs, I make a decision that may inordinately threaten the party but will not betray the party's trust in me, their DM. I curb any sense of entitlement on my part regarding what sort of encounter is imaginably possible and choose instead an encounter that will make a good game. When I make this decision in the moment, the decision is heuristic; the making of a heuristic decision saves time and enables me to tailor my game to the specific moment in time that the game is being played. This is what I mean by "flexibility."
When DMs talk of "winging it," this is what they mean - though of course they don't give it a label, calling it heuristic, unless they also happen to work in the field of psychology or a related subject. Most who claim to DM this way express how it works without knowing precisely why it works . . . I am hoping with this post to give them a clue as to what sort of reading they might want to do if they'd like an intellectual handle on what they're doing.
There are many other DMs who feel very uncomfortable with heuristic decisions, who want every part of an adventure to be measured out and predetermined, expecting that this will ensure a positive shape to their games ~ and often it will, though there are no guarantees. This measuring is, for some, the result of a fear that making a heuristic decision during the campaign will result in some terrible mistake that hurts that night's experience for the players or ~ even worse ~ challenges the viability of the whole campaign.
(yes, it is excessively dramatized, but I've heard and read people expressing exactly this fear)
Designing everything in advance is, however, an onerous process that often suspends game play for weeks while the DM gets things ready. As well, playing with everything prepared lacks the flexibility of a heuristic. While I can decide in my campaign that the players need a shot in the arm to get them pumped up, creating a brief combat for that purpose, the DM with the prepared, dovetailed adventure may have no such opportunity without compromising the adventure's structure. As a result, on a given night a prepared campaign can fail to hit emotionally and the party is left slogging in dull misery for hours without respite.
It is then assumed that the fault lies in the ability of the designer and not in the functionality of the design. As such, DMs rush off to pay a lot of money for a "professional's design," a store-bought module, that will often unfortunately produce the same sour experience (then causing the DM to assume that it is a personal failing and that nothing whatsoever can be done, therefore it is time to quit).
We must understand that the risk of the prepared structure is that it isn't flexible. It is like deciding that on June 28, 2018, we will get in the car, come hell or high water, drive to the beach and ~ by sweet cheese and crackers ~ have a good time. And if the weather is bad, Jack's mother has just died or Mary has broken her leg, tough tookies: we're going. For reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the adventure or the quality of the DM running the adventure, a prepared adventure can play brilliantly with one group of players on a Tuesday and tank the following Friday. There are a hundred reasons why this can happen.
Desirably, we should be creating adventures that have the virtue of preparedness AND the virtue of opportunity where it comes to make a heuristic decision. Neither approach, to be sure, will work optimally by itself, whatever an individual DM might claim. We need to use all the resources at our disposal if we want out games to be better suited to our players.
Now, I will try to drag this around with my next post to the original points I made about decision-making and introspection. Wish me luck.
Introduction to Heuristics
Why do we play D&D, or any other fantasy role-playing game? Ask this question and nine times out of ten the answer that comes will reach for intangibles like "for fun" or "it challenges me." Most of the remainder will answer the question with some description of how the character creation system provides inspiration or that the combat system is great - which is something akin to explaining that we like chess because the bishop moves diagonally.
Most people can't answer the question in truth because most people are not introspective in that way. They have not examined their own lives to determine what emptiness that role-playing fills or why specifically their brains are built for this particular kind of "fun." For some, it's apathy: they like the game, that is enough. That's really just a cover, however: the fact is, on the whole we wouldn't know how to start being introspective. We have no experience with it.
Let's take some time and examine that.
As I am on the spot for providing class material for teaching decision-making, I continue to research the subject (I do want to be better prepared than the student, yes?). This leads me down all sorts of pathways - most recently, it has been heuristics - which some readers, no doubt, have run across in their internet travels.
The short explanation is given rather directly by the Wikipedia link. Employing a heuristic is to make a decision using one's gut instincts - close to what I called "pattern recognition" in my book How to Run. On one level, it suggests that having been around for a while, having achieved an age where we know not to put our hands on a hot stove or drive with our eyes closed, our judgement is at more or less sufficient to allow ourselves to make good guesses, at least about ourselves and our motivations.
On another level, however, we need to acknowledge that we've been duped quite a few times in our lives, to the point where we also know to occasionally second-guess our instincts - because, as Nick Hornby's character Rob Fleming says in the book High Fidelity, our guts have shit for brains.
It is somewhere between these two extremes, in getting to know ourselves and trust ourselves, learning how to restrain ourselves and police ourselves, that introspection occurs. Thankfully, we're not usually on our own, here (though some of us are). Society has at least tried to set us up with parents, instructors, written material and art in an attempt to show us the right path. Of course, we're still responsible for walking it.
To explain how this works, I'll co-opt a sports analogy. I like to use sports to explain games because experiences tend to be universal, widespread and easily understood. I usually turn to baseball, because a lot of my readers are American, but this time around I'll use hockey.
Hockey is a game of momentum. For those who play seriously, the age of introduction is usually three or four. Most small children haven't the ankle strength at that age to skate well, but balance is critical to the game and starting kids early will help them adjust to the difficulties of standing and moving on blades of metal that will sustain them when they learn how to move.
As I remember, somewhere around eight or nine years of age, we began to realize that a pair of skates will transform the body into a fairly efficient projectile, particularly when used against other eight or nine year-old children. Coaches know this, which is why the most common thing shouted from the sidelines is, "Pick up your feet!" As most children of this age are still clumsy, particularly in the use of sticks while packed in thirty pounds of padding and armor, most opportunities for scoring happen when all these little projectiles smash together in the vicinity of the goal crease.
The choice to pick up one's feet comes from trusting the coach or having the personal will to enter combat, for whatever reason; but of course there are many who will not pick up their feet and dream only of never having to play this game again. This was not me; I was an angry rink-hornet who spent many thousands of minutes in penalty boxes, as the gentle reader should expect.
The key word in the above passage is trusting . . . because once we dig in and pick up our feet as we are told to do, making things happen, we acquire experience at how things happen each time until we're ready to say, with conviction, that we know what will happen when we rush the opposition this way or that way. The lesson is to get moving; the knowledge comes from repeating the lesson often enough make educated guesses that count.
Most of us have not had the benefit of a lesson where it comes to RPGs - because we began with a limited set of mentors or a data set that could be mined effectively in order to produce a reasoned result. We have what is called an "availability" heuristic or "representative" heuristic - both of which are mental shortcuts that side-step an investigative analysis.
An Availability heuristic is to make a decision based upon the some recent experience that we have only just obtained. For example, because the fighter that we were running in last night's game failed to overcome the monster in question, then died, we come to the conclusion that our next character is definitely not going to be a fighter. In a wider sense, upon discovering that Wizards of the Coast is thinking about releasing a 6th edition of D&D, our perception of the value of 5th edition is immediately challenged, making us wonder if the edition we're playing now is really the best possible edition that there can be. With new available information that comes to light in the short term, our perception and our judgement is put into question, particularly if that judgement has always been based upon whatever most recently available information that was available.
It is as if the player, having responded to the coach, must now again wait for the coach to shout something else before taking action. The player is not self-motivated and therefore not self-dependent . . . and any information that may happen to make itself available will in turn become a threat to the player's equanimity.
A Representative heuristic seeks to make a decision based upon a template that - supposedly - accurately describes what a given thing in. For example, having grown up hearing a man's voice shouting advice from the sidelines, it is presumed that all coaches must be men, as all representative coaches from the player's childhood were, in fact, men. In a wider sense, it is to argue that since the original game of D&D possessed very few rules, whatever the reason for that, all correct and effective game versions of D&D must also be lean on rules because that's the "norm."
It is as if the player, having learned how to skate as a child without learning to crossover, insists that crossovers are either unnecessary or inappropriate to effective skating. As a child, crossovers feel weird and difficult, but there is simply no way to improve one's skating without adapting to the change.
Online, we see these heuristics employed as arguments all the time. Both, in their own ways, resist change - and are used as "common sense" arguments, which is to say that they are so obvious that they don't need proof or evidence.
Understanding our personal motivation for playing these games begin by rooting out these heuristics from our lexicon and recognizing that both dissuade us from making sound, rational decisions in our game-playing. When I pick this up again in the next post, I will try to explain how heuristics can also be positive and effective strategies in role-play.
Most people can't answer the question in truth because most people are not introspective in that way. They have not examined their own lives to determine what emptiness that role-playing fills or why specifically their brains are built for this particular kind of "fun." For some, it's apathy: they like the game, that is enough. That's really just a cover, however: the fact is, on the whole we wouldn't know how to start being introspective. We have no experience with it.
Let's take some time and examine that.
As I am on the spot for providing class material for teaching decision-making, I continue to research the subject (I do want to be better prepared than the student, yes?). This leads me down all sorts of pathways - most recently, it has been heuristics - which some readers, no doubt, have run across in their internet travels.
The short explanation is given rather directly by the Wikipedia link. Employing a heuristic is to make a decision using one's gut instincts - close to what I called "pattern recognition" in my book How to Run. On one level, it suggests that having been around for a while, having achieved an age where we know not to put our hands on a hot stove or drive with our eyes closed, our judgement is at more or less sufficient to allow ourselves to make good guesses, at least about ourselves and our motivations.
On another level, however, we need to acknowledge that we've been duped quite a few times in our lives, to the point where we also know to occasionally second-guess our instincts - because, as Nick Hornby's character Rob Fleming says in the book High Fidelity, our guts have shit for brains.
It is somewhere between these two extremes, in getting to know ourselves and trust ourselves, learning how to restrain ourselves and police ourselves, that introspection occurs. Thankfully, we're not usually on our own, here (though some of us are). Society has at least tried to set us up with parents, instructors, written material and art in an attempt to show us the right path. Of course, we're still responsible for walking it.
To explain how this works, I'll co-opt a sports analogy. I like to use sports to explain games because experiences tend to be universal, widespread and easily understood. I usually turn to baseball, because a lot of my readers are American, but this time around I'll use hockey.
Hockey is a game of momentum. For those who play seriously, the age of introduction is usually three or four. Most small children haven't the ankle strength at that age to skate well, but balance is critical to the game and starting kids early will help them adjust to the difficulties of standing and moving on blades of metal that will sustain them when they learn how to move.
As I remember, somewhere around eight or nine years of age, we began to realize that a pair of skates will transform the body into a fairly efficient projectile, particularly when used against other eight or nine year-old children. Coaches know this, which is why the most common thing shouted from the sidelines is, "Pick up your feet!" As most children of this age are still clumsy, particularly in the use of sticks while packed in thirty pounds of padding and armor, most opportunities for scoring happen when all these little projectiles smash together in the vicinity of the goal crease.
The choice to pick up one's feet comes from trusting the coach or having the personal will to enter combat, for whatever reason; but of course there are many who will not pick up their feet and dream only of never having to play this game again. This was not me; I was an angry rink-hornet who spent many thousands of minutes in penalty boxes, as the gentle reader should expect.
The key word in the above passage is trusting . . . because once we dig in and pick up our feet as we are told to do, making things happen, we acquire experience at how things happen each time until we're ready to say, with conviction, that we know what will happen when we rush the opposition this way or that way. The lesson is to get moving; the knowledge comes from repeating the lesson often enough make educated guesses that count.
Most of us have not had the benefit of a lesson where it comes to RPGs - because we began with a limited set of mentors or a data set that could be mined effectively in order to produce a reasoned result. We have what is called an "availability" heuristic or "representative" heuristic - both of which are mental shortcuts that side-step an investigative analysis.
An Availability heuristic is to make a decision based upon the some recent experience that we have only just obtained. For example, because the fighter that we were running in last night's game failed to overcome the monster in question, then died, we come to the conclusion that our next character is definitely not going to be a fighter. In a wider sense, upon discovering that Wizards of the Coast is thinking about releasing a 6th edition of D&D, our perception of the value of 5th edition is immediately challenged, making us wonder if the edition we're playing now is really the best possible edition that there can be. With new available information that comes to light in the short term, our perception and our judgement is put into question, particularly if that judgement has always been based upon whatever most recently available information that was available.
It is as if the player, having responded to the coach, must now again wait for the coach to shout something else before taking action. The player is not self-motivated and therefore not self-dependent . . . and any information that may happen to make itself available will in turn become a threat to the player's equanimity.
A Representative heuristic seeks to make a decision based upon a template that - supposedly - accurately describes what a given thing in. For example, having grown up hearing a man's voice shouting advice from the sidelines, it is presumed that all coaches must be men, as all representative coaches from the player's childhood were, in fact, men. In a wider sense, it is to argue that since the original game of D&D possessed very few rules, whatever the reason for that, all correct and effective game versions of D&D must also be lean on rules because that's the "norm."
It is as if the player, having learned how to skate as a child without learning to crossover, insists that crossovers are either unnecessary or inappropriate to effective skating. As a child, crossovers feel weird and difficult, but there is simply no way to improve one's skating without adapting to the change.
Online, we see these heuristics employed as arguments all the time. Both, in their own ways, resist change - and are used as "common sense" arguments, which is to say that they are so obvious that they don't need proof or evidence.
Understanding our personal motivation for playing these games begin by rooting out these heuristics from our lexicon and recognizing that both dissuade us from making sound, rational decisions in our game-playing. When I pick this up again in the next post, I will try to explain how heuristics can also be positive and effective strategies in role-play.
Monday, October 10, 2016
A Startling Wind-based Website
This is pretty sweet. The link is a current surface wind map showing in real time. I caught the picture below at 6:30 PM EST, Oct 10, 2016:
This was sent to me by a reader, who suggested that I might find some utility in it. I wish. Unfortunately, unless my game is actually taking place on October 10th, the details have limited practicality. But this is so cool.
Using hurricanetrack.com, which gives information on hurricanes in real time (also; I love this modern age), I was able to identify that the hurricane north of Puerto Rico is Nicole, which will give some rain to the Bahamas but is expected to take a circle out to sea and die in the north Atlantic, as many hurricanes do. So no worries with this one; the reader can see from the map that Matthew has completely dissipated. I'm sorry I didn't have this site two days ago.
Compare the map above with any weather systems map you care to find. The website will show any part of the world the reader cares to see. The Antarctic is fascinating, a massive land-based high surrounded by violent lows.
There are also options for ocean currents, for chemicals in the atmosphere and for particulates. The latter shows a tremendous flow of particulate snow falling out of the Sahara:
I have no idea how I could use this, but it sure is awesome. Thank you Erich.
UPDATE:
I am beginning to suspect that it is NOT real time video. After many hours there are no appreciable differences. I feel I have not correctly understood what is being depicted. It matches up with the weather site I've linked but doesn't seem to be updating from hour to hour. I'll have to see what it looks like in the morning.
 |
Using hurricanetrack.com, which gives information on hurricanes in real time (also; I love this modern age), I was able to identify that the hurricane north of Puerto Rico is Nicole, which will give some rain to the Bahamas but is expected to take a circle out to sea and die in the north Atlantic, as many hurricanes do. So no worries with this one; the reader can see from the map that Matthew has completely dissipated. I'm sorry I didn't have this site two days ago.
Compare the map above with any weather systems map you care to find. The website will show any part of the world the reader cares to see. The Antarctic is fascinating, a massive land-based high surrounded by violent lows.
There are also options for ocean currents, for chemicals in the atmosphere and for particulates. The latter shows a tremendous flow of particulate snow falling out of the Sahara:
 |
| Also shown in real time. To see it, click the earth link in the bottom left hand corner. |
I have no idea how I could use this, but it sure is awesome. Thank you Erich.
UPDATE:
I am beginning to suspect that it is NOT real time video. After many hours there are no appreciable differences. I feel I have not correctly understood what is being depicted. It matches up with the weather site I've linked but doesn't seem to be updating from hour to hour. I'll have to see what it looks like in the morning.
Friday, October 7, 2016
Many Cultures to Make
I have finished the Scotland map. For those who have donated $20 to my Patreon, the publisher and png files have been duly updated on the Google Drive file so you can have a look at them. I'll be doing this going forward on any map changes that I make, so if I do update something important the maps will show it without anyone having to wait.
The dragon territories seem most upon people's minds, as they ask me how those work in my world order. That's understandable; it is certainly the weirdest political division that I've included, mostly because it is the only one that is not a humanoid in some fashion. It reminds me, however, that I have a very large world yet to fill, massive empty areas in Africa, North and South America, Australia and the rest of Oceania and of course Antarctica. I don't have enough humanoid races for all of those.
I've already used dwarfs, gnomes, halflings, elves, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, norkers, ogres, bugbears, xvarts, cameltaurs (like centaurs), djang (from Dray Prescott), qullan, frost giants, githzerai, githyanki, firenewts, flinds, trolls and minotaurs. It is easy to imagine where I might locate quaggoths, lizard men, tabaxi, aarakocra and kenku, but I'm quickly running out of odd humanoid races and I'm not running out of parts of the world to fill.
Incidentally, I have been thinking of cutting off the Dingwall part of the map from Cromwell's Britain and identifying the inhabitants as berserkers. Technically, the population density is high enough to be rated as human - but then, berserkers are, kind of, sort of, human. The idea of identifying the wildest part of the Scottish highlands (along with parts where my Scottish grandmother's family originates, name of Ross) as a bunch of rabid multi-attack per round death engines appeals to me greatly - particularly if I adjust the berserking rules so they can be "normal" most of the time and only berserk when sorely pressed in battle. And heck, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds anyway - so why not a piece of Scotland where the fighters attack twice, hm?
I have to be thinking, though, of making a dozen other dragon cultures, along with other giants, then onward into regions where live any and all of the other intelligent races. I don't have a single faerie kingdom created (though I have the sylvan forests of America to settle), I haven't considered Rakshasa (maybe we'll assign one of the minor kingdoms of Burma and make it a Rakshasa-controlled human entity), Drow, doppelgangers, surface troglodytes, gargoyles, mind flayers, night hags, yeti, xorn and umberhulks, not to mention the number of sea-dwelling creatures I haven't considered yet as I've been concentrating on the land. As I move outwards from Europe in all directions, the residents are bound to get weirder and weirder, particularly as I get inventive as I did when I created Paraguay.
Much to do, much to do.
The dragon territories seem most upon people's minds, as they ask me how those work in my world order. That's understandable; it is certainly the weirdest political division that I've included, mostly because it is the only one that is not a humanoid in some fashion. It reminds me, however, that I have a very large world yet to fill, massive empty areas in Africa, North and South America, Australia and the rest of Oceania and of course Antarctica. I don't have enough humanoid races for all of those.
I've already used dwarfs, gnomes, halflings, elves, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, norkers, ogres, bugbears, xvarts, cameltaurs (like centaurs), djang (from Dray Prescott), qullan, frost giants, githzerai, githyanki, firenewts, flinds, trolls and minotaurs. It is easy to imagine where I might locate quaggoths, lizard men, tabaxi, aarakocra and kenku, but I'm quickly running out of odd humanoid races and I'm not running out of parts of the world to fill.
Incidentally, I have been thinking of cutting off the Dingwall part of the map from Cromwell's Britain and identifying the inhabitants as berserkers. Technically, the population density is high enough to be rated as human - but then, berserkers are, kind of, sort of, human. The idea of identifying the wildest part of the Scottish highlands (along with parts where my Scottish grandmother's family originates, name of Ross) as a bunch of rabid multi-attack per round death engines appeals to me greatly - particularly if I adjust the berserking rules so they can be "normal" most of the time and only berserk when sorely pressed in battle. And heck, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds anyway - so why not a piece of Scotland where the fighters attack twice, hm?
I have to be thinking, though, of making a dozen other dragon cultures, along with other giants, then onward into regions where live any and all of the other intelligent races. I don't have a single faerie kingdom created (though I have the sylvan forests of America to settle), I haven't considered Rakshasa (maybe we'll assign one of the minor kingdoms of Burma and make it a Rakshasa-controlled human entity), Drow, doppelgangers, surface troglodytes, gargoyles, mind flayers, night hags, yeti, xorn and umberhulks, not to mention the number of sea-dwelling creatures I haven't considered yet as I've been concentrating on the land. As I move outwards from Europe in all directions, the residents are bound to get weirder and weirder, particularly as I get inventive as I did when I created Paraguay.
Much to do, much to do.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
A Week's Work
Well, a week's frittering, really. Maybe 11 or 12 hours. Time spent resting after work before getting down to things more serious.
Compare this to the map I posted last week. Worked the coastlines down to central Lancashire, plotted the cities for this corner of Great Britain and filled in the coast lines (so it begins to look right). I still have the rivers and borders to draw in and then there's the business of making sure that the map is layered properly (the labels on top and all properly showing, the rivers on top of the borders and both not bleeding into the seas, all that).
The land is proving especially daunting, with all the tiny islands and indents, not to mention squeezing so many burgs into such a small space. I'm glad I didn't start with mapping Britain. I needed practice to do this one.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Same-Old, Same-Old
Mr. Plinkett has a new review out after quite a long absence ~ and although tasteless in parts, I cannot help feeling captivated by the rational, unrelenting deconstruction that he manages where films are concerned. The two fellows he's connected with through RedLetterMedia are infantile man-boys of the lowest order (must be 9gag users), so I can't begin to fathom how that association works - but Plinkett, apart from his need to pander to the lowest denominator, is well worth the movie-length perspicacity of his reviews.
This one is about the Force Awakens - which I haven't seen and which I am likely never to see, until three kidnappers break into my house someday, tie me up and force me to watch the film. Obviously, I know just about every plot-point of the film from beginning to end, even though I've never deliberately sought out a synopsis, because I use the internet. The reasons for my disinterest came from the fact that I don't like Star Wars. I find the characters stale and wooden, I find the story of the first three pictures strained and fairly hokey and - I would guess - I saw the films for the first time at a sufficient age that I just don't feel that wave of nostalgia that seems to possess other people.
Plinkett brought up a good points, however. Some of his arguments about the film (which don't get started until he spends about 55 minutes eviscerating the Star Wars universe and its new corporate masters, Disney) momentarily made me want to change my mind. For a fleeting five or ten minutes I was thinking, I'll finish watching this and then I'll load up the Force Awakens on Netflix and watch it. I was that close.
Then Plinkett killed that compulsion. He outlined a point that resonated with me, that resonates with me regarding a lot of fan-service content. The film (apart from plot and character) repeats exposition that we already know, because it is "cool" to hear these new characters talk about the force and the dark side and all that jazz all over again, even though every person sitting in the theatre already knows every detail about it and has known it for most of their lives.
This puts me in mind of something that will seem, to some, like a strong departure, even an unfair departure. Once upon a time, I used to go to church. I was raised as a Lutheran boy and for many years I sat through services every Sunday morning. Then I married a woman who had been raised Anglican and - although I had long ceased to feel any faith or belief - I was married in an Anglican ceremony and I continued to attend services because that is what she wanted. That was a long time ago now. I haven't attended a ceremony outside a wedding in 25 years.
The Anglican church is all about repetition, Sunday to Sunday, season to season. The process is this: after dressing through the morning in readiness to look the part, parishioners arrive at the church and enter a foyer where dozens, perhaps a hundred, other people are milling about. These people see each other every week and it is a quiet, pleasant opportunity to chat and feel a belonging before groups slowly depart to find their places on the pews. There is a quiet time for reflection while people control their kids and start to find their sense of self and humility. A ritual entrance of the choir is followed by a pastor moving up the aisle with a small collection of altar boys or an associate clergy. The choir opens with a hymn and everyone stands up, finds the hymn in their books and begins to sing together. They've all sung the hymn before, though there are a lot of hymns and there are generally months that pass before a hymn is repeated. The hymn finishes and the pastor begins to speak. There are a few announcements and then the service begins with the same words that are heard every week, with moderate changes for certain times of the year like Advent, Christmas or Easter.
It is comforting. Even if we don't believe, experiencing the pattern, knowing that it will happen in precisely the same manner, week after week, is comforting. The failure of religion isn't that the mode doesn't work, it is that we found - as a people - other ways to find other repetitions that can be experienced among a smaller group of people and from the comfort of our homes. Every football commentary begins exactly the same way, with the same muttering phrases and the same attributions to expectations and predictions. Every morning we turn on youtube or find our personal news feeds or load up the video game we were playing the night before and slowly we immerse ourselves in something familiar and comforting, with the same expectations and patterns that we know from hundreds of previous mornings. We read to see what the candidate we don't like has just said the day before that will encourage us to believe they're going to lose. We scan through the humour sites to get ourselves a little laugh that will make us feel ready to face the day. We discover that a favorite reviewer who hasn't reviewed a movie in three years has finally released new content and we are reborn.
But some people, see, want to live in this place all the time. Some of us enjoy the familiar for an hour or two in the morning and then we get on with our day, making new things, reading new things, enjoying the change. But others just want the same-old, same-old from the moment their eyes open until they blissfully fade into unconsciousness again . . . without any real evidence that consciousness was ever achieved.
I play D&D because it is different from session to session. The way I design my games and motivate my players, the way that their actions have consequences and the way that their participation has to adapt to the consequences that they created, causes my game to move forward in a way that a dull, familiar hack-and-slash campaign never can. I don't want to run the same game I ran last year. I'm here now, in this new place, in these new strategies and this new method - I can't get excited about reliving, I'm too busy living.
There are things that I do enjoy again, particularly movies. I have movies I have watched many times and I often laugh at the same jokes or enjoy the same sequences. I often see something new in a film or read something new in a book that I didn't notice before. But these are my weak moments. These are the moments when I'm tired or run-down or frustrated with a problem I can't solve. I relate any and all repetition to weakness ~ just as I relate the people who go to church and bet on football and drink every Saturday at the bar as people who use a crutch to survive a life they are plainly not up to living. I don't like that weakness in myself; I would rather be working, I would rather have something new to point at, that I can say I did.
So when I think a new film or a new book is just going to tell me something that I already know, I'm apt to choose a different film, a different book. I have yet to hear anything about the Force Awakens that suggests I'm going to see anything new. It may be pretty, it may be funny, it may have all the nice actors in it that people liked before, but frankly it doesn't look that pretty or that funny or that nice in the trailers. It looks, I'm sorry to say, same-old, same-old.
I have better things to do. Watching Plinkett tear it down, for instance, along with a lot of other things. Or writing this post about it, which is creating something new.
This one is about the Force Awakens - which I haven't seen and which I am likely never to see, until three kidnappers break into my house someday, tie me up and force me to watch the film. Obviously, I know just about every plot-point of the film from beginning to end, even though I've never deliberately sought out a synopsis, because I use the internet. The reasons for my disinterest came from the fact that I don't like Star Wars. I find the characters stale and wooden, I find the story of the first three pictures strained and fairly hokey and - I would guess - I saw the films for the first time at a sufficient age that I just don't feel that wave of nostalgia that seems to possess other people.
Plinkett brought up a good points, however. Some of his arguments about the film (which don't get started until he spends about 55 minutes eviscerating the Star Wars universe and its new corporate masters, Disney) momentarily made me want to change my mind. For a fleeting five or ten minutes I was thinking, I'll finish watching this and then I'll load up the Force Awakens on Netflix and watch it. I was that close.
Then Plinkett killed that compulsion. He outlined a point that resonated with me, that resonates with me regarding a lot of fan-service content. The film (apart from plot and character) repeats exposition that we already know, because it is "cool" to hear these new characters talk about the force and the dark side and all that jazz all over again, even though every person sitting in the theatre already knows every detail about it and has known it for most of their lives.
This puts me in mind of something that will seem, to some, like a strong departure, even an unfair departure. Once upon a time, I used to go to church. I was raised as a Lutheran boy and for many years I sat through services every Sunday morning. Then I married a woman who had been raised Anglican and - although I had long ceased to feel any faith or belief - I was married in an Anglican ceremony and I continued to attend services because that is what she wanted. That was a long time ago now. I haven't attended a ceremony outside a wedding in 25 years.
The Anglican church is all about repetition, Sunday to Sunday, season to season. The process is this: after dressing through the morning in readiness to look the part, parishioners arrive at the church and enter a foyer where dozens, perhaps a hundred, other people are milling about. These people see each other every week and it is a quiet, pleasant opportunity to chat and feel a belonging before groups slowly depart to find their places on the pews. There is a quiet time for reflection while people control their kids and start to find their sense of self and humility. A ritual entrance of the choir is followed by a pastor moving up the aisle with a small collection of altar boys or an associate clergy. The choir opens with a hymn and everyone stands up, finds the hymn in their books and begins to sing together. They've all sung the hymn before, though there are a lot of hymns and there are generally months that pass before a hymn is repeated. The hymn finishes and the pastor begins to speak. There are a few announcements and then the service begins with the same words that are heard every week, with moderate changes for certain times of the year like Advent, Christmas or Easter.
It is comforting. Even if we don't believe, experiencing the pattern, knowing that it will happen in precisely the same manner, week after week, is comforting. The failure of religion isn't that the mode doesn't work, it is that we found - as a people - other ways to find other repetitions that can be experienced among a smaller group of people and from the comfort of our homes. Every football commentary begins exactly the same way, with the same muttering phrases and the same attributions to expectations and predictions. Every morning we turn on youtube or find our personal news feeds or load up the video game we were playing the night before and slowly we immerse ourselves in something familiar and comforting, with the same expectations and patterns that we know from hundreds of previous mornings. We read to see what the candidate we don't like has just said the day before that will encourage us to believe they're going to lose. We scan through the humour sites to get ourselves a little laugh that will make us feel ready to face the day. We discover that a favorite reviewer who hasn't reviewed a movie in three years has finally released new content and we are reborn.
But some people, see, want to live in this place all the time. Some of us enjoy the familiar for an hour or two in the morning and then we get on with our day, making new things, reading new things, enjoying the change. But others just want the same-old, same-old from the moment their eyes open until they blissfully fade into unconsciousness again . . . without any real evidence that consciousness was ever achieved.
I play D&D because it is different from session to session. The way I design my games and motivate my players, the way that their actions have consequences and the way that their participation has to adapt to the consequences that they created, causes my game to move forward in a way that a dull, familiar hack-and-slash campaign never can. I don't want to run the same game I ran last year. I'm here now, in this new place, in these new strategies and this new method - I can't get excited about reliving, I'm too busy living.
There are things that I do enjoy again, particularly movies. I have movies I have watched many times and I often laugh at the same jokes or enjoy the same sequences. I often see something new in a film or read something new in a book that I didn't notice before. But these are my weak moments. These are the moments when I'm tired or run-down or frustrated with a problem I can't solve. I relate any and all repetition to weakness ~ just as I relate the people who go to church and bet on football and drink every Saturday at the bar as people who use a crutch to survive a life they are plainly not up to living. I don't like that weakness in myself; I would rather be working, I would rather have something new to point at, that I can say I did.
So when I think a new film or a new book is just going to tell me something that I already know, I'm apt to choose a different film, a different book. I have yet to hear anything about the Force Awakens that suggests I'm going to see anything new. It may be pretty, it may be funny, it may have all the nice actors in it that people liked before, but frankly it doesn't look that pretty or that funny or that nice in the trailers. It looks, I'm sorry to say, same-old, same-old.
I have better things to do. Watching Plinkett tear it down, for instance, along with a lot of other things. Or writing this post about it, which is creating something new.
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Churchill's Flood
Just before this past weekend I wrote a post called Acts of Faith. That was intended to be the preliminary to another post, one that has been floating around in my head for more than a week - but then I got wrapped up with the Expo and some making of maps and I never did get around to it. Worse, the post was meant to answer a question that a reader asked me - that even after a lot of thought, it's a question to which I'm not sure I have an answer.
This is the best time to plow into things, however. Just as I would sit and talk to someone over coffee, I find it just as easy to write out my thoughts here online. So let's get to it.
What is the one thing that anyone could do that would really, truly, be the most valuable thing to make our worlds better?
From a strategical standpoint, where should we start? It isn't that we won't have time to do other things, in the long run, but given that we have a session that is starting in about two or five or ten days, what can I do today that will make that session run better?
My first instinct is to say that it's too late. Role-playing is a difficult process and getting better requires forethought and consideration. Real, relevant change happens in the long term and always after ages of apparent failure and disappointment. Winston Churchill, in describing British armaments manufacture prior to World War II, belaboured the point that with great things, the payoff is necessarily in the future: "The first year yields nothing, the second very little, the third a lot and the fourth a flood."
Yet his argument is also that we start today because without starting, there is no future. And so it isn't that we're without a strategy that we can't employ this minute . . . it is that we shouldn't expect a result from that strategy the minute after.
But it isn't true that we can't do something that will affect the session that I am running, say, tonight. There are a number of practical, useful things I can do, all of which can be managed in the eight hours between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.
I can think. For this, I can sequester myself from other people, concentrate my mind on the matter at hand and think. I'll start by deconstructing the player's reactions so far to the various things they've faced, their apparent motivations, things that they seem to have found expressly interesting. I can diagnose things that haven't worked, both recently and in my long past, and force myself to think about those uncomfortable things that I would rather forget and examine them for reasons why I screwed up or why the players resisted or resented the ideas presented. I can settle on an evaluation to my diagnosis and make up my mind to do something tonight that will satisfy that which the players have always liked and eschew that which the players have disliked.
For example: my players who had bought a ship and hired a captain were surprised to find that the captain they hired was an enemy of Spain, having once been a Catalan rebel and a Genoese pirate. The captain, knowing he was about to be arrested when the ship landed in Morocco, fled the ship, abandoning the party to the first mate, upon whom they then relied upon to continue their journey towards the Canary Islands. The going was difficult because the mate (now new captain) did not know the waters as well - and yet eventually the party's ship made its way to Aguilar in south Morocco, well out of Spanish influence.
The former captain was then speeding the length of Morocco on horseback, sending a message by pigeon ahead to Aguilar for the party to wait for him; that he had information that was of special use to the party. The former captain knew the party would have to land in Aguilar to supply before searching the islands of the Canaries, as that had always been the plan. The party heard the message and decided to wait. The captain arrived, having spent three days in a library in Fez to acquire his story, then told the story to the party to set up the forthcoming adventure. There's a huge amount of treasure laying at the bottom of the sea off an island that the former captain (now full captain again) knows and isn't telling. The treasure was sunk there when the last pretender to the Portuguese throne fled the country in 1580 after the Spanish unification with Portugal, following a sea battle in which many of the Portuguese crown jewels were seized by two Spanish ships that fled south from the Madieras, were pursued, caught near this island in the Canaries and sunk (this last being completely made up for the campaign).
The party has heard the story and have decided to trust the captain, to search for the sunken ships.
This is where my campaign was left five months ago, as I struggled to find money, work, organize my life, survive, change places of residence and adapt to endless changes. Thing is, and I admit this quite freely, I have no plans whatsoever in place for the campaign beyond this point. I know the island, I have a general idea of what the scene should be, but I haven't decided upon what creatures the players may have to fight, I haven't invented enough rules for underwater adventuring or combat, I haven't made up my mind as to how much treasure is there (enough to get them all up a level, for sure, which will be a lot since they're all 9th to 11th at this point) and many other details.
So, what could I do right now? Well, I could certainly decide some of those things, yes? I could start sketching out a map of the treasure's location. I could sit and think about other obstacles I can put between the players and the treasure to buy myself more time. I could write rules for underwater combat. There are definite strategies I could employ today.
I have already set up some major contexts for what could happen. The captain is clearly not to be trusted. The historical relationships through which I built the adventure have real documents and references that I can turn to for ideas if I need to. There could be Spanish still hunting the captain and it must be remembered that the Canaries are a Spanish Viceroy. And, of course, the players have been adventuring for awhile and have made other enemies not connected to this adventure who could pop up nonetheless.
Most of those things, however, take time, a lot of time, more than eight hours; and it's easy to feel overwhelmed by that and throw hands in the air and shout, "No way! There's just no way!" before deciding it's a good time to get incrementally better at Overwatch. "Fuck it, I'll muddle through somehow."
Muddling, however, sucks. I was muddling with the previous running, with the captain catching up with the party and giving his story. Much of that running went rather stale, with the party travelling by sea around Morocco and not much happening. If I had thought about it and taken some time, they could have encountered something without the captain, or come across some other information about the area that had nothing to do with the Portuguese jewels, that could nevertheless now exist as another layer on top of what's happening now. But I didn't do that because I muddled. I was tired and I was phoning it in and I knew it. I knew I was taking a break and I was glad of it, glad to be putting aside my game and paying attention to other things.
Coming back to my game, I can't muddle. I need a proper strategy. Bringing this post back around to the main point: what can I do in 8 hours to make this happen?
Hah ~ I can't. Thankfully, I'm not setting up for a game tonight. I meant that above as a "what if," knowing that many readers are starting their game tonight. I'm going to come back around to playing in two weeks ~ and my first night is going to be mostly accounting, updating the players on the rules, getting them set up for the adventure and, possibly, letting them get their feet wet [!] with a minor adventure action and nothing more. I don't expect to be in a thick adventure until four weeks from now.
So, there's a short term answer for those who are looking for something they can do right now: stall. Skip a session if need be; if that's out of the question, create a very short side-quest into a dungeon or just long enough to keep the players busy for a session that you can muddle through without much trouble, that gives them a boost in treasure and power and makes them better able to handle the actual adventure. Then use the extra time you've created to design something worthy.
In the very short term, during the session, hold off on bringing the players back to the point. Let them muddle around, let them overthink things, let them stall for you! They're having fun and it will give you time to think. This game - dungeon mastering - is all about thinking. Do it, practice it, apply it. Our only chance of improving our short term game is through having one epiphany after another, rapidly enough that we can prove we're smarter than they are.
Yet, this all sounds nice but it doesn't actually answer the question. What makes the epiphanies work, hm Alexis? How do I know it even is an epiphany, Alexis? Answer me that one. And while you're at it, please explain why you're not just full of shit?
Sometimes, it feels like I am.
I admitted that I didn't have a proper answer to the question. All I've said so far are some of the things I use to side-step the "best thing I can do for my world" question. Like everyone else, I'm wallowing too; I'm struggling, I'm thinking things up on a dime, I'm putting off the work and not doing the things I should be doing (underwater rules) so that I can frivolously map Scotland.
Fact is, I don't have an answer for what the underwater rules should look like; I have nothing good to base them on, since apparently everyone else who has tried to make such rules had no idea either. And unlike horses, we don't have a lot of real world discussion about swinging swords and firing crossbows underwater. People in the Middle Ages and Renaissance did not fight battles under the sea ~ it was a good way to drown. And there was no reason to do it.
There are a lot of things about the game that I just don't have a straight answer for. I know how to map Scotland. I don't know precisely how this adventure with the players is going to go. So I waste time doing the former (because it keeps my hand in the game and continues to build up resources I may use later) while waiting for inspiration to solve the latter. It's what everyone else is doing, also.
Churchill's flood pays off when it comes to things like knowing the game rules cold (which DMs should do) or spending a lifetime reading about history (so that I can wonder what happened to the Portuguese crown after 1580 and discover that there's an adventure to be built out of it). It pays off when the maps are already there and I've done the research to find out how the Canaries were settled and what purpose they serve in the Spanish geopolitik. It pays off when the players decide to do something really weird and I already have house rules for that or I can base a precedent making decision on something else that I have rules for. Working at random things in my world every day and all the time steadily accumulates until the immediate needs of the campaign have the potential for inspiration from the knowledge base I've acquired or the habits I've adopted from running my world as long as I have.
Can anyone have that by "doing the most important thing" in the short term? No. That's the cold answer. No. There is no specific, definite thing that anyone can do that will universally fix every campaign.
But individuals running their games can do the next thing. And that is really the key. The next thing. I did this yesterday, today I'm going to get up and work on this for some time. And tomorrow I think, if I'm not still doing this, I'll do that. And so on. Every day. Patiently. Waiting for the flood to happen.
This is the best time to plow into things, however. Just as I would sit and talk to someone over coffee, I find it just as easy to write out my thoughts here online. So let's get to it.
What is the one thing that anyone could do that would really, truly, be the most valuable thing to make our worlds better?
From a strategical standpoint, where should we start? It isn't that we won't have time to do other things, in the long run, but given that we have a session that is starting in about two or five or ten days, what can I do today that will make that session run better?
My first instinct is to say that it's too late. Role-playing is a difficult process and getting better requires forethought and consideration. Real, relevant change happens in the long term and always after ages of apparent failure and disappointment. Winston Churchill, in describing British armaments manufacture prior to World War II, belaboured the point that with great things, the payoff is necessarily in the future: "The first year yields nothing, the second very little, the third a lot and the fourth a flood."
Yet his argument is also that we start today because without starting, there is no future. And so it isn't that we're without a strategy that we can't employ this minute . . . it is that we shouldn't expect a result from that strategy the minute after.
But it isn't true that we can't do something that will affect the session that I am running, say, tonight. There are a number of practical, useful things I can do, all of which can be managed in the eight hours between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.
I can think. For this, I can sequester myself from other people, concentrate my mind on the matter at hand and think. I'll start by deconstructing the player's reactions so far to the various things they've faced, their apparent motivations, things that they seem to have found expressly interesting. I can diagnose things that haven't worked, both recently and in my long past, and force myself to think about those uncomfortable things that I would rather forget and examine them for reasons why I screwed up or why the players resisted or resented the ideas presented. I can settle on an evaluation to my diagnosis and make up my mind to do something tonight that will satisfy that which the players have always liked and eschew that which the players have disliked.
For example: my players who had bought a ship and hired a captain were surprised to find that the captain they hired was an enemy of Spain, having once been a Catalan rebel and a Genoese pirate. The captain, knowing he was about to be arrested when the ship landed in Morocco, fled the ship, abandoning the party to the first mate, upon whom they then relied upon to continue their journey towards the Canary Islands. The going was difficult because the mate (now new captain) did not know the waters as well - and yet eventually the party's ship made its way to Aguilar in south Morocco, well out of Spanish influence.
The former captain was then speeding the length of Morocco on horseback, sending a message by pigeon ahead to Aguilar for the party to wait for him; that he had information that was of special use to the party. The former captain knew the party would have to land in Aguilar to supply before searching the islands of the Canaries, as that had always been the plan. The party heard the message and decided to wait. The captain arrived, having spent three days in a library in Fez to acquire his story, then told the story to the party to set up the forthcoming adventure. There's a huge amount of treasure laying at the bottom of the sea off an island that the former captain (now full captain again) knows and isn't telling. The treasure was sunk there when the last pretender to the Portuguese throne fled the country in 1580 after the Spanish unification with Portugal, following a sea battle in which many of the Portuguese crown jewels were seized by two Spanish ships that fled south from the Madieras, were pursued, caught near this island in the Canaries and sunk (this last being completely made up for the campaign).
 |
| How much treasure could two of these carry? |
The party has heard the story and have decided to trust the captain, to search for the sunken ships.
This is where my campaign was left five months ago, as I struggled to find money, work, organize my life, survive, change places of residence and adapt to endless changes. Thing is, and I admit this quite freely, I have no plans whatsoever in place for the campaign beyond this point. I know the island, I have a general idea of what the scene should be, but I haven't decided upon what creatures the players may have to fight, I haven't invented enough rules for underwater adventuring or combat, I haven't made up my mind as to how much treasure is there (enough to get them all up a level, for sure, which will be a lot since they're all 9th to 11th at this point) and many other details.
So, what could I do right now? Well, I could certainly decide some of those things, yes? I could start sketching out a map of the treasure's location. I could sit and think about other obstacles I can put between the players and the treasure to buy myself more time. I could write rules for underwater combat. There are definite strategies I could employ today.
I have already set up some major contexts for what could happen. The captain is clearly not to be trusted. The historical relationships through which I built the adventure have real documents and references that I can turn to for ideas if I need to. There could be Spanish still hunting the captain and it must be remembered that the Canaries are a Spanish Viceroy. And, of course, the players have been adventuring for awhile and have made other enemies not connected to this adventure who could pop up nonetheless.
Most of those things, however, take time, a lot of time, more than eight hours; and it's easy to feel overwhelmed by that and throw hands in the air and shout, "No way! There's just no way!" before deciding it's a good time to get incrementally better at Overwatch. "Fuck it, I'll muddle through somehow."
Muddling, however, sucks. I was muddling with the previous running, with the captain catching up with the party and giving his story. Much of that running went rather stale, with the party travelling by sea around Morocco and not much happening. If I had thought about it and taken some time, they could have encountered something without the captain, or come across some other information about the area that had nothing to do with the Portuguese jewels, that could nevertheless now exist as another layer on top of what's happening now. But I didn't do that because I muddled. I was tired and I was phoning it in and I knew it. I knew I was taking a break and I was glad of it, glad to be putting aside my game and paying attention to other things.
Coming back to my game, I can't muddle. I need a proper strategy. Bringing this post back around to the main point: what can I do in 8 hours to make this happen?
Hah ~ I can't. Thankfully, I'm not setting up for a game tonight. I meant that above as a "what if," knowing that many readers are starting their game tonight. I'm going to come back around to playing in two weeks ~ and my first night is going to be mostly accounting, updating the players on the rules, getting them set up for the adventure and, possibly, letting them get their feet wet [!] with a minor adventure action and nothing more. I don't expect to be in a thick adventure until four weeks from now.
So, there's a short term answer for those who are looking for something they can do right now: stall. Skip a session if need be; if that's out of the question, create a very short side-quest into a dungeon or just long enough to keep the players busy for a session that you can muddle through without much trouble, that gives them a boost in treasure and power and makes them better able to handle the actual adventure. Then use the extra time you've created to design something worthy.
In the very short term, during the session, hold off on bringing the players back to the point. Let them muddle around, let them overthink things, let them stall for you! They're having fun and it will give you time to think. This game - dungeon mastering - is all about thinking. Do it, practice it, apply it. Our only chance of improving our short term game is through having one epiphany after another, rapidly enough that we can prove we're smarter than they are.
Yet, this all sounds nice but it doesn't actually answer the question. What makes the epiphanies work, hm Alexis? How do I know it even is an epiphany, Alexis? Answer me that one. And while you're at it, please explain why you're not just full of shit?
Sometimes, it feels like I am.
I admitted that I didn't have a proper answer to the question. All I've said so far are some of the things I use to side-step the "best thing I can do for my world" question. Like everyone else, I'm wallowing too; I'm struggling, I'm thinking things up on a dime, I'm putting off the work and not doing the things I should be doing (underwater rules) so that I can frivolously map Scotland.
Fact is, I don't have an answer for what the underwater rules should look like; I have nothing good to base them on, since apparently everyone else who has tried to make such rules had no idea either. And unlike horses, we don't have a lot of real world discussion about swinging swords and firing crossbows underwater. People in the Middle Ages and Renaissance did not fight battles under the sea ~ it was a good way to drown. And there was no reason to do it.
There are a lot of things about the game that I just don't have a straight answer for. I know how to map Scotland. I don't know precisely how this adventure with the players is going to go. So I waste time doing the former (because it keeps my hand in the game and continues to build up resources I may use later) while waiting for inspiration to solve the latter. It's what everyone else is doing, also.
Churchill's flood pays off when it comes to things like knowing the game rules cold (which DMs should do) or spending a lifetime reading about history (so that I can wonder what happened to the Portuguese crown after 1580 and discover that there's an adventure to be built out of it). It pays off when the maps are already there and I've done the research to find out how the Canaries were settled and what purpose they serve in the Spanish geopolitik. It pays off when the players decide to do something really weird and I already have house rules for that or I can base a precedent making decision on something else that I have rules for. Working at random things in my world every day and all the time steadily accumulates until the immediate needs of the campaign have the potential for inspiration from the knowledge base I've acquired or the habits I've adopted from running my world as long as I have.
Can anyone have that by "doing the most important thing" in the short term? No. That's the cold answer. No. There is no specific, definite thing that anyone can do that will universally fix every campaign.
But individuals running their games can do the next thing. And that is really the key. The next thing. I did this yesterday, today I'm going to get up and work on this for some time. And tomorrow I think, if I'm not still doing this, I'll do that. And so on. Every day. Patiently. Waiting for the flood to happen.
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