Carl Solomon and Me

"Our only respite [from the RPG community] is a self-awareness about our behaviour, our games, our efforts at legitimacy, our belief in a less toxic future and the real experience we have had playing among groups of highly intelligent, decent, remarkable people, having been customarily obtuse about closing our doors against the odious hordes."

I wrote this two days ago as part of an address I was writing against the state of play in RPGs — and rather than revisit my criticisms, I'd rather invest in the positivism that I indulged at the end.

This investigation into advice and community belief has been disheartening.  There are many things, I find, about which I have been happily ignorant; I could have gone my whole life without learning about stat arrays, for example, which I only learned about, gawd, Wednesday.  I can still feel the bile in my throat.

When I look at it all, I wonder how the original message got this distorted; and I stagger at the effort needed to get the game "back on track" — if indeed that is even possible, given the ongoing, "official" propaganda dispensed about role-playing, backstories, balance and deliberate cheating.  I'm already drifting into an age when saying that I play "Dungeons & Dragons" is an inaccuracy.  Whatever I am playing, writing about or designing, it certainly isn't D&D™.

And that is a pity, since it means I can't go to the local games shop and sit down to play a game, even if I want to.  I wouldn't enjoy the "game" being played.  It means that if I stumble across a fellow at the coffee shop who also plays, we can't have a conversation.  It isn't just that we disagree on relative points of play or method ... we're divided by the lack of a common language, where my game uses a set of descriptions and definitions from a once-upon period, while the fellow is garbling on about stat arrays, session zeros, backstories and an "adventurers league," all of which are common terms that did not exist when I began writing this blog, just nine years ago.  Nine years from now, who knows what shit the company is going to dump on the player, in an effort to retain the relevance of the company.

So yes, my game is about my table; and in a wider sense, the small number of readers I can maintain, here and on the wiki, where new players to the game are polluted with arguments against combat, against random chance, against risk and against even the concept of a homebrewed world.  The noobs are driven into the pens of "the new kind of game," where the die roll of the kid in Florida this Wednesday night is the same pre-planned die roll of the kid in Manchester, the kid in Kuala Lumpur, the kid in Vancouver and the kid in Johannesburg, on the same night or at least the same week ... all of which are similarly modified and fudged by DMs operating with the same permissive cheat-codified playbook.

Gah.

It's hard not to be negative.  It's hard to rise above that reality, to pretend this isn't how the community is being driven, by ignorance, by a lack of proper guidance, by hard information, by pervasively purple splat books and by a waxing desperation for some kind of clarity.  We can only sell the idea of a session zero because communication between DMs and players is atrociously bad; both sides will grasp with despair at anything that might promise a better connection between presenter and responder.  The pervasive acceptance of fudging and DM manipulation can only happen because we must do something in a game that has utterly failed the participants, forcing them to express their dissatisfaction, their feeling of being used, and the DM's concommitant feeling of inadequacy in making the player happy, somehow, even if it means gross cheating is the only option.

How else can we explain such an utter split from ethical behavior, or the cognitive dissonance in players being grateful when they are told, "Instead of rolling dice to determine your character, it will be so much better if you choose from a list of numbers that have been carefully balanced" so that no one is offended?  How else can we explain not only the acceptance of a predetermined success and fail adventure, but the SAME success-and-fail adventure being flogged at every game store, among every would-be player, everywhere?  The participants are lost, flailing around, quite obviously wanting to game, to the point where they are willing to swallow any idea that will help maintain some sort of reasonable expectation of play.

Because the home game has been a failure.  We've failed.  We weren't able to teach the next generation how to DM, as I learned how to DM from the DMs who came before me.  We weren't able to teach players how to play, being that we ourselves stumbled around so blindly, so vaguely, cramming together splatbooks from multiple game editions, stealing from hither and yon and finding ourselves lacking the time and the energy to make it work, make it come together, make the players come back to play again — rather, they quit and went back to the ordinary life of all the rest who never played, where they could wistfully hear the name of the game pronounced and say, "Oh, yeah, that.  I played that when I was in college."

We who can DM, who can play, who respect the rules, who respect the code of human ethics that says do not lie, do not cheat, do not fuck with your players ... we are just forbidden isles in an empty sea, untouched by and not touching the continental chaos that reigns.  We can feel good about ourselves; we can be appreciated by our players.  We can influence, perhaps, a dozen others who will try to run the game as we ran it, if they are not turned from that path by the siren song of easy modules and easy solutions to difficult players who can't deal with their character's death and must be cheated of a bad experience that might correct their entitlement.  We're nothing in this chaos.  We're in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland
     where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland
     where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland
     where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland
     where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

From Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Each time, it seems, that I rise up to write another post about D&D, I feel the weight of living in an insane asylum, where players drag themselves through a static dramatic play, speaking the lines they are told to speak and responding to the chorus in the way they are told to respond, orchestrated not by a single DM, but by a faceless, emotionless machine that doesn't care, so long as there's money.  And this is the game.  This is what's right.  This is what's praised.  This is what we are told to play.

Where I struggle not to rant.  Where I struggle to deconstruct patiently, and not to scream remorselessly at the void.  Where I struggle not to let my despair get the better of me.  Where I pretend I am making a difference and all is not chaos and piss.  Where I lie to myself instead of saying, I should not have fallen in love with this game, this game with knives in it, that staggers to the dais to die in its hubris.

I am all right.  I'll keep writing.  But I am mad, starving, hysterical and naked.  I am dragging myself through the negro streets at dawn looking for a fix.  I am caught in publishing obscene odes from the windows of my skull, broken, crying, trembling in a white gymnasium before the machinery of other skeletons.

I want to save this game that I love, more than success or sanity.  But it is already gone.

Improvements

Before we can sort out the placement of references for Wowotu, I'll need to explain improvements.  I've borrowed the term from the Civ-4 game; I have made my own alterations for convenience.  Improvements are basically the physical manifestation of a reference as it appears in a given hex.

Here is a table for the available improvements available with a Development-7 region.  More developed region would have a larger variety of improvements (as well as "buildings," but we'll get to those later).

I trust this is readable.  You'll have to click the picture; you might
want to save a copy so you can reference it as you read.

We have but six forms of improvement, but these should be sufficient for creating a respectable environment.  I'd like to skip over the "Notes" entry on the top line for the present, and dig into the material below with a short cautionary introduction.

An "improvement" is just that.  Hexes are improved when they have been made better by the inhabitants, beyond the usual, normal production.  Improvements do NOT describe an isolated, singular presence of a given good or resource, but rather an enhancement of that resource.

So, for example, if we have a reference for rice, this would mean we have a "farm" that produces the rice.  The "farm" here is a colloquialism.  Rice would surely be produced in many places, on many different ordinary, everyday farms, in every kind of hex, none of which would be classified as an improvement.  However, if we speak of a "farm improvement," we mean an area where the cultivation of rice is intensive and more highly productive.

It may have been inconvenient to choose to call intensive agriculture a "farm," given that the term also describes the usual presence of farms in virtually every rural hex.  However, I saw no other fit name for it.  If the reader likes, feel free to call it a "meta-farm." In any case, the term is strictly for the use of the DM; I would never have a reason to describe a given hex to the players by describing its structural details.  I would simply tell the players that there were a lot of farms in the hex, and that they were intensely cultivated.

Because of this, if the area has a mining camp for gold, this also does not mean that the only gold in the area comes from said mining camp; only that the majority of the gold does.  This is true for every product's reference.  The improvement system is merely there to provide a focus for various products, to the point where they are produced in a large enough amount that it is noticeable, and so that the food production, wealth, labor, health, happiness and culture can be measured, should the players wish to settle and build within, plunder or tax the region.

Improvement Details

Each type of improvement has four subcategories: description, placement and reference & effect.  The description is for the benefit of the players, giving the DM a general sense of the improvement's visual effects.  The placement indicates into what sort of hex the improvement occurs.  The reference field indicates what sort of reference is needed to enable the improvement.  If there are no crops are market gardening references, there can be no farm improvement in any of the region's hexes.

[This would not mean that there were no farms, no crops or no gardens.  The lack of a reference only means that there is no sufficient commercial value in what crops or gardens exist; what we call subsistence agriculture.  Therefore, there would be no intensive agriculture either, and therefore no improvements.  But there would still be inhabitants who would grow food for themselves]

Lastly the effect.  A farm adds two "food" to the hex.  The reader might recall from this post last month that a type-5 rural hex has a "natural" hex production of 1 food.  Add a farm improvement and this jumps +2.  In terms of raw food production, 1 food [binary numeral 1] is enough to feed 70 people.  3 food [binary numeral 111] is enough to feed 490 people.  That is a significant adjustment.

Likewise, the mining camp and the quarry each add 1 labor.  For this system, I am defining "labor" as an expression of the available labor resource that can be skimmed from the top of the working population.  A quarry improvement, for example, would probably employ virtually everyone in the hex.  The reader will remember from the last post that we had a population figure for the number of people in a given hex before carving the infrastructure into seven hexes.  Alas, I have no easy method for dividing the population as well ... we could come up with a number, but the reality is we don't need one.  We can guess the population by the amount of food available; or we can simply ignore the population and concern ourselves with what the players need.

There are only a few situations in which the players would need to know the exact number of quarry workers present: a) if the players wanted to start a quarry, in which case the number is what the players want to hire; b) if the players want to kill everyone in the quarry as an encounter, in which case most of the workers will run away and we only need to know how many might fight back; and c) if the players want to hire quarry workers and have come to a quarry to buy them.

The last is easiest.  We simply list 1 labor as 14 workers and have done with it.  How many would fight the party if they attacked?  About 14.  The bigger numbers, and their families, don't matter.

More than half of these 14 would be laborers hoping to get a job, or recently injured and laid off.  A few might be disgruntled, poor laborers (remember this post?).  If we want, we could use a general roll, like 4d6 (average 14) to get a changeable number.

All this means that I will have to change my hiring rules at some point, but that's also a problem for another time.

Placing Improvements

Okay, let's say we're going to put the gold reference somewhere on our rough map of the Port Tethys-Avalon district.  Here's the map again:

The improvement table says that a mining camp, where gold is produced, is placed in a rural 7 or 6 hex (type-7 and type-6).  It also says, "Balance random preference for less dense hexes."  Type-7 are less dense than type-6, so we want to roll randomly in a way that will favor the former over the latter.

There are fourteen type-7 hexes and ten type-6 (take note, even the sliver of land occupied by the two type-7 hexes east of Avalon would still have room for a gold mine).  If we give 2pts for every type 7 and 1pt for every type-6, we can roll a random number between 1 and 38 to determine where the gold ends up.

Here we come to the note at the top of the chart.  Basically, it says that rather than assign only 1 hex per reference, if it is possible, we should assign two.  These two references will not end up in the same hex.  I proposed this because it seemed cheap to plunk a single reference into a wide area, such as the district above.  Two references are far, far more interesting; and in the case of gold, each will add the prerequisite labor to the hex where the reference ends up.

If it turns out there is only a single hex of type-7 or type-6 in the region (and some of my regions are very, very small, equalling as little as one 6.67 mile hex on the above map), then only one hex is designated by the reference.  If there were no type-7 or type-6, then the reference would go into the hex most like the appropriate hex.  This means that yes, a gold mine could end up in the middle of a city, if that city comprised the whole region and had a gold reference.

There are different ways we could roll 1d38, but I'm going to use excel.  Counting the hexes from top to bottom, with each column from left to right, the possibles are, in order, 7-7-7-7-6-7-7-7-7-6-7-6-6-6-6-7-6-6-7-6-7-7-7-6.  My rolls are 24 and 26.

This puts the gold references in hex 1007 and in hex 1103 ... a good distance apart.  Avalon has good access to 1007, but 1103 is more than 25 miles away (assuming hex 1104 is rough hill-country and impractical for cart and wagon travel).  It is only 18 miles away from the manor house in 0804, which is only 15 miles from Port Tethys.  The journey, then, to Port Tethys is only 8 miles greater than it is to Avalon.  On the other hand, the coast in hex 1304 is only 12 miles away from 1104.  Perhaps the gold is shipped to a rough dock, with a protective blockhouse built just above the beach.

It is up to us.  We can put that gold mine anywhere in the hex, moving it closer to the water or closer to Port Tethys (within the six miles or so leeway the hex allows).  We can use this information to add character to the district; that blockhouse and dock could be an adventure, as the characters are hired to protect the gold or steal it.  In my open game, that is up to the players.  In any case, where we put the road will have an influence over a lot of things.

AND, we haven't placed our other references.  Where are the limestone and salt quarries?  Where are the four sheep pastures?  Remember, we had two references for sheep. What about the rice?  Rice requires a lot of water ... wherever it goes in this arid country, we'll have to create an extensive sink and probable lake to account for the cultivation of that grain.  How the two placement hexes line up on the map is bound to create a river for us, or two isolated oases.

This is the genius of the system I'm building.  We choose the references, splat down land and towns, easy peasy.  Then the infrastructure system builds a dart board for us; then as the references strike the dart board, the world evolves into focus. Thereafter, we simply juggling the facts to make sense of the semi-random placement (remember, we're controlling the placement to fit a certain hex type), to make the world real and purposeful.

Afterwards, we can calculate how much wealth, labor, and food we've created ... then establish the health and happiness of the region, as well as it's culture.  The more the pieces fit together, the more real it becomes.

Just think: all this, and the rules and adjustments change radically when we try this with a Development-8 region.

A Pox Upon Thee

Before I begin, I am deeply conscious that this post might be taken for an argument.  That is not my intention.  Instead, I wish to express the impression I am getting from watching video after video about how to play, run and design for role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons.  That impression suggests that what is commonly happening at game tables is radically different from my experience at my table.  I only wish to suggest reasons why that may be.

Therefore, because many of the details of 3e, 4e and 5e are unknown to me, I'm going to be general in my descriptions - and when certain details are not known to me, I'm going to say as much.



In light of the previous post, let's take a situation:

The players complete their characters and begin the adventure; they need to climb into the forest above the town, to locate the cabin of a druid, who has information they need in order to locate the Palace of Pickscale Peak.  On the way, the party encounters four giant ticks ... and within two rounds, one of the ticks rolls a 1 in 100 critical attack, killing the party's strongest fighter.

The Reaction I'm Hearing

At this point, the player goes off, ranting about how unfair this is, how wandering monsters or verminous monsters shouldn't have the power to roll critical hits, etcetera, apparently at length and in general disturbing the "good times" being had by the players on the one day this week they are allowed to play.

Here are reasons that I have heard given for why death sucks.  To begin with, the player has spent much time making their character.  I am not sure how long this takes in 5e.  I have heard that in 4e it can take an entire session.  I suspect it was not a short time in 3e either, what with the varying feats and builds that were part of that system.  I have never made a character in any of these systems, so I am only going on the considerable amount of time that people online have given to describing the considerable amount of time it takes to make characters.

3e, and presumedly 4e, had a lot of choices to make, to create the carefully crafted character of the player's intent.  I am guessing this was a cross between pimping out one's ride and buying a car from the worst car dealership in Michigan.  After choosing skills, there is the problem of equipping the character, and according to most descriptions I've heard about present-day games, a lot of time spent writing a backstory.  Now, even a two-page backstory is a steep hill for someone who doesn't write all the time.  If the player really got into the process, the backstory might be longer, or really considered, perhaps even written multiple times between the running when the character was made and the running just before the character died.

Of course, now that the character is dead, the game stops.  This has been described as onerous in the extreme ... though I've heard it said and seen it written constantly that the player is free to leave the table, go to a corner, and roll up their character entirely on their own without any supervision whatsoever.  Which is just ... well, I have no words.

AND it's a big issue of the DM.  After all, the DM has planned everything for Gespacho the Gwistbaker to take the lead in every part of the adventure going forward, and now there is no Gespacho.  What now?  What if the player doesn't come back with another fighter?  What if the new fighter isn't strong enough, or is the wrong race?  What then?

These are all problems that seem to seize the very heart of the gaming community.  I cannot relate.

What Happens in My Game

Because the time needed to roll up the character was about half-an-hour, there's very little investment at this point.  The player hardly cares that the character was killed, unless the character was something really unusual, like having two 18s or three 17s.

Since I generate a background, rather than have the characters invent one, there's not much investment there, either.  Oh, the character might have been terrifically lucky, been of noble birth or with some unusual extra skills, but again, there hasn't been time to play them and at any rate, the background is rich with extra skills.  So there's always an expectation that something like it will turn up again, only better.

The player starts picking out dice to roll up the new character, while the other players make a few jokes about the death or chat amiably about whatever.  There's no sense that the game is "stopped," because ALL the players are anxious to see what the new character is going to be.  They, and I, watch earnestly as the dice are rolled, giving congratulations at each good roll and good-natured humour at each bad roll.  The player may not roll well enough to meet my minimum stats (either at least one 15 and one 16, or a single roll of 17 or 18), which aren't super-high.  No one minds the re-roll.  They want to see how much power is joining the party.

Quickly, the player sorts out which numbers go under which stats, picks a class, picks a race and starts thinking about spells, weapon proficiencies or sage abilities.  These are really easy to choose, especially for anyone who has played in my world a few months, so it is past in 5-10 minutes.  If the player really wants to think before choosing, I'll forego spells until the first combat, or a sage ability until the next running.  I don't care if the player chooses an ability for a specific situation, because the player is then stuck with that ability forever, whereas the situation may not come up again for months.  So it doesn't matter.

15 minutes have passed.  Now comes the biggest timewaster: the player has to pick a name.  Meanwhile, I automatically generate a background, which I post as a file on the net which can be downloaded on the player's phone.  I read off anything that looks interesting, not for the benefit of the player, but for everyone's benefit.  If there is a sailor or an armorer or a physician in the party now, everyone wants to know.

25 minutes gone and the player can now start looking over the equipment table.  The new character is THERE, in the game, buying equipment at the table as they are introduced to the party.  Basically, the character comes stumbling out of the forest, expresses surprise at the party's survival, pity at the dead body, and asks to join.  There is usually no role-playing; everyone has done this dozens of times and they don't care about introductions.  Bang, we're off and the adventure continues unabated.  After a bit, the character says they have finished buying equipment.  Total time before adventuring again: 25-30 minutes.


Concluding Thoughts

I think that the need to tailor characters has resulted in this unhappiness connected to player deaths.  The issue, it seems to me, is that with so much lead effort before actually playing, we are creating a deep attachment to something that hasn't proven itself in the field.

People aren't going to give up this habit.  The later editions have emphasized all these build time and effort, in effect expanding the mini-game of making the character to meet certain expectations of the player (who wants total control over who they will BE).  They're not going to give that up.

I'm glad I never went this route.  By maintaining the class system, the class abilities are standardized across the board - and though these may be boring to many players, actual experience of seeing and doing things seems to be more eloquent in character development than trying to do it all at one go before actually starting.

If a fighter in my world fights, and has little else in their skill list, that means the player has to come up with some other way of defining themselves beyond what they "do."  If the background tells them what their past has been and who their people are, then players can't define themselves by their past.  Instead, they have to define themselves by what they want, what things they wish to acquire, what plans they wish to put in motion ... and then to see if they have the stuff to succeed at that, regardless of what class they happen to be and regardless of where they came from.

I find it curious that as the game moved away from the class system, the need to identify with the job title, or the personality of the character, intensified.  Though there are fifty different ways to be a paladin, or more, the most important fact about a character is still what the character does for a living, rather than the aspirations of the character.  I think that's lacking.

In any case, death is always a hard thing.  If a character that has run in my world for years dies, that's a hard day for the player.  But it isn't a pox on the game.  Not at all.

Something I Hadn't Thought of Before

Here's a breakdown of the argument I keep hearing:

     1.  If I play strictly by the rules and the die roll, it happens too often that players end up losing their characters because of some hapless, unlucky roll connected with an uninteresting or minor combatant, or at the moment when the whole party's survival hinges on one character's roll.  If I don't fudge the dice a little, the players lose characters they like or worse, TPKs keep happening.  I have to do something or the players just hate combat.

     2.  As it becomes increasingly obvious to the players that they are very unlikely to die in combat, it makes combat increasingly boring, to the point that the players will do anything to avoid another drawn-out hack fest.  And combat doesn't really matter anyway, because I've found that what the players really like is role-playing.  Whenever I create an adventure with a lot of role-playing, the players always have the best time.

     3.  Therefore, I think combat is a broken metric.  The game shouldn't be about combat.  It should be about role-playing.  Everyone likes role-playing, so what is wrong with that?

Like the Grinch, I have puzzled and puzzled, and my puzzler is sore.  I don't think there is a solution for this kind of thinking.  I think when a phone or a computer begins to function with this sort of miscalibration, the only thing that can be done is to junk it; I have no idea how a person walks a conclusion like this back from the edge.

But I think I may have an explanation I haven't thought of before.

If you're someone who was born post-1990, and are of a culture able to find this blog post, chances are that you have spent more hours of your life competing against a computer program of some kind than you have a real, living person.  This includes the time you spent playing games in school, or playing sports (unless this is something you excel at), or even time spent participating in debates both formal and informal.  You may have racked up a lot of hours arguing with others over the internet; but whether this is against a "real" person, as far as your animal brain is concerned, is arguable.  But even if we throw that in, if you're the sort to argue on the internet, I'd guess you've still spent more hours playing some sort of video game.

There are three elements about playing video games that make losing easier.

First, it is fairly difficult to argue that a computer game is "cheating" or treating any individual unfairly.  There is a certain inadequacy that arises from knowing others can play this game better than us, but that doesn't change our association with the game system; we know the game's ability to destroy us isn't personal - it tries to destroy everyone, to the same degree [whatever level of difficulty that we select].  And that lack of sentiment reduces our relationship to the game to the same level as we would have with a raging river.  It can kill us, but it won't do so in some special way that enables us to cry foul.  That is a sort of comfort.

Secondly, with a lot of game systems, we can cheat.  Not just in selecting an easier setting, but also in a number of ways, some enabled by the maker and some enabled by some clever person online.  That ability to cheat, even just a knowledge that it is an option, changes the fabric of our perception.  If we really, really want to, we can stick it to the game, but good.  That's comforting.

Of course, there are some games where cheating isn't possible ~ particularly with multiplayer games, where we're playing with thousands or millions of others, who are as faceless and non-personal as the game system itself (through sheer randomization).  And those games, it must be said, attract a particular kind of remorseless, competitive person.  They don't need to cheat ... but there is also a sort of pleasure in knowing that, once they're good enough, there are endless noobs for the easy killing.  After a while, the chance of losing drops precipitously.  Which is also a comfort.

Finally, if we do lose, it's private.  No real person out there in the world knows we've lost.  We may feel a bit of humiliation, that bit of inadequacy I mentioned, but we don't have to subject ourselves to any voice other than our own with respect to the loss.  We don't have to answer for it, or explain ourselves.  It isn't like losing at a game of skill when you're a little child, and your grandparent feels the need to explain, in detail, why you lost.

So,

These comforts have accumulated over the years, even the decades, as video games have proliferated, as the time spent at private gaming has pushed out most like activities ... except that most of my reader here also play role-playing games.

But I think you've probably played more hours of video game in your life, Dear Reader, than you have spent role-playing.  And when that is considered, against the three arguments at the top of this post, I think it helps explain why some people get upset at combats, with actual persons, that they didn't win.

I think it helps explain why a player sees the DM as the ultimate in video game cheats; a cheat that can be negotiated with, that can be browbeat, that can be threatened or made to feel the villain.  I also think it helps explain why the DM, with a similar lifetime spent with cheats, and easier game settings, and a sense of humiliation at a hard loss, can empathize with players who are clearly feeling humiliated because they made a bad choice, or rolled a bad die.  A humiliation that is very much not in private, but shared.

If we play chess, you and I, we have neither of us an "easy" setting that can be toggled.  We have neither of us an expectation that one of us has a little more reason to win, and the other a little more responsibility to make sure the other deserves it.  There's no dialogue on the internet that says two chess players shouldn't have an "me-vs.-him" mentality.

Combat isn't broken.  It is merely as heartless as my bishop will be against your rook.  And as I will be against your pawn formation.

And that's a little too hard at a game-table for a generation raised with faceless enemies.  It's a little hard knowing that the DM can help you out, but won't.  It's a little hard knowing that the DM can have a spellcaster magically appear to raise your 11th level paladin, but won't.

Because obviously the DM is abusive.  And the game is about role-playing.

A Disconnect in Message

     Kelly: "One of the great things about experience points is it gives the players something that they get to gain aside from treasure, magic items and things like that, whenever they complete a task, they get experience points that makes them feel like they're gaining power in the game."

     Monty: "Even though they're really not.  It's kind of a psychological effect, and it works ... anytime you've played a video game, or that's an RPG, you feel good about gaining experience points even though you haven't quite gotten to the end goal, but you feel like you've made some progress.

     Kelly:  "Yes, every time that bar fills up a bit more, I feel accomplished, like I'm working towards the goal, I'm gonna accomplish something.

     Monty:  "And I think that's one of the most important tools that dungeon masters have at their disposal when using XP, because you can award XP for almost everything.  And it's a great way to signal to your players, 'Hey, good job.'  It's not really going to affect your game aside from the players levelling up a little bit faster, and it's much easier to control the pace by making the rewards larger or smaller, depending on what the players have accomplished."

If the reader is able, try to watch the whole video, to the end, to get the full sense of the message being presented.


Why Players Like It

And they do.  There is no denying this.

We should wonder why we had a special, functional capacity for survival, some fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand years ago.  We were not the fastest creatures, we were not the strongest.  We were the smartest, true, but we need to ask ourselves, how did that "smart" manifest itself?  Particularly when we consider that there was little in the way of "talking ourselves into doing things," as language, both spoken and in terms of self-awareness, was minimal.  There is an answer.  We had other motivating influences, a cornucopia of self-produced hormones, one of these being dopamine.

Let me explain how works.  Dopamine is a chemical hormone synthesized from L-Dopa, which is a psychotropic drug made in the brain and the kidneys.  Basically, the human animal is a construction, which runs on various chemicals, of which dopamine is one.  Dopamine has a particular function, one that exists because it contributes to the survival of the human animal, you and me.

Say that we find the sign of an animal, that we want to eat.  Without introspection, we intuit that to find that animal we will have to track it for hours and hours, and for miles and miles, which will be very exhausting and sap our present supply of energy.  If the tracks are old, it isn't worth it; we would probably die before finding our meal.  But if the tracks are new ... dopamine.

Dopamine gives us a completely non-intellectual award for finding something in our environment that encourages us to believe that we're going to eat, or find shelter, or be warm, or otherwise feel safe and happy.  Note that I say "award" and not "reward," because we haven't actually done anything yet.  We've just found fresh tracks.  But that doesn't matter, because we need an impetus to get started hunting, and that is what dopamine does.  It gets us going.

Truth is, dopamine feels so good (particularly to the human animal that has no other amazing invention do give it pleasure), it energizes.  If we're tired from tracking the animal, no problem, we've got this tremendous endurance rush from following the tracks, and seeing that they're getting fresher and fresher; and then we see the animal and that's a dopamine rush too; and then we kill the animal and now we know we're going to eat, and that's a rush.  And when we're done eating, we know that our clan group is hungry and they're going to eat, so we're willing to carry the hundreds of pounds of food back home, even if we're tired and worn out doing it.  And with the dopamine there are other hormones that are helping, like endorphins that are masking our pain, or seratonin, which makes us feel pride and status, and that we're amazing and powerful.

So we do it.  And it feels so good, that we get addicted to it.  We get up the next day and rush out to do it again, because "Damn!  That was so much fun, I will totally do that again!"

Understand:  we don't have to accomplish things to experience dopamine.  We only have to feel that whatever it is we experience, we can identify some change that is going to happen because of this discovery.  And seeing numbers rack up on a piece of paper has precisely that sort of meaning for us, because we have socialized ourselves all of our lives to identify certain increased numbers as a promise that things are going to get better, and soon.

It doesn't matter that we didn't earn it.  The human animal did not "earn" the fresh tracks of the animal that were stumbled across.  Dopamine does not care.  Dopamine is not a drug that rewards our accomplishments, it is a drug that encourages us to accomplish something in the future.  Something that will help us.

So yes, of course, players think that getting XP for an activity is a terrific thing, because the human animal's biology does not care about "why."

Dopamine is deeply, deeply addictive.  Some things that release dopamine?  Alcohol.  Nicotine.  Gambling.  Cell phones.  When we hear the beep that says we have a message ... dopamine.  Why?  We haven't done anything.  But we know, something might happen that could be good.  And what do we usually find?  Spam.  That's why we hate spam.  Not because spam is such a drag, we can delete it or ignore it easily.  But because the let down from the dopamine is so sharp.


What's Wrong with this Picture?

Games are invented mechanisms designed to trick the human animal's biology into releasing psychotropes, neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, which are what makes a game "fun."

The quality of game design is measured by the power a game has to produce this effect.  Over the centuries, we have augmented the gaming experience for humans, until the present day, when video games are kicking the ass of the formerly most successful games, games that are also sports.  Arguably, sports-games are still in the lead, but those are declining while video games are only just beginning to find their legs.  We have no idea how far VGs can go.

RPGs are also a highly evolved experience, albeit one that appeals to a very specific type of person.  It, too, is only just finding its legs, since it steadfastly refuses, as yet, to embrace the communicative technology of the present.  It has a long, long way to go.

This mired-in-the-past issue is a part of the stumbling inconsistency of RPGs, but so to is the human animal delivery system of the game itself.  Because RPGs are not programmed, they are subject to hormonal catalysts resulting from different human impulses: like uncertainty and fear, a quest for power and prestige, covering for ignorance, the need to win the approval of others and so on.  These very human behaviors cloud the manner in which the game is processed, so that DMs forget that they are providing the structure of a game, and are not actually tasked with the need to gratify, satisfy, indulge or fulfill the desires and fantasies of the participants.

This is a destructive break in the mechanism of RPGs, one that continues to proliferate throughout the game's structure, systematically underscoring every discussion or "clarification" by the participants.  In the interest of self-gratification, the DM seeks to service the Players, who in turn reflect the service with words that gratify the DM, and so continues the stagnating loop which soon infects every aspect of what was once an active, healthy game.

Yes, the players LIKE the DMs providing of XP.  The players would probably like a lot of other things as well, designed to specifically award the players regardless of their actual participation in a structured game.  If, for example, I gave money out of my pocket for good role-playing, I'm very sure that would also increase the amount of role-play that went on at the table, as well as the number of perspective players I might have, ending in my campaign becoming very popular once the word got around.

The fact of this explodes every argument the video makes.  Of course, XP doesn't actually require the DM to sacrifice something, like money would, to be gratified by the process of giving (which is a terrific peptide called oxytocin) in exchange for receiving approval (which would be more drugs).


Concluding Thoughts

Many participants are quite happy with the agenda of the video; this process, too, has the power to trick the human animal's biology into releasing psychotropes, neuropeptides and neurotransmitters.  Some of us, however, are not convinced.

That is because we've come to the conclusion that a very well-constructed, deliberate game gives a far better hit than an easily given push.  We feel the dopamine from being given XP for accomplishing a mission, but there is a nagging concern that the value of the number is cheapened when it does not also come with risk ... and most of the things that "deserve" XP in the video are things in which risk is clearly unavoided.

For example, the most common argument for this policy is that players should receive XP for not killing the monster, if they can circumvent the monster somehow, whether through role-play, innovation or some other means.

This presupposes that experience should be given for achieving the goal, and not for overcoming risk.  There's no risk in circumventing the monster.  The risk is in fighting the monster, and potentially losing.  IF the players fail to role-play past the monster, and therefore they have to fight the monster, there is risk.  But if the players role-play past the monster, it is because the DM decided that a die roll indicated success, or because "reasons" indicated success ... and where is the risk?

There isn't one.

Games are about making choices regarding risk.  Without risk, there is no downside ... and therefore "winning" loses all meaning.  When we provide a benefit that requires no possibility of failure or loss, for some people that cheapens the effect.

Remember when I said that if tracks were old, we weren't going to follow them to find food?  When we look at those tracks, no dopamine.  It doesn't matter than they are still tracks.  The fact that they are tracks isn't enough. 

Remember when I said we look at the phone and see that it's spam?  No dopamine.  It doesn't matter that it is still a message.  It isn't an interesting message.  Being a message isn't enough.

For some people, getting XP for role-playing is enough.  But dopamine is funny.  It is only turns up when something is special.  When something is repeated and repeated, and stops being special ... no dopamine.

This isn't a choice.  This is biology.  Once we have participated in something that produces a certain rate of dopamine, because of the nature of that activity, a lesser activity doesn't cut it.  A lesser activity is boring.  A lesser activity doesn't give us dopamine.  It doesn't matter how many thousands of people argue that doing such-and-such with experience helps in their campaign, we shouldn't expect this to work in ours, because it is we may be playing with different stakes at this level.

It's bad advice, because the dopamine gratification provided by the advice isn't sustainable.  If you try it, you'll find that out.

Expanding Wowotu

To begin, here is an update of Wowotu's full infrastructure, shown on the right.  I have adjusted the color scheme, so that hexes without any infrastructure, regardless of terrain, are now grey in color.  Settlement hexes are rich green, non-settlement plains are a pale greenish-yellow and hills are a slightly greenish-brown.

Because of terrain and distance, Wowotu is broken into five districts, departments, provinces or counties, whatever nomenclature we might choose.  I'd like to add the infrastructure numbers for each district:  Port Tethys-Avalon, 147; Nagoya-Fenris, 57; Cork, 40; Hoth, 12; and Sarai, 8.  This is a total of 264.

This would be a higher number if the settlements were not constrained by terrain, and could spread their influence more easily.  However, whatever the infrastructure, the population total would be static; basically, infrastructure measures communication, not population.

Still, we can now divide the population by the infrastructure: 39,166 by 264 equals 148 people per point of infrastructure.  This is something we want to keep in mind as we build the hexes.

Next, let me admit that I don't intend to expand the whole map into 6.67-mile hexes.  I could do it, obviously, but it would take time away from my actual world and it isn't necessary to make the point I want to make.  So I'm going to show the Port Tethys-Avalon district, partly because it's the largest and partly because it is the most isolated.

This does create a dilemma, regarding the references that I had the readers choose.  Normally, I would make the whole region, then randomly distribute the references among the possible appropriate hexes where said reference could occur.  For example, mining camps, where we would find iron and gold, occur in type-6 and type-7 rural hexes.  So after expanding the whole map, I would add up all the possible type 6 & 7 hexes, roll randomly and place the gold or iron reference.

Here, I'm going to place all twelve references in the Port Tethys-Avalon district.  This is not too many for an area of this size; most of my game's regions of this size have at between 20 to 40 references.

Okay.




Yes, I know, not very exciting.  But nonetheless, the system gives some structure to the hex surrounding Port Tethys.  Remember, there are nearly 12,000 people in this hex alone.  The settlement itself accounts for most of that; type-"2" indicates that Port Tethys is a commercial city, so right off we can put the two market references chosen by the readers in place.  Avalon won't come close to this.  Port Tethys would have a repair shipyard, even if there were no shipping reference; but the readers did designate a ship yard so the city does build ships.

The other type-2 that we generated is a rural hex; and as it happens, consists of a manor house with a small village surrounding it; and knowing it exists, we can give that village a name (I'll just go ahead and call it Rainus.  There's a 1 in 4 chance of it possessing a shrine ... which it does!  We're on our way.

Past that, we should hold off on guessing where the other references will go.  We only need to know for the moment that the type-5 rural hexes are occupied by grouped freeholder farms (no lords on that land), while the type-7 hex is a marginal area with isolated homesteaders.

I'm going to leave off now, and get into all the delicious grittiness after.  It has taken a long time for me to write this post. I'm going to finish by giving the numbers (but not the terrain, I'll add that again with the next post) for the rest of the Port Tethys-Avalon District).  Just for consideration.

The grey would be an arid, near-desert wilderness.

Pursue Whatever You Like

" 'Fictional.'  We're going to fabricate the details from our personal vision; some of this detail can be stolen and worked into the frame of our consciousness, while much of it will be re-invented from the gestalt of art media that we've been consuming since being little children."

I hope to write a post about Wowotu later today, but as it is still morning and I am still working the creaks out of my body, I'd like to discuss this from yesterday's post.

Perhaps the biggest lie about creating a milieu for an RPG is the notion that you, the creator, can make "anything" you want.  This is simply not true.  Your mind is not an autonomous, isolated functionary machine; it is limited by what you have been made to be, by your culture, your experience and your steady accumulation of habits.  You cannot will any thought into your mind; you are imprisoned by the thoughts you happen to have.  These are thoughts that surface from the compiled, biological construction of your neural net; there are trillions, perhaps quadrillions of thoughts that might potentially rise, that don't, simply because the outward circumstances around you do not foster any of those particular patterns over the one that does.

From this, we should recognize that all notions we have that we are not thinking as well as we should, or that we our worlds are not imaginative enough, come from a judgmental place where we are comparing ourselves with other people ~ most likely faceless, nameless, imaginary people, whose skills or abilities are inconveniently superior to our own due to a fear of shame and social expectation.  This comparison is meaningless.  If we set out to fabricate a world, it is not because we willed ourselves to do it, it is because we feel a desire to pursue this particular surfaced thought.  If there is any value in the process, it is the pleasure we receive its pursuit.  It is not a competition.  It is an act of seeking happiness.

We cannot create a world except from those thoughts that happen to surface.  Therefore, if the surfaced thoughts seem to produce something "cliche" or "common," what of it?  Why concern ourselves with it?  We have no power to force ourselves to be more creative than we are.  Creativity is not a goal, it is an investigation ... which sparks awareness through trial and error, which causes new thoughts to surface, which furthers our investigation, producing new avenues for trial and error and so on.  We must give ourselves to the process and realize that "art" is a by-product, a manifestation of the work we happened to commit ourselves to completing at a given moment in our progress.

To put it in a nutshell: world-building is not world-finishing.

Podcast Questions

On the subject of performing an interview with DMs and worldbuilders (the podcast I spoke about with this post), I've been working to create a series of complicated questions that would stir the pot, so to speak.  Moreover, I've been considering that it would be sufficient if the guests were free to dispense with two or three questions they would prefer not to answer.

So suppose the reader had to choose six from the following ten questions.  Which six would you choose?  And how extensive do you feel your answers would be?

UPDATE:  The questions below are no longer applicable to the podcast I am proposing.  They are in the ball park, but they have been rewritten with this post: Podcast Questions Redux

     1. What sequence of events caused you to become a player in role-playing games?  How old were you and how quickly did the game take hold of you?

     2. How did you start with running games as a DM, or GM if you prefer?  If it was a situation of necessity ~ you were the only one willing to take the helm ~ did you feel a resentment?  Or did you find yourself comfortable in the role?

     3. What other activities were a significant part of your life when you began stealing time from those things to play role-playing games?  Do you have any regrets about paths not taken?

     4.  In your opinion, does your game differ substantially from the games of other DMs?  If so, how?  Would you say that it is because your game is tailored to you specifically, or is it because of the experiences you've had?

     5.  How would you say your players benefit from your game.  Would they agree with you?  In what ways would they want you to change your methods?

     6.  How do you structure the setting of your campaign?  How much preparation do you invest?  How much is borrowed material from films and literature?  How often do you find yourself during the actual running feeling like you're in over your head ~ and do you habitually conceal that feeling from the players?

     7.  Do you push the envelope of your game's concept, employing ever-so-light elements of a risque nature, with such things like racism, wealth vs. poverty, sexuality or criminality?  Have you in the past?  If so, how has it played?  And if you haven't, is it something you'd consider if you had players open to the idea?  Why or why not?

     8.  Apart from friendships, memories and time spent well, what additional skills and disciplines have you and your players acquired through role-playing?  How has it changed your thinking about the non-gaming world that has surprised you?

     9.  What do you think of teaching others how to run games?  Have you had much success?  Can you attribute any of this success or failure to yourself, or do you firmly believe that mastering an RPG is mostly a natural talent, or at least a talent that comes from the person one has become through nature and nurture? 

     10.  If you do not play right now, do you still plan and design a campaign you hope to run someday?  If not, how do you continue to feed the elephant's 'satiable curiosity?  How satisfying is it and how do you think you might feel if you were ever given the opportunity to again run a game, or act as a player?

I know that some would be concerned about subjecting themselves to an interview with me, but I assure the reader that my goals would be to inform, create a pleasant experience and help establish a framework of DM participation which was not based on either myself or the overwhelming corporate image that dominates the rhetoric.

What's a World?

"A DM's got to know his limitations."

~ Clint Eastwood

Of late, the DM's Advice videos I've been watching have been all about worldbuilding, videos like this from Dungeoncast (2017), this from Acrelatae (2015), or this from Dawnforged (2012).  Dawnforged did a bunch of others, based on this one.  This guy did a two-parter that I talked about before, this douche puked about it and the boys Pruitt and Jim did a profoundly vague culture dump version.

Then, the whole thing is complimented by an endless parade of people who have co-opted "world-building" to describe a novel setting (which I've also talked about before), giving us videos such as this one, this one, this one, this one and this one.

All these videos have one thing in common.  They are unwatchable.

If I set out to explain that we will need design a unique electric drill in order to complete the building of our project, it is useless to explain that the drill will make holes, that it will run on power, that it will need some kind of bit, that it should probably be small enough to carry in our hands, that it will replace the inadequate tools we're using now or that it will be really, really great for the job, once we have it.  Those things are all true, but none of it tells us how the drill will be designed, modelled or manufactured.  This "advice" is nothing like advice.

We need to start with the question, what is a "world."  Essentially, for an RPG, it is a fictional setting catering to the cognitive point of view of a group of players, intended as a causal impetus to behaviour that can then be modelled into the setting's structure.

And see, right there, we are miles from the shadowy non-specifics that most DMs employ in trying to explain what's needed.  When I set out to answer the question, I want to deconstruct the problem ... because it in taking things apart that we find out how they work.

Lets examine that jumble of words I've used, so that we understand exactly what's involved.  "Fictional."  We're going to fabricate the details from our personal vision; some of this detail can be stolen and worked into the frame of our consciousness, while much of it will be re-invented from the gestalt of art media that we've been consuming since being little children.  "Setting."  The world will be a place, with dimensions, appearance, inhabitants, a momentum of sorts, a generalized agenda of purpose and pattern, probably predictable since we are incapable of constructing anything that isn't heavily influenced by our psychology, biology, habits, socialization and inseparable human biases.  "Catering."  The world will provide what is needed for the functional activity of the player's perceptions, knowledge, game play and imaginative awareness of what is happening; that is, once the imaginative structure has been constructed, it will be passed to the players in an effective, believable manner that it can be imaginatively consumed.  "Cognitive."  This will be done with our brains, with the communicative mental action through which we acquire, process and store information, for use in the immediate present or the imprecise future.  "Group of Players."  Participants; both those who are presently ready to play the game and those whom we have not yet met, who may turn up in the unknown future with a ready desire to play in a setting that cannot, by virtue of the rules of time and space, be specifically tailored to their needs.  "Causal."  The setting, information and communication of the above must be designed so as to impel the players to adopt beliefs, convictions, intentions and plans that inspire action, or more specifically a response to the created cause.  "Impetus."  The causality we promote will include a force and energy that will make the response irrepressible and exciting, so that the player will feel immersed by the game's ebullience and lively presentation.  "Behaviour."  The players will act.  "Modelled."  The action presented by the players will effect a singular, identifiable change to the setting, the manner in which the game is communicated going forward, the material causes that occur afterwards and the unrestraint of the game's momentum, in a manner that will require the worldbuilder to rebuild the world in an ongoing fashion in real time as the game is actually played.

And that, Gentle Reader, is merely the definition of what we're building.

We haven't remotely begun how to build this.

The task is enormous.  It is not insurmountable.  Once we can correctly understand what's required, we can go through and figure out a rational, practical starting point, from which the rest of the structure can be built.  That starting point is not the "fictional" aspect.  It is not the group of players, nor the manner in which we cater to them, nor in the setting, all places where most vloggers expect us to begin.  That is because these are the easiest parts to comprehend.

The starting point we want is this: what can we, as DMs, right now, with the knowledge and experience we have, effectively run?  What are our limitations?  Everything else, outside of establishing this, is pure bullshit.  It is worthless to discuss starting a campaign based on a seagoing  adventure setting if we don't have any knowledge of sailing.  It is worthless to discuss upon what we should be putting our focus on if we don't know what focus we have.  There's no sense in drawing lines on a map until we know what the lines mean, how maps work, or what geography is.

So if you have never built a world, and you want advice on how to build a world, start by writing down what you know about anything real, that you can actually touch.  Your fictional, made-up setting, based on your imagination, is going to depend 100% on what you actually know about stuff.  If you don't know that much, then you're going to be pretty awful at building.

Once you start to know things, or operate inside your knowledge, you'll start to see what else you need to know ... and once you motivate yourself towards deliberately seeking out and educating yourself about things you need to know, you'll be on the right path.

Don't worry.  You have decades to learn how to do this.  Bite off exactly what you can chew, then start figuring out how to make your mouth bigger.

Good Advice

It has taken weeks and many hours of searching to find this, a video with advice I can actually approve.  The speaker still has a face that is eminently smug and punchable, but at least the stuff coming out of his mouth is good advice [well, better than 80%].

"Here is the proper way to roll your dice.  You make sure that you have the attention of the Game Master; that it's your turn or at least your moment, and you say, 'I'd like to make a check.'  The dice is [sic] still in your hands.  'I'd like to make a knowledge-engineering check to see how the door is put together.'

"You're still not rolling yet.  And the Game Master ~ this is what you're waiting for ~ the Game Master says, 'All right, make your check.'  Then you take the die and you roll it.  You don't roll it off somewhere hidden behind your hand.  You roll it clearly and obviously across the table in front of you ... in your general area (you don't throw it across the table), but somewhere, where the result of the roll will be obviously plain to anyone nearby; particularly the Game Master.  With the die sitting there on the table, you look at the number."

Additional Thoughts

I grew up playing cards with relatives who had lived in the 1920s and 30s, in the backcountry of Alberta and Saskatchewan, who could still remember a time when if you were caught cheating at cards, knives emerged and people were hospitalized.  In the 70s, when I would play with these people, they would make clear, unrestrained references to this practice, deliberately suggesting to my young and as-yet-unmolded thoughts that counting the number of peg holes on the cribbage board, or the way I held my cards when playing poker or bridge, mattered ~ in the way that it matters that you don't touch a red-hot burner or walk in front of a moving car.  That is, moving a cribbage peg was an act of considerable tension, as we all took pains not to fuck up.

I'm not suggesting that we should cut out the hearts of people who hide dice behind their hands, or snap the dice up as soon as they are rolled, saying whatever number enters their dear little brains ... but when I did first encounter this behaviour in the early 80s, connected with role-playing, I was flabbergasted that players thought they could get away with this incredibly duplicitous shit.  And I was not restrained when I made my feelings about this clear.

I could not have guessed that this, and not civilized behaviour, would become the norm.  It is the sort of thing that rouses the ancestral Tory in me to say something like, "These are children who were obviously not beaten enough as children by very strong farmers."

Suffice to say, if a player were to do this at my table today, I would warn them firmly, but politely, never to think of doing it again, and never to roll a die without first getting my okay.  And then, if the player did it again, any time within a year of beginning in my campaign, that player would be bounced from my game, my residence and my whole fucking life so fast that they'd only know it as their shoes, their bags and the rest of their shit was hurled after them.

Because if a player will do this in your game, that same player won't hesitate to steal five dollars off your bureau, or a die out of your collection, or task a roommate to rob you of your computer so that he can cover his drug habit or some fine he has to pay.  People who show their character by this sort of flag are awful, loathsome scum, waiting for the eventual day when the social structure lands on them with a force that routs them into permanent, often incarcerated obscurity.

I say, help society do that.

A Bigger Hex into Smaller Hexes

The 2nd-stage process of expressing infrastructure is one that modifies this single hex:

Figure A

Into these 7 hexes:

Figure B

And specifies what those hexes are.  Somehow, that number "10" needs to be distributed into the seven hexes, so as to breath life into our empty hex.

I have discussed this process, but I'm not content yet that I've gotten the message fully across.  Therefore, I'd like to pause before continuing with Wowotu and discuss a part of this process in detail.

Let's assume for a moment that we're looking at the hex before Avalon was founded, before any people settled there.  At that time, the hex would be completely wilderness.  Rather than an infrastructure of "10," the hex would have an infrastructure of "0."

If that were the case, then each of the seven hexes inside the hex above would be a "type-8" hex.  Type-8 means wilderness; no meaningful player-race civilization exists.  This would be a place for monsters.  Feasibly, there might be a kobald village, but we don't account for that except in game play; as far as our map is concerned, a type-8 hex is adventure country.

For civilization to exist, we need an infrastructure of no less than "1."  As can be surmised from the earlier Wowotu post, this would likely be a hex somewhat distant from a city or a town, or perhaps in a hex adjacent to a village.  That "1" infrastructure transforms only one of the seven-hexes in Figure B from a wilderness hex to a civilized hex.  The other six hexes of what was Figure A would still be wilderness.

That new civilized hex, created from our "1" infrastructure, would be a "type-7" hex.  Let's assume for the moment that instead of having a "10" infrastructure as shown, Avalon has but 1.  As the settlement is the most important hex among the seven, our type-7 hex would be 0203, where Avalon is placed.

This single hex in the wilderness, with Avalon, would be what I am calling a "type-7 settlement" hex.  I wrote a post last month about type-6 and type-5 settlement hexes.  Type-7 is even smaller.  Here is my description for a type-7 settlement hex, for a Dev-7 region:

A lot of meat there, but we are still talking about a 6.67-mile diameter hex with about 150-200 people in it, about 5-6 per square mile.  Mostly empty.  And surrounded by six similar hexes that would be even more empty.  Basically, the frontier.

Now, if the Avalon hex in Figure A had a "2" infrastructure, what would that mean?

The most obvious answer would be that there were two hexes that were occupied, both type-7.  One of these would be the Avalon hex, and one of them wouldn't.  The other hex wouldn't necessarily be adjacent to Avalon; it would be located wherever the land was best.  One thing about the other hex, though, it wouldn't be a settlement hex.  It would be a "type-7 rural hex."  What would that look like?

Now, this would also a description of the Avalon settlement-hex, outside the actual village, if the Avalon village were a type-7 hex (it isn't, we're just pretending here).  The table above describing Avalon needs the countryside description as well, as the type-7 settlement obviously does not occupy the entire hex.

I'll stop the reader here, however, and point out that a "2" infrastructure wouldn't necessarily mean two type-7 hexes.  It could mean a single type-6 hex instead.  How does that work?

Let's have a look at this table, which at first glance will seem a trifle confusing:

Figure C

The column on the left indicates the infrastructure number.  I have only included the table up to an infrastructure of 6.  The whole table goes up to a total of 448.  At 448 infrastructure and above, every 20-mile hex (figure A) is made up of seven type-1 hexes.

The Base cost shown under each type on the table above indicates how many infrastructure are needed to make that hex.  If you look at the two rows that list an infrastructure of "2", you will see that one alternative would be 5 wilderness hexes (type-8, no cost) and 2 type-7 hexes (cost 1 each).  A different alternative would be 6 wilderness hexes (still no cost) and a single type-6 hex (cost 2).

A type-5 hex costs 4 infrastructure; a type-4 hex costs 8 infrastructure.  And so on.

Okay, apart from some questions, we can move onto to figuring out the rest of Wowotu's infrastructure and start carving up the larger hexes into little ones.

P.S.,

The table for type-7 rural hexes notes that a mining camp might exist in the hex.  This is where we would potentially place our references for gold or iron (salt and limestone are quarries, not mines).  However, type-7 rural hexes are common.  We would want to randomly distribute the two references among all the type-7 hexes in Wowotu, once we knew where they appeared.

New Years 2018 - Things to Come

Here we are, New Years' Day ... and I am finishing up my tenth year of writing for the blog.  There have been so many house rules since the start, so many ideas and things I've implemented into my game.  I've written more than 2,500 posts telling people how to play, making up rules and getting into a great many arguments.  I've made bad mistakes as a writer and, occasionally, as a human being.

So, why not make a few resolutions, since today is the day for it.  By now, the Gentle Reader is surely aware that I consider designing D&D to be a journey, not a destination.  So while I will continue to work on many ongoing projects, some of which will never be finished, I also have some new ideas in mind.

I have tested the screen capture software I have on the new computer and it works.  So does the camera and mic I have, so I have made some dry runs in the audio-visual department as well.  I'd like a better mic, and have had some suggestions on that front, but that's something that can easily wait. Here's some things I am thinking about for 2018.

Vlogging

I tend to agree with readers regarding giving D&D advice via talking head.  I have disliked my own efforts in the past, even to the point of deleting them from youtube.  However, it is also true that we get better with things we practice.  I haven't had a lot of practice.  I should get more.  The right path would be to record myself every day, until it gets to where I don't hate what I'm seeing.  I'm going to try that.  Until I have some insight in this regard, I'll say no more.

The Online Campaign

I haven't talked about this with the players, but I'd like to get the Juvenis campaign going again.  Part of the reason it was a headache had to do with the speed of my old computer, which did not happily process images very well, despite the demand with multiple images for combat sequences.  Just now I am struggling with a new version of Publisher, which isn't anywhere near as friendly as the version I've used since 2007... but I'm getting the hang of it.

I should still be able to make images like this ~ even better.

Something I'd like to suggest would be trying an online game, IF the players are confident enough with their images appearing on the internet.  I considered doing it with voices only, but I think that could be confusing.  I certainly don't want to pressure anyone.  I don't think I'd give up the blog ~ but if it proved possible, the videos of the live sessions could be embedded in the Juvenis blog.

A few things about recording.  I have watched the video strategies that others have employed and I must say, I am not a fan.  Problems I have include the dullness of empty, listening player faces, as the DM prattles; nervous grinning and giggling, because a camera is running, adding nothing; competing for verbal space, as people talk over one another; an unchanging view-shot that goes on for hours, without relief; and not enough editing.

I believe that filmmakers are trying to "capture the table vibe" with this sort of depiction ... but it is awful and misses the point of playing in a game altogether.  D&D is not about staring continuously at players.  Most of your eye-movement will be centered on: a) your character sheet; b) whatever the DM is drawing; c) rulebooks or source material; and d) the face of your dice.  Yes, of course you do look at the other players, but not from a vantage point seven feet away, like depicted here:

The very proximity of the players here takes me right out of the game.  It is nothing like real game-play, where the next player's face is two shoulder-widths away.  Where most of the time, you can only look at one fellow player at a time, as you turn your head from side to side.

I've felt for a long time that properly filming a D&D game is a feat in itself.  Each player should be personally cam'd and mic'd.  The game table needs close-up shots as well; the whole thing should be heavily edited, like a film, with camera angles changing to better catch the moment-to-moment interpersonal relationships.  The example above, the most popular online game in the world, is like a cheesy set-piece in a high school play, with less authentic costumes, voice-acting and amateurish character-casting.  Stuff like the above only played on stage when the performers were super-popular jocks, who could memorize two lines before roaring, "San Dimas High School Football Rules!"

Cue cheers.

It might be interested to get players to film themselves on their cells, up close, then cut that together into the general film, but probably not practical.  I have found that my screen capture will simultaneously capture both my main screen and my secondary monitor at the same time.  I'm planning on making some tests to see if I can split the video after recording (I'm pretty sure I can, as the editing program I have will let me change a video's size quite a bit).  This would let me duplicate a second video that would show the screen with the combat maps and images, separate from the video that would show only the players.  The two videos could then be cut together, with the players' voices retaining their continuity, regardless of the editing.  I could line up another personal video of a player filming their dice or their own face, so long as the sound through their computer was consistent with the recorded sound on my own (which should be easy, and the sound mix troubles basically ignored, as I am not yet able to play with sound).

One big problem is this: how do the players see the maps and images I'll be putting on the video, while the game is going on.  I don't have an answer for that one.

On the editing front, I can edit visuals way easy, I've had hundreds of hours of practice.  It would be a lot of work to present one video of game play, but if it worked out as I liked, it would be WAY different from the shit I'm seeing on youtube.

I'll wait to hear back from Pandred, Embla, Englehart and Lothar on this one, but I am definitely going to try this with someone this year.


Podcasting

This is a different thing altogether.  Part of my podcasting experience has shown that one-person podcasts just don't work.  At the same time, I don't seem to be able to rely on any one person to put in the time and the commitment to get into a regular cage match with me on D&D (or most any other subject), for various stated reasons that I completely appreciate.

However, I think that some of you wouldn't mind having a go at me once, so here is what I have in mind.

I'd like to interview Dungeon Masters who are in the process of running a game that is, in some part, of their own design.  It doesn't have to be D&D, but I may need a primer if the game is very obscure.  My agenda would be this:

The first half of the video would be a fact-finding process.  Keeping my own opinion out of it, I would be asking how the DM got started in the game, what they liked about it, why they keep playing, what sorts of things have they learned, how are they applying those things to the game they are playing now and so on.  I'd like to provide the DM ahead of time with all the questions I'm going to ask, to ensure that there are no surprise questions and that the DM had time to prepare.  I would then run through the questions, letting the DM rule the interview, presenting their opinions and position freely and with full knowledge of what was coming.

Then, I believe I would pause the recording, and explain (based on what I had just heard) where I intended to push back.  I would want the interviewed DM to have a few moments to prepare (again, not wanting to blindside anyone), before starting the recording again.  The second part would be, then, somewhat confrontational, but hopefully in the spirit of constructive disagreement, supported by my giving warning before cutting into anyone.

Once I got a few of these recorded and edited, viewers should start to grasp the principle and intent of the interview, enjoying the conflict while recognizing that the participants did not seem to be taking it personally.  It would still be a cage match, but the agenda would be to inform and deconstruct, not to shame and humiliate.

Obviously, I can't count on any famous people to come forward and be interviewed, but I don't think that matters.  I believe that the best DMs on the internet are familiar with or reading this blog ... and I further believe that the everyday DM has more to say about the creation of a good game than celebrities would.

I haven't got questions yet, but I am researching into it and it is really just a matter of applying myself for a few hours.  Obviously, a few guests will mean a change is needed, so there's no need to feel a strong need to be exact in this regard.

I would like to start interviewing people in January; I've lined up a few people on facebook about this, but I have made no definite appointments.

In Conclusion

So, this is what my superior computer will let me do.  I'm probably biting off more than I can chew, like I did with the comic last year; but that comic was a fun ride while it lasted and I may find myself going back to something like it one day (maybe a serial; people liked that idea).  For now, here is where my thoughts are.  It is just day-to-day from here.