Bored Games

To appreciate this post, it has to be undestood that I was born in 1964.  I was 9 y.o. before there came a 3rd channel on the TV.  I did not see my first arcade game until I was 11, and only then because I was in California visiting Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland.  I didn't see an arcade game in Calgary until 13.  I didn't have cable television until I was 15, which only meant about twelve channels.  I didn't have a Betamax video recorder until I was 16, the year after I began playing D&D.

In short, the number of distractions apart from boardgames and sports was far more limited than now.  Thus, when I say I spent hundreds of hours playing a wide number of boardgames and card games, it was because there was lots of time.

My parents were serious about games.  By the age of 6, I'd learned to play numerous card games, chess, checkers, battleship, parcheesi and Chinese checkers.  Game nights on Saturday were a regular thing, two or three times a month, so that by eight I'd was a veteran of cribbage, backgammon, rummy, canasta and poker.  Whist, and then bridge, would come later.  Every member of my extended family, especially my hard-fisted German material grandfather, played cribbage ... and he in particular played "to educate" trusting young children.  If your not familiar with the cold-hearted rules of cribbage, if you fail to count all the points in your hand accurately, your opponent can call "mulligan" and count those points against you.  No empathy intervened.  My grandfather would be the first to say it was a mean, son-of-a-bitchin' world out there, and if you can't learn to rely on yourself, you deserve to get kicked in the teeth until you do learn.

So ... games were a weird, fucked up battlefield.  Virtually every elder person I played cards with held those sosrts of beliefs, on both the German and Russian side of my kin.

I got rather good at cribbage; there's more to the game than might be imagined, as it's about leading your opponent into playing cards that will enable cutting their throat.  No need to go into it.  Like poker, it's a skill.  I'm an excellent poker player ... if the poker is REAL poker, that doesn't rely on ridiculous levels of chance, such as the ignorantly popular Feckless Hold-em.  I love convincing a bunch of young "players" to try stud or draw; they just don't understand percentages or pressure.

As a kid, I played poker for literal peanuts, poker chips, matches ... whatever was available.  I once was busted during a school science fair for playing poker while waiting for the teachers to bring the classes down to the auditorium one at a time.  Gave lots of time to sit around and be bored.  Got a week's detention for "gambling" ... with jelly beans.  Authority fails to recognize a lot of the time that they're teaching the wrong lesson.

 I never liked checkers as much as chess.  If I played with my sister, it had to be checkers because she didn't understand complicated games.  She was good for games like "war" and "go fish," or any board game that was really linear, like Careers, Payday, Life, Mille Bornes, Snakes & Ladders, Monopoly, that sort of thing.  I played more board games in my childhood than I can possibly remember now.  My sister and I used to play games at the family cabin, all afternoon, playing one kind of game after another.   For my sister, the tougher games were onces like Masterpiece or Stock Ticker, and she certainly wasn't up to RISK.

But, let me get back to chess.  My father taught me when I was very young and I regularly played with him and with my brother, who was five years older than me.  My brother was and is a bastard; he and I have been in the same room four times over the last thirty years.  The last time I saw him was my mother's funeral, nine years ago.  I began beating my father at chess when I reached 11.  My brother, when I was 12.  By 14, I was deep into chess with the school club and competing in the occasional tournament.  My best rating was just over 1400.  I did okay, not great, but I was studying chess by then in addition to playing it; the game became a science rather than fun.  But ... as writing became more important to me, and with the time I wanted to give to D&D, I recognised that to get better at chess I would have to give up other things I liked more.  So I backed away.  I continued to play into my 30s, but I haven't played a game offline in 20 years now.  I'll be sure and teach my grandson, and play with him if he likes it, but that's all chess is to me now.

Stock Ticker hit me like a fever around age ten or eleven.  I got better at the game and my father liked it a great deal.  He did all the calculations instantly in his head — it's just two and three digit multiplication — but it was impressive when he could rattle off how much 11,500 shares of stock would cost at 1.35 cents a share.  He taught me tricks that I used through high school and university, but computers ruined me.  I'd have to struggle coming up with the right number in my head today.

I liked S.T. because it consisted of edging out the competition by risk and tenaciousness ... personality traits I still possess, though I apply them to other things.  I don't imagine many readers here have played the game, and if they did most likely found it rather dull.  But around age 11, it was my favourite game.

RISK, not so much.  I appreciated the geography of it and I was always a strategy player, but children playing the game are liable to argue, kick the board over, sneak armies onto territories and that sort of thing.  I lost friends to RISK, some from cross-accusations and some from hard feelings from getting pasted.  It's hard to like a game when, if a run of luck occurs, the losers start screaming.  I began to shy away from invitations to play that game.  I did try Axis & Allies for a time, but I felt the game was structured against complete freedom of play.  Every game tended to follow the same objectives, reaching the same three or four possible conclusions; I didn't feel there was enough imagination involved to hold me.  In any case, by 13, I had a friend introduce me to Panzerleader.

Before D&D, that set of Avalon Hill tank games became fairly central to me, apart from playing chess.  I continued to play Panzerblitz, Arab-Israeli Wars and Squad Leader through university, until other participants evaporated.  I had two copies each of Panzerleader and Panzerblitz and I remember one summer our group of four played a vast game with 14 boards and seven hundred units to a side — two commanders to each side, each moving two armies against two armies.  Obviously, we never finished it; when the tide of battle started to go one way, the losers lost interest — though of course it could have gone either way, still — and I learned my first lesson in player "commitment."  Often, the idea of a game is much more interesting than actually playing it.  I could have happily played that battle to the last man standing.  Perhaps if there's a heaven, I'll get to yet.

D&D was the elephant that changed all my patterns.  I still played boardgames with my family, but with my friends it was mostly D&D.  There were some dalliances with Car Wars and The Creature that Ate Sheboygan; The Awful Green Things from Outer Space was a riot.  Those were games I never played with family.  Much later on, my parents got interested in things like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan ... but these are games that have a limited number of practical strategies, and once the strategy is realized, the game is as linear as Careers.  Truth be told, video games in the 1980s began to obliterate any interest in board games.

My father taught me how to play whist when I was 10 and cutthroat bridge soon after.  Bridge was his favourite game; he played it like a tonic, and once I'd become a decent player he wanted to get up a foursome between him and mom and me and whomever I was dating, engaged to or married to.  So a string of girls sat in as a fourth until my first wife Michelle, who was about my level.  But my father really understood that game; he never failed to teach or praise after every hand, as necessary.  For a time he turned me into a good player, a skill I used well at university; through the 80s I played nearly a thousand rubbers with other friends and strangers; sometimes we'd play all day, changing out partners as people went to class, picking them up again when class was over.  Typically, there were two or three tables going at a time, with alternates waiting to jump in.  It wasn't a "club" ... it was just something to do in a world without social media and cellphones.

There are no boardgames of the '70s I didn't play for hundreds of hours; and most especially Monopoly, as there was always a copy of the game around.  On one level, I count a lot of that time as wasted.  There's not much to learn from one's 157th game of Life.  It's really just waiting for death.  It helps put a little perspective on those who talk about teenagers "wasting" their lives with social media.  At least that's a potential to learn skills like communication and writing.  We tend to forget that many of the pasttimes of erstwhile days were based on chewing up hours with purposeless make-work.  Roll the dice, move the piece, buy the property.  Wup wup.

'Course, anyone reading this will argue, "But Alexis, clearly you established a set of game principles that have served you in good stead these decades since!  Not cheating, waiting for others to take their turn, thinking before acting, understanding how many, many different games were constructed — all of that is good meat for the stew!"  Sure, I'll go with that.  One thing a video game doesn't do well is teach participants to wait their turn; and both D&D and life require a considerable amount of letting other people speak and act ... and not just waiting for our chance to speak.  But I'd argue that D&D was a better teacher of that then those old board games.  It's a far, far better game.  I'd far rather work on my game world than spend a minute playing a board game or a card game.  I've spent enough of my life doing that.  I'm not interested anymore.

Game Details

Recently I was asked some questions by a reader ... and now seems like a good time to answer them.  The question was about my gaming group (I have two of them), which admittedly I don't talk about much.  There's a reason for that:  I've no wish to parade them in front of my readers for the sake of views, given that they have private lives and their participation in my game is a private thing.  Still, there are some things I can say that I haven't related so far.

I'm going to answer these in the reversed order they were asked ... but only the asker and I know that, so I don't know why I'm bothering to say it.  Meh.  There it is.

Question: would I run my game differently if I could run only once a month?  How would I address finding the balance between wanting to run an immersive game vs. the players having to work hard to pull threads and find their own adventure?

In this country, Canada, we have a social system that has successfully passed laws that have been passed to control the spread of covid in order to protect the greater number of people.  This law-passing process occurs because there is only one Government body involved, which is not limited in its power by bullshit laws about phony filibusters, or even real ones.  One of these laws at the present, disallows private gatherings of any kind where more than two households are involved; period.  If such a thing occurs, the police can appear, demand the end of the private function and, if not complied with, can make arrests and end the meeting legally.  This actually occurs, despite the nutjobs in this country who make stupid videos ... because in Canada, the actual law is the law, and not what internet boobs pretend the law to be.  Therefore, for some time now, since the appearance of the Delta Strain, I haven't run D&D in person, at all.  Although, for a brief time in early 2021, I ran it a few times, about a month apart.

I ran the game exactly the way I always run the game.  After 40 years of play, I know of only one way to run; that is, with the expectation that I will run again, definitely.  When we pick up the game at some point in the future, the first session will begin with where the last session left off, even though that may be a year or more in time.

Keep in mind I have participants who have advanced as players for more than a decade, couched in the sort of game I run.  They also play in other games (though not lately), and tell me about distinct differences, but once they sit down with me they're ready to be immersive as soon as I'm ready to run.  It is a mindset that both DM and player possess, when they're adjusted to thinking of the game that way.  It's evidence of the "practice" I describe regularly.  There's no "hard work" involved.  While away from the game, the players consider and think about the things they'd like to do next, even calling me up and chatting about them out of game, whereupon I'll offer advice or angles they perhaps hadn't considered ... and when the game starts again, they'll say, "Oh, and there's that thing I wanted to do.  What are the numbers on that, or can I meet with the right people, or we get started on our way to pick up the thing we'll need.  Can we buy the land tonight?  How much is it?  That kind of thing.  They're as anxious to get started on their ideas when the game starts as I am to answer.

I've been experiencing this dynamic for virtually all the time I've been running, so it's weird for me to think that most players seem compelled to begin each game session utterly cold, with nothing to think about until the DM tells them what's in the next room.  Seems a very stale enterprise.  Yet until now, I don't think I've mentioned what goes on outside my games in just this manner.

Question: Can I tell a little bit about the dynamics of my in-person gaming group.

Okay, sticking to the character names and concealing some details.

The Smaller Party consists of one family member and two close friends.  This is variously called "Demifee's Party" or the "Airship Party," the latter because the players uncovered an ancient airship in Egypt and have been tooling around in it returning sacred objects to their origin in order to raise a member of their party who was in bondage on another plane of existence.  That member has been returned, those quests are over and the party has decided to use the airship — which is driven by force of will and not by currents of air — to venture to the Moon.  They were busy insulating the ship against the cold when last we played.  It has been almost two years before I've been able to get together with this party, though the four of us recently took a trip to B.C. together.  We hope to begin playing again in February.

The Larger Party consists of two direct family members, two in-laws, one member who was a cousin of my first wife Michelle and is therefore a cousin of my daughter, two lesbians — and "the lesbians" is how they expect to be called by everyone, all the time, with their expectation that we should do so — and one friend, for a total of eight people besides myself.  This game has been ongoing since 2004, though not everyone has played for that long.  It is typically thought of as "Falyn and Pikel's Party;" with the original "main" characters and their henchfolk, the total number of "party characters" available to the players equals somewhere around 35.  As some have reached name level, another 40 followers, whom the players are free to run, can be added to that number.  These are scattered in three groups, with the middle body in Transylvania, where the players possess land, a secondary group in Volhynia, in Poland, where they are attempting to seat one of their number, who drew royal blood as a background, on a throne of some kind, and the primary group which is off the coast of the Canary Islands, submerged below the sea, having transmuted themselves into waterbreathers in the hopes of finding one of two missing treasure ships of the Portuguese Crown that were stuffed full by Antonio, Prior of Cato; by the story the players discovered, these ships were driven south by Dutch pirates, only to fall prey to a Spanish patrol that sunk the ships somewhere immediately south of the island of Gran Canaria.  Either ship might contain as much as a million gold pieces in valuables, perhaps much more.

When they sit around my table, using their main characters, Arne the ranger sits on my immediate left; Arne is very much the "enthusiastic" player I described in my book, How to Run.  Falcon the mage sits on Arne's left; Falcon is an intense bookkeeper, keeping track of names, where things happen, how much everyone has and so on, without my expecting it.  Sebastien the cleric sits to the left of Falcon.  Sebastien is a talker; he gets bored more easily than the others and he has to be shut down by me regularly if he's not directly involved in play.  Hof the thief sits to the left of Sebastien; Hof is a jovial, Santa-like figure, clever and very innovative.  If there's a strange, excellent way to do something, Hof will think of it.   However, he's self-sacrificing and fiery in combat, making him a lot of fun to battle with.  Garalzapan the wizard sits next to Hof; he's much more powerful than Falcon and one of the first two participants in the game, along with Falyn.  Unfortunately, Garalzapan cannot tell the difference between an eight-sided and a ten-sided at a glance; so Pikel the druid sits next to Garalzapan and gently sorts out some of the game's details.  Pikel is my power player, my munchkin.  He's stoic, patient, a die roller of mysterious and devastating luck (which occasionally runs out) and decidedly the brains of the outfit where it comes to tactics, organisation and problem solving.  He talks very little with NPCs.  Next to Pikel is Fayln the other ranger; Falyn is the role-player, the scrounger, the one who remembers to buy everything that anyone ever needs on the equipment page.  Falyn started with Garalzapan, Pikel joined to make it three ... and all three remember clearly when they were brittle, fragile neophyte adventurers.  They've come a long way and been joined by smart people.

There's one missing; an in-law.  Very eager to play, very anxious, but has recently joined our number and hasn't had a chance to roll a first character.  Once again, we hope to start running again in February, but it will depend on what the restrictions are after Christmas.

Question:  How long is a session?

Sessions for either party start between 6 and 7 PM, depending on when everyone can arrive.  By 7:15 we're usually in full swing.  There's often a 15 minute break between 9:30 and 10, which often involves a run to the local convenience store.  This last summer I moved to a place that's literally 150 yards from a 7/11 (do they have those in the States?), so it will get visited a lot.  Games then run until midnight, usually, even if people have to work the next day.  Now that the grandson is 13 months old, I don't know about that end point; we'll have to see.  In former times, if a good battle was still in swing, it wasn't impossible to keep playing until 1 or 2 AM; but none of us are as young as we used to be.

 

Well, if anyone else has a question, I'd be happy to answer.

Of Little Account

"But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavours to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity. Just as television puts the goals of its creators behind the demands of advertisers, and movies are more answerable to accountants and marketers than to audiences and filmmakers, role-playing games bend the knee to owners who care more about the bottom line than the needs of play and story.

"Peterson notes early on that D&D was an unlikely success. Although Gygax left behind a comfortable living in insurance to pursue his gaming hobby, he likely never expected to make more than a modest income. A big reason why is that D&D was never actually meant to be a product. He wasn’t initially interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today; he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up. He wanted this because that’s exactly what he had done as a game player and creator himself, folding J.R.R. Tolkien–style fantasy into his passion for wargaming."

 —  Leonard Pierce, 'Dungeons & Dragons' Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

A gift like this doesn't arrive every day.  Err ... ahem ...

I told you so.

Which doesn't exempt the author from being wrong in many places throughout the article.  International copyright law doesn't work the way he thinks it does, or the way the WOTC pretends that it does ... but no professional writer wants to lift up that rock and free the creepy-crawlies inside.  And like most outsiders — and oh yes, this writer is definitely an "outsider" — he's forced to base his article upon public sources of knowledge, which is fair.  After all, he hasn't time to visit around to dozens of local non-league affiliated gaming clubs to learn what grassroots players think or do.  At least he acknowledges that homebrew campaigns still exist, even if he has to link stackexchange to prove it.  I rarely expect this much, so I suppose I'm grateful.

My position continues to be that capitalism doesn't actually "kill" D&D's artistic development.  This is ongoing, and will continue to be ongoing for as long as players and copies of the game are available.  The thudding malaise of the industry does smother improvement and innovation by giving a bullhorn to the stupidest, least imaginative participants (the non-productive 80%), catering to their needs and structurally building a public persona to match those expectations.  Yet we'd be hard pressed to locate an industry that doesn't do this.  The harder pill to swallow derives from the "productive" 20%, who are prone to climbing onto a cross whenever some beloved part of their game is threatened by legitimate improvement.  All the blame cannot be assigned to capitalism.  At least one part in five must be assigned to dogmatic quasi-encephalitic fundamentalism.

"Encephalitic"?  Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain.  It makes a far better term to describe the online intellectual pollutant than "flame wars."  It's difficult to promote change and growth in an atmosphere fed by tetchy man-boys clinging to the few good memories they had before they were ten — namely, game modules written at a grade eleven reading level hoisted on pedestals formerly occupied by fantasy writers who are degraded now for the crime of not having been born in the "woke" 21st century.

But ... now I'm just taking pot shots at random.

My larger point is that the folderol surrounding capitalism and its billions, the "evil" that wins in the end, evaporates like a puff of smoke the moment some technologist invents something more interesting than Instagram.  Technology giveth billions and technology taketh away.  D&D's value is that it's not based upon a product or a gadget, but upon small groups of humans collaborating in real time, with a set of rules not dependent upon what a hipster or a company thinks.  The whole world does not sit at my gaming table; the whole world has no say in the kind of game I run.  I need the cooperation of just two to four other people ... a number that's far too small for a big company to design for, while being just the right size to commit whatever heinous acts personally suit our ilk.  It defies mass marketing by not depending on what the mass market needs or wants.  It defies influence by the rich.  It does not need a public voice to function, and unlike the "crafts industry," it does not need buyers or sellers.

It needs our friends.  And ONLY our friends.  The rest of the world and what it thinks, the hue and cry of lost artistic dreams and whatnot, the sad demise of the originators, the failing shark tank of present day family members squabbling over scraps, can all just fuck right off.  Because they're irrelevant; just as "the Christian gawd" is irrelevant to the kind of sex I had earlier today, despite 2000 years of trying to dictate how that's supposed to go for all of us.

Oooooo!

 

Heraldry

Starting with a brief overview of the sage ability system.

The goal is to systematize the game world's knowledge & skillset into a single organized system, not for the sake of simplicity but as a means to ensure continuity and complete inclusiveness.  Each character class is supplied with at least 15-20 "studies," which serve to classify everything that can be done or known.  In toto, this creates a great many sage studies — about 200, many of which exist as notes and ideas and haven't been fully sketched out.

Characters are able to specialize in the sage study of their choice, but by the system's design, will accumulate at an "authority" knowledge in every sage study available to that class eventually.  Being an authority would be equivalent to a fully-capable professional.  Each study permits a number of "abilities."  These are not "feats."  For the most part they are capabilities the character possesses which do not require a die roll.  For example, someone proficient in scouting doesn't roll a die to make a fire or locate nearby water; a potter doesn't need to roll in order to create pottery; an alchemist doesn't roll to identify a mineral.  Sometimes, a roll is made to determine how long something takes or how much can be found.  For example, a mushroom hunter will find mushrooms when searching, if mushrooms grow there; but will need to roll to see how many.  A lockpick will certainly pick a lock, but how long it takes requires a roll.

In some cases, a success roll is needed.  A physician knows how to heal a patient, but this doesn't mean the patient will always live.  A rock-climber is very likely to successfully climb a mountain, but some conditions, like ice, are never certain.  Therefore, each individual ability must be assessed for risk — but most abilities are a matter of the character knowing how something is done, or what something is, and simply knowing.

All knowledge is included in the system.  How is a wand made and filled with power?  That's two sage abilities, one involved with growing the wood and one embuing it with power.  Where do potions come from?  Sage ability.  How is an artifact made?  A collection of very difficult to achieve sage abilities.  How do you travel to another plane of existence, other than using a spell?  Sage ability.  How do you call a demon?  How do you build a coven?  How do you make golems or other sentient creatures from base materials?  How do you obtain contracts as an assassin?  How do you forge goods?  How do you fight better and hit harder?  How do you learn to breathe underwater?  How do you learn to manage a sled-dog team?  How do you build an airship?  How do you visit other planets?  How do you train soldiers to fight in an extremely tight formation?  How do you teach anything, or learn anything?  Sage abilities.

If I think of a thing that can be done, and the sage ability doesn't exist, I figure out which study it belongs in and put it there ... so that eventually a player possessing that study will be able to do that thing.  All told, at present, there are about 2,000 sage abilities that have been proposed for creation and eventual use.  It's no wonder I haven't written pages for all of them.  But I'm in no hurry.  All of these things consist of things the players have never been able to do; they are "extra" bonuses to their character's abilities, and they will wait to get them.

Okay, let's get to the meat of this post.

Some sage studies are ludicrously obscure — at least to the mindset of the traditional player.  Many have fairly oblique applications to the traditional D&D adventure structure.  One such example is the study, Heraldry, Signs & Sigils: 

"Armory is that science of which the rules and laws govern the use, display, meaning and knowledge of the pictured signs and emblems appurtaining to shield, helmet or banner.  Heraldry has a wider meaning, for it comprises everything within the duties of a herald; and whilst Armory undoubtedly is Heraldry, the regulations of ceremonials and matters of pedigree, which are really also within the scope of Heraldry, most decidedly are not Armory." 

— A Complete Guide to Heraldry

I've read several texts now on the subject and I can say with familiarity that the writing is all like this; I've come to believe there's a motive to deliberately obscure making plain statements as the result of a conspiracy bent to ensure that outsiders never really understand how Heraldry works.  Please, feel free to read the linked book and tell me I'm wrong.

The above seems a puzzling addition to the list of character abilities ... but I assure the reader, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of heraldry and heraldic symbolism as it pertains to the fantasy/medieval time period.  Most people, including nobility and most soldiers, were unable to read; society was organized along thousands of parcelled land units that existed semi-independently from overlords, and along the lineages of the families who controlled them.  Every parcel and every family possessed an "icon" that defined who and what they were, what their ancestors had accomplished, what rights and privileges they possessed and to whom they owed their fealty.  Making sense of the host of 25,000 French Knights at Agincourt required extraordinary skill in the realm of semiotic linguistics, compounded by the recognition that every family treated failing to be recognized and respected as a slight that could cause the break-up of an army and systemic hatred that could last for centuries.

A king's life was not made easy by this.

Still, this hardly bears much importance for a traditional group of D&D adventurers.  So why include the sage study at all?

Part of the benefit of the system is that it applies not only to player characters, but to NON-player characters also.  Every skill and bit of knowledge that exists in the game world is possessed by someone, even if it's not the players.  Moreover, the amount of knowledge required to have the particular sage ability gives a solid guideline as to the individual's experience level and social status.  Levels enable the accumulation of knowledge points, which enable the accumulation of sage studies and abilities.  Anyone making potions is a very high-level character, most likely a mage (but not definitely ... there are various ways to crosstrain into the sage studies of other classes).

Therefore, even if a player cares not at all for this study, someone does.  Additionally, since the character will gain knowledge points in the study, even if they don't actively show an interest for it, there's reason to create meaningful benefits to the study for the character to gain ... such as the old Monster Manual's enabling of attack bonuses to several non-human races when within a certain distance of a tribal standard.  This, like every other random bit of flotsam that appears in D&D, neatly fits into the system as well.

I bring up this particular example, however, because it's very hard to invent practical uses for something this esoteric ... though, slowly, things occur and get fit into the whole.  There's no hurry for heraldry for, as I say, it's not likely a player will choose the study over something more immediately applicable and useful.  Here, I'm using it as an example to support the readers' worldbuilding efforts.

Write everything you think down; and try to make it organized, so you can revisit it later on and expand upon it.  In creating your game world, you don't want to forget things.  I began my sage abilities system seven years ago; it is far too big to keep in my consciousness, not to mention far too arcane.  Yet each time I revisit a given page, or reconsider a certain place or proposed bit of design, having a single organized structure to my thinking enables me to be forever building on what I've done before, and not wasting time endlessly reworking the same things without advancement.

That's what it used to be like, when everything I did was on paper and stacked in binders in the 1980s and 90s.  Wiki-design a spectacular advancement in knowledge management — one that I would certainly include with double-entry bookkeeping and subject indexing.

On to other things, then.

Stoneless

Yesterday's post was written out of hurt.

Words were said about me elsewhere, days ago, that left me disturbed; in pain; feeling misused.  It happens.  I understand why it happens.  I say things here that lead it on, so of course there's no mystery.  But still, I'm human, I'm vulnerable to a cutting remark and occasionally, they will haunt me for several days while I puzzle my way out of it.

If I were the sort that cowered from a fight, I'd be afraid to punch back.  Unfortunately, I know I can punch back, I have a forum from which to punch back ... and I have a long history where the privilege of punching back was denied me through early abuse as a young man.  And so, there is a compulsion to punch back.

I was often told, "They're just saying those things to get a rise out of you; don't give them the satisfaction."  This is common advice.  Unfortunately, with some people, if they don't get a reaction, it doesn't mean they stop.  No, they see it as a challenge ... and they don't stop, ever, until they get what they want.  I learned early, if in fact you want bullies to stop ... scare them.

Outbully the bully.

This has a price.  So let me say clearly, anyone on the net has every right and justification for going after me as hard and as viciously as they please.  I've given them that right.  Exercising it would not put them in the wrong.

Imagine a horizontal scale.  Towards the left we become more and more destructive, to ourselves and to others.  On the right, we become constructive.  Imagine that everything we say and do fits somewhere on this scale, in terms of that act's consequences.  I push someone's car out of a snowbank; they get to work on time; that's constructive.  I fail to shovel my sidewalk after a snowfall; someone slips, twist their ankle; that's destructive.

Measuring yesterday's post, where does it fall.  I gave in to the hurt, so I wrote a post that many of my supporters would prefer I did not write.  Like this one, it's full of personality and is not about worldbuilding.  Additionally, the anti-establishmentarianism of the post contributes to the general feeling that my blog continues to be, without change, toxic.  Hate-deserving.  From that perspective, the post harms me and my reputation, displeases my avid readers, changes no one's mind and, in fact, wastes the 90 minutes I took to write it.

That said, yesterday's post also addressed a subject rarely examined.  It informed.  Among new readers, it helps establish my reputation as a well-read, multi-disciplined man of letters, that I'm clearly not interested in the white racist agenda, though I'm a very white male; that I'm clearly liberal; and that I'm not fundamentally dependent in my thinking upon pleasing other persons.  Yesterday's post was punching back ... but I didn't lie, I didn't make up falsehoods to support my position and I stand by every word.  It was written from a position of integrity.  From that perspective, was it really hate-deserving ... or does it only look like it is, as it was punching back?

Is punching back always wrong?  Or is punching back a means of correcting someone else's destructive behaviour?

If someone sets out to insult me, or my writing, or my belief system, or the effort I take towards D&D, are they doing so with an intention of constructive improvement ... or are they, like me, surrendering to a destructive impulse?

I thought long and hard about yesterday's response to the hurt I felt.  I didn't write, "Ya, look at this dolt, what a hack, yada yada ..."  I didn't link the source of my hurt.  I didn't address the actual comment at all.  I tried to address, rather, the reason why the comment hurt; and from what society-driven impulse it originated.  I believe I am not liked by most readers because (a) I write with an "authoritative voice," which implies that I'm right and you're wrong; (b) I hold opinions that virtually no one else holds; and (c) I'm inflexible.

Welcome to a large number of the criticisms I receive ... exactly the three words used here.  The fact that the website needs to say authoritative writing is NOT these things only goes to show how often it's accused of being these things.

My opinions derive from the many books I've read, the many people I've heard, met, and heard give lectures, the highly diverse array of materials from which I take my learning and my refusal to accept anything "on faith," ever.  Once I did take things on faith: the bible, the government, authority, love, the golden rule ... oh, many things.  I have scars all over me caused by the faith I had in those things.  Remove faith and wish fulfilment from your opinions and without a doubt, the new opinions you have will not sound like anyone you know.

I'm inflexible because I've done the research.  Because I've walked the walk.  Because I've defended my positions hundreds of times to hundreds of different people.  When those defenses have failed, I corrected my opinion, accepting that I was wrong and thus strengthened my position.  If I build a fortification, and someone comes along and destroys the west tower ... and I learn how and why the west tower fell, then the new west tower is going to be better built, better thought out, stronger and more able to withstand a siege.

Most people I know, when their west tower is destroyed, they pretend it wasn't.  They don't fix anything.  They just go on pretending everything is exactly the same, no matter how often they get punched in the face by others plainly demonstrating that tower isn't doing its job.  I've spent a lifetime placing every brick and firming up every juncture.  Yet some rube shows up and makes a big deal out of picking up and throwing a tiny stone, made of the first and last thought they've ever had about the subject.  And when this stone fails to penetrate my lifetime of evidence, consideration and argument on the subject, they become shaken and flurried that my wall didn't fall down.  "You never admit that you're wrong!" I'm told; though, in fact, it's because I've admitted I'm wrong thousands of times ... and corrected for those wrongs.

This is why I'm inflexible.

Still, my best readers would like me to return to great posts about worldbuilding.  And I would ... except that I don't have an unending storehouse of these great posts ready to go at any given moment.  I have to think of one; and that takes time.  And meanwhile, life is happening.  As a writer, I want to write ... and not always for the purpose of having something wonderful and new to say about worldbuilding, or because I've invented some spectacular new game functionality.  These things are not invented easily or often.  I just don't have them on tap.

I do wish I wouldn't get hurt.  It's not that I'd wish others would stop attacking me; I don't want to tell anyone else what they should do.  But I do wish it didn't hurt; that I was inured, or unfeeling, or like Quasimodo, made of stone.

Conformity

I don't like to read the IMDb trivia for a film.  While interesting details are learned, often I also learn something about the film's making or its design that I can't unsee once I know it.  This has occasionally ruined individual shots in films for me, and once or twice a whole movie.

I'm sure this is a common experience.

Knowledge has this side effect regarding a great many things.  Outside of art, I prefer the effect.  For example, I'd rather know that Alexius Comnenus of the Byzantine Empire wasn't expecting thousands of nutjob crusaders when he asked Pope Urban for help in 1095.  I was told otherwise by my high school teachers.  I also prefer knowing that the American and French revolutions were not grassroots popular uprisings, but propaganda campaigns by rich assholes who wanted to retain their properties while getting rid of their overlords.  Again, not the story I was told.  Likewise, many of us have learned much of what we were told about Christopher Columbus was horseshit, and likewise with regards to considerable host of other "heroes" and historical figures.  I recognize that people don't like having these icons shattered, but I'm different in that regard.

Moreover, once I learn something along these lines, I can't "unsee" it.  For example, recently I convinced my partner to watch Fury Road; this was the end of a long campaign.  She didn't like it; not because of the violence or the story, but because of the intensity of male toxicity that impregnates the story ... even though the toxicity is clearly messaged as bad, with that toxicity coming up the loser in the end.  Which is, of course, a reason why the film didn't do well with the white boys of the alt-right.

Our discussion turned to the appearance of the villain males throughout ... not just Immortal Joe, but all of them.  The desired effect of make-up, pins, nails and other freaky appurtanances is to evoke fear in the observer.  The same principle underlies the various face-painting that's been incorporated in hundreds of cultures when preparing for war, and the subject could be left there.  However, I feel compelled to point out that one's outward appearance is not of direct benefit to the wearer.  I can wear the paint; but when I'm out there, I can't see the paint.  No matter what others see, I'm still me.

Let's take that a step farther.  In a primitive culture without mirrors, relying wholly upon the occasional askew reflection to be found in water, only occasionally, our looking frightful as primitives is a truth we accept from others.  More to the point, I rely upon you to make my face, while you rely on me.  When I make your face, I'm not able to make a face that you may necessarily find frightening; I must make a face that I find frightening.  In effect, I create your outward "personality" and you create mine.  This is a personality made prior to a battle, without my input.  Yet, to maintain the respect of my clan, I must live up to the face I'm given — a face I'll never see.

This provides context for the tribalism that is fundamentally a part of our cultural structure.  It's not the paint that makes us think this way, but the co-operation that allows individuals to forsake that individuality for the benefit of the greater whole.  This practice has been co-opted for millennia, despite advancements in technology, because it's what makes humans ... human.

The practice of deciding how everyone is going to look, past the clothes and the helmets to precise ways of holding the weapon and the body erect; the manner in which everyone's facial hair will be maintained, the expression on everyone's faces, the tone of voice and ritual of speech ... once regimented in a specific, ritualised manner, the practice builds endurance, the willingness to stand fast in a fight, the willingness to die in place rather than forsake one inch, welds a group of individuals into a unit as unyielding as geology.  One man will not break and run, because there is nowhere to run to.  From birth, every man is indoctrinated to understand that cowardice is a permanent, irreconcilable social disgrace ... not only in that I will be disgraced if I'm a coward, but that I will perpetrate disgrace upon every coward I encounter, ruthlessly and contemptuously.  Every man knows this.  Better that I stand here and face impossible odds, knowing that I'm going to die, another faceless drone among an empire of faceless drones, than that I present the least sense of being an individual.

This is not a post about Fury Road ... but it is a post about the yearning of males, particularly white males, for individuals of the culture to conform with what they perceive is sacrosanct of that culture.  The 80s films, the ones where all the women were victims, were "great fun" and "innocent" ... but this new Mad Max is nonsense, nihilistic, sterile and empty of meaning (because the originals were Shakespeare).  What's changed?  Certainly not the filmmaker, as he's famously still George Miller.  Nope.  It's that women are depicted in the film as able, capable and ultimately triumphant over the white, white, white, white males.   So white, we have to paint them white, just to make the point clear.

Women are not "scary" ... painting them just makes them sexy.  They haven't got facial hair; they can't put the same expression on their faces; their tone of voice doesn't conform, the ritual of speech doesn't ring true ... and most of all, if one of them backed out of a fight, there is absolutely no way that society is going to indoctrinate women to stand fast and be murdered, or indoctrinate men to ruthlessly express contempt for a woman who protects herself.  Functionally, as humans, we just don't work that way.

Which can only exacerbate the fundamental, biological comprehension that males are disposable in war and battle, but women are not.  Understanding that this is a "comprehension" from the male's point of view and NOT THE WOMAN'S.  Still, males have been doing things in a particular way for a very long time, and they don't like that this way is turning out to be ... well ... limited.

Still, we are seeing an intensive cultural rise in white males abandon their individuality for the comforting conformity of a singular, co-operative, aggressive, discriminative outward-assigned communal value system.  Why comforting?  Because individuality is confusing and unsettling.  It is full of questions.  What do I believe?  Am I a good person?  Did I behave wrongly five minutes ago?  What should I have done?  Questions like these can dominate anyone's consciousness if they haven't something to ground themselves — like what my family told me to believe ... which is, in fact, just another outward-assigning group of people.  Thinking for oneself — being an individual — just feels wrong for virtually everyone in the population.  This is what's meant when sociologists or anthropologists talk about us having a "need" for belonging.  What they don't say, of course, because it doesn't play well in the media, is that "belonging" means being told what to think, how to think, when to think and why not to think for yourself.

As enlightened people of the 21st century, we pretend this isn't true.  We rush to spew out content like the comment above as though it's on point, imaginative and unique ... when it's exactly what I expected to find when I went to the comments section of IMDb's Fury Road page.  It was the fifth comment down on the 1-star ratings.  The other comments talked mostly about how the violence was "silly."  Because violent films don't sell millions of film copies, at all.

We pretend that everyone is special and that our tastes are so unique, but everyone's list of top ten anything always includes the same tired list of the same approximately 100 shared items.  We know inherently that if we include something obscure and commonly frowned upon in our list when sharing it publicly, we'll have to explain ourselves ... and that just brings up that list of self-abusing questions that make us run for the communal experience in the first place.  Everyone recognizes that if we post a list of, say, "top 10 films," what others see will cause them to judge us.  It is easier to pick "safe" options than to risk being judged.  As a result, we're taken at our word ... and most of us have found ourselves in some situation where we've agreed that Return of the Jedi is one of our "favourite" movies, only to have to sit miserably through it when family members set up a surprise birthday party where we're expected to be pleased as punch to sit through this awful, terrible film.  Again.  Rather than admit we never liked the thing.

Our clothes don't reflect our inviduality so much as the "individuality" we think others will accept quietly.  And those who don't behave this way, who dare to be actually individual, get to endure this constant, abusive, unrelenting joke-making, under the rubric of, "I don't mean to be disrespectful."  Because this is how things are.

This blog is hostile, but not towards those who fail to conform, but towards those who do.  This gives me the semblance of "affecting greater importance" than other people, because I have zero interest in identifying with other people.  The very fact that I don't care to identify suggests it's because I feel "superior" ... when, in fact, as a single, isolated, totally vulnerable outcast without a tribe, I'm vastly inferior to the forces arraigned against me.  A single individual makes a terrible army.

I speak disloyally of the D&D pantheon of holy inventors because I didn't sanctify them and I don't recognize the faith granting that sanctification.  I don't believe in any faith.  "Faith" is what we have when we let someone else paint our face for the greater good that I won't choose.  Fuck faith, and the seeds it gestates.

Finally, I scorn the words of bloggers who love editions, modules, artworks and other elements of traditional D&D because I can see plainly that these are not the blogger's words.  They are repeated words, unexamined words, ritually repeated and never truly defended, because they are indefensible.  This blog is a campaign that repeatedly examines the words, exactly the thing that individuals do, but which belongers are terrified of doing.  Over and over I post the words, ask questions, demonstrate the failings, demand explanations for why such as such is so popular, or what makes it good, when it is so obviously, flagrantly shit, especially compared with words originating from sources other than D&D.  Traditional D&D is bad game design, bad writing, bad interactive advice, badly organized publishing, mawkishly disastrous business envisioning and, on the whole, irascibly resistant towards educating non-players HOW TO PLAY.  This last, obviously, should be the first thing addressed, but it's the last thing every admitted.

The crime that other people see is "not conforming."  I know that.  But the crime I prefer to address is "the game is shit as written."

The British Army was once an irresistible military force; I don't question that.  But it was a force that defended racism, brutality, theft, systematic murder of both cultures and people and ultimately the perpetuation of human misery.

Letting someone else paint your face may be all well and good for you, but I'm not a native.  I don't live in a tribal group because tribes are selfish, territorial, coercive, ultimately enslaving entities, whose practice in dealing with any desire for freedom is to shame, hate and ultimately to ostracise, which once upon a time meant dying in the wilderness alone.

Civilisation has taken the teeth out of ostracisation.  I, for one, am happy in the wilderness.

Menu Content Arrived

The menu content has arrived.

Through the weekend, I'll be getting my ducks in a row; come Monday, I'll start mailing out to those people at the front of the queue ... with any luck, you should see your copy within 10 business days.

Unfortunately, the two additional menu pages, which will be coming, are not ready as yet.  Research and development is ongoing; I know what all the items are at this time so it's just a matter of ensuring they're well-written and that the prices match the original pages.

In addition, while the coasters have been ordered, but they've been delayed.  The logo will be the same; we're intending to get them in silver but we may have to settle for black.

I'm fully comfortable with sending a second package with these contents following the first to those select few who deserve to see the menus as soon as possible.  The second package will weigh very little and therefore incidental in cost — so don't bother to write and wave them off, I'm definitely anxious to distribute everything that I'm working on.

Naturally, I'm very excited right now.

Seriously

 

Constraints of the Real World

The goal remains to foster the creation of characters and game opportunities, promote the DM's storytelling, enable the players to cut their own way through the forest and encourage them to work together as a team in a rich, three-dimensional world.

I think I see a different way to the beach, so I'll follow that path and see how it goes.

Brandon addressed the subject of worldbuilding yesterday with regards to things written down.  I answered that my attention in writing things down applies to the rules ... and in retrospect, it occurs to me to explain that — present company excepted, of course — worldbuilding is not only a matter of building the physical game world.  That's needed, of course ... but there is a great deal more to the world than maps and dungeons.

This last year the systematisation of the wiki format has enabled me to build a list of 2,683 wanted pages for eventual writing.  Obviously, a considerable number of these are spells, monsters and knowledge-based abilities ... but other large segments include geographical features, organisations, provincial regions, religious subjects, goods and services, occupations, pieces of equipment and theoretical rule proposals.  It's a spectacular list; much too large for me to keep track of ... but thankfully, the wiki does the work.  On any particular day, I need only focus on those subjects that come up most often in the wiki's existing text.

If I had the money, I'd set up an office and hire approximately ten persons to develop and expand the wiki: five writers, two editors, two artists to create page-relevant artworks and a draughtsperson to do nothing except draw exhaustively detailed floorplans for castles, inns, temples, barracks, villages, towns, fields and so on, creating a game world so detailed that players and DMs could tromp hither and yon for scores of sessions.  I can see these phenomenal bull-sessions where we brainstorm how some village could be structured for open game play in a manner different than the other five or six villages that have already been mapped, populated, sketched and described in one vast wiki.

Not going to happen.  Nevertheless, it's how I envision the game world.  The places of the world are real to me, as real as any historical figure whom I only know second hand, or any scientific truth that I only know second hand, or any promise that I've been given by a friend ... that I more or less have to have faith in rather than direct knowledge.  When I write a post or a book, it's something real; but it's also real, to me, before it's written down.

But, if we can cease berrypicking for the time being, this isn't getting us to the beach.  As I was saying, a game world is more than making maps.  It's also designing the rule systems, which build constraining conditions on the players, some permanent and some temporary until the players expand their list of abilities.  For example, the players are subject to the roll of the die in any circumstance where the outcome is necessarily uncertain, such as, "Can they hit an enemy?" or "Can they find a needle in a haystack given a set amount of time?"  They must adhere to the die whether they like it or not; and likewise as DM I must adhere to the die, whether I like it or not.  It's a hard boundary.  Hard boundaries exist everywhere in video games and players don't quit playing games on their account ... whereas the removal of boundaries in video games make them so boring than few desire to play.  D&D must adhere to the same principle.

But consider this: apart from the game's conventional rules relating to such like the creation of a character, which kinds of characters are available, the resolution of combat, the fixed potentiality of spells and such, there is other sets of rules inherent in the game's play which are not dictated by the game's rule books.  Understanding these other rules is central to understanding how to create scenarios and NPCs that can be effectively embraced by the players.

Let's start with reality.  To a lot of readers, this seems immediately counterfactual.  There are monsters, spells, unreal supernatural forces, la-di-da, so "obviously" D&D cannot possibly be "real."  However, I'm not talking about superficial elements and entities.  I'm speaking of laws of reality.  The game world must be livable, it must include gravity, it operates according to the principles of time and space.   There are fundamental facets to play that must not be circumvented with spells and monsters.

Normally, when we start to play, these things are taken for granted.  Rarely, I would imagine, does the DM begin a session zero by explaining that the game world operates as a physical universe constructed of atoms and electro-magnetic energy.  However magic in the game works, whatever the monsters do, whatever the supernatural forces are, they must manifest in some way that perpetrates and acts in tandem with forces we associate with reality.  Otherwise, it would be impossible for the game's participants to relate to the game world.  Therefore, water is water, everyone drinks it to sustain life.  The trees consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide.  Food is grown and eaten.  Characters get hungry.  Characters and every other living thing eliminates its waste accordingly.  

It seems so obvious that it needn't be stated ... but if it IS true, then physics and momentum are also a part of our universe, which means that a halfling CANNOT climb a giant while the giant is in motion without accumulating so many vectors of acceleration as to make the halfling useless while clinging to the giant and simultaneously as helpless a defender as an infant hanging onto my arm.  That infant on my arm is NOT in a superior fighting position.  Instead, it is largely dependent on my not shaking it off and causing it to land on the floor and sustain grievous injury.

We must not cherry pick which forces of reality exist in the game world and which do not.  They all do.  Ignoring those forces doesn't make the game "cool" or "fun" or "interesting," it ludicrously ignores the constraints of game play and turns everything that happens into a ridiculous farce.  Now I understand that many "players" seem to enjoy the farce; they pursue it vigorously.  To do so myself, however, would require my resuming many levels of stupid, restoring me to infancy.  Thank you, no.

With the rules of reality, come rules of culture.  A mere ten human beings cannot manage themselves without electing an intelligent leader, as any slasher film proves.  Forty human beings absolutely cannot, and with as many as a hundred human beings there are multiple levels of authority that are automatically pursued.  Therefore, the game world operates under "laws" as defined by the inhabitants of the game world — which are quite able to contravene the laws of reality AND the rules of the game.  Nevertheless, the characters must still adhere to these game culture laws, such as do not kill, do not carry weapons in town, do not say bad things to women, do not threaten children, do not set the bar on fire, do not blatantly cast spells in front of witnesses, do not be an ogre and walk into town like you're a human, do not kill, do not steal, do not pretend there are no laws, do not imagine that the town guard, watch, mercenaries, captains, outriders and bounty hunters are not capable of kicking your ninth level ass from here to creation.  Etcetera.  Flout these laws at your peril.

Because we are creatures with limited intelligence and senses, we have the law of ignorance.  No, you don't know where the nearest dungeon is.  No, you're not entitled to "rumours."  No, you have no special knowledge about the area.  No, you must actually seek knowledge and earn it.  No, there are no short cuts.  In addition, where there is knowledge, there are lies.  Many, many, many lies.  So do not trust one person.  Get a second opinion.  Always, always, always get a second opinion.  And watch your brother's six.

There are other cultural certainties.  Governments are always unstable.  As an effort to maintain stability through tradition and morality, there are always religions poking their noses into everything.  There is never enough money.  There is always a criminal class because there's never enough money and there are always those ready to break the law.  The criminal class is never made of nice people, because they those who don't respect law, traditional, morality, et al, tend to be very selfish.

When designing game environments, it pays to consider these constraints on the players' freedoms as opportunities to create stories.  There are stories about criminals and about why religion is important.  There are stories about falling governments and governments that sustained themselves.  There are stories about ignorant people learning things, and about why laws are passed.  There are many, many stories about leaders, and whom they led, and what they did, and why no one today is as great a leader as those people in the past.  Stories that encourage players to stop criminals or be them; that encourage players to embrace religion or fight it; that encourage players to discover and explore; that make them want to be leaders and pass their own laws.  There are a lot of stories and they already exist.  We just need to scratch out a few names and labels before writing in new ones.

Constraints create the need for ambition.  When the players haven't enough of something, they will always have to get ambitious about getting more.  When they want to do something, and can't, because they're not recognized in the eyes of the world, or because they haven't enough money, or because they don't know how to change their stars, then they'll have to overcome those failings.

Everytime they do, the DM can be right there, showing them a number of paths they could take, letting them decide how to accumulate, get recognized, power up and force their way in, whatever it takes and however the party wants to handle it.  Dealing with the constraints of a real world is not like poking around a set-piece dungeon, where all the routes are clear and obvious, and everything's waiting to be killed or picked up.  The real world is way more complicated ... but if the reader thinks of the game world as the real world, I think you can see plainly HOW the real world is complicated.  After all, you live in it.  It's right outside your front door.

The Other D&D was never about fetching things from dungeons.  I know that's what the game's makers thought it ought to be, but none of the participants I played with in the early 80's played that way.  We all saw the game world as THE world, with all the opportunities and possibilities the real world offered.  Yet there were things D&D couldn't provide in its early days.  There were no lap tops, no easy way to keep track of tons of data; no easy way to research and filter the knowledge of the world from the internet; no easy way to watch any film or read any book just by wanting to; no easy way to keep in touch with other DMs, or seek the advice from other DMs.  The isolation was just too ... intense.  So those players enjoyed their time in the sun until they finished school, then put "childish things" aside and got on with starting their careers and families.  And somewhere along the way, the Other D&D that I continued to play got lost.

Sometimes I think it'll never be found.

Well, we got to the beach.  And the water is nice.  I believe I'll be putting down this series for a while.  

Sense

There's more to wisdom than exercise.  A game world's got to make sense.  The people in it have to do more than move, they've got to do it with a purpose.  The world and its people have to react to the players like a pond reacts to pebbles thrown into it.

"Sense" comes of understand how "the" world thinks, as we have only one example to draw upon.  I don't count the novels and writings of fantasy writers; they draw on the one source just as any of us must.  We live and breathe and strive forward in this one world — and whether we comprehend it or not, the players respond to things as believable or not without needing to understand why.  If our game world is to hammer the button hard enough to ring the players' bell, it's got to hit true.  Hit false and the players will know it.

"Purpose" argues the same principles upon what we consider worthwhile activities ourselves: improving life, gathering wealth, seizing power, making a dent in the universe.  If the game world's denizens are nothing more than dolls moving around a clockwork mechanism, single-mindedly acting without sentiment, vitality, ambition or passion, again, the players will know it.  And if we do not have a grasp one what those words mean ... if we cannot produce attitudes about a situation when required, then the fault is not in the world, the game's design or the edition played, but in ourselves!

The players enter the world, enacting upon it, jumping in and splashing about.  WE make the ripples happen.  With each splash there are more ripples; the ripples of multiple splashes interact and interfere with each other, and as the ripples hit the far shore they rebound and return to interact and interfere with the players.  This must be apprehended with the clarity of the finest crystal ... or there's no chance of lifting ourselves out of old, tired habits, reading from the banal descriptive paragraphs written by people who cannot look into the eyes and faces of our players.  D&D, and by extension RPGs, are not a communication between absent persons who've never met communicating through dry text, but Me, You, Here, Right now, Face-to-Face, acting and reacting with the speed of thought and voice.  It is nuance, tone, subtlety, body language, watching, guessing and leaping forward mindfully from one happenstance to the next.

Is it any wonder that I can't say in a few paragraphs what to say or think?  There are a million possibilities of what can be said or thought in any given moment ... and none of us know even half a dozen of them.  Collectively, a DM or a Player might describe anything, take any action.  The play, and the fun, and the thrill, is waiting to see what it will be, so we can respond, get a response and surge forward excitedly.  There are no lists, no tables, no pre-planned if-then strategies that will keep pace with a group of humans sitting together participating at this speed.  When we try to "simplify" and "order" the process, we emasculate it, we hamstring it, we cripple human inventiveness and possibility to the pace of crutches and bed rest.

Is that what we want?

If I could wave a magic wand and enable the reader to know what I know, I would ... but as the last post described, I did not know seven years ago what I know now.  I didn't know three months ago what I know now.  I didn't know when I started this post that this was the paragraph I'd be writing once I explained the matters of sense, purpose and ripples in a pond.  We are learning and growing and changing ourselves every minute of the day, even when that change is negative and we're repeating the same lessons we took up before.  I cannot pick you up and put you beside me merely from wanting to do so.  I have to walk you through the process just as I was walked through the process, by others who knew more than I did when I was young.  That's all I have.

What's worse, I'm guessing here.  I don't know exactly what worked with me and what didn't ... or what drove me to make a world this way and not that.  I don't know why, from the first, I found the notion of a module-adventure distasteful and bland.  Was it the writing?  Was it the long experience in watching films or reading books before coming to D&D?  Was it the plain linear quality of the adventures that restrained and blocked my wish to pursue personal whims?  I don't know.  But while other players seemed to like them, I hated them.  And when I ran my own style of game, with the open setting I've always run, my players never said, "Oh, please, won't you run a module?"  No, they wanted what I was selling.  I've always found players that wanted what I was selling ... I've never had to complain that players couldn't be found.  I don't think that's coincidence.

I started this blog in 2008 because I felt I could explain a better way to play D&D.  I hadn't guessed, until feeling a lot of resistance, that it would be so hard.  I hadn't guessed how few people there were who played like I did.  Except for players I've met personally at game cons, I've hardly met anyone online that comprehends running a game in the manner described in the above paragraphs.  It's flabbergasting.  Why would people want to play this game in such an obstructed, shackled, bankrupted manner?

But they do.  They do want it.  And they will argue viciously for their point of view.

So.  As I say: I'm guessing.  On that account, starting with "sense," it works to discuss how the world does think.  We can't understand that point if we don't discuss it.

Hm.  Seems a pretty big subject.  Where do we start?  Philosophy?  Human events?  Anthropology?  Biology?  Surely, you've read fifty to a hundred significant books on each of those, yes?  No?

How are we going to understand the motives of a peasant, a king, a criminal, a tax collector, a hermit, a friar, an admiral, a teacher and so on, if we haven't a solid grounding in why we humans do what we do, or what we've done, or what we've overcome to become human, or what "human" even means?  A person is not only their job; there isn't just one kind of peasant or criminal.  It's not like there are only 200 types of person.  Everything is way more complicated than that.  Understanding how the world thinks, and therefore how the world reacts, and how the ripples work and why they rebound in just this way or that, depends on knowing what ripples are and what makes them.

The full scale of learning to dungeon master cannot be obtained with plug-and-play components.  It is not a matter of putting round pegs in round holes.

Oh, hell.

Here it is.  This is a dead end.  Without an inspiration at this point, I'm out of gas.

Athena

Let's take stock.  We've created a game world that we can perceive surrounding us, to a degree that when we close our eyes, we can see the trees, the houses and the people.  The world is BIG, so that it overwhelms the players, impressing them, and likewise providing us with every possible resource we could need to create game elements and game stories.  We can picture what the people in the world are doing; we can see the world moving around them.  There's a lot happening, all around the party — we're not limited by a single context or narrative.  Got all this in your head at the same time?  Good.

How does this come together, enabling us to invent people and moments spontaneously?  The goddess Athena was said to have been born from the forehead of her father Zeus; Athena is the god of wisdom and we may presume that "forehead" is a euphemism for thought.  This is what we want to do: pluck a thought, bang, right from our minds, like a magic trick, instantly creating something for use in the game.  Go.  Make it happen.

At some point, a transition is required, from academic comprehension to practical application.  With regards to the former, take note that Athena doesn't spring forth from a library of books written by Zeus.  She appears instantly ... it's not a matter of piecing together contemplative thoughts from weeks of study.  This is an inspiration.  The writer, William Faulkner, wrote,

"You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression."

 —  Interview with the Western Review, 1947

Capturing the momentary thought in the game's running is like seizing a will o'wisp, accepting it for what it is ... and then obeying the set of contraints the wisp provides.

It's like this; let's imagine standing on a street in the game world.  Picture this cinematically, like a scene from the Matrix; we pop in, we see the various persons going about their business, we feel the sun on our arms, hear the sounds, smell the odours ... and as we turn, we see one thing after the next.  And while I've given no examples in this paragraph, the reader has some sense of what ought to be there.  We do not, for example, have a motorcar at a sidewalk curb, idling its engine while a man in a suit smokes a camel cigarette.  We might have a dragon laying waste to the street, but let's try for something more mundane, hm?  I could give examples, but I don't want to constrain your imagination with mine.  This is a thought experiment ... your thoughts matter here, not mine.

Try to think what's there.  Put something on your right, then something on your left.  DON'T imagine how you'd describe either to the player ... just put the image in your mind.  Provide the image with motion.  Listen to the sounds being made.  Turn to your left and look at something else.  See it.  Now imagine what the scene might have looked like five hours ago, in the morning.  Now see it at night.  Have a person shout something off to the left; what was said?  How is it changing what's happening.

It hurts, I know.  You're not used to thinking this way, using your third eye ... and it's harder still to do it without writing something down or perhaps drawing it.  Faulkner is concerned with retaining a moment of inspiration, but this is also inherent with parsing those moments from thousands of other thoughts he doesn't write down because they're unworthy.  He's speaking specifically of a special thought, something really amazing.  Just now, I want you to picture the mundane, the daily happenings on this street ... and I know it's hard to keep your mind from wandering, to maintain the vision for more than a few seconds.  It takes practice.  And clearly explains that one reason you can't "think of something" on the spur of the moment is that you don't work at it much.

A fair number here won't understand the purpose of this exercise.  "This is D&D; D&D is about adventure.  A street scene isn't very adventurous."  Some are stuck now on the dragon's blasts of fire burning up parts of the street.  "Ah, now that's more like it," they'll say.  But really, it doesn't work.  Introducing players to a game by popping them into a street scene with a rampaging dragon will not produce immersion.  It'll produce resistance to the game's message, make the players feel corralled and, overall, produce a very shallow experience, despite the images of catastrophe and body counts.

We don't get a thrill from a stranger shooting a tie-fighter with a ship's blaster.  We get a thrill from a young, dumb farmboy hitting anything with a blaster he's using for the first time.  To get that payoff, we have to put the farmboy on a farm, portray the farm, portray the farmboy's life and listen to the farmboy say unhappy things.  If we can't do that well, the later moment falls flat.

We're not just creating a scene; we're creating the groundwork for later scenes ... potentially, all kinds of scenes, not just one.  There are hundreds of spectacular, adventurous things that can happen on a town street ... but if we don't invent one first, and make the players see it, then the adventures will have all the verve and excitement of a microwaved hot pocket.

At first, this creation process feels hard.  That is why so many artists equate creation to giving birth ... to pushing the baby out, with all the complications that implies.  But Athena was not pushed out from Zeus' legs, but from his forehead; and she is not the goddess of birth, but the goddess of wisdom.  Wisdom makes everything easier.  When I first began writing and playing D&D, it did feel like labour; but after forty years, it's nothing like labour.  I sit back, close my eyes and visualize my D&D world as a way of relaxing.  This is the benefit of time spent, practice, having clarity of mind and knowing what's waiting on every street and every field.

It's much harder to communicate what I do in words that make sense, to people I can't see, who most likely will not follow my advice, or haven't read the last ten posts very closely, and thus cannot make the leap they must make to free themselves from wasted effort and bad choices.

In 2014, I recounted a tale of the writer Mordecai Richler:

"Anytime a known writer speaks in public, at a library or a university, and the field is open to questions, there's always one adventurer who will rise from the audience and ask, 'Where do you get your ideas?'

"I have seen a number of answers to this question: polite answers, vague answers and academic answers. I remember seeing Mordecai Richler speak (for non-Canadians, this is a 'famous Canadian writer' whom every body praises but nobody reads). When the question came up, he became quickly incensed. 'From my BRAIN' he bellowed, having obviously answered the question a thousand times already. Then he added, 'Sit down, you stupid girl!' "

It's funny what seven years will do.  I said at the time that Richler may have given the best answer.  Today I recognize that Richler was a fool ... and I too, for seeing the world that way.  Seven years of writing, and the accumulation of wisdom, has changed me.

The right answer would have been for him to say, 

"The ideas have accumulated through a lifetime of consideration and thinking of many things — the world around me, the people in it, the experiences I've had, the things I've wanted that I've had to sacrifice ... the correlation of a million moments that have lent me the wisdom to see what needs to be taught and what needs to be understood by my readers.  I don't possess all the ideas there are; I'm only one writer.  But I understand from the question that you see yourself as unable to reproduce the ideas I have, or what you perceive to be the value of ideas that I have.  You're wrong.  You just haven't had the time to think as long as you'll need to before ideas as good as mine or better begin to emerge from the maelstrom of your thoughts.  That time will come ... and when it does, it'll be up to you to make them valuable to other people.  That's where the real work begins."

Richler didn't say that, though he was as old then as I am now.  I'm disappointed about that.

Don't lose faith.  There's more to come.