Coming to My Senses

"The common thread here, applying across editions of D&D, is people try to learn the game from the instructional text (i.e. the rule books) and CAN'T. Those who want to pursue the hobby (or who want their kids to pursue the hobby) then find an existing, active group to join who can teach them (or their kids or both) how to play the game."

"And I'd guess that there are more than a few folks in (more-or-less) the same shoes as myself who've walked down a similar path: bitched-and-moaned about the "state of gaming," complained someone should 'do something,' considered (briefly) doing something yourself, before (finally) deciding you'd rather just work on your own game/world/campaign."

— JB, B/X Blackrazor

This describes me exactly upon reading the above.  Briefly, very briefly, I considered "doing something."  Then I came to my senses.

Then I spent two days puzzling over why exactly I felt compelled to "come to my senses."  So let's look at this thing.

On first reading JB's words, I thought, "Well, hell, I could probably knock off 25, 30 thousand words on the subject.  Why don't I?"  Then I thought, "I could teach how to play AD&D."  And then, "Hm, I suppose I'd have to stick to the original rules as written."  Then I felt an unpleasant lurch in my stomach, followed by a wave of revulsion, whereupon, as I said, I came to my senses.

A few times since I've thought, "Okay, how would you do it if you weren't writing specifically for a given edition, or even genre?"  After all, I wrote How to Run without hinging the advice on a genre.  I thought, "I'll write a beginner's guide without concern for the rules."

I have no idea how I'd do that.

Naturally, the thing to do is see how others did it ... and so I dug up three attempts the company made to address the subject back in the day, the disaster areas that would later become the backbone of the OSR movement.  I'll stick to the factual details:

Published, 1981.

By Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Edited by Tom Moldvay.

Previous edition edited by J. Eric Holmes.

Foreward: "I was busy rescuing the captured maiden when the dragon showed up.  Fifty feet of scaled terror glared down at us with smoldering red eyes.  Tendrils of smoke drifted out from between fangs larger than daggers.  The dragon blocked the only exit from the cave ..."

Introduction: "DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® Fantasy Adventure Game ("D&D® Game" for short) is a role playing adventure game for persons 10 years and older.  In the D&D rules, individuals play the role of characters in a fantasy world where magic is real and heroes venture out on dangerous quests in search of fame and forture ..."

Published: 1983.

By Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Revised by Frank Mentzer.

Preface: "This is a game that is fun.  It helps you imagine.  'As you whirl around, your sword ready, the huge, red, fire-breathing dragon swoops toward you with ROAR!'  See?  Your imagination woke up already ..."

Dedication: "This game has undergone a startling metamorphosis from its earliest forms, written for hobbyists, to the current revision, usable and understandable by nearly anyone.  The original flavor and intent has been carefully preserved ..."

Learning how to play DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® games: "Start here.  A dungeon is a group of rooms and corridors in which monsters and treasure can be found.  And you will find them, as you play the role of a character in a fantasy world ...

Published: 1984.

By Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

By Frank Mentzer.

Editing: Anne C. Gray.

Preface: "Throughout the revisions of the BASIC and Expert Sets, and now in creating this one, my work has been guided by three simple rules.  First, the game must be fun — else why play the game?  Second, it must be playable.  Many historically accurate details of medieval times are complex and disorganised — generally all too human to use in a game ..."

Introduction: "The Changing Game.  Your characters have visited dungeons, defeated many strange and evil creatures, and found great and wondrous treasures.  But games for higher level characters are often different — as new as when the characters first braved the unknown wilderness ..."

Got all this?  Feel free to follow the links to the pdfs, so you can read the volumes individually, especially the first few pages.  Examined, it's not hard to see why very early in the game's history, the groundwork was laid for the most confusing collection of rules for a game, ever.  The White Box set that's available in pdf form online "is a modified version" of the original 1974 publication.  (I raffled my set off to help pay for my flight to the Toronto fan expo in 2014, so I don't know what the unmodified version says).  The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released in 1979.  I'd been playing for two years when the "basic rulebook" was published, and four years by the time the above "players manual" was published.

Take any game ... say, Monopoly.  Monopoly was published in 1935.  Now imagine that another version of Monopoly was published in 1940, then a "basic" version in 1942, and then a different basic version in 1944.  Following that, new versions were published in 1950, 1961, with a sub-version in 1964, followed by a remake in 1968, and finally all over again in 1975.  Let's be clear about this ... every version of Monopoly exists out there, and while the most recent version is the one you'll find at the swankest game store, any game store boutique might sell between three and nine versions.

Now, you are a ten year old.  You've never played Monopoly, but your friend has dad's old boxed game in the basement.  So you go to it, you pull it out, read the rules and play it.  You like it so much, you go online to talk about your experience ... and let the shit storm begin.

Monopoly is a simple game.  D&D is not.

So you've been playing Monopoly for 43 years and you read a blog post by a respected fellow bewailing the fact that while there are a lot of things that have been written about Monopoly, no one's ever written a really good book that teaches new people and kids how to play.  And you think, well hell, I've read every version of Monopoly that's out there, though I haven't played them all, and I write professionally for a living ... why don't I write that book?  I'm sure I'm experienced enough.

Okay.  How?

What do you do .... do you ignore that there are nine versions and sub-versions of the game, not to mention hundreds of copycat games, of which there are at least a dozen that have reached main stream at one time or another?  Do you pick one version — say, the most popular, recent version, that's stolen virtually every aspect of Monopoly to the point where the players just go round and round the board, no one going bankrupt until everyone agrees to exchange game pieces and start again?  Do you try to highlight some earlier version, arguing that's the one that actually made the game popular in the first place?  How do you explain this choice?  And how relevant is it, anyway, to adults and children who have never played the game?  Who, in fact, think it's just one game — they have no idea, yet, that there are nine versions of Monopoly.  How do you address that?

Part of the problem with people who have no "Elder player" to guide them is this: the more you know, the less certain you are about the game you're playing.  Even if I could write a "perfect book" that exactly explained the game cold, it would necessarily disagree with some twenty other bofunk's notion of the game, which makes anything that's first learned seem suspect, even when it's not.  Unless you have the Elder, who is right there to guide you though the shoals and whirlpools of the game's play and preparation, you will end up scratching your head, wondering who's right and who's wrong.  And there's a very good reason for that, one that reaches past the game's multiple versions and multiplicity of disagreeing pundits.

Allow me to give you a brief primer on marketing.

Rule no. 1 is that the product doesn't matter.  If the product is garbage, that doesn't matter, because it's your job to demonstrate the product in a way that makes it look (a) amazing! ... (b) worth every dime ... and (c) amazing.

[I'm starting to sound like John Oliver]

How you do that depends on your sense of right and wrong, your ingenuity, how the camera operator points the camera and so on ... but the point is that you must find some way of getting across the product's awesomeness in a way that convinces people to buy the product.

THEN — and this part gets overlooked by young entrepreneurs — you must work doubly hard to convince your garbage-buying public that they're glad to have bought the garbage you're selling, because you need them to convince their friends and ultimately themselves all over again that what they bought is (a) amazing ... and (b) amazing.  

This is why every version of the game includes functionally useless sentences about imagination, fantasy, fire-breathing dragons and "adventure," even though next-to-none of these sentences have any chance of telling the new reader how the game is played.  In actual fact, this "fuzzy" text seeps into nearly every page of the rulebook ... because it's really, really important to the writers that you LIKE this game, A LOT.  So the trick is to make the game sound so amazing that you become certain that the reason you don't understand it must be due to how amazing the game is.

Consider.  A 10-year-old, for whom game would ultimately be written, hasn't the experience as a reader to tell the difference between vitally important details about the rules and utterly unnecessary fluff.  He or she probably has no idea a previous version of the game exists, yet Mentzer is in like a dirty shirt, being sure to tell us right off that this is different from earlier versions.  How exactly?  Not really important.  In any case, the old rules aren't provided in this book so you can compare them with these new rules ... so why mention them at all?  Why, to fluff the author's feathers, that's why.  Which in no way helps a young boy — or an adult — learn how to play the game.

Many present day players look back on their old rule books with big frothy mugs of nostalgia, going all soft and purple inside at those first words about the captured maiden and the dragon.  Sure they do.  They understand perfectly now how that works in actual game play (that is, it usually doesn't at all, but it could I guess), so they automatically fill in the details with their experienced role-playing brains without any trouble.  What does a young kid do?  Why, reads the text, goes "wow," has no idea what it means or how that happens, or what rules make it possible, but heck, that doesn't matter, because we've marketed the game successfully!  It's "amazing."

If the kid finds a good Elder, then he or she will ultimately become the mug-guzzling nostalgia drinker who enjoys the text today ... but if the kid doesn't, and never does figure out what in hell any of these rules did have to do with the maiden and the dragon, and is plagued by other rules that are everywhere, everytime the kid goes online, then the kid will drop this game and fume miserably about how that whole maiden/dragon thing was a fucking rip-off they weren't entitled to enjoy.

So, what's to do about that?  We've certainly got ourselves in a box.  We can't "Elder" every kid and adult in the world.  We can't shut up a hundred thousand ignorant voices on the internet bent on slamming down every part of the book we'd write.  We can't make everyone play the same game, the same edition or even the same rules inside that edition.  So what?  What do we do?

Okay.  I have a proposal.  And it's unexpected.

Let's say your ten-year-old cousin, Pei, has never played the game but wants to.  Let's say Pei has a group of friends, that have elected Pei as the dungeon master, if he can learn how to play.  And finally, let's say that Pei lives on another continent, but you still want to help him.

The idea of the 1981 basic rulebook was to provide a simpler version of the game that could be more easily learned.  Let's embrace that.  Only, let's scour the book clean of every part that isn't absolutely essential for learning how to play the game.  We don't care about marketing, we don't need Pei to "like" the game ... we're helping Pei DM it, not get off on it.  So let's ditch the scaled terror, let's ditch the comments about how the rules came about, let's burn most of the introduction (which isn't actually relevant until the rules are discussed).  Let's get rid of definitions about what a "scenario" is (p.B51), since Pei and his friends are going to experience them, so we don't need the description.  Pei's not writing a dissertation later on game design, so what do we care what a scenario is supposed accomplish?  For the love of gawd, don't list a bunch of them for someone who can't possibly understand what the hell what the are!

Break every sentence, every part, down to it's absolute critical parts.  When do you roll a die?  What does the roll mean, exactly.  Grasp that the DM has never seen a table before.  Assume NOTHING.  Rewrite the whole book, page by page, doing this with zero tolerance for anything that isn't instantly comprehensible.

Then, when Pei has read the new version, and has started to grasp it ... have him read the original.

I doubt very much that most of my readers can even grasp this "simplication" for what I'm suggesting.  I hear all the time how simple the above-linked books were ... yet when I read them, and put myself in the place of a reader who has none of my knowledge, it makes perfect sense to me why they don't understand.

Take this bit on P55.  Try to imagine that you have no friends, no sources, no one at all who can tell you what any of it means.  And that you're 10, you've never read a history book in your life, you have next to no solid education in any of this:

"A keep is a kind of castle.  The Haunted Keep has two towers connected by a gatehouse.  The upper stories have collapsed, and the buildings now have only one floor.  The rest of the castle is totally in ruins.  The insides of the two towers should be similar, though not exactly the same.  The gatehouse is split into two sections, divided by what was once a main road.  The interior of the gatehouse will be similar to the towers, though there will be fewer rooms."

And then we're given this map:

Okay, the above looks nothing like any "castle" I've ever seen on a postcard or in a movie.  How are these "towers"?  They're just squares.  I know nothing whatsoever about maps — when have I ever had reason to study one?  What is a gatehouse?  It just looks like two black squares.  What makes it a "house"?  Why does it say the rest of the castle is in ruins.  It said that the keep was "like" a castle.  Is there a separate castle?  Or does this mean the rest of the keep?

I looked up ruins and it says "crumbled, falling apart" ... why are the walls of this map perfectly smooth?  What's on the left and the right side of the road?  Where is "the rest of the castle"?  What does the text mean that they're the same, but different.  How different?  How am I supposed to present that?  What do I say when the player asks, how are these things different?  Why does the text say it was "once a main road" when the road is still there?  If the gate house is divided into two "sections," why do I just see black squares?  HELP!

This may sound like I'm pushing the point, but seriously, you're new to this.  Sure, eventually you'll figure out most of this, but are you really ready to push yourself hard, hour after hour, peering through all this text — every inch of which makes reference to something you don't understand — until finally you figure out what's meant by "should be similar, though not exactly the same"?  In fact, probably not.

Why start with this big, clumsy castle at all?  Do we need a multi-room set-up to explain how combat works?  How player characters ready their attacks?  How to run characters?  Wouldn't a simpler set up, like a house with two rooms, suffice better?  Who are we assuaging here?  Moldvay's ego, proving he can make a simple one-off dungeon, or helping new players learn how to play?

Do you, Gentle Reader, get where I'm going with this?  Do you understand why trying to read this stuff straight out of the gate without prior experience playing the game gets out of hand awfully fast?

In the film Blast from the Past, Adam's father tries to explain baseball to Adam unsuccessfully ... and that's how it sits for 35 years until Adam actually sees the game played:

"I get it!  I FINALLY GET IT!  You have to see it to understand it!  Because he must."

And baseball is way, way easier to understand than D&D. 

Tablets from God

"Regardless of how we're running the game, when you're doing all original material with your friends, there's something called 'convergence' that happens.  And that is, you'll do kind of a mediocre session one day that introduces something to the game, and there'll be another kind of mediocre the next day, next week, and the week after and the week after ... and you'll feel like this isn't going anywhere.  And then there'll be some sort of impetus; something will happen, and the players will be particularly inspired.  And you know you, you as a DM may have put something in front of them that you thought would challenge them or entertain them or, and excite them, or engage them ... but then something magical happens.  Some kind of synergy happens — and then everything that has been put into the game or that has emerged from the game, week to week, over usually about six to eight weeks or so — all of it becomes suddenly weirdly relevant.  Things you didn't know were important, in retrospect ... and then you have this scenario that happens ... all these things ... they all come together and produce a scenario that is better than anything you could have."

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

I had to cut and shorten this quote at several points, as it waffles quite a lot while Johnson does his best to express the concept.  Following the quote, he drifts into war story examples of what he means, but he never comes around to explaining why this moment of "magic" occurs.  The best he does is ascribe it to something in the game's design, which Gygax and Arneson inserted on account of their previous experience with wargaming, but even that is a vague collection of sentences that make little sense when quoted.  Feel free to listen and see what you can make out of it.

I agree.  It definitely happens.  As discussed in this treatise by Zittoun and Brinkmann, it's a factor of "studies in situated learning" and "cultural approaches to apprenticeship in thinking."  I plunged into this hardcore back in 2018 when I discussed meaning making, game consensus and situated learning ... concepts that go right over the heads of most.  In each case, I tried to dumb it down as far as I could while retaining the core research, but these are not easy subjects.  If you have no experience reading psychology, you might want to keep sharp instruments well out of reach.

In brief, the bros approach to rules-as-written D&D works because they're compelling everyone to coordinate the trajectory of their learning process in the same direction ... sorry.  Everyone is thinking the same.  By nullifying the "metagaming," the effort players commit to get around the rules — by saying "NO, you cannot get around these rules," player commitment falls in line with the game intention.  You can't kill the orcs by out-inventing them, you can't simply blast them away with your twenty fireballs ... you have to beat them with random die rolls and scant resources.

The result is that every choice and every die roll dramatically increases in importance.  More game hinges on that which the players cannot directly control — so when the die falls the right way at the critical moment, everyone is overjoyed.  Effectively, D&D is tranformed from role-play pissing for distance into a ring of people playing roulette ... which as anyone whose seen hard core players around a roulette wheel know, things can get loud.

This has zip to do with Gygax and Arneson as game designers.  It has zip to do with the players being especially "inspired," though it can certainly look that way if one is casting around for explanations.  And of course it takes weeks and weeks before the experience "emerges" ... these are players who have been trained since their inception to see D&D's eternal metagame.  It takes time to break their will with the rules and force them to put their chips on the table for REAL.

As I wrote in 2018:

"We focus on the words, accept each rule as written, with some assumption that it will become clear later. We view the individual rules as separate bits of data, having little to do with one another. We give considerable credence to the rule source; we interpret the rules as the meaning, bestowing innate, inviolable knowledge to the writer of the rules, presuming that the writer cannot possibly have failed to make the meaning clear when wrestling with the language."

This is, in essence, the argument that Johnson makes.  He's accepted the rules as written, he expected results, the results have happened.  He has no idea why, but he assigns the "why" to the rule source, to Gygax; Johnson bestows innate, inviolable knowledge on Gygax and presumes Gygax must have known what he was going.

It's really rare when I get to smash someone's argument four years before they make it.

As my post goes on, Johnson's understanding is "surface knowledge."  Real knowledge begins with a wholistic understanding of what the rules set out to accomplish ... which is the path the bros are on, evidenced by the rest of the podcast.  Further along, understanding pushes past the rules-as-written and into the realm of rules-as-intention.  Why does a rule exist, what does it accomplish ... and does this rule, in the way it's written, accomplish the goal it should?

This is the reason I don't play other people's rules-as-written.  I try very hard to play MY rules-as-written, or as I prefer to think of it in game, OUR rules-as-written, but I don't play AD&D's because AD&D's rules were a good try, but they missed the mark.

Take a rule I've replaced very successfully.  AD&D's experience award system is based upon the monster's attack die (determined by HD), hit points and some very fuzzy logic for a monster's special abilities.  The idea is clearly that more powerful monsters, those with more hit dice and hit points, which have powerful special abilities, should provide more experience than weaker monsters.  Agreed.  The question is, does the rule-as-written really do that?

If an orc with 1 hit point gets lucky with a d20 and causes 27 hit points of damage against the party before it gets killed, that orc gives less experience than an orc with 8 hit points that missed every swing.  If a monster with a special ability fails to use that ability during the fight, it gives the same experience as a monster that got to use that ability once, five times or twenty times before it died.  The only answer the book gives to this kind of inflation/devaluation of monster experience given is for the DM to make an ad hoc judgement call on what the experience for that monster "ought" to be ... which is a pretty damned fuzzy fix for a rule that clearly fails in its function universally.

Think of it this way.  Your camper has a black water reservoir with a listed capacity of nine gallons.  Only, you've found that in fact, although the actual tank does have this capacity, the way it fits in your camper causes some of that capacity to be wasted, since the outflow valve stops working when the tank is only 8 gallons full — whereupon, the extra black water overflows into your camper ... and worse, it does this when the outside meter reads somewhere inconsistently between 7.5 and 8.5 gallons.  Now.  Do you put up with this, acknowledging that it's up to you to make guesses as to where the actual blackwater limit is, and accept that you have to empty it more often than the camper designer rated, even when the gauge reads nowhere near full, or do you fucking fix it?

The goal of the original experience award rules did not include "it gives the DM one more bit of contentious decision-making to worry about," although that's what AD&D's rules amount to.  The goal is, harder monsters ought to give more experience.  Well, we can measure that.  Everything has hit points.  The orc that hits nothing, gets no experience for hitting, period, while the one that hits everything gets lots.  The monster that never uses its special ability might just as well not have had one, while the one that gets to use its ability is measured on how well that ability was used, not the fact that it has one.  Design a new system.  Play it AS WRITTEN.  Fuck Gygax.

The AD&D rules are not an inviolable system that produces magic.  The bros have several features relating to AD&D — their highly questionable interpretation of time, for example — that come off like someone explaining how their "totem" keeps elephants away.  "See?" they say.  "No elephants."  Somehow they've convinced themselves that several game elements, such as training, patron players, reaction rolls and yes, time, are essential to this business of solving all your problems and keeping away elephants.

Plumbing my own memories, unquestionably I had my own totems and talismans of this kind, which I gripped tightly for decades before recognising the underlying value, or lack of value, that some of these things had.  I said with the last post, and with this one above, what the bros are going through is a process.  It's evident from their dialogue that they have zero understanding of anything they're saying.  Their schtick is to repeat, "IT WORKS!" as loudly and arrogantly as possible.  Which is does.  But they don't know why it works.  It works because it does.  It works because Gygax was a genius.  It works because gods came down to Wisconsin in 1975 and handed over two tablets full of rules.  We don't need to know why it works.  Put your faith in it; that's what matters.

Which is, really, awfully pathetic.  Things don't "just work."  They work for sound, rational reasons.  Cars go faster and burn fuel more efficiently because we invented fuel injection, transmissions, coolants and ten thousand other items.  AD&D is not the end of the game's evolution, no matter what it's done for the bros.  They're assumption that it is, and their further assumption that "no one" has thought about any of this since 1980, is ignorance on a spectacular level.

We can do better.

Thistles

"This is not something that someone just casually goes off and sets up a 1970s-style campaign, ex nihilo.  That just doesn't happen, and like, and when you're not the BROSR, and you haven't gotten two or three years of work into figuring this out and playing with this, it's like, you know, if someone actually has done all this, I guess it would be obvious.  But when you done know what you don't know, there's a lot of big process there to find out what matters and what doesn't.  And there's a lot of things that are going to like not necessarily work out."

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

Okay, so why am I taking pieces from this podcast and deconstructing them?  I assure you, it's not to humiliate or disparage the "bros" — which, I confess, they make more attractive by mispronouncing Latin and statements that begin, "If you're not us ..."  But this is not my goal.  Rather, it's that much of what the bros say is based upon absurd bits and pieces of information, based upon what appears to be gut instinct than real knowledge.  That needs to be addressed, since they're plainly reflecting the messages they've heard and drinking that kool-aid.

Which gets in the way of a message that IS a good one, that needs adoption.

Agreed, obviously, D&D is a mountain to climb.  Any one can see one doesn't need to be "the BROSR" and that, in fact, it doesn't take two or three years of work to figure this out.  I and my friends, all 15 years old, began running our games during the winter of 1979-80; we had older people around us whom we could go to for advice, from whom we could get good advice.  By the summer of 1980 we were all fairly confident about DMing.  Going in rotation, playing twice a week — Friday after school in the cafeteria between 2:30 and 6:00, then Saturday between 7:00 and 10:30, by the end of 1980 we had some 300-350 hours of play under our belts.  Three quarters of that was play and about a quarter was DMing.  All this was after I had finished with football, which was only that fall in 1979.  I didn't go out for football again with grade 11.  And this doesn't count the time I spent playing in other campaigns, Empire of the Petal Throne and Chivalry & Sorcery.

By the summer of 1981, between grades 11 and 12, we had sorted out which of us wanted to DM and which didn't.  Because we were older, facing our last year before graduation, most of us were freer to play later hours before we had to go home.  I ran about 60-70% of our games because I was better prepared than John, and our time had shifted from 7 hours a week to 9.  So, 18 months after starting the game, I had about 225 hours of DMing to my credit.  By then I was also running Traveller on Sunday afternoons and occasionally switching D&D up for Top Secret.  Gamma World, Paranoia, Tunnels & Trolls and straight wargames, like Car Wars, got shoved in here and there ... the two months that summer gave all kinds of opportunities to play.

By winter of 81-82, two years after my DMing began, I was the only DM left in our group.  I was not a bro and I could already see there were huge problems with AD&D, none of which are the problems that any modern-day blogger bitches about.  Alignment was weak, but not because it didn't make sense or because it couldn't be perfectly defined, but because it got in the way of the players seeking higher expressions of their character.  Any literate person knows that human beings are NEVER of a single mind; they never commit to one behaviour in every circumstance.  We are a hodgepodge of badly thought out decisions and actions that are both cruel and noble ... and the alignment system, with it's stodgy "tell you what to do" approach was simply kindergartenish and unnecessarily restraining.

The weapons vs. armour class adjustment isn't hard to run and it does make sense ... but any capable, wargame strategist — which we all were — could figure out in a few runnings that certain weapons were plainly better than others ... which drastically compelled wise players to choose the more obviously superior weapons.  We agreed after playing with it a year that the constraint was limiting the spirit of the game, while liberating no special value of any kind, so we ditched it.  If you want an end to power gaming, eliminate any system that arbitrarily specialises a weapon beyond it's functional limitations.

A battle axe needs two hands, and a sword does not, permitting the use of a shield.  They both do 1-8 damage ... so it appears that the sword is superior.  Why would anyone use a battle axe?  Well, you can't cut through a door with a sword.  When a sword breaks, the whole weapon is useless, but a battle axe always breaks at the weakest point, the handle ... which is cheap and easy to replace.  The weapon is made that way.  In the long run, the battle axe is more reliable.  Like a car with a spare tire.  You can carry the extra handle with you, or pirate it from another weapon.  Meaning the sword and battle axe each have their strengths and their weaknesses.  There's no definite right or wrong choice.  This doesn't keep a simple-minded player thinking that one or the other IS superior ... but the game includes elements to make them change their mind.  On the other hand, if you make the sword clearly superior by creating arbitrary weapon-vs.-armour rules, then every player would be stupid to lessen their chance of survival by choosing an axe.  That's not power gaming.  That's sensible.

The larger point is that, no, it doesn't take two years to get a handle on this game.  Those DMs who stepped down after trying it were fine as DMs, if a bit overwhelmed.  I can still easily get overwhelmed while playing.  A DM is a particular personality that likes being overwhelmed, who sees it as a good thing, because it's exciting and a high.  He or she looks forward to the next time the opportunity to DM comes ... whereas others view the next running with anxiety.  There's only so many times one can be possessed by that anxiety before one quits running.

Understand, however, this isn't a sign of the game being comprised of bad rules, or of the prospective DM not knowing what needs to be done.  We can know perfectly how to run, and still fail at it because it's really not for us.

The bros make the pitch hard that by playing AD&D by the rules exactly, it's a much better game.  And they repeat over and over that it's "the AD&D rules" — and apparently, only those rules, that affords this better game.  This is nonsense.  The problem with 5th isn't that it has different rules.  It's that the rules aren't "rules" at all.  They're suggestions at best, easily compromised, badly defined and overall a ghastly mess for organising a campaign.  AD&D is superior to 5th not because it's a better rule system, but because it IS one.  Any consistent, structured, limiting rule system is vastly superior to 5th for that reason.

It's a good idea for an unsupported DM, without practical experience with wargames (which are all about hardcore exact adherence to rules), without access to good advice (which throws out everything on the internet), to adopt AD&D rules-as-written as a starting point.  I encourage that, whole heartedly.  Not because I think AD&D is a good system as written, but because, as a matter of fact, that's exactly how I started. 

Nor do I think AD&D's rules represent "how Gygax envisioned the game," which is a load of dingo's kidneys.  In any case, who gives a rat's boil what Gygax intended?  He's dead, we're still here, and humanity moves on from what inventors invent.  We don't make cars the way Henry Ford did, and guess why.

Most would-be DMs out there have had ALL their opportunities to learn viciously co-opted by morons and exploiters.  These poor DMs desperately need to stop viewing D&D as a set of guidelines and instead as a set of hard, strict boundaries, which have the capacity to change and discipline these DMs into new people with new perspectives.  Playing AD&D rules-as-written might do that.

5th is not about disciplining players.  And while I hate to sound like a christian website urging you to beat your children, "discipline" in the academic sense is necessary for building the strong, sustainable apparati that will keep a game campaign going, year after year.  Us old school guys who played 1812, El Alamein and Tractics had our mental spines broken over the backs of rule systems that permitted zero flexibility.  That's what we wanted.  It forced us to solve the problem using the games rules, and not solve the rule problems with our flippant imaginations.  And hell, regarding what Gygax "thought," he contributed to the design of the last one linked ... 'course, that was years before he lost his shit with TSR.

Every player faced those same rule constraints; and as it played out, it became clear that some could see how to move units in a way that would win a battle and some did not.  For those who did well at this, and for those who did okay and occasionally succeeded, this was a triumph of game design.  But for those who could not think like a commander, who could not make sense of strategy and tactics, these games were horrible.  Those people did not enjoy these games.  Yet no one ever spoke of changing the rules to suit their shortcomings.  Simulation, Avalon Hill and other publishers didn't pump out "basic" game versions for these games, designed to make sure "everyone had fun."  Fuck everyone.  "Everyone" could go to the fucking beach if they wanted fun.  We were playing games that challenged our intellect and our limitations.  We screamed at each other, we fought viciously over half an inch of movement, we tore the skin on our fingernails and on our knees moving units over carpet with the fastidiousness of a surgeon.  We did not speak of having "fun."

The crucifixion-cross of "FUN" for everyone has ruined D&D past the point where most players introduced to the game have any chance of experiencing the sort of game we played 40 years ago.  If it takes them two or three years to learn D&D, it's because they didn't learn the importance of rules at a young age, or because they were taught that "fun" was the only defensible hill upon which anyone would play a game.  If the bros above feel the need to self-aggrandise themselves as "the ones" — go Neos — who have seen the blessed light of AD&D rules-as-written, all power to them.  At least they're on the right path, even if they've decided to start on it 43 years later.  At least they're a tiny percentage of the community that's finally realised that Mentzer, Holmes and the string of fucked-up weak-player enablers who followed in their wake, were taking the game on a crooked, EASY road to Hell.  At least someone woke the Chriscakes up.

So, yeah, I'm annoyed by their ignorance and terse arrogance — but unlike a lot of people, I see the bed from which it's grown.  From soil that's done little but grow mould these last forty years, along comes these two thistles.  And they're pushing out a couple of flowers.  I'll take that over what I've had.

Still.

I can't resist deconstructing the donkey piss of misinformation they're dribbling out, so there are going to be a few more of these posts.  I hope my readers are wise enough to see the good in this process.

Practical Learning

"... if you look at any role-playing game from the 70s, Metamorphosis Alpha assumes you're going to draw out 24 levels of a giant starship — and there were people at the time, who were just like me, and said like I don't know how to do that.  How's that gonna work?  And then there's, um, Tunnels and Trolls, says 'Okay, the first thing that's gonna happen is, someone's gonna have to dig the tunnel.'  Map out the dungeon.  And of course St. Andre there was copying from Original D&D where Gygax says, 'Okay, somebody's gonna have to design six levels of a dungeon,' right?

"Now a kid like me was always baffled by this.  How did someone come up with all this stuff?  Because you look at professionally produced modules and you — and I think, I'm never going to make something that good.  You know.  It's always been a mystery to me.  How did all these people in the 1970s — how did they give themselves permission to just go correct things, to create things?"

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

It's a gift that keeps on giving.

Metamorphosis Alpha was originally published in 1976.  The game included descriptions of 17 levels of the "Starship Warden", a 50-mile long damaged vessel.  Not 24.  17.  Most children in the days before helicopter parenting, video games, cellphones and even cable television suffered from acute and crippling boredom, which encouraged the drawing out of physical pictures from descriptions.  It's not a mystery.

Tunnels and Trolls was originally published in 1975 by Ken St. Andre.  I don't have any memories of the game before 1979, and perhaps I didn't play it often enough, but I have no memories of any text saying, "Okay, you have to dig the tunnel."  But I could be wrong about that.  In any case, it's not like we had to head off to a place with dirt with our shovels.  It's just lines drawn on paper, right?

Nor do I have any memories of Gygax saying a dungeon had to have specifically "six" levels.  I accept that Johnson's goal is to stress the difficulty of prepping the game — but again, these are just lines drawn with pencils.

While I didn't play RPGs until 1979, starting around 1970, at the age of six, I had grown remarkably adept at playing in the sand, where we would collaboratively build villages with roads, hotwheels cars, complete with small plastic garages, post offices and police stations, because these things were available and we were boys.  These villages would fill the sandbox from side to side, and then we'd collect rocks, golf balls and wooden blocks and smash these villages "from space" just before dinnertime.

By eight or nine, we were drawing our own comic strips — or in my case, making maps — as well as drawing out spaceships smashing into planets, or whatever took our fancy.  Virtually everyone's binder (a thing used to carry paper) was side-to-side illustrated, because we were punchy with boredom in school and doodling made the clock's minute hand move faster.

By eleven, we were playing playing complex wargames, having moved beyond RISK into Panzerblitz and Squad Leader; by twelve, it was rebuilding the rumpus room floor with anything we could find in order to build large battle maps, on which we move our plastic-model built tanks and miniature soldiers all-day Saturday ... before these had to be cleaned up before everyone went home.  We knew every detail about those tanks; we could rattle off engine types, range, fuel use, weight, etcetera, because we collectively owned all of Jane's Big Books of whatever ... which included scale models of cut-away diagrams of giant battleships and airplanes, which we would stare at for hours and discuss for longer.  Pffft.  Invent 17 levels of a giant spaceship?  Yeah, like we had no template for that.

Anyway, my being 11 takes me up to 1974.  It was another five years before I even heard of D&D; and after first hearing of it, I played it in a space of an hour.

I'm a little fascinated by these people talking in the present about how "in the 1970s," role-playing games were supposedly everywhere.  Um, no.  The friend who introduced me to the game had been playing a month, while the DM had been introduced to the game only three months before.  It was going like wildfire in 1979, but no one in Calgary could have easily played the game before December of 1978 ... because that's when the only game store in the city opened its doors.  So this "what people did in the 1970s" is bullshit.  Yeah, maybe some people played, somewhere, but it wasn't a widespread phenomenon and every one of those people had a wargame-obsessive background like I did.  This is a very tiny subset of the population, with a specific mindset ... the sort that would know exactly how to design 6 levels of a dungeon, or a huge spaceship, without any trouble.

I have mentioned before that I joined a campaign in 1980, run by a fellow who played with Gygax in 1974.  He passed away last year; his name was Bill Hartley.  He didn't publish any modules or get famous in any way ... but he did begin running his own game after moving to Calgary post-school.  He became a teacher, reappearing in my life as my daughter's grade nine english teacher.  That was a very funny parent-teacher interview, I can tell you.  My daughter was barely discussed.

In 1975, I'd wager that Bill was the only player of D&D in Calgary.  And as it happened, he lived just three blocks from where I lived, in a house overlooking my elementary school playground.  I can show you the house.  But as a 5th grader in 1975, I had no idea — though I probably glanced towards his house every day.  I think that's kind of funny.

Giving ourselves "permission" to make things was how the world worked.  I made my first science fair project in 1976, a working circulatory system along with quite a lot of knowledge about it.  I put forth science fair projects each year until grade 10, by which time I'd lost interest in practical science and had moved onto theatre arts.  The same year that I discovered D&D I had also begun performing in city wide events on stage ... which is a different kind of collaborative, creative effort.  I also got interested in football, in those days when I was young, raw and lean, which is intensely collaborative and a good place to wear out aggression.  But it was football or drama, and in the end drama won ... which, CTE considered, was definitely for the best.

I have no idea what kind of kid Jeffro Johnson was, but certainly not the kind that I ran around with when I was building model ships and planes, or building physical representations to display contour lines as a science fair exhibit (1.5 meters wide and 0.5 meters high, built with 5 mm sheets of styrofoam and carefully cut to represent the contoured landscape around Sylvan Lake in central Alberta), or learning how to program computers with punch cards (yes, christ, that's where I started with computers).  Long before I played D&D, I was trained to play D&D.

Make a dungeon?  From scratch?  Oh ffs.  Give me something hard.

The Boys

 

These guys talked for 30 minutes yesterday, this far apart.  I could hear them clearly, with my window open in July.  They called each other "Bro" approximately once every 26 seconds, or on average placing the word at the beginning or end of every fourth sentence.  I took the picture because I thought it might give me the opportunity to talk about why I so heartily dislike men so much of the time.  Honestly. They shifted their feet, shook their shoulders, flapped their arms and so on, but they kept their distance.  Standing far apart keeps it het, bro.

I didn't think I'd find a use for the pic until JB of Blackrazor drew my attention to this podcast, using the acronym, "BROSR."  Ech.  Yeah, that's really ... execrable.  Makes me look forward to the future acronyms for BROCD and BROBE.  To be honest, the "bro" bit truly put me off.  At first.  I did listen to all of it.  From James Streissand:

"Every single time we bring up any of these, uh, '... well I just do what I feel like, I just do it whenever I want' — and then we have to spend time, every single conversation, spend half of it or more, explaining why attack rolls are not adjudicated through DM fiat, or sorry their attacks are not adjudicated through DM fiat.  We have attack rolls, because we as designers have decided that if the DM was there to, uh, adjudicate, was to decide on a completely new and random method of adjudicating how attacks are handled in the game, every time the game came up, the game would probably be unplayable.  At very least in this context.  We need some sort of supporting structure, we need some capacity at this value to players declaring that they're going to make an attack, as opposed to asking the DM whether they can make an attack, and then have them adjudicated ... there's value to independent mechanics that the players can rely on to ensure that the game will progress in some fashion.

"Having this conversation every single time is far slower than calling you an idiot.  And saving myself all that exhaustion because I know you're not going to get it anyway."

I fully expect that James gets blasted for this kind of talk but of course, here, I applaud him.  This is a game, it works like a game, you idiot.  James goes on to talk about how he'd rather use his energy for people who can understand what he's saying.

So.  This is not a post disparaging these guys ... though in many, many, many ways they have not done their homework.  This post is also not going to talk about AD&D, or the rules of that game, or comparing it to other forms of D&D.  I am done with all that shit.  I am not rehashing those conversations.

I'll begin by saying, first, that the boys, the "bros," have stumbled across the principles of playing the game as written first before thinking you're smart enough to change them.  Genius.  For the record, I played AD&D pretty close to "as written" between 1979 and 1985.  And there were many parts of the game that I found myself still adhering parts of it for no good reason as recently as four years ago; much of my gaming history has consisted of hacking off parts of the old game and replacing it with mine, with each part going over time.  The boys, however, seem to have hit on their comprehension in 2020.  It's hard to be sure; searching their names turns up a lifeguard in Clovelly with a hot bod named Jethro James who's described as a "deep-thinker."  That's my kind of boarder.

I give them credit.  It's not easy to rediscover the round wheel when every wheel we see is stupidly square; they've uncovered a basic fact about D&D that's been lost a long time (except to we who have not died yet) ... and they have spines, telling people who say a thing is "bad" must produce a reason.  On the whole, I'm in their camp.

But as a blogger I need things to write about ... and I know a good thing when I see it.  Here are the boys talking:

Streissand: "Those of us who are interested in objective discussion of game design — which a great deal of the stream is going to be — just having objective communication between different parties about the games that we love ... it necessarily comes off as abrasive.  People will come in and muddy the waters, and say, 'well just do what you think is fun, as long as everybody's having fun at the table, everything is valid' ... and those people of course don't hold to that standard themselves, but it doesn't matter.  Because what you have to do, I find — or the most effective way of chasing those people away, is just being abrasive."

Jeffro Johnson: "No, no, the worst thing is like when they're like, 'Hey, your message is going to go so much further if you just change the way you deliver it." [Streissand facepalms]

I don't know ... that could be something I've heard a few times also.

Johnson: "... when D&D, or the elusive shift happened ... where wargaming shifted into RPGs ... if that shift actually happened, and if it was predicated on rule zero thinking, then there are no standards.  There are no standards for discussing what role-playing is, there's no standards for discussing what's better at the table and what's not, for what works and what doesn't — there's not even a game there.  There's just people that are sort of larping as people that are playing a game.  And so, by having these objective standards, and pushing them really hard and not compromising on them, we can actually begin a discussion that in some sense that stopped sometime around like 1979, 1980 or so." 

Okay, so, this sets the tone for where I and the boys go our separate ways.  The reason why I keep referring to them as "the boys" is because, by phrases like this, they betray themselves as phenomenally stupid about the world's turning these last four decades.  Or, if you prefer, magnificently self-involved, believing that what they see about D&D in the present allows them to easily extrapolate events and perspectives based on a few extant source materials they've happened to read.  As if what Gygax or Arneson wrote down, or what the Dragon said, is the last word in early D&D culture.

They're not wrong about rule zero thinking.  They're not wrong that there was a discussion that existed in 1979 and 1980 that has evaporated since ... but Johnson hammers the word "stopped."  Obviously, it didn't.  There was no wargame-to-RPG shift.  And I'm material proof, as is every player I've participated with in 40 years, that the discussion never ended.  It's still ongoing, OSR notwithstanding, the company notwithstanding and the general popular bullshit notwithstanding.  Johnson, however, and Streissand as well, have no idea.  They live in the bubble of their present and they've no reason to step out of it.

This is not the only time in the podcast that they're guilty of this assumption.  It happens so often, with blinding regularity in fact, that it helps to look at their choice of branding ... and remember they're only boys with a bright idea.

Do I think the conversation should be taken up by more people?  Absolutely.  That's why I listened to all of the podcast.  I don't usually.  In general, they're insipid.  The boys are definitely on the right track.  They don't know why the track works.  Their "wisdom" is totally experiential ... and so it's regularly backed up with "explanations" for things that sound much like the "theories" most people concoct in high school about what the real world is like.  For example, they're convinced that the way they measure game time is an absolute necessity to game success.  To support this faith, they've radically misinterpreted and cherry-picked a few gygaxian paragraphs about game time, and then "proved" to themselves that "Gygax was right" about the importance of time.  It's a delightful bit of tautological thinking which helps them believe their one the right track about this whole following the rules thing.  They are on the right track.  Not for that reason.  But they think time matters ... so they'll grip that totem tight until they realise it's nonsense.

Since I was there when the discussion "ended," I feel bound to explain that the world of 1979 didn't have the internet, and therefore knowing what "everyone thought" was drastically limited to what the news decided to report upon and how many people one could conceivable talk to face-to-face.  As such, there existed a sort of dividing line between what we knew from direct communication (which we could trust for the most part, because we could ask questions and present arguments), and what we knew from the limited media (which we could not trust, because it was mostly presented by people plainly trying to bullshit us for our money).  In 1979 and 1980, between the 20 or so people I gamed with, the additional 15 people who played that I didn't game with, and they guy who ran the only gamestore in Calgary (population:469,000) that sold D&D content and therefore knew everybody, no one ever praised anything Gygax said or did; no one even knew Arneson's name; no one cared who wrote the books; and the discussion was mostly about important stuff like how many frost giants does it take to kill a gold dragon, and if elves live forever why isn't the world hip deep in immortal elven children?  We did not, ever, talk about the value of rules, or which rules to follow, or if we needed rules, or if the DM had to obey the rules; we argued over what the words in the books actually meant, exactly.   And those arguments often got so heated that physical fights started.

The "conversation" that mattered in 79/80 was this:  what is D&D, and How do I run it?  I mean, just what the fuck is it, anyway?  What is it supposed to be?  Because, if I'm going to run it, it would really help if I knew what the fuck I was running.  This is the core conversation that everyone was keyed on.  No matter where, no matter when, on the way to school, on the way home, waiting in line for a movie (we used to do that), laying on our backs and looking at the stars, with the game shop guy, with the older guys, with the guys who played Napoleanics, with the guys who played Tractics, with the guys who played Squad Leader ... how does it work when we say we want to do something and the DM doesn't know how we're supposed to do it, because there aren't rules for that and yet I'm not physically prevented by the game from doing that thing?  What is the DM supposed to do, and does that mean the players aren't allowed?

We went around and around in a circle with this ... and then modules to appear everywhere and the conversation was still there, but it was way easier to run a module and most of the lower echelon people ran to that as a DM tool, which kind of left us elitists still talking but still not finding an answer ... though I thought I was onto something because I'd started letting the players just do stuff, while I reacted sort of like how a player is supposed to react when I tell them that stuff is happening.

Then the splatbooks of Unearthed Arcana, the Fiend Folio and Deities came out, and the conversation started to be about which of these new rules we'd use, and meanwhile we were ditching rules that didn't work, and then I started inventing new rules, which changed my game and I moved away from the public discourse for about 17 years, and when I came back, it was all about 3rd edition and sandboxing/railroading, and generally people are better educated about what a DM needs to do now than we were in 1980.

So, the boys deciding that running AD&D by the rules "solves problems" makes sense from both a 1979 and 2022 point of view.  We did it, because those were the only rules.  The Dragon magazine was mostly about fluff and general interest chatter until 1983, coinciding with the splatbooks, when it got new rule heavy.  The boys in 2022 are doing it because they're seeking a grail and they think they've found it.  We played AD&D "raw" because when we didn't, we got shouted down.  Remember: I grew up in an age where every game had rules and everyone followed them.  No one thought to question the rules of AD&D ... at first.  It was only after trying to play with them for a couple of years that we decided they didn't work.  Which is what the boys are essentially selling on the podcast.

It's only that they don't know they're selling that.  Because they haven't gotten to where we were in 1983.  Yet.

So, yeah.  They're on the right page.  But they're 40 years behind me.  I'll be 98 years old before they get to where I am now.

You'll forgive me if I call them "the boys."  I don't think they're my age.

Limitations & Rules

A dragon's breath weapon is one of the most deadly attacks in the game ... and so it should be, considering the game includes "dragons" in the title.  It's not Dungeons & Dryads, is it?

But instead of concentrating on the attack's strengths, for a moment let's consider ways in which we limit the breath weapon — and therefore, as a thought exercise, how it might be reduced further.

Obviously, we can have it cause less damage, which applies to a host of different creatures including smaller dragons, hell hounds, firenewts and so on.  We can reduce the number of times per day that it can be used.  We can reduce its area, enabling combatants to get closer.  We could deny the dragon any other attacks when using the breath weapon, and even deny it the freedom of movement while the breath is in play.

We could go a little further.  We could argue the dragon has to space its breath weapon, so that it can't breathe two rounds in a row.  Or that it has to wait until the third round, or the fourth round.  We use this sort of limitation with weapons that have to be loaded; we could insist the dragon has to "load" it's breath.  We could argue that a dragon has to have a certain element available in order to "charge" itself ... water for steam, heat for fire, bile for acid and so on, meaning that while it's charging, it has to eat or come into contact with that thing, thus limiting its mobility.  We could create a time of the day when the dragon is too tired to breathe.  Or a moral element that says some dragons can't breathe unless they're attacked first.  We could even say that if the dragon is struck hard enough just before it breathes, the damage from the breath is halved.

I said this was a thought experiment.  I have no intention of putting any change in place.  I'm writing this to get the reader thinking about how skills and abilities in the game are intentionally limited, so as to make them playable ... and how in making new rules, or making judgement calls, it's much less the power we're giving that encourages play, but the manner in which that power is limited.

Let's take a hand-held weapon — a sword for convenience — and view its role in the game.  We take the sword and we swing it ... over and over, until there's nothing left to swing it at.  In the standard combat system, we get to swing the sword every round, no matter what happens that round, so long as we're close enough to a target.  This makes the only "play" the question of our location and whether or not we hit ... and in a lot of games that throw out a tactical arrangement for placement of characters, or simplify it so much that it hardly matters, this leaves only the question of hit and miss — which is out of the player's hands.

Boring.  As players, we're left repeating, "I swing," over and over, until the battle is done.  That's not game play.  That's an assembly line.

Incorporating tactics — where I am, where I'm facing, how far am I from the enemy, along with combatants constantly moving — forces the player to think through a new problem: "Where do I want to be when I swing my sword?"  Though even if tactics are part of play, most players don't give this question much thought.  In fact, it's like playing snooker or billiards.  "I want to strike there, so if I hit I can turn here, move there and clear a path over here."  This plan can be changed every round, but the result is the same: the player is thinking three, even four turns ahead, eyeing the next target while fighting this one.  Tactics imposes a limitation.  "I can't be everywhere, and I have to be ready to move to the next place if I want to be in reach of the next target.  Otherwise, my attack will be wasted in the middle of a fight because I'm over here, when I should be over there."

We impose another limitation if we make it possible to drop the weapon — say, upon rolling a natural "1."  There are several angles with this.  Where does the weapon fall?  Does it break?  How hard is it to pick up?  Does it take less time to draw a different weapon?  What if the weapon lands in an adjacent, empty hex when we're fighting next to a cliff, or just as we're atop a siege ladder?  What if the enemy picks it up?  The various possibilities and solutions have to be worked out in advance, but once in place, the "drop" rule creates an alternate series of problems that breaks up the swing-swing-swing momentum of common play.  With a dozen combatants swinging every round, drops and their consequences accumulate in strange, unforeseeable ways.

The "critical" balances this detriment.  While I might drop my weapon, I have an equal chance of hitting the enemy twice as hard.

The structure and beauty of a combat system is not in its reflection of reality, but in the possibilities of adjustment, change, unexpected consequences, subtle and harsh increases in danger, each blended in such a fashion that the characters can continue to plan their next steps while suffering and readjusting their places to compensate for the enemy's movements and strengths.  Thus the mechanics of combat are further made complex by an remarkable host of natural abilities and immunities, the presence of spells, the influx of new combatants, good luck, bad luck, foresight and planning before the fight even begins and matters of whether the party is trapped or can run if need be.  The more elements we can pile into this system the better, so long as the players can rationally gauge their power against that of the enemy's with reasonable proficiency.

It would simply be impossible to describe all the ways in which battle is enabled and restrained ... but that's the substance of every rule that's put in place.  Enable too much and the battle is too easy to win; restrain too much and battle is impractical.  Either makes a bad game.

Okay, let's reach for a different example entirely ... and while we're at it, we might as well address the trope: a character wishes to jump the distance between two ledges.

Let's say that Bob is faced with a leap of 13 feet, 8 inches (3.56 m).  We'll keep this simple and state that this is not the actual distance between the two ledges, but rather the distance Bob has to jump with his last takeoff stride being as close to the edge as possible while reaching the point where he lands firmly enough on the other side that he doesn't slip and fall.  To get rid of the consequences of heat, we'll say the jump is over thin air.  The standard practice in D&D is to make a roll ... success/fail of course.  A roll seems right, as we usually make a roll when something in the game is uncertain.  That seems to apply here — emerging from the argument that we're restricting Bob's jump by making it uncertain.  

But the question is not, does Bob succeed, the question is, can Bob succeed.  Is there any reasonable expectation that this character, with these ability stats and these skills, of this level, has any chance of making a leap of this length without hitting the other side and falling forward, not backward.  Remember that in performing the long jump in competition, it's usually a landing onto sand, and most people when hitting the landing don't throw their body forward unless they've been taught to do so.  Has Bob been taught?  But then again, maybe a normal, untrained person can make a jump of 13 feet, 8 inches (3.56 m) fairly easily, if they have a run, and that if he falls backward he'll land on his ass safely, even if he falls backwards.

Consider ... approaches for a long jump in competition vary between 12 and 19 "strides" ... so Bob needs a good space to run.  The objective of the takeoff is to create a vertical impulse through Bob's center of gravity while maintaining balance and control.  That means there might be a roll, depending on how close it is between the distance and Bob's likelihood of making the jump.

It's virtually impossible to find statistics for non-competitive long jump distances; I couldn't do it.  An average high school competitive jump is 16-17 ft. (4.9-5.2 m); 18-20 ft. (5.5-6.1 m) is awesome.  Therefore, it's reasonable that Bob could make the jump so long as he (a) is a physical fighter or thief type; (b) is approximately the height of an average high school student; and (c) is making the jump wearing about as much as a competitive high school athlete.  So long as he meets those three criteria ... those limitations, he doesn't need a die roll.  On the other hand, if he doesn't meet those minimums, he could roll five hundred dice and they'll all be, "Bob falls and dies."  Unless Bob has some specific ability that makes him a better-than-average jumper.  If he does, then this moves the goal posts.  It does not mean that Bob gets +2 on a die roll.  A roll only happens if we're talking a difference of inches here.  If Bob is an above average jumper, then he makes the jump, period, regardless of any roll.

The rule's limitation, then, isn't founded on the same principles as combat.  It's founded instead by comparing Bob's physical existence against the believable physical feats he can perform given the real world.  We can make Bob's leap easier if we adjust the world's gravity ... but then that change has to equally alter all gravity-influenced actions.

Think of it this way.  We don't roll to see if we can swing the sword.  We know we can.  We've been trained to do it.  That's why we're a fighter, or a thief, or whatever can use a sword.  So it makes no sense to see if Bob can jump the distance.  Like swinging the sword, he's either trained to do it, or he isn't.  In combat, we don't actually roll to see if we "can" hit.  Rather, we roll to see if our combat ability vs. the opponent's combat ability enables us sufficient luck to hit.  As we advance in levels, that ability improves, so our chance improves, so we hit more often.  We get "two swings," which greatly increases our likelihood that round, but the functional effect is the same.

So when making a rule with limitations, the goal is not just to impose a series of ad hoc die adjustments, but to first make a distinction between what can be done and what might be done.  If I'm swinging the sword at a block of wood, and I'm trained, I'm going to hit it.  I don't make die rolls every time I cut a carrot with my knife.  The only thing that keeps me from hitting what I aim at is someone else who's able to dodge or parry my sword.  The carrots don't have a chance.

How we invent limitations in the game world's rules matters most dearly.  Every one deserves to be deeply and closely observed; changes must be applied, monitored, reconsidered, adjusted if need be or thrown out if they don't substantively improve play.  Familiar is better than strange, so unless the change is worth it, don't make a change.  Very, very slight adjustments that contribute to the restriction of a character's skills usually make the best changes.  When adding something that benefits the character, be sure to limit them according to how rarely they might be useful, or how truly little they actually change the game.

As an example of both, I added a sage ability called hereditary weapon; I've spoken of it here before.  Although it can be used all the time, and although it adds a +1 bonus to hit, this is no different than the elf's ability with sword and bow.  It helps the combatant only 1 time in 20 ... so although it can be used all the time, it actually only applies rarely.  As most fights run between 8 and 12 rounds, there's only a 50% chance in any fight that it will be helpful at all.

It also urges the character to perhaps use a weapon the player doesn't want, which is a limitation.  It makes a regional army with that weapon more dangerous.  And it lowers the combat balance of elves against other characters.  Anything that kicks an elf in the slats works in my book.

If the reader notices something in the game that seems to award the players with too much power, or makes their lives too simple, consider adding some moderate limitation on that power.  Present it as a change you're implementing; withstand the complaints and moaning.  Most likely, the players will chafe if it's cherished, but you should be able to explain that you want your game to be more "challenging" and that it asks the players to solve their problems with innovation, not abilities.  Most of all, tell them you're going to try it in the short term and that you'll discuss dropping the change after two runnings.  This is important.  Most people will agree to try something so long as it's term limited.  If the new rule is a good change, you might find the players might support leaving it in place, despite how it limits them.  If you can't get support for it, chances are your rule change went to far, or it changed the wrong aspect of the original rule.

Zounds!

On the 1st of July, I pitched $50 into the company raffle, expecting as I always do with these things that it's a good will gesture, a sort of tax on working with other people.  Many times in my life, that amount of money has made the difference between my starving and not in a given week, going right back to when my daughter was a little girl.  But it's not the same amount of money that it was in 1992, so I guess it's a little easier to part with.

The company has people far and wide in multiple countries so it wanted to give everyone an opportunity to kick in, so the actual draw was put off until today, a week after the 1st.

And yes, I won.

We're a little stun locked around here.

The prize is a six-day trip for two to Montreal in Quebec.  I suspect the company managed both tickets and stay for free, as complimentary, as I recognise the names of clients ... but, hell, why would I care?  My entire experience with Montreal is that once I spent 20 minutes in a bus depot commissary before climbing aboard the bus again on my way to Quebec City, in 1987.  I had friends that moved out there from Calgary years ago, but I've lost touch.  Not sure I'll even try to look them up.  Mostly, it's an opportunity to go somewhere glamorous.  My partner Tamara is beside herself.

So.

I'll be in Montreal over the cusp of September-October, just shy 12 weeks from now.  If there's a regular reader who's close enough that you'd like to meet — for all I know, some of you live in Montreal — then let me know by email.  I'd be glad to shake a hand or buy a drink.

Value Them

Let's finish off this series about how to get a party launched into a campaign with a few rejoiners.  First and foremost, it must be understood that dungeon mastering is a technique that cannot be acquired through a few platitudes, however well-meaning and apparently encouraging those empty phrases are.  A DM must know his or her players, and be able to predict what they want and what will reach them as thinking people.  A good DM must be ready with a multitude of imaginative details that evoke the players' interest, which they will pursue towards answers and then actions.  A lot of things a DM tries are going to fail; they're going to blow past the players without arousing notice.  Players are sure to decline having curiosity about the one thing the DM cares about most.  We have to recognise this.  We have to expect it, knowing in advance that it's going to happen, so we can move easily into the next thing without a pause or show of disappointment.

Running the game requires exhuberance and skill in presenting ideas ... and although that skill isn't always reliable, cultivating the manner in which words are spoken — the order of words, the choice of words, the tone of speaking — is the fundamental power the DM possesses.  I hem in my players with rules; I motivate them with rewards; I empower them with abilities — but I master them with the way I speak.

Describing one untidy fellow carrying an injured mate along a road is not a simple matter.  The moment can be introduced into the game in a thousand ways ... and merely saying, "Have this moment happen" is not enough to teach you, the reader, how to draw your players into the situation.  You could do it and have the players mutter, "Meh," and keep walking, leaving you with an adventure amounting to an empty gesture.  And thus stupidly, frustrated, inwardly demanding of yourself that this "MUST WORK," you'll have one of the brothers shout at the party, forcing the moment, wrecking the intrigue as you display obviously that there's an adventure here.  You might just as well describe the moment as the brothers moving under a gawddamned Mario Bros. coin.

This weakness in DMing, the self-motivated insistence that, "I worked on it, damn it the players are going to experience it," cannot be gotten past however many posts I write on how to DM.  That is a problem that blinds many DMs to the treasure to be had in subtlety ... in the perception that the players found the adventure themselves, which they must have to feel important in the campaign.  There is no sense worse in being a player than that we are slaves to the DM's campaign.  I grant that soooooo many players accept this; but that's only because they've been trained to accept it; to see themselves as slaves ... just as all slaves inevitably accept their indenture once they've conceded the absence of options.

When the DM can offer the player something more — when the shackles are knocked away — the arrangement between DM and player is heightened.  The players cease to slog through the campaign.  They cease to grumble and derail; they will shout at their companions to stay on message, because it is THEIR message.  It's wonderful to see.

I keep using a phrase, which I assume is obvious but let's take it apart a moment.  I'll describe an artwork as ruined because of the writer's or director's "fingerprints."  I mean any situation where the maker has been so clumsy and self-involved that they've left evidence of their presence ... such as a story that's been contrived to come to a specific conclusion, or characters who act out of character because the author suddenly needs them to agree to a proposition or act in accordance with the story's theme or plotline.  There are many examples, nicely outlined by the webpage TV Tropes.

Obviously, the writer has written the book.  So why does it matter that there's evidence, in the book, that the writer chose to have the characters act thusly, or chose to have events unfold?  Why shouldn't the invented character suddenly, conveniently, have a change of mind or values?

Because it cheapens the book's construction.  There is a sense the author didn't value the characters over the message or theme; and that the author didn't care that we would see that ... and therefore, that the author doesn't value us.  That the author thinks we're stupid.

A lot of times, the author can get away with that.  There usually are enough blind, stupid, poor readers with little experience who won't notice the fingerprints; one can always be sure that a reasonable number of children ready and able to read the book ... and children are easily duped.  They're so ... young.  They don't know anything — and their money buys all the things an adult's money buys.

But children also grow up.  And look back at things they liked, and feel the pang of having been lied to.

Offering the game carefully and thoughtfully demonstrates how well the DM values the player ... but that relies on the player being able to see it.  If I have a player who approaches my game cynically, it's because they've come to resent the way other DMs have devalued them in the past.  There are, right now, hundreds of would-be pundits on the internet who are using next-to-no understanding of the game to sell bullshit that will end in tens of thousands of would-be players and DMs achieving that sense of cynicism.  There are hundreds of game commentors and bloggers who, right now, have made an industry of praising the garbage of the past, despite the long history D&D has of driving out millions of players who dropped the game a year or two after starting.  They have an easy message.  "Have this moment happen," they say ... and when that doesn't work, well, they're not in the business of offering guarantees.

I am.  But I don't guarantee that a particular adventure works, or that if the players help someone or find something new that the game will be an instant unmitigated success.  I guarantee that if the reader sets aside all the shortcuts and the cookie-cutter game play aside, and seeks to understand why a sequence of events works, or what the players feel, or where it goes next, then absolutely, your DMing will improve.

That's what this series has tried to do.  I'm not really giving a top five list of great things to do with a new party.  I'm explaining how a given situation hits the party in the breadbasket, or what makes them hungry for more, or why a dilemma fucks with them or who ought to feel in control of the ongoing campaign once it's started.  The how, what, why and who is what matters ... not the actual event.  Once the reader gets a firm grasp on those approaches, then the next event that ought to emerge will be obvious.  In fact, the reader will find themselves conceiving of so many possibilities that there won't be opportunity in a lifetime of getting to play them all.

RSS

Things are not always as they appear.  Back in January of 2019, my blog page visits mysteriously dropped off ... and continued to fall month after month through the time of Covid.  I assumed this marked the death of blogs, and was probably affected by the disease ... though of course, one might expect numbers to improve when people are stuck at home all day.

Then recently, I began getting reports from people that they could no longer access my blog through their RSS feed.  I tried to fix the problem, could not, and to date that problem continues.

However, a curious result has come out of that:

Apparently, my blog numbers never did fall off.  Rather, they were stolen.

Blogs are not dead.

Have Them Help Someone

Keeping with the premise of finding the players something to do at the start of a campaign, I find myself returning to this scenario again and again — because it's enormously effective.  Here I am not speaking of the wizard that appears and wants "help" finding some stone or rescuing some princess ... no, not at all.  Rather, the scenario here is something quite unguarded and ordinary in scope.

A hundred years ago it seems, I wrote a post about setting the scene, and how the way a scene is described provides motivation for the players to invest themselves.  There's little worse than the DM having someone use the words "help us" when introducing a potential adventure; it fairly screams the DM's intention here.

Consider, if you will, a scene from Silence of the Lambs; it runs one minute, eleven seconds and it's safe for work.  Buffalo Bill doesn't ask for help.  He doesn't introduce himself or even glance at the woman; instead, he sets the scene to make himself look pathetic ... the sort of person in a situation that is in desperate need of help, but is "too proud" to ask for it.  His arm is in a cast.  He tries to lift the couch and fails, grunting like someone who's been at this a while.  He appears weak, which is easily equated with "non-threatening," and the girl jumps in like a good Samaritan.  The scene is fairly upsetting because it's easy for the viewer to imagine jumping forward to help like her.

I've counselled often against DMs setting up traps like this.  It's far to easy for a DM to manipulate circumstances to make something look innocent that isn't — and this isn't fair to players.  Moreover, going to the well just once seriously damages the trust between player and DM, which can easily end a campaign even if the players admit the DM's "right" to take the action.  Trust is crucial to a campaign and should never be thwarted over a cheap opportunity.

Still, the actual incident recalled above, if legitimately a person in trouble, offers other opportunities that work so well with D&D.  There are endless possibilities: a sleeping child falls out of a wagon ahead of the party and the family doesn't notice; a priest is walking along the road with a burden that's far too large for his or her tiny frame; a shopkeeper is being intimidated by a ruffian; a cart has overturned; a soldier is carrying a wounded companion.  Any of these are a perfectly ordinary sight; and where trust exists in the campaign, the players are sure to act in some manner.

But the method takes some subtlety.  When the players offer to take the two soldiers on board their wagon, the well soldier does not suddenly spool out a story about a salt marsh dungeon, a treasure under a smoky mountain or a borderland citadel!  Um, no.  What we do get is the set up for a narrative that pulls the players in a little bit ... which we can follow by another event, and then another, until we have the actual adventure on its feet.

Consider: Hans, the well soldier, is carrying his younger brother Friedrich back from a battle that took place hundreds of miles away.  Hans is friendly, describes how they're trying to get home, while Friedrich sleeps.  Quaint, simple, a few moderately interesting tidbits about the war, who's fighting it, where the brothers live and what they do there.  A good five or ten minutes of role-playing.

One of the players naturally tries to cure Friedrich and discovers that a cure spell won't work.  What?  There, now we have a mystery.  Hans admits that Friedrich was struck with a cursed weapon, causing this effect ... and that, in fact, the brothers are deserters.  Here we have need; we have sympathy.  Yet the boys do not ask for help.  In fact, Hans urges the party to abandon them on the road.  "We'll manage somehow, once we get home," he says.  He's proud.  Brave.  Refuses help when it's offered.  This stuff is catnip for a party.

To take the players in the online campaign out to a dungeon in the wild, I had them learn about a cow that had disappeared; and not the first cow, either.  The players ventured out, found a trail of blood ... and from that point on, nothing I could say or threaten with could dissuade them from delving into a very nasty, very uncomfortable dungeon full of undead.  Because this is how the appetite for adventure works.  As soon as the players feel they have a handle on what's happening ... they don't need someone else to give them marching orders.  Cow, missing, probably find out by following this trail of blood?  We're in!

It's ridiculous to invent complex unnecessary tales about what this princess did a hundred years ago that caused the invention of this cursed item that has produced this horrible consequence that's lasted for generations.  Lead with this kind of story and expect the players to sigh, roll their eyes and commit to the campaign because they're expected to.  "Whatever.  Yada, yada, princess, cursed item, yeah, we've heard it.  It's your world.  We're just here to do what we're told."

But have the players start hunting for food, find a glade, catch a fish, stumble across a frightened old man in the bushes who begs not to be killed ... it all feels perfectly ordinary.  As the old man gratefully sits down to eat the player's fish, because he's obviously starving, all we need do is have him hesitate before answering the player's questions about anything.  "Where are you from, old man?"  The old man's eyes veer towards the distant umber peaks in the distance, full of aching and longing before he answers, "Nowhere special."

"How long has it been since you last ate?"  The old man's stomach grumbles; his expression reveals pain.  His hand quivers as he reaches for another bite.  "This morning," he answers.

This sort of contrasting exposition is both compelling and frustrating; it hooks the party in, makes them anxious to understand what's really going on ... and before we know it, the players are hanging on every word of our description about the generational curse, the item and the princess.  It just needs to be filtered through the old man's hesitation to give details, and the details being doled out with an eyedropper.

What's more, the process of "helping" produces relationships between the party and the people being helped ... relationships that establish the player's role in the game world.  One relationship leads to the next, as we meet Hans' sister Joanne, whose friend Silvia is being forced to marry Olaf, who doesn't love her but wants the money that Silvia inherited from her father ... and now with the help of Hans, Friedrich and Joanne, we're learning what makes Olaf such a horrible person ... and so it goes, building the party's ties with the community and adding new adventures in service of new people to whom they're introduced.  The players become invested in these people, in the local town ... and when we have a new character arrive, hat in hand, to actually ask the player's help directly, it's not some stranger, it's Silvia's cousin Jacoby.  "You helped my cousin; she said I should come to you."

This takes foresight and awareness on how to "play the party's" heartstrings ... but so long as trust is maintained, the players want to be played this way.  It feels "right."  Each person who comes forward to gain the party's help makes the party feel more and more important ... as the line goes in Conan the Barbarian,

"... he began to realise his sense of worth; he mattered."

The players can possess this feeling only when they're running the show ... if the DM dispenses every adventure from "on high," then it's the DM who matters and the players are merely pawns in the DM's game.  DMs who cheer for this approach, who proclaim proudly about how "I ran the party in such-and-such, which I've run before," are assuaging their own ego and not building it in their players.

When the players "find" the adventure, buried under the leaves on a trail somewhere, when they let their interest decide their path, when they make the decision themselves to see where it goes ... then they see themselves as the choosers of their fate; they see themselves as succeeding or failing at THEIR expectations rather than those of the DM.

What's funny is that, for the most part, modules are often written to give the sense of the players stumbling across an innocent village, or climbing to a fairly innocent set of caves or the like.  The sense is that the players are being surprised that the cave leads into this unexpected and amazing dungeon that unveils itself as a paced mystery ... but then we slap a title on the module like "Horde of the Mountain King" and blow the reveal.

How much better it would be if the module were titled, "Old Man in the Woods" or "The Wounded Brother."  Then we have no idea what we're getting into.  We only know we're getting into something, and that it's sure to be good.

Etude

My goal with this series of posts has been to answer the question of what to do with players at the start of a campaign.  Having them find something, or suffer a consequence, builds a series of connections with the game world upon which later, more personally-oriented adventure structures can be built.  Perhaps we can get to those in time.

In service of this goal, I've used examples from the online game I ran between 2016 and 2020.  As readers can witness, the action of presenting those examples tends to elicit strong feelings from my former players — which says a lot about the game I play.  JB played in my game for about 5 minutes back in 2013 (2012?) and still remembers the experience acutely, so that he occasionally engages in self-deprecation about it.  Pandred has come away from the campaign with a strong sense of introspection regarding what he believes as a person.  Drain has strong feelings that persist years after.  These don't sound like the usual sentimental blather we associate with former game play.  Players who commit to my game come away having experienced a sensation that mixes ardour with vehemence.  It's difficult to express and it leaves its mark.  I've experienced that response for most of my DMing career.

JB has just written a long account of his progression through role-playing over the last 40+ years, a narrative replete with tiny details that my memory couldn't hope to produce from my own life.  I'm particularly unsettled by his weaving, erratic approach to the game of D&D, as he drifted through varying renditions of game rules and choices, from BCEMI to 3rd to B/X to AD&D.  I have to remind myself sternly that this is a standard model of game play, far, far removed from my own approach.  I played Empire of the Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls and Chivalry and Sorcery, but these were dabblings that were quickly thrown aside within three years of my introduction to RPGs.  Traveller and Top Secret lasted a little longer because those games were very different in scope and their goals.  But my D&D world began as AD&D in 1980 and remained my game — though progressively gutted and rebuilt — from the beginning.  It's another cold reminder that my ideals and approach were, from the beginning, unique.

I'm not certain how my style of play and approach grew into existence; how and why did I set out to mind-fuck my players with situations that would force them to evaluate themselves as people more so than participants?  With each post in this series I've made an effort to give a literary example that might serve to indicate the situation described.   Tom Sawyer braving the anger of Injun Joe; Bilbo's regret at picking up the ring; Sidney Carton's willingness to sacrifice his life in order to gain a life he could never have; these situations and stories left their mark on me before I encountered D&D, because in the year that JB saw Dungeon! in a Fred Meyer store, I was already 17, meeting the woman I would get engaged to (and never marry) and so far down the road into liberal politics that I'd begun marching in political rallies opposing the cruise missile.  Life at the time was moving very fast and my sense of being a person in those early years of D&D were consumed with art, performance, violent music, lovemaking and a very great deal of anger.  I saw the world within its propensity to commit cruelty and sadism towards it's occupants and ... I suppose ... the savagery the world seemed to possess left its stamp upon the sort of game world I chose to run.

I remember next to nothing about the early narratives that established my game.  I can recall scenes of plunder and mass slaughter; the players always seemed to be piling up dead bodies of one creature or another.  I remember creating the darkest enemies I could imagine, and the players eventually killing each in their turn; but the only one I remember was the "Countess de Sade," the overarching Moriarty-like crime manipulator who was never met in person but whose influence was everywhere.  Much of the adventuring was based upon travel-and-kill, travel-and-kill ... my game didn't start to develop a more structured aspect until I began using the real world in 1984.  Those players in the campaign began as mercenaries, found their way to Spain, became engaged in a protracted war between the humans of Iberia and drow elves, fought a great battle, were rewarded with land and titles by the King of Portugal and settled in Viana do Castelo.  From there, they established an outpost in Portuguese Guinea-Bissau, and another in Barbuda in the Caribbean, to establish the triangular trade link that uses the winds and currents of the Atlantic to such as effect.  At one point they were shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland and had to overcome lack of resources and a bloody civil war to escape the island and return to their lands.  When that campaign finally came to an end in 1992, they were venturing inland to help put a prince on a minor throne in the vicinity of "Upper Volta," modern Burkina Faso.  They hoped to establish permanent trade between the prince's lands and the port they were building in Guinea.

My game improved vastly with the flood of information the real world provided; it advanced vastly again with the advent of computers.  My learning the processes and business of publishing in the 90s was another big improvement in my skillset that led to the mapmaking skills I've developed over the last two decades.

My actual marriage in 1986 helped to calm me down considerably as a person; my fatherhood in 1988 was a big step in my sense of self, as I set out to raise a child very differently from the way my parents raised me.  University gave me scope, stage performance gave me bearing, being published regularly after 1988, so that strangers could read my words, built confidence ... as did performing in stage at festivals and, eventually, on film.  Step by step, becoming an experienced human being transformed the practice of my game world towards serious, relevant game play, in which people were enabled towards passion and the potential for being uplifted and hurt by "pretend" game play.

And that is the key, I think, to my approach.  The monsters and the abilities may be imaginary, but the decisions and the consequences ARE NOT.  Those are utterly, frustratingly, maddeningly real.  In ways that force people into discomfort and self-reckoning.  No other game does this, or can do this.  I imagine other DMs have caught the method I've embraced, but I don't see them talk about it online, in books or anywhere else.

Yet it is crystal clear: players want this.  Once they've tasted it, they don't want anything else.

It's a damn shame I can't run everyone.