When the Writer is Ready ...

"Well, at this point I'm not very interested at being 'a great DM.' Somehow it's enough for me as it is. So now I'm not very interested in that kind of books."

— Redrick, an ordinary commentor

On the subject of writing books telling people "how to D&D," we can safely divide the game-playing population into two initial groups: (a) pat me on the head; and (b), like Redrick here, "meh."  It's quite common for people to adopt the excuse that since I don't want to be great, there's no reason I should be better.  Obviously that doesn't just apply to D&D.  We see it everyday in our jobs, exhibited by both the boss and one's co-workers.  "We're doing well enough; let's not make this more difficult by trying to do better."

As far as those wanting a pat on the head, there's plenty of sustainable energy from those who give brilliant advice like, "keep learning" — without, obviously, making any suggestion about what ought to be learned or where this knowledge is to be gotten.  If this is the sort of advice you want to get, try chatGPT.  It's wonderful for that.

Me: I want to write a book teaching people how to be a DM for Dungeons and Dragons.

Chat: That sounds like a fantastic project! Being a Dungeon Master (DM) for Dungeons and Dragons is both an art and a skill, and there's a lot to learn and share in a comprehensive guide. Here's a rough outline to get you started:

Title: "Mastering the Dungeon: A Comprehensive Guide to Becoming a Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons"

Introduction:Welcome to the World of Dungeon Mastering

• What is Dungeons and Dragons?
• Why Become a Dungeon Master?
• What This Book Offers

Chapter 1: Getting Started

• Understanding the Role of the Dungeon Master
• Gathering Essential Materials
• Choosing an Edition: D&D 5th Edition Overview
• Setting Up Your First Adventure

Chapter 2: Building Worlds and Narratives

• Crafting a Compelling Setting
• Developing Engaging Storylines
• Creating Memorable Non-Player Characters (NPCs)

Chapter 3: Rules and Mechanics

• Understanding the Core Mechanics
• Combat: A Detailed Overview
• Handling Challenges and Skill Checks
• Incorporating House Rules

Chapter 4: Preparing and Running Sessions

• Session Zero: Character Creation and Expectations
• Structuring Your Sessions
• Improvisation Techniques
• Managing Player Choices and Agency

Chapter 5: Managing Players and Table Dynamics

• Fostering a Positive Gaming Environment
• Dealing with Player Conflict
• Balancing Player Engagement

Chapter 6: Creating and Balancing Encounters

• Designing Balanced Encounters
• Adjusting Difficulty on the Fly
• Using Terrain and Environmental Factors

Chapter 7: Building and Managing Campaigns

• Planning Long-Term Campaign Arcs
• Integrating Player Backstories
• Maintaining Campaign Consistency

Chapter 8: Enhancing Your Game

• Incorporating Props and Visual Aids
• Using Music and Sound Effects
• Experimenting with Alternative Game Styles (Theater of the Mind, Hexcrawl, etc.)

Chapter 9: Troubleshooting and Problem-Solving

• Addressing Common Issues at the Table
• Handling Player Disengagement
• Rebooting a Stalled Campaign

Chapter 10: Continuing Your Journey

• Resources for Further Learning
• Joining Online Communities and Forums
• Seeking Feedback and Improvement

Conclusion:Congratulations! You're a Dungeon Master

• Final Words of Encouragement
• Appendices:Sample NPCs and Monsters
• Sample Adventure Modules
• Glossary of Terms
• Character Sheets and Blank Maps

Remember to include examples, anecdotes, and tips from your own experiences as a DM to make the guide more relatable and engaging. Good luck with your book!

See?  No thinking necessary.  And if you want to wade into a world of garbage thinking, ask Chat to explain any of the above points.

The problem isn't that writers of game books choose not to be useful; it's that the actual philosophy of how to describe gaming, and what gaming is, and what matters, contributes to a culture of "proactivity" that is more concerned with organising the bullshit than discriminating between what is and what isn't helpful.

Me: Explain how to deal with player conflict, as a DM, within D&D, in paragraph format.

Chat: Dealing with player conflict as a Dungeon Master (DM) in Dungeons and Dragons requires a delicate balance of diplomacy, fairness, and assertiveness. The first step is to address the conflict openly and directly. Encourage players to voice their concerns in a respectful manner and ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak without interruption. As the mediator, listen attentively to each side's perspective and strive to understand the underlying issues. Once the root cause of the conflict is identified, work with the players to find a compromise or solution that satisfies everyone involved. This may involve making adjustments to the game mechanics, revisiting previous rulings, or clarifying expectations for future interactions. It's crucial to remain impartial and avoid taking sides, focusing instead on fostering a collaborative and inclusive gaming environment. If necessary, remind players of the importance of respect, teamwork, and mutual enjoyment. Ultimately, the goal is to resolve the conflict constructively while preserving the integrity of the game and maintaining positive relationships among the players.

See?  Whatever the question, the result is a parade of subjective non-specific things you ought to do, without any possible comprehension between what's offered.  There's no point in asking how to be "diplomatic" or "fair" or "assertive" ... the answers are all equally subjective.  Not because Chat is designed to be subjective, but because the source material that Chat is pulling from is only more of this.  These are what all the source materials already existing on the internet, or in those piles that Chat was trained to comprehend, are designed to convey. They simply spew tons and tons of this kind of material ... because it fills pages.  Lots and lots of pages.  Pages that people are willing to pay for.

It's the same rhetoric the pervades the self-help phenomenon.  It's not possible for a person to just "be more assertive" or know what to do just because players have been encouraged to "voice their concerns."  Like a book that urges you that getting better isn't that hard, that you have to just keep climbing, that you have to believe in yourself and not give up, none of this actually tells us what we should be doing.  And worse than helping, self-help books prevail upon the reader to think more and more about the problem by promising a solution that never, in fact, materialises.  In effect, the book blames you, the reader.  If you, the reader, would just be make the right adjustments to the game mechanics, your game would be great.  If you, the reader, would just remind the players of the importance of teamwork, your game would be great.  But somehow, it never is.  And because of the source material you're reading, the answer to that, too, is obvious.  It's because you, the reader, didn't do it right.

I don't know how I can make this clearer.  You, dear reader, are the victim: and the self-help book industry is blaming you.  Because it empowers the self-help book industry.  Q.E.D.

However, the RPG industry has insidiously embraced this industry for a long time, so that they've successfully convinced the balance of would-be DMs that this is how advice ought to be given.  Many, many commentors habitually describe these phrases, such at those Chat above generated, as "concise" and "practical," though obviously they're not.  It's not ignorance; it's a belief that, in the absence of any concrete information being available, many convince themselves that they were helped by such books, although in fact it was little more than a pat on the head that effectively said, "just be yourself, you're a good person, everything's fine" or some other similar drivel.

For any book to be actually helpful in training a dungeon master to do any of the things generated above, in concrete terms (that is, existing in material or physical form, not abstract), there are specific things that it needs to do.  But to portray that, I'll have to use an example from a completely different
activity:

Me: How do I prepare a soft-boiled egg?

Chat: To prepare a soft-boiled egg, start by selecting fresh eggs from the store. Fresh eggs ensure a firmer egg white, which helps maintain the egg's structure during cooking. Next, fill a pot with enough water to cover the eggs and bring it to a rolling boil over high heat. Gently lower the eggs into the boiling water using a spoon or tongs, being careful not to crack them. Set a timer for about 4 to 6 minutes, depending on your desired level of doneness and the size of the egg. While the eggs are boiling, you can prepare an ice water bath to stop the cooking process and prevent overcooking. Once the timer goes off, use a slotted spoon to carefully remove the eggs from the boiling water and transfer them to the ice water bath to cool down. Let them sit for a few minutes before gently cracking the shell and peeling it away. Serve the soft-boiled eggs immediately with toast or incorporate them into salads or other dishes. Adjust the timing as needed based on altitude, egg size, and personal preference. With practice, you'll achieve perfectly soft-boiled eggs every time.

There.  Stores exist.  There are eggs there.  They have recognisably different properties that can be defined.  Do this.  Then do this.  Set this timer.  Recognise you may have specific tastes regarding how long the egg ought to be cooked to fit your personal needs.  Use these tools.  Let them cool.  Crack the shell and peel it away.  Practice the procedure.

Until the question, "How do I become a dungeon master" can be defined in this manner, the book you're reading is useless.

Naturally, the begged question is, can a book about DMing be written in this way?  Is that possible?  Quote, "Because it doesn't seem possible.  I've never seen such a book; no one has ever published such a book; the company hasn't even hinted that such a book could be written.  D&D seems so, um, subjective to me."  I find it hard to believe that a concrete book of this time is a believable possibility."

Yep.  See, this is why the self-help industry is very careful in targeting a particular kind of subject ... squidgy, imprecise subjects.  Little did I realise in the early 80s, with my first experiences of D&D, that the inability of people to be precise about the sort of game they wanted to play would open the door to the sort of writing that would make so much money from telling romantics how to get married, or would-be businessmen to become rich and famous, or youtubers how to make tons of money making their own videos, etcetera, etcetera.  But here we are.  Don't discount what I just said about the industry setting out to convince you, the reader, that you need the self-help industry.  It's your life-line.  After all, there's no other possible way you could start a successful business.  You have to believe in yourself.  You have to think your way to success.  You can't just do a simple thing well, keep doing it well, be polite to people, don't overspend, learn the industry you're in, pay attention to changes and work all the time, so as to be successful.  That's just crazy talk.

When a person on the internet says, "Stop playing 5th edition," we read that as "opinion," which can be instantly ignored.  But when that same person says, "foster a collaborative and inclusive gaming environment," that sounds very positive, and therefore obviously much better than "opinion."  Gosh, I'm going to keep playing 5th edition, only from now on I'm going to foster a collaborative and inclusive gaming environment.  That'll work.

There's a method of telling the difference between "opinion" and "knowledge."  The method hasn't been around very long.  Only 2,300 years and some.  The distinction addresses one of the most subjective subjects there is, human thought, yet somehow gets a lot further towards providing a concrete definition than a typical how-to D&D book. Here goes ...

According to Aristotle, knowledge is characterized by certainty and necessity, based on true and justified beliefs grounded in demonstrable evidence or logical reasoning. In contrast, opinion lacks the certainty and reliability of knowledge, as it is based on appearances, probabilities, or premises accepted as true but not necessarily universally valid. Knowledge involves understanding the causes and principles underlying phenomena, whereas opinion relies on perceptions and beliefs about the world that may be subject to error or revision.

If you want to dive into this — and trust me, you won't enjoy it — the works are Nichomachean Ethics and Prior Analytics.  But this is all I'm going to say about Aristotle today.  You think.

For a book to be helpful regarding D&D, is must be rooted in research; that is to say, the writer must have done more than play the game, and must be willing to go further than giving subjective advice without concrete examples of what is meant by the words used.  If the writer says, "D&D requires a delicate balance" of anything, then the following must be included: (a) several factual, concrete examples of this balance; (b) a specific step-by-step guide, equivalent to how to boil an egg, to explain how this balance is achieved by someone who has never done it before; and (c) a conclusive paragraph explaining how the results of this balance cannot be achieved in some other way, specifically because of what the balance concretely does.

If these three things are not written about this balance, then the passage is not merely opinion, it is BULLSHIT.  It's certainly not knowledge.  Aristotle says so.

No, two out of three is not enough.

For a book to be helpful regarding D&D, the advice given has to be universal. Let's see, what does that mean? It means it can't be contingent on specific circumstances, individuals, or subjective perspectives. Instead, universal knowledge is applicable across all instances of a given phenomenon and is independent of particular contexts or personal beliefs.  In essence, the knowledge claims must possess characteristics that are genuinely "knowable."

If the advice being given is, "do what feels right," or "you do you," these things are utterly subjective in their perspective.  In no way whatsoever is this advice objectively comprehensible.  It doesn't even help me know what feels "right" for me, much less the next person.  Something that's universal is often characterised by its necessity.  You NEED this if you want to boil an egg.  It can't be done at all if you don't have this specific thing, namely an egg, the water it has to float in or the heat needed to boil that water.

For a book to be helpful regarding D&D, the advice can't make false promises.  It cannot give assurances that something unrealistic will happen.  We can't say, "this book will make you a better DM," because we don't know who's reading it.  When you pick up a book about chemistry, you don't find in the introduction, "This book will make you a better chemist."  In fact, absolutely nothing whatsoever is said about the reader, because the book is about chemistry, not the reader.  A book on how to play D&D should not start with the question, "Why Become a Dungeon Master?" ... because my choosing to become one or not is none of the book's fucking business.  The book should shut the fuck up about why I'm reading it and get about the business of telling me what I want to know.  A high school chemistry book might have an introduction about why chemistry is a great subject, but that part's written by some educator, not the chemist!  The chemist doesn't care.  The chemist is concerned with chemistry, the reason the book is being written.

There is too much time spent in these books that have nothing to do with the subject at hand ... which is, without a doubt, evidence that the book's goal is not to teach us how to be a dungeon master, but how to appreciate the author's suffering and how to feel worse about ourselves.

And finally, for a book to be helpful regarding D&D, though I've already said this, it must provide real-world actions that I, the reader, can take.  And I, the reader, must in turn take those actions, experimenting with them to see if they ARE universal and not, in fact, about blowing smoke up my ass.  These actions should be crystal clear.  "Stop playing 5th Edition," for example.  Buy 3rd edition books, 2nd edition, 1st edition, for these reasons.  And we, as the reader of this book, like we would if we were reading a chemistry book, knowing very little ourselves about chemistry, should trust that the damned author understands the material being presented.

When the D&D book says, a DM must have these specific, point-by-point expectations of the players, for these reasons and these reasons, and must enforce these expectations, in this way and in this way, then we as the people who wish to become better DMs have to embrace that concept and walk the path laid out for us.  We can't suddenly decide, "Wait, my friend's feelings were hurt," and then choose not to enforce our expectations for that reason ... and suppose at the same time that we're going to somehow understand what's being said and why.  The book can explain, "Sometimes you'll have to hurt your friend's feelings," and "In the end, you'll discover why your friend will be grateful for that" ... but if we won't actually go through the actions in order to get the wisdom, then we deserve to be ignorant.  Because this is how knowledge works.  Sometimes, what we suppose is not knowledge, and conversely, knowledge is often what we don't suppose.  Part of the reason for that is because, according to Aristotle again, your suppositions are "opinions" and NOT KNOWLEDGE.  The book is here to provide knowledge.  It shouldn't be here to assuage your suppositions ...

... particularly because your suppositions aren't universal.

Would it be easy to write a book like this?  Fuck no.  Is a chemistry book easy to write?  Is a children's book ...?  All books are hard.  If you, dear reader, have no idea how a book like this would sound, or read, or have to say to you, then you're obviously not the person to write such a book.  And if you choose to base the probability of such a book based on your suppositions about it's purported existence?

Then you're a bloody moron.

The Campaign Travels the Volga River

Continuing from the last post.  These events described below happened some 18 or 19 years ago, so please recognise that neither I nor any of the player characters can quite remember exactly what happened.  Celeste, my daughter, has been helpful in filling in some gaps, but there are names and such that have just disappeared, as well as the details behind vaguely remembered combats that took place.  None of us kept an elaborate record until years later.

After having visited the market at Voronezh a couple of times, for my trade tables were up and running at the time (though they'd undergo a severe overhaul in 2009), the party indicated they were more interested in exploring to the north and east, rather than the west.  They set out for Borisoglebsk, an alternate market yet in the county of Voronezh, but very different.  With the history of my Russia being very different from the real world, much of the central Volga river remains in the hands of the Tatars and the Jagatai (or Chagatai) peoples.  That is, orcs.

Borisoglebsk is a seasonal market, a tiny village of just 150 people, where orcs and humans trade by agreement with each other.  Starting in the late summer, the steppe is too cold to travel upon, so only the permanent residents of the village remain and no sales take place.  In the summer, when the party was there, nomadic peoples travel there and settle for a month or more, so that the "population" swells to more than 2,000.  Many of the things sold aren't officially part of the village market, but rather goods that can be got by wandering among the tents.  Both orcs and humans understand that this tenuous arrangement is more valuable than an outbreak of violence would be; but there are young fools on both sides, and brief fights to occur.

These are usually arranged to take place in stone pits, a la the beginning of the old Conan film.  While the party was here, we picked up three new players.  Mike and Andrew lasted for all of one running.  They chose to ignore the dangers, double-dealing a set of ruffians; frankly, I can't remember the details, but it would have been pretty transparent what they were doing.

These two players were friends of mine, about 30 y.o., who learned I was running a campaign, something they hadn't done in many years.  They had all the bad habits of players who think roleplaying is about being a jackass and getting away with it, with the usual assumption that a DM won't kill them, but will always find a back door for them to escape through.  Andrew's character was quietly assassinated, the way someone would have to be in Borisoglebsk.  Mike was forced into a pit match and he died there.  Neither held it against me, but they decided my kind of serious gaming "wasn't for them."

The third player to join was Tucci, who goes by his last name because his first was far too common in school.  He was a schoolmate of Celeste and Kevin.  Tucci rolled up a monk, which also still lives to this day, a fellow named "Shalar."  Even back to 1980, my associates and I understood the two basic flaws with the Player's Handbook monk character was hit points and armour class.  Improve the latter by two points, and change the HD from a d4 to a d6, and a monk as written is totally sustainable.  I've run a few myself; they remain my favourite character, though I never play any more.

Tucci is a terrifically goodnatured fellow, sardonic, brave but not completely stupid, though the balance was different back in those early days.  I'll talk more about that after.  He took advice, fit easily into the party and I liked him right from the start.

The party decided to travel north from Borisoglebsk, circling around the orcish lands up to Tambov, then towards Nizhne-Novgorod, modern-day Gorkiy.  This is a huge market town on the Volga River, which enabled the players to improve their belongings to some degree.  Damned if I remember what they bought, but they were pleased.  From there, they travelled southeastward into the small land of Harnia, a gnomish kingdom in the present day oblast of Penza, for those who might be interested.  There were a few combats along the way and the party had reached 3rd level.  Tucci, unfortunately, wasn't as consistent a player as the others, which only meant that he tended to gather experience a little slower.

They felt intimidated in Harnia, deciding to travel through and see what was there, without disturbing anyone.  In Bortrun, a fair-sized city of Harnia (modern Kuznetsk), the party was approached to carry a message eastward into orcish Jagatai, to the city of Samara on the Volga.  The same Samara that's there now; in my game world it's a fairly international market city, with strong ties to the far east beyond the Ural Mountains, Siberia and such, none of which is in human hands; it's also the first step on one route to China.

The letter was to a Moscovite noble, Petrov Famitch, who was posing as a merchant in Samara.  There was no danger, they were told, but the letter had to be delivered soon, as time was a factor.  The players agreed and set out, the journey being about 150 miles.  They encountered an orcish patrol and dispatched them with little difficulty, as they'd made friends with a hill giant by that time (name forgotten) who agreed to help them through the more dangerous hill country.  Three days from Samara, it rained heavily, a cold rain, and Pikel rolled a 1 on a d100 and came down with a bad cold.  A similarly bad die roll the next day nearly spelled his death.  When the party reached Samara, Pikel was unconscious with pneumonia, carried thankfully by the monk, who by the tables I was using in those days, had rolled a height of 7 ft. 2 in., and a weight of nearly 300 lbs.  An apothecary was found and Pikel was saved, but it took three weeks for him to recover.  Kevin's bad luck with that incident has come up many times, for as I said, bad luck is rare with him.

Petrov Famitch was nowhere to be found, but at last the party located an associate of his.  The letter told that there was a siege planned upon the Moskovite river fort of Saratov, down the Volga from Samara.  This was something that Petrov had discovered on his own, and being a paladin lord, had already taken a collection of his retainers down river to accomplish what the gnome in Bortrun had wanted him to do — prevent the siege if possible, or remain there to lead a force the Bortrun gnomes intended to send.

This associate, name long forgotten, but we'll call her Maria Sokolova, was also a retainer of Petrov and was waiting for more of his retainers to gather in Samara before heading out.  Learning of the party's bravery in crossing the Jagatai frontier, she offered for them to attend her down to Saratov and the party agreed.  They had neared 4th level by the time they reached Saratov, which was under siege by an orc army.

Following "suggestions," the players harrassed the fringes of the orc troops, picking up some treasure and improving their fighting skills.  They met Petrov, appreciated greatly a few gifts he gave them in the way of +1 weapons and armour, and then accepted a dangerous mission.  Gnomish support was just days away; when they arrived, an attack at a key point of the orcish horde would be made, to break into Saratov if possible.  The party was asked to hazard a passage through the army to a concealed door in the city's fortifications and bring maps and a message of when the attack would occur, and where, so they could lend whatever forces that Saratov had, to squeeze a passage through the orc army.

This proved dangerous but doable.  Garalzapan died on the way and was raised inside the city successfully; the rest of the party made it there on vapours.  The attack was made, Saratov citizens flooded out of the gates, the party missing everything because they were recovering.  The orc army broke and ran, Saratov was saved ... and Petrov Famitch died in the effort.

Nevertheless, the party was deeply moved by the whole adventure, and in particular felt warm and fuzzy because of their own contribution in helping a hero (for the city of Saratov were shattered by Petrov's demise) to retake the city.  I could see plainly through the eyes of players who had no long-standing perception of what D&D should be or usually was, that making changes in the game world was better, by far, than just gaining treasure and gold.  I'd always tried to make my adventures meaningful, but perhaps because they players were young (18 by that time, since it was about 2006), and perhaps because my ability to run had improved, I could see they were gobsmacked by the way things had played out.

Anyway, the treasure reward brought them to 5th level, and that meant henchmen, or "henchfolk" as I'm calling them these days.  Shalar didn't get one that day; he'd missed too many runnings, and monks level very slowly.  We also got three new players ... so it is regarding these details that I'll pick up the next post.

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The Campaign Gets Started

Well, this isn't "new" content, exactly ... but if it's warstories, at least I don't have to invent things.

Around 2004, my partner Tamara, who'd never heard of D&D before we'd met in 2001, showed signs of wanting to know how to play.  I hadn't pressed her to do so, which is why three years passed of her watching me work on D&D before stepping up herself.  I must point out that during those years, I didn't have a campaign going, nor did I have any sort of online presence.  To her at the time, my "game" was nothing more than my accumulating details about the world in general and working on my trade system.

When we met, even the trade system did not exist.  I'd been mucking about with the idea since 1986, but I hadn't solved the math and couldn't actually make it work.  The solution was a sort of flexible mathematical device that could stretch like an elastic, but like an elastic, it would stretch only so far.  This keeps the numbers from exaggerating, so that even if something is very expensive in a place where it isn't made, it isn't impossibly expensive.  This was always the problem from the beginning.

Anyway, I'd tell Tamara every once in a while that I was going to have a bath and "think" about the trade system.  This involved me going to the bathroom, turning off the lights, running a hot bath and thinking for 30 or 40 minutes before getting out.  Forcing myself to problem solve, so to speak.  I'd run possible calculations in my head based on the parameters I had: number of references, base totals for products, distances, supply vs. demand, food vs. manufactures and so on.  Then I'd get out, fool around with a few tests and fail, shrug, and let my head rest on the subject for a couple of weeks.  I did this for years.

This sort of behaviour was completely alien to Tamara.  She'd never known anyone with that kind of nature, had never had an artist as a friend, or known a mathematician, or had a problem she had to solve with skull-sweat.  To her, what I was doing made no sense at all ... but since I'm very passionate and I get excited when I hit upon some new thought, like Archimedes running naked down the street screaming "EUREKA!", when I actually did figure out the trade system in 2002, and then tried to explain it to her, Tamara's interest in this thing D&D began to grow.

She asked if I could teach her how to play and I agreed.  This started with both of us rolling up characters, as I wasn't going to put her on the spot without my helping.  She rolled a human fighter named Allyson, and I added a dwarven thief named Frith.  We played twice, with me setting up very simple scenarios (I don't remember what those were), while I'd suggest that we could (a) do this or (b) do that.  It was basically just make your pick.  Tamara found it a bit intriguing, but couldn't get the hang of it without my instigation.

One afternoon she was explaining this to my teenage daughter, who has a thing about being named online.  I'll call her "Celeste."  Celeste lived with her mother Michelle and her grandparents, not me, and this is a very long and sad tale that I'll tackle eventually on the Shifting Sands blog.  At the time, Celeste was just 16.  She suggested playing with Tamara, whereupon I retired Frith and ran them for a little bit.  I'd never actually run my daughter, though she'd seen me run others many times when she was much younger.  She knew my idiosyncracies and she'd played with kids her own age off and on since she was nine, so the combination of her and Tamara worked out for, I think three runnings.   At which point, Celeste suggested that her boyfriend Kevin should join us.  This would have been late 2004, when I had just figured out how to build the sort of 20-mile-hex map that has become iconic since, which I started for no particular reason in the oblast of Voronezh, southeast of Moskva.

I suggested that we use the new map, and that if Tamara and Celeste wanted to roll up new characters, they could, along with Kevin of course.  They both decided to do so.  Tamara rolled up a mage which she named Garalzapan, Celeste rolled up a ranger that she named Fayln, and Kevin rolled up a druid he named Pikel.

I put them in the little village of Kolyeno, on the vast rolling steppe between the Don river and the Kopyor, a place with 156 people.  This was their home town.  And wanting to give the three of them a feel of "traditional" D&D, I didn't mind running them in the "Caves of Chaos," though I made changes to the number of creatures to suit just three 1st level characters.

Fayln still is an 80 lb. female elf who hit like a hammer even then, especially as I was still using the silly rule of rangers causing an extra point of damage per level against some creatures.  Garalzapan is also still alive in my game, though Tamara has retired; he has an 18 intelligence and she was very lucky with her spellbook rolls.  Pikel is also still alive, but the rule about his being limited to leather armour, and only a druid's hit points, were a hazard.  Because the mage needed a screen, Fayln and Pikel were it; and while Fayln could hold her own, Pikel always needed saving.  Fighting the ogre in the Ogre Cave, area E. in KOTB, Pikel very, very nearly bought it ... and for many, many years afterwards, as Pikel grew to be a very powerful druid, the party would remind him of when he was "soft and spongy."

As a player, Celeste is hyper-prepared, patient and resistant to unnecessary problem-solving.  She'd rather just get into a set of events where the goals are clear so she can swing.  She hates "solving the problem that gets the party to the next problem," which defines a vast quantity of game modules.  When I had the party run in Death Frost Doom, she was so infuriated by the bullshit puzzles that at inevitably she refused to go on playing.  Eventually, the whole party at that time agreed that we'd just skip any puzzles that remained.

Kevin is a brilliant tactician, a very clever spellcaster, incredibly lucky with dice (watching him makes no difference) and absolutely a disaster at role-playing.  Any situation that calls for asking an NPC anything is just dead air to him.  Once Pikel reached 5th level, with a sufficient number of spells under his belt, he became the lynchpin of the party's combat offensive.  Fayln hits and causes all the damage, but Pikel's always at the right place at the right time.

Tamara hasn't the game-playing experience to really master the game, though she saved the party's bacon time after time.  When she was playing, and that was for 11 years, she gave it her all, she took advice, she proved an excellent problem solver and she had a knack for rolling a natural 20 at the verge of things going into a TPK.  However, one thing she didn't like was my way of setting up lose-lose scenarios.  Oh, I don't mean the party would lose, but rather that the consequences of winning always has some bitter pill that ended up leaving a bad taste in the party's mouth.

To give a sense of this, you can go on a quest for the father to rescue his daughter, and you can rescue the daughter ... but when you get her back home, you discover the father has been stabbed in the back and murdered by the girl's uncle; and now that is the next adventure.  You can find the uncle, corner him, waste his minions and finally push him into the sea, where he drowns, but when you go through his things, there's an arcane, powerful book written in a language that you need the dead uncle to interpret.   And now it's too late.  So you have to adventure to learn the language of the book, which you succeed in doing ... only now you wish you didn't know it, because it's raised this horrible monster that's now laying waste to the countryside.  Oh, you can ignore the monster and go on your way, but you know that you're responsible for that monster existing, so ...

Tamara used to say, "GREAT!  It's DM shitland all over again."  For most players, this sort of twist is intriguing, like wondering where I'm going to go with this thing ... because heck, who wants to end the campaign, right?  I like the campaign drifting forward logically from adventure to adventure, rather than there being any definite end to things.  Tamara, on the other hand, began to feel, "What was the point?  We just end up creating new problems."  Eventually, at a time when circumstances suspended my campaign for quite a long time, she decided just to bow out.  And so she has; but thank heaven, because when I run today, there's a 3-year old boy running around, who loves his Grandmother, who is there to look after him.

I'll pick this up with the next post.

The Well Is Dry

Well, let's get off the pot and write something.

Briefly, because I don't want to waste a lot of time with this, but look at the splatterfest that D&D has become: a lot of fervent baity material based on "solving problems" while, in fact, just vying for as many clicks as possible.  Click this to learn about myconids, click this to learn that difficult terrain exists, click this for "news," for "lore," for audio D&D tools.  Come one, come all, step right up, don't be shy!  Gather 'round folks, gather 'round, for today, right here in the heart of our great role-play selection, we've got spectacles that'll dazzle your senses and leave you begging for more!  Yes, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen of all ages, brace yourself for a journey into adventure, into amazing great weapon combats, into charm spells and worlds brought to life!  Do you want to know about paralysation?  About blindsight and truesight?  About mystery goblin dice?  Do you have the nerve to challenge the greatest monsters in the universe?  Well, folks, today's your lucky day because D&D is filled with wonders of every kind!

Okay, I'm an old man.  Which is one reason I know when smoke is being blown up my ass.  I might be impressed if any of this shit had real merit, but it's just the same crap repackaged from 1988.  When I read that Matt Colville, the great Matt Colville, has written a module that encapsulates the ESSENCE of D&D: exploration, combat and puzzle-solving, I'm pretty much fucking done.  Look, it's a movie.  It captures the essence of movie making: actors, settings and dialogue!  How can it not be amazing?!

This is why I haven't written of late.  Not because this shit is just recently out here, but because I've reached a point where the thing that I love, the thing that I have a passion for, has become the only thing for which the internet is a complete waste of my time.  I don't know, maybe there are home renovators in the world who can no longer watch home renovation videos, or read home renovation books.  Maybe there are knitting fanatics who would rather cut their throats before reading one more "Knitworld" magazine or watch one more amateur drop a stitch.  Maybe that's how it is for other people.  I don't know.  I've done an awful lot of cooking.  I'm not the greatest cook in the world; I don't think I'm the greatest DM either.  Then again, I can watch a cooking video.  I can still enjoy watching someone skillfully cut a watermelon into odd shapes.

But I cannot watch another fucking video about D&D.  Of any kind.  I can't listen to anybody for more than about 20 seconds.  I just want to scream.  I guess there are idiots in the world who must have random encounters explained, or told the need to make puzzles or why combat matters, but after 25 fucking years of this shit on the internet, it's really enough.  D&D is obviously too small a field to sustain more than a few dozen separate discussions.  Clearly, it takes no more than three weeks to say everything that a person needs to know ... and then, because that's all, the only thing to do is to just keep saying the same things, since the blind, ignorant, myopic morons who play this game won't get it on a 45th telling anyway.

My blood is up.

Breathe ... breathe ...

Most of what I've said in the last 16 years of this blog has fallen on deaf ears.  I've done my best to be clear, to include charts and pictures, to be creative with my descriptions and metaphors.  I've broken things down into smaller, digestible chunks and I've used relatable analogies and real life examples to help convey ideas.  I've ranted and I've spoken pedantically, I've lectured and written humour, I've answered questions and asked more than a few of my own, to elicit a meaningful response.  I've explained technical jargon from other fields and studies and showed how they related to the plain language of D&D and role-playing.  I've put up polls to understand the reader's point of view, I've endlessly called for comments to ascertain what else I might describe or how else I might address the problems people have.  I've repeated points, rephrased arguments, done all I could towards the goal of empowering the reader to be a better dungeon master, to be a better player, to recognise what makes either a good thing and even how to support and provide guidance to good players and DMs the reader might encounter.  I've dissected, deconstructed, used a pointer to describe structural and functional features of the game and taken unconventional routes to convey my ideas.

I'm not done.  I'll never be done.

But I am at a point where if I want to write something, or say something, there isn't a crutch left for me anywhere.  There are no readers piping up to suggest directions for me.  There's no one in the audience raising a hand and saying, "But Mr. Smolensk, when are you going to explain about this?"  There's no resource anywhere on the internet I can turn to, no treatise I can read, having anything to do with this subject.  All that's left to say can now only be those things I realise on my own, without help.

And let me say a few things about that.

I'm not Isaac Newton.  I don't pretend to be.  The man mastered physics and I master a stupid game called Dungeons and Dragons.  I don't need to be reminded of my place in the whole of human accomplishment.  But as an example of being on the fringe of a particular specialty, Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.  And the next book he published, Reports as Master of the Mint, which was not about physics, came out in 1701.  He wrote that report every year for the next 24 years.  His next book about math did not come out until 1707, twenty-one years after the Principia.

In the intervening time, he wrote letters to friends, people who understood him, and apart from that, according to reports, he spent a lot of time as a rich person in a rich house, in a firm effort to be unpestered.  He didn't publish anything about math for all those years because he didn't think he had anything worthwhile to say.

As I said, I'm not Newton.  I've had a lot to say, though of course it's all dreck compared to Newton. His words have survived four centuries and will go on that way.  My words are in danger of evaporating before Tuesday.  Let's not pretend there's a comparison here.

But when I have nothing to say, there's a tacit understanding that I really should write a blog post anyway, or else by Tuesday, my existence would be in danger of being forgotten.  So I come up with something.  As I said, however, this isn't like it used to be.  Once in awhile, somewhere on the net, I could read something by someone that sparked some part of my intuition, making a post possible.  Lately, not so much.  Not at all.  In fact, there's really fuck all out there.

And I haven't got anything new.  I underwent a helluva a lot of stress last month; we lived packed together like sardines, with a 3-year old boy to boot (and let me tell you, there's no question my grandson is a boy, in spades, complete with hurling and death defiance possibilities), without an argument taking place.  Which, given the intense volatility of both myself and my daughter, who matches me in every way and has the benefit of being 24 years younger than me, is something of a miracle.  We're both very glad about that.

It's done now, though, and for the present, I'm just not that into teaching.  I haven't anything new to say.  I have no fruitful new way to explain the art of DMing.  I haven't conceived of some profound new way to calculate encumbrance.  The well is dry.  I need rain.  A little rain and maybe I can go back to filling buckets, but for the present I'd be happy if I'd write one gawddamned paragraph for the Guide, which I can't even look at presently.  I'm sick to death of playing video games but, alas, it's about all I have the mind for.

Earlier this year, I filled the void by posting my Ternketh Keep.  Would anybody be interested in my giving an account of the whole of the offline campaign I've been running (with a seven-year break near the end) since 2005?  I could do that.  It would just be war stories, but it would fill blog posts.

I'm going to post this on my patreon, https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466, where the public can comment if they want.  If I get a few non-regular readers there say yes (the regulars, I know what you feel), then I'll get started.  Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy to let this blog stand dead until 2045, if need be.  If Newton could do it, I can too.

Saturday Q&A (mar 23)

 Maxwell in California writes,

I am a natural pacer. I have spent my entire life walking while talking. it’s how I think through everything. Sometimes people find it distracting. Or even offputting, saying that it makes them feel like I’m going to pounce on them.

As I recite, I compulsively pace. I feel like this is to be corrected. I am trying very hard to root myself to the spot, even using a timer to test myself. But it is quite difficult.

Is this actually a problem or should I just focus on doing a good job presenting the world?

Have you had some tics, or habitual gestures, or other things you’ve had to rein in while DMing? If so, and if you were able to dein them on, what effect did have on your game?

Answer: Early on, I taught myself to get out of my chair when I was DMing. At first, this felt unnatural ... but I was playing in a very large room, the cafeteria of my High School, so there was plenty of room to step back from the game table and frame out scenes with my hands. Later, I discovered that talking with my hands, which I'd done since elementary school, was progressively getting in the way of my communicating to people I thought I was making myself more clear, when in fact I was pulling their gaze, causing them to become so distracted they didn't hear the words I was using.

There is a form of public speech problem called "prowling." You can see even very experienced speakers do it, in university lectures or Ted Talks online. The speaker walks back and forth across the stage, back and forth, back and forth. A prowler will argue, I'm moving so that I can talk to everyone. A prowler will argue, "I'm demonstrating that I really care about the subject." What they don't understand is that prowling is mesmerising. It's like watching a pendulum swing back and forth, back and forth. A really good listener will focus on the spoken words, but half the audience just drifts out.

I learned in my more serious acting period, performing at the Edmonton Fringe Festival and auditioning for film, that the very best way to communicate is to have your body be absolutely frozen except for your facial expressions. Humans relate to a speaker entirely because of their facial expressions. We're programmed to read the tiny muscle patterns of others; we're hyper-tuned to the tiniest of facial movements. Waving our arms around, or moving our bodies, just spoils our potential impact, because it pulls our face out of our audience's reach. If Simon Sinek prowls across to stage left, for all of that time I can't see what his face is doing while he's talking. If he's shaking his body to make his point more emotionally, he makes his facial muscles shake and we lose the connection we'd have gotten if he wasn't moving.

There's no reason you can't walk while you think, or walk miles outdoors if it helps you think clearly. I used to walk and do that, but I find these days that a shower is more efficient; I suspect there's a thing about the change in body temperature and some sort of sensory deprivation caused by the water beating on my skin ... but it doesn't matter. Do whatever helps you think. But D&D is a performance. If you want to rivet your players, don't move. Emote and speak. Compare this excellent scene between two very different actors in one of my favourite films:

https://youtu.be/49_QRU7NSYs?si=AfIzGBwtLXlMnA3y

Watch Olivier's apparent lack of expression, which lets every tiny tick produce an emotional impact. Watch how intensely still that both he and Sybil Thorndike both remain, though she occasionally flips her head, which makes them both riveting. The glass in her hand doesn't move. Olivier directed this, and he practically beat Monroe with a stick to get her to stand absolutely still. She still bobs around, but it's done so mutedly it's hard to believe she's the same actress as she is in other films.

Obviously, not everyone is an actor, or wants to be. D&D is just a game, played with just your friends. You don't have to go to this extent. You certainly don't have to reproduce the style of Olivier! But a little consciousness, moving a little slower, being a little more still, will have tremendous impact on the witness.

_____

Thank you Maxwell.

For the sake of the RSS feeds that read this post and put it elsewhere, I need to post the full url of my Patreon with every post:  https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466.  Apparently, links are rendered dead on many feeds.  Please support my Patreon, it's an important part of my monthly income.

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.   

Soon

For some time, I've progressed away from a format of dungeon mastering tutorials towards the more sustainable desire to just show off my work.  For many of my viewers, this hasn't been a positive development.  As such, those who cared about how to deal with troublesome players, or how to describe a dungeon, or how to encourage role-playing or whatever, have simply drifted away.  Those who remain of that kind know the tutorials are all still here, floating in the enormous backlog of my posts over these last 15 years (if they can be found).

For myself, I got tired of producing these sorts of posts ... less because I began repeating myself and moreso because they received, on the whole, either resistance or passive agreement.  Once upon a time, back when angry birds roamed the earth, these posts garnered a lot of attention and produced excellent discussions that ran for thirty or forty comments; but those days, along with the "blog" I suppose, are gone.

We're in a place now where discussion has lost it's verve.  And for the record, "what can you show me" is a better path.  It removes the casual blatherer from the fore, putting the worker, the operator, "creator" in front.  Of course, there are still performers and hustlers, but steadily in this experiment we're calling the internet, ephermeral things are on the decline.  They'll be with us forever, no doubt.  But there are only so many cat videos we can care about; so many kids dancing well in their living rooms we have time for; and so many people spewing out yet one more diatribe on why the right way to play D&D is ...

I'm rather comfortable shucking off that shirt and dropping it on the floor, where it can be laundered should I want to put it on again.  I have little left to say.  Steadily, I move further and further from the world of game modules, D&D online social events, even the desire to visibly see other people play the game.  I just don't relate.

Recently, JB posted a series of posts detailing numerous modules that were part of some contest.  I couldn't bring myself to read past the first sentence of each post.  In retrospect, I've been running a single "module" for 15 years now, taking place on Earth, where the various boundaries and choices within the module steadily drift from location to location, occasionally upon a specific theme and occasionally just to fill a few runnings with whatever the players are interested in at that moment.  If I need something to happen, I invent it out of my own head.  I don't steal it from other creators because what they're creating is ... of absolutely no use to me.

The trouble, naturally, is that when I'm in a state of creation, I post on multiple platforms and there's new material every day.  And when I'm not in that state, as with the moment ... there's really nothing to say.  I talk about myself.  I talk about my discontinuity with everyone else.

My houseguests have departed as of Sunday.  There are less interruptions, there's no 3-year-boy laughing and running back and forth, back and forth, in what I could only describe as the desirable manner.  I'm finding myself able to think again.  I'm just sort of kicking ideas around.  Working at the job and thinking about getting started on serious stuff.  But for now, just enjoying the quiet.  At my age, quiet is a wonderful thing.

For those waiting, I apologise.  Soon.  That's all I can say right now.  Soon.

These Simple Days

Again, I've had a long, difficult, unsatisfying week, where my own intentions and plans have been repeatedly put on a shelf.  This week worse than most, it seems.  No maps, no posts, no book writing, with five of us living here the house looks a disaster, and as of right now, I haven't any questions or answers for tomorrow's Q&A.

In self-defense, Tamara and I took a drive around eastern Alberta, visiting the badlands by Drumheller, the dinosaur capital of Canada, and then tooling through the pot and drumlin country between there and Stettler to the north.

Took this picture of Tamara yesterday; she's the smaller one at the bottom, just in front of the world's largest dinosaur's left foot.  For the record, 86 ft. high.  Tamara wasn't impressed; but she did love the appearance of the landscape, of which I'll post elsewhere sometime soon.

It was just a day trip, nothing very special, except that we enjoy each other's company a lot and we don't have any trouble talking continuously for 10 hours, even after all this time together.  I've been working on a story about her and I from way back in 2002, as the next post for Shifting Sands.

I've been enjoying that experiment, and there's evidence of it catching on.  I need a little practice writing non-argument, non-thematic content, but that'll come.  My biggest concern is that a lot of the stories I have to tell make me sound either irrational, like a fool, or contains too much of what my daughter calls my "assholicity."  It's a pity that in retrospect, so many of the moments when I stood up for myself, or went to war to die on a some hill or other, ends up after so many years with my thinking, jeebs, what the hell did I think I was accomplishing.

It may be different for other people, or maybe not.  Of course, other people quietly put those stories in a mental closet for permanent storage, in the hopes that the key to that closet might be lost as soon as possible.  I can't say exactly why I'm not doing that; or why I want to roll stuff like that out.  It won't be to make myself look good, I can tell you.  In fact, I'm very conscious of that.  All the stories I've told so far are fairly neutral, being things that happened to me, as they might happen to anyone.  I'm telling these in the hopes of building some credence for when I write a story about some moronic thing I did, or when I caused hurt to someone, or in fact failed as a human being.  I figure I'm bound to tell a certain number of those stories, before I tell even one story that puts me in a good light.  The last thing I want to accomplish here is my own self-aggrandisement.

Yesterday, travelling along country roads and highways in those parts, I talked to Tamara about hunting partridge and pheasants with my father, and the canoe trip I took down the Red Deer river, which we  crossed on our journey yesterday four times.  Tamara's not from around here; she spent her youngest years in a place called Hickman, Kentucky, on the Mississippi river, in the 1960s.  So everything we saw yesterday, especially the badlands, was new to her.  Most people can throw a rock across the Red Deer.  It's not the Mississippi.

But ... just now ... not in the headspace to write any story tonight.  I'm finding this post a trial, as I fuzzily await the end of this weekend.  My daughter and son have keys to their new place, and so begins the removal of furniture and other things from our environs to theirs.  They have a far harder weekend ahead of them than Tamara and I; we're given an exemption from these things as the "kids" have plenty of help from their friends, and don't need us old people.  Our job is to manage the grandson, whose in a state of confusion and panic because he hasn't had a proper home in more than a month, as this is the first time he's been old enough to understand what moving actually means.  I didn't encounter what Julian's encountering now until after I'd finished high school.

No, I'm writing this post in support of the fiction that I haven't died, and that I'm still in possession of my faculties and self-will ... neither of which seems, at the moment, remotely believable. There will be no Q&A tomorrow.  I trust I can get my wits together to return to work on my book, so that for the first time in four weeks, come the 22nd, I'll have a preview to post on Patreon.  And maps to post.  And blog posts.  And my sanity.

Saturday Q&A (mar 9)

Maxwell in California writes,

Do you ever have game towns that enforce a law where weapons may not be openly carried (except by nobles, soldiers, or other people with special privileges)?

I ask because, while encountering and overcoming friction is central to playing the game, I think this scenario would be quite likely to make players bristle. I’m curious if or how you’d run it — and if so, whether you would, within the urban environment, deliberately provide some spaces of “breathing room” where players could try to get away with open carry. A description from an old post of yours, don’t know which, comes to mind: you suggested that an area of town with burnt or dilapidated housing could serve to stage a fight for a few rounds, before the NPCs scattered, knowing the authorities would arrive.

I’m imagining the knock on effects of a “no carrying weapons” law: thorough searches of property at the town gates; an outcry and swift arrival of the guards if a PC insists on wearing his sword belt into the street; players brainstorming how to smuggle the party’s best magic weapon to some crucial spot … as DM, I could get much mileage from a privileged NPC drawing his sword and threatening an unprivileged NPC in plain view of all.

Answer: I have used the rule of restricting player weapon use according to local ordinances, though I don't do it often. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but there is an understanding in the medieval world that anyone who can afford proper weapons is likely a member of the upper classes, or potentially in service of another lord, and therefore beyond contestation. I'd argue the only reason ever to have such an ordinance would be a situation where the town was in relative chaos, factions were fighting in the street, and the city magistrate was desperate in his or her attempts to establish order.

But note that the Montagues and the Capulets, among other rakes of the most civilised part of the world, Italy, were naturally expected to be carrying weapons with which to duel and such. In my opinion, it's far more likely that an ordinance would exist that stated where fighting with weapons could take place, thereby allowing enemies to blow off steam, than to actually restrict the weapons themselves. Thus, the authorities would arrive to stop fighting in the wrong places (see Dumas' The Three Musketeers), or perhaps on the wrong day (no fighting on holy days and such), or even the wrong time (morning please, certainly not after tea has been served!).

Finally, as far as threatening unprivileged persons, the point is that they're unprivileged. It's quite possible they wouldn't possess even the right to live ... though why a rational person would injure or kill such a person is quite outside standard practice for the period. Even in D&D, it could bring a lot of trouble from a privileged person if we happen to injure a cherished servant or the only gong farmer in the neighbourhood, it gives no treasure, a miniscule amount of experience and is quite ridiculous. It takes a 21st century person with a penchant for sadism gained from modern times and media to think this is a "thrill." As a DM, you'd be in your rights to say to a player intending to do such, "Um, no, you can't bring yourself to do it; you have a rational thought and it stops you." Or some such limitation. Think of it like not being able to jump a two inch wall in a video game, because it's not a part of game play. On the other hand, if you prefer your characters to have the freedom to create trouble for themselves, and don't wish to restrain them, let them have at it. The worst it can do is turn the campaign into a cartoon.

OhioHedgehog writes,

After a search of the blog and the wiki I've found very little about tattooing (which has suddenly become "a thing" at my table.) Wondering if it will be touched on in the Street Vendor's Guide? The background provided by following your posts about virtually everything else equip me with the wherewithal to create/design what I need on my own so I'm just curious.

Answer:  I hadn't intended to include tattooing as a service.  A quick search tells me that tattooing in the Medieval-Renaissance periods was typically done by individuals who'd acquired the skill, but who had no traditional location or shop where they might do it.  It may have been possible that individuals offered tattoos as a broader range of services, but actual prices would probably have been negotiated on an individual basis.

Creating the tattoo without modern equipment involved repeated puncturing of the skin with a hand-held needle to create the desired design.  It's possible that a light mallet was used for this purpose, to tap the needle in to improve the experience for the tattoo artist, who could thus be more precise since it would ease pressure on his or her hand.  Pigment and dye was then rubbed into the punctured skin; this could be done before or after the skin was penetrated.  Healing was dangerous because it would have been more difficult to keep the area clean and prevent infection ... something that wasn't much of concern among extremely isolated tribal peoples in the era, since they were wholly immune to any infection that might have occurred in their region of habitation as a result of hundreds of generation, even thousands, of continuous occupation.

As far as the Streetvendor's Guide goes, one must realise that even in this day and age there are many who resist the notion that tattooing is either healthy or commendable.  In many cases, open display of tattoos is treated as evidence that a person is either irresponsible or prone to self-indulgence, leading to preconceptions that may stand in the way of a person's financial or career success.  Much as I hate to admit it, by including tattooing in the Guide, regardless of how it's intended, could create the same sort of negative response that I'd receive if I included, say, slavery or a price to have someone murdered.  Comparing this against the actual benefit of including nine lines with a tattoo price on page 213 doesn't seem like much gain overall.  So I don't believe I'll be including it.

 _____

Thank you for your contributions.  Been such an annoying week, I'm sorry I'm only answering these questions today, and not some days ago on Patreon.  My apologies.

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish to ask a question or submit observations like those seen here, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.

 

 

It's, um, Not What You Think

My apologies for not writing here for days.  For those interested, I've produced content for the map blog, and for a recent project called shifting sands, and for patreon, but not here ... and of course, here is the only place that really counts.

My daughter, her husband and their son had to vacate their former place of residence at the end of February; they can't take possession of their next residence until the 16th of March, so for the present they're bivouaked with Tamara and me.  We're all friendly and pleasant, though our place is just 750 sq.ft., so naturally there are hurdles.  One benefit is that my daughter and I were able to record a video for her let's play site on Monday, which is always fun; she's been in the middle of a long and difficult move and hasn't been able to post anything, so she's glad to have something to put there.  Please have a look if you're willing, give her a like and let it run a bit, since that helps her stats.  It's me explaining how I play Oxygen Not Included, which might reveal something of my general character with regards to D&D.  It is, after all, a design-based logistical game.

I wasn't able to put a preview up of the Streetvendor's Guide last Friday, and the way it looks I won't this Friday either.  There's lots going on, I'm struggling to find quiet time to do my job (which for whatever reason needs doing) and frankly I haven't even been able to open the document since last Thursday.  Lately, the time I've found for myself has been spent making maps because it's comparatively relaxing compared to producing serious content.  It doesn't help that I've run into a block regarding the layout of the wood section early parts ... as that's what I've started putting together.  Things are sure to settle down after a week or so, when I can return to my weekly pattern of equanimity.

Did have a useful conversation about the production of content, motivated by yet another one of thos many youtube videos in which some person talks about all the people who are quitting youtube and how hard it is to make money on the platform, and what's it all for anyway, and besides the real hard part is finding something meaningful to make content about.  You know the type.  Here's an example from a mature, adult woman whose able to express herself competently without having to posture like either a testosterone-driven jackass or an estrogen-possessed flake.

I trust that's an equally balanced insult of people of both sexes.  I don't want to play favourites.

Creating something new is hard.  Therefore, it's obviously easier to create something that's, um, derivative.  Something derivative may receive a lot of views and likes, but at the same time it's not exactly soul-sustaining.  If we make something derivative, it feels like it's derivative, so any actual praise we get for it feels, um, empty.

If later we then create something actually original, we can't help noticing that it gets precisely the same praise as something derivative.  Often, it gets less praise.  This is discouraging.  In fact, it's discouraging in the same way that praise for derivative stuff feels empty.  This is true even if the channel is making money.

All in all, this result undermines one's motivation to produce ... anything.  In fact, it's rather crippling.  Fortunately for me, I experienced this spiral in roughly the 1980s, when my audience consisted of no more than 60 persons at the best of times, and more usually a circle of about 6 friends.  Eventually I settled into a groove of comfortably creating content regardless of anyone ever seeing it.  I had no idea the internet would eventually happen.

Now that it has, I try occasionally to take some advantage of it ... only to be usually disappointed.  But I've been better trained to handle that then most people who are turning to the internet as, um, an alternative to working a real job.  Only to find, all too often, that creating stuff is a lot like a real job that fails to provide the purpose of a job: income.

Lets see ... I ought to provide some sort of advice here.  If you're going to make a youtube channel, film yourself doing something you're already doing every day.  If you like to sail, and you would be doing that anyway, learn how to post four well-secured cameras in the right places around your vessel and then film yourself until the power on these cameras runs out.  Then teach yourself how to voice over, so you can explain where you are, what you're doing, why you're doing it and so on.  The end product of cutting all four camera feeds may turn out to be utter garbage ... but at least you got to do what you would have done anyway.  And you've gained some knowledge of how cameras, editing and overdubbing works.  Win-win.

I write.  If the world were empty of all people, if I were the last man left alive, I would still write down things today because four years from now, I'd enjoy reading what I wrote four years ago.  This is the sort of madness you'll need if you're going to do something for a living, without a boss that pays you money just for showing up.

DON'T decide to do something you've never done before and film that.  Don't.  You won't like the thing ... and if your channel somehow does well, you'll learn to really, really, really hate the thing.  Eventually, you'll hate your fans for liking that you do something that you hate.  You'll hate them.  And that'll come out.  And you'll regret it.  Not just because your channel isn't popular any more, but because it once was, it stopped being, and you're going to utterly hate yourself for letting it fail.  It's a lose-lose.  Don't do this.

DON'T base your channel or anything else you're doing on someone else's work.  You may have a mission to teach people the wonders of history, but if all you're doing with your history channel is repeating information that exists in books, or hundreds of other history channels, in the end you're going to feel like you're on a hamster wheel.  You may have a wonderful plan for your next presentation, you may put hundreds of hours into making your presentation pretty, or witty, but if you're on a hamster wheel and that's not where you really want to be, in a few years you'll realise that this is all getting you nowhere.  Even if it makes money for you.  In the end, you'll realise you're not making any kind of difference at all, any more than all the other copies of your work do.  You'll realise you're not special, and you're never going to be.  You won't like that.  And worst of all, it's not going to be an alternative to doing a "real job."  It will be a real job.  One you might be able, someday, to get numb to, but not one that's going to fill you with joy.

Truth be told, most of us don't do something every day that's worth pointing a camera at.  Sorry.  Just how it is.  Most of the time, these people who sigh and show regret for the internet not being what they hoped for are just too, um, ordinary to be watched.  Again, sorry.  Just how it is.  Performance is for performers.  It's a type.  Not everyone is a class clown.  And most of the time, being a class clown isn't all that rewarding anyhow.

It's great that youtube and the general internet gives everyone a shot at being a class clown, or some other kind of performer ... but realistically, a "shot" isn't much.  It's not fame.  It's mostly not rewarding.  It's mostly a wasted afternoon getting ready for the audition.

Saturday Q&A (mar 2)

Maxwell in California writes,

I found this new framework of yours both inspiring and practical.

Last night I spent an hour or so trying to write up the “foraging” motivation across the eight hex types. Got about halfway; I went too fast and kept struggling to come up with the less-than-literal interpretations of foraging which would make sense in the more civilized types of hex. I’m returning to it now and just trying one hex type.

Suppose a type 7 hex: “homestead.” The homesteading race — the one whose presence grows with the hex type; let’s say they’re humans — is still establishing their grasp on the land. To keep hold, they must spend all day in the backbreaking labor of pulling stumps, carrying water, plowing and sowing, inspecting the crops for pests, etc.

Their “foraging” was to come out into these lands in search of somewhere to settle, but now they’re attached to the homestead. Foraging presumably minimal. However, among the few dozen people in a thorp there will be a few hunters, maybe shepherds and prospectors too — and those are foraging activities. Good hunters earn respect for bringing home precious meat; they have a well-understood position in the family unit that compliments farming. Shepherding may not seem like foraging, but I think it would count if we imagine the shepherd as seeking good pasture land, venturing further from the homestead than other inhabitants. Prospectors would be itinerant, probably not part of the family units, possibly less well-respected— and if on their irregular returns to the thorp for supplies, they bring tales of strange creatures in phenomenon, they will likely to get written off as fibbers. (And where there are prospectors, there’s the chance one actually does find something; that leads to a dash to a more civilized hex to register the claim, if such authorities exist, as well as the possibility of claim jumping.)

If there are longer-term nonhuman inhabitants of the hex, even if they’ve developed agriculture, they probably must also forage in order to feed themselves. They may have names or myths for each and every berry bush and fish-filled river, and would see all of those as their property — even ones that happen to grow right by a new homestead.

Imagine a farm boy walking the boundary fence to check if anything needs mending. Each day he’s been pausing to note the progress of the wild blackberries growing in a wagon-sized bramble just ten paces past the fence, eager for the day when he can pick them — and today ought to be the day, but when he arrives he sees all the ripest berries have been taken.

There may or may not be snapped branches and foot prints. I think that’s a little on the nose, and we would expect goblins or similar to be utterly adept at moving without trace (though young, excited goblins could make mistakes.) Either way I expect a boy would be curious; he might sneak out that night to post up, nervously clutching a hoe or some other improvised weapon, trying to catch a glimpse of the thieves.

Another kind of foraging: unintelligent or low intelligence creatures doing their thing, in whatever way befits the creature. Wildcats stalk birds, birds and squirrels gather nuts, owlbears shake the trees to catch and eat squirrels — and so on.

Another kind: “foraging” for somewhere safe. A prisoner on the run from a higher-type hex could take refuge in a type 7. You yourself have brought up a few times the example of robbers and highwaymen being hidden and fed by country folk, in defiance of any authorities, because the robbers share their ill-gotten gains. A man who escapes from jail in a neighboring higher-type hex could make for the type 7, seeking refuge.

There. That’s a lot further and deeper than yesterday; I’m glad I tried again. I’ll definitely be applying this framework to flesh out Tenerife: my party landed there last session and will start exploring it tonight.

Answer: I think it's helpful to go back and look at the etymology of a word, to perceive how it might be differently defined in a connotative, rather than a denotative sense.

"Forage" comes from the 13th century French "forrage," which is fodder for animals, pillaging and looting. The 12th century German is "fodr." Roving in search of provisions in English is the late 15th c. "Provisions" in the sense of something provided or necessary is attested to the mid-15th c. I'd suggest that the primary concept here is the searching for something that is needful ... so I think you're dead-on with the sense of would-be homesteaders searching for a place to settle. On the other hand, however, they ought to still be in the condition of searching, not in the condition of pulling stumps or cutting trees. That, I should think, would be technically "building."

Beyond food, then, what else do we search for that's needful? Well, security, knowledge and understanding, spiritual fulfillment, purpose and meaning, freedom from strife, material wealth, proof of being brave or honorable, inspiration. If we think only in terms of how many NPCs engaged in a thing that's necessary to produce a "situation" or an "adventure," we find that we can do that with 1 person, or 100, or 10,000. So with your would-be homesteaders searching a wilderness hex, we can add prospectors looking for metals, priests searching for enlightenment, a herbalist searching for an extremely rare and valuable plant (which makes Rapunzel's hair magical), refugees fleeing from persecution, a lone knight in search of a jabberwock and so on. Carefully thought out, any of these would also satisfy the "foraging" structure for a wilderness hex.

Shelby M. writes,

I have a couple of questions regarding a scenario my players are facing and talking through at the moment. They have been mistaken by smugglers posing as licit bargemen to be allies of a fence the smugglers know. The party is debating whether to entertain the delusion (in which case they would all board a barge and proceed to another location to pick up the goods) or to throw back the cover and kill the men here. My questions are these: 1) how do I appropriately communicate the danger they might be in by going to an unknown and extremely isolated location where there could be an unknown number of pirates (suddenly hostile, as the ruse would be up) without explicitly stating so? 2) In your trade system, how would you generally determine what goods a trading vessel would contain?

Answer: I could do with a little more detail, but I'll offer what I can. So, the party aren't a barge crew, but they must have access to a barge enabling them to pretend it's their own. Except for the scenario where the party might turn on the smugglers (who ought to have a fair experience and level-ability), I don't see much danger in going to an unknown and extremely isolated location. Smugglers (a) want to ship stuff and make money; and (b) don't want to be exposed to the authorities. So long as the party helps with (a) and avoids (b), the smugglers will be happy and in no mood whatsoever to hurt the party. After all, like all criminal groups, they rely on like-minded people's aid and work to get (a) to happen. If they kill everyone who meets them in an obscure location (and where else could smugglers meet to avoid (b)), they'd be poor.

So what "ruse" are you speaking of? That the party members aren't the smugglers they're pretending to be? If they take the barge and load up the stuff, they're no longer pretending. From that point, they ARE smugglers. So long as they then don't rush off to the authorities to tell them everything, there's no "ruse" to expose. Pirates, smugglers, et al, aren't "suddenly hostile." Why would they be? Oh sure, Cap'n Flint killed his men to keep his treasure hid, but not until those same men helped him get all that treasure. And too, there was a LOT of treasure involved in Treasure Island. It took Ben Gunn months and months to move it all. So unless the players are going to be in the room with that sort of hoard, they're fairly safe ... and if there were that sort of hoard, why would they be invited there.

The danger is in being inspected by authorities after the party has picked up the goods. That's what they should worry about.

To answer the other question, the trade system is designed to price items, not randomly determine them. I'd ask myself, what would smugglers be smuggling? It ought to be things that are either (a) not allowed in a country, like alcohol or opium, or (b) things the country taxes very heavily, like salt and other spices. Different countries have different issues here. If a kingdom is in turmoil, efforts will be taken to keep weapons out of the hands of ordinary persons, so those are good things to move. If guilds control monopolies on clothing, metal goods, medicines or food, then those are good things to smuggle because, selling them comparatively cheap, they're easy to turn over into coin. If a region is dead set against science or education, then books and pamphlets are good. If there's religious persecution, then artifacts and holy writs from the persecuted peoples make a good smuggling choice. And of course, there's always the movement of stolen goods, where the country being left is a bigger threat than the country being hurried towards. You need to assess what the target country wants, based on your worldbuilding concept, and then create the smuggler's motivation accordingly. It definitely shouldn't be random.

_____

Thank you for your contributions.  I like weeks with responses.

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish to ask a question or submit observations like those seen here, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.

Further Chatting about Chat

So, some may wonder what I was clarifying with my earlier post today, just as some no doubt wondered what was the point of this earlier post regarding "lore."

I feel that much of the discussion surrounding what chatGPT is, or what it does, reflects sentiments against the idea itself.  Much like the way that television media discusses the ills and evils of social media or the addictive internet (its most devastating competitor for eyeballs), writers of magazines, both on and off line, have been waging a war for a year now to sow fear about and resistance against Chat.  I've seen Chat accused of making people stupider, destroy privacy, destroy facts, take jobs from people, wreck education, cause real-world harm and no doubt initiate the rapture.  These articles are being written by people increasingly working in an industry that's progressively embracing Chat (an industry I'm part of) because in truth, it's fantastically useful in the hands of someone who knows what he or she is doing.  And because, yes, it's going to destroy thousands of jobs held by people who have been writing magazine-level dreck all their lives (and are unable to write anything better).

Once upon a time, I used to write for a real estate magazine.  I wrote three articles a month, about 650 words an article, which paid me $450.  Sometimes, I was asked to write a fourth or a fifth article for an associate magazine of the one I usually worked for, because the umbrella company ran about fifty different publication "fronts" all over western Canada.

These magazines were free, being available at stands located on downtown corners and LRT stations, in strip malls and sports centres and outside convenience stores.  They were essentially rags designed to sell advertising ... and for the most part, the writing was precisely the level that I see pushed at me by articles arising out of google's algorithm.  I had this side job for 7 years, during which time I produced some of the worst writing I'd ever produced.

The three articles were as follows: (a) an article on some element of real estate, which I was to explain for the uninitiated; (b) an article on the real estate market, which had to look like economic reporting but in fact could only come to the conclusion that the market was great and was on the rise; and (c) an article highlighting some neighbourhood in Calgary where people might want to live.  And obviously, every neighbourhood was wonderful, just wonderful.

My deadline would be the Tuesday before publication, which was the Friday after.  I succeeded in that about 19 times out of 20.  Sometimes, I would write an email to ask for another day to finish one of the articles.  The only reason I was ever late was because I hated writing these articles; ugh.  And now and then, I couldn't force myself to do it when I had to.  In all honesty, I both researched and wrote the articles on the same day they were due.   On average, research and writing together, for one article, took between 25 and 40 minutes.  I'd get up early Tuesday, sit down in a state of misery and slam out three articles in under two hours.

After a year, much to my surprise, I found that the editors loved me.  And I mean LOVE.  Because I was on time (other writers were turning in their stuff late Thursday night or Friday morning, though their deadline and mine were the same) and because I would throw in little bits of dry humour or an odd framing of a point that had paying clients congratulating the company on my being such a "great" writer.  But I've been honest with all of you here; I was not a "great" writer.  I was a terrible writer, basically cribbing details off the internet and then rewording them to fit the requirements.

If I had chatGPT then, like I have it now, I could have written all three articles in about 25 minutes.  Not because chatGPT would have written the articles for me, but because and I'd have had to do was to take Chat's awful writing and edit it out at my normal writing speed, about 65 words a minute.  No research would have been necessary, because it would all have been there in the program.

I promise all of you here, if you're reading an article written by someone for the internet, he or she is copying that article from a slightly worse effort by chatGPT.

Many people are scanning down through this post because they think I've chosen to write nothing of consequence, but the truth is that Chat is as an important technological advance as the internet itself.  This won't be understood by most people, partly because it's being touted that Chat is "writing" the content.  It isn't.  The content is a distilled mass of foregoing content, often in the hands of someone like me that can write and isn't concerned with whether or not it's "morally right" to use this tool.  For the last 20 years, every writer in the world has been stuck either with google or wikipedia when seeking to research anything; and while the usefulness of either vastly dwarfs the library where I used to sit and research freelance articles I wrote in the 1990s, these tools have been made obsolete — not only because the answers one gets are more to the point and reflective of what's actually wanted by a question, but also because each question asked is kept in Chat's memory, so that future questions can be asked IN CONTEXT.

Once this is grasped, that I can say to chatGPT, "Earlier you said that cream had to be separated in a machine -- what sort of machine is that," without having to go back to the beginning of every question, it's easy to understand what a leap forward this is.  I can maintain a single dialogue about oil fields in Indonesia that runs 50 or 60 thousand words, including text that I've punched in from other sites that Chat also remembers, all in context, so that I can question and pick out and have chat evaluate constantly.  Whereas the company I work for had some bad experiences with Chat last year, they've realised that yes, all their writers can produce about four times as much work each month in relatively less time.  I'm not discouraged from using Chat; I'm encouraged.  And everyone I know whose working in any field associated with writing right now will same the same — privately.  Publicly, this isn't supposed to be common knowledge.  Publicly, the narrative is being run by those companies who are directly threatened by Chat.  Publicly, the general population, who know nothing about writing, or how to do research, or anything about where words actually come from, are being told, "There's nothing to see here, move on, move on."  Which they are doing gratefully.

When I had that conversation about "lore," I wasn't looking for an answer to the question, "what is lore," but rather to expose that the whole matter and subject of lore is really just propaganda being used to sell company products, especially those products that have become stale and old as the years have passed. But if we repackage those products as "lore," this gives them a specific specialised flavour that encourages "true believers" to invest themselves towards the whole cannon, not just the works they've happened to buy. It's the same strategy we're seeing with Marvel and many other products, whose "shout out" mechanism for past glories pushes the stay-invested model.

Chat's answers, as the short back-and-forth I published earlier today explained, were dredged out of the industry's garbage-writing "lore" of a different kind ... the endless propagandistic dredge of reasons why we should all keep buying D&D products and thinking about the game in such and such terms, feeding the fanboy game player's need to "keep on top of what's happening" all the time.  Asking Chat these questions is much like those conversations I used to have on boards like RPGNet many, many years ago, where I'd spend time trying to corner some true believer into admitting that character backgrounds or game balance was really just a lot of bullshit.  The difference is that Chat won't move the goal posts; it won't derail the argument into some other discussion; it won't devolve into name calling or mockery or attempts to get others to dogpile as a means of winning the argument.  It'll try, as best it can, to argue the point on its merits ... which can be fun, as with something like "lore," there are no merits.

Some will say that you can make Chat say anything you want.  That you can argue it in a circle until it spits out whatever answer you think it ought to spit.  I don't think I asked leading questions in my example.  It's fairly easy to see when Chat got stumped; it helplessly repeated itself because there was no other answer except to repeat the propaganda.  This is how propaganda always is.  The only reason it "works" in human context is by those strategies I just named.  Proponents of sexism, racism, gun violence, abortion, whatever we might name, succeed in their rhetoric by moving goal posts, gish galloping, derailing, appealing to authorities, half-truths, name calling or any number of other deceptions.  This is what intelligent people do to maintain their biases.

Chat isn't intelligent.  It doesn't think at all.  It's bound by what it knows.  And what it knows is tons and tons of both good stuff and crap that's been dumped on the internet these last 30 years.  Digging into that is like putting on gloves to go dumpster diving.  Messy, full of possible sharp objects, not nice smelling ... but at the same time, people throw out a phenomenal number of interesting things.

I think it's interesting to pluck them out and turn them this way and that.

For Clarification

Me.  When you give replies around a specific subject, you obtain the details for that reply from other internet sites, yes?

Chat.  No, that's not how I work. My responses are generated based on the vast amount of text data I was trained on, which includes websites, books, articles, and other text sources up until my last training cut-off in January 2022. I don't access the internet in real-time to retrieve specific information for responses. Instead, I generate responses based on patterns and information learned during training. So, while I can provide information and answers on a wide range of topics, I can't access or retrieve real-time data from the internet.

Me.  So you access the internet as it was.

Chat.  That's correct. I was trained on a diverse dataset that includes text from the internet up until my last training cut-off in January 2022. However, I don't have the ability to access or retrieve information from the live internet. My responses are based solely on the information and patterns present in the data I was trained on. If you have any questions or need information within the scope of my training data, feel free to ask!

Me.  And the responses you give on subjects, say dungeons and dragons, is based on the information you were fed before 2022

Chat.  Exactly. When you ask me about specific subjects like Dungeons and Dragons, my responses are generated based on the knowledge and understanding I gained from the text data I was trained on, which includes information about Dungeons and Dragons up until January 2022. My responses are a reflection of the information and patterns present in that training data.