Something To Do Today

That is, if you're serious-minded about learning how complicated a world can get.  I mentioned that I had been doing research into India.  I finished Italy about six weeks ago and I decided to work on the eastern edge of my 'known' world rather than start on France, which would logically have come next.

Well, I stumbled across a remarkable text that the University of Chicago has put online in, well, what appears to be its entirety.  In addition to links which lead to both general and city maps of the Indian subcontinent circa 1909, there's a massive Gazatteer of India.  You can find Volume 1 here.

This in itself isn't all that remarkable.  It is just an overview of India, climate, botony, zoology, ethnology, population and so on.  However, what stuns me is that this is only volume 1 of 24.

Volume 2 launches into an historical overview, including numismatics (which ought to keep you busy for a little while), prehistoric antiques, pre-European literature and a nice section on Early European settlements.

Volume 3 is all trade and commerce.  I don't want to dig extensively into it, but there are some nice tables and data going back to the 1860s.  I am under the opinion that for D&D, statistical accuracy is not so important as getting data as close to the medieval period as possible.  Backcountry India in the mid-nineteenth century was virtually indistinguishable - technologically - from the medieval period.

Volume 4 ought to be of interest to everyone, whether or not you have any intention of running anything like the real world.  For example, this section on land use:

"Hedges and walls are, as a rule, unknown; at harvest time the waving fields of rice, wheat, or other food-grains reach almost without interruption to the horizon; and in intervals between the harvests an equally uninterrupted stretch of shimmering heat-baked soil fades away into the haze.  Every morning during the cultivation season the Indian peasant - the most frugal and patient in the world - goes out to his fields with his cattle to work his well or to plough his land: and every evening he returns to his thatched cottage by the trees or his mud-built house in the closely packed village.  His wants, such as they are, are met by the local artisans and menials, whom he rewards with customary contributions from his harvest."

How sweet is that?  I love these very old books, since the description borders on poetic.  The above paints as nice an image as any DM could want, one which easily translates to a hundred worlds and a hundred imagined races - always giving, of course, a stronger sense of the world that the characters find themselves in, and which the DM must hold in mind if the world is to feel real.

There's 38 pages on land revenue, 29 pages on local and municipal government, 58 pages on the army, 14 pages on currency and banking ... all this in just volume 4.

Volumes 5 through 24 is the core of the Gazatteer, with individual entries on hundreds and hundreds of regions, cities and villages, as well as geographical features, all written in the aforementioned style and with emphasis on strictly geographical and historical features.  It, too, tends to be poetical.  I leave you with a description of the battle at Aliwal (which I cannot improve upon).  I stumbled across it as one of the pages in the gazatteer.  There's tons and tons of stuff, of every kind:

"The Sikh force, which amounted to about 15,000 men, was posted in the lowlands close to the Sutlej [river], with the right resting on the village of Bhundri on the high bank, and the left on Aliwal close to the river.  East of Bhundri the high bank or ridge, which separates the valley of the Sutlej from the uplands, sweeps inwards in a semicircle to the distance of 5 or 6 miles, crowned with villages at intervals, and leaving a wide open plain between it and the river.  It was across this plain that the British army on the morning of January 28 [1846] moved to the attack, the capture of the village of Aliwal, the key of the position, being the first object.  The Sikh guns were as usual well served; but Aliwal was in the hands of inferior troops, and the resistance was spiritless.  By the capture of the village the Sikh left was turned; but round Bhundri their right, composed of enthusiastic Khalsa troops (trained by Europeans), made a most determined stand, and the whole battle is still called by the natives the fight of Bhundri.  The most gallant part of the action was the charge of the 16th Lancers on the unbroken Sikh infantry, who received them in squares.  Three times the Sikhs were ridden over, but they reformed at once on each occasion; and it was not till the whole strength of the British was brought to bear on them that they were at length compelled to turn their backs.  The Sikh troops were either driven across the river, in which many of them were drowned, or dispersed themselves over the uplands.  The British losses were considerable, amounting to 400 men killed and wounded.  A tall monument, erected in the centre of the plain to the memory of those who fell, marks the scene of the action."

Creativity and Breast-Feeding

Three weeks ago, Trollsmyth linked to a Newsweek article about creativity called 'The Creativity Crisis,' an article pitching the argument that creativity is an inherent quality and that it is something society is in danger of losing. Having established (through typical journalistic bias) from one source the existence of a ‘creativity score’ for individuals, the article naturally sells the fear that “creativity scores are declining,” rushing to blame TV and videogames, with the lack of creativity development in schools as the third culprit.

The article at one point bemoans, “All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions ...” – then claiming that it takes a ‘healthy marketplace’ to allow a populace to either be receptive to ideas or contribute.

The whole article is written in typical Newsweek style, punching forward the political agendas that the magazine has become famous for and making sure that you keep reading in case some terrible calamity might result when people no longer have ideas!

It's a big steaming pile of hooey, of course ... but Trollsmyth only wants to pull out the small bit about creativity being learnable and I can't fault him for the paragraph he chose.

Putting it more succinctly, my first wife went to high school with a very tall fellow who didn't play basketball, saying he didn't know how ... and the coach told him, "We can teach you how to play basketball - we can't teach you how to be tall."

There are, obviously, millions of ideas in the world, brilliant and otherwise, that won't be advanced in our lifetimes because they step on someone's toes, or are simply too difficult for a tight-fisted public to implement.  Ideas only have value if they can be sold - that's the guts of our world.  'Reception' of an idea in this culture, the one that pays Newsweek's bills, is the willingness of your average stranger to open up his or her wallet and give you twenty bucks.

But seriously, fuck all that.  There's an enormous amount of creativity that goes on continuously without money changing hands that doesn't have much to do with the marketplace, and is therefore of no interest to Newsweek.  It interests me, however, and I'd like to tackle the question that Trollsmyth quotes.\

Is creativity learnable?

I'd like to advance an unqualified YES.  But that's not going to do many of you a lot of good.  Because, you see, it isn't easily learnable.

Many of you are creatively working on worlds and developing adventures, and so you've learned that creation is hard.  Particularly, extended creation.  As the progress of your world increases, the number of variables and tasks that suggest themselves starts to seem like an insurmountable list ... leading to a great number who quit.  Those who quit simmer unhappily for months in their creative juices until they launch themselves into a new world, a new idea, a new game, hoping that THIS time the process will prove something within their scope of achievement.

I know something about creativity.  I'm going to take advantage of the evidence this blog provides to try to make a few points here about how you become more creative, and how you get to be better at it.  And since I'm a contentious old bugger, I'm not going to be nice about it.  Here's what you do:

Get Your Mouth Off The Tit

If you've been playing this game more than two to three years as a DM, and you are still buying modules and considering playing a new gaming system that's just come out, you have a dependency problem.  I think that twenty years ago it was worthwhile looking into new things, since a lot of the stuff that was being created and advanced in the world of RPG was actually new.  But there is an enormous amount of written material that has been piled up already, and you should have had plenty of time to peruse the lion's share of it in the space of three years (assuming you're serious about the craft - if you're not, what the fuck are you reading me for?).

If this is your twentieth year and you're still checking out the shelf at your gaming store for new games you've never heard of before, there's only one thing I have to say to you: you have a fetish.  For the love of the game, RPGs are not like the medical profession. There aren't any mind-boggling changes in the technology that you need to keep abreast of year-by-year.  If you're not happy with the combat tables that you have, after three years you ought to be expert enough to make your own tables.  What in hell is wrong with you?  Why are you plonking down another $25 dollars on another module when by this time you probably have more experience playing the game than the fuckwit designer?

Okay, that's harsh.  But at some point its time to take stock of your life and ask yourself why you haven't learned how to draw rooms on a map and fill them with monsters and treasure.  You're obviously lacking where it comes to using your brain - it's time to dust the cobwebs off that thing and put it to use.

Yes, true, you probably won't design a dungeon as flashy and nuanced as the really great stuff you can find online ... but that's because you've had your lips firmly suckered to the tit all this time.  It's time to pull back and recognize that mother's milk doesn't need to be your favorite food any more.  Yes, with the end of the sucking there's going to be a lot of bad designing in your future.  But that's only because you should have been practicing, instead of becoming the best tit-hound in your neighborhood.

So, Expect To Be Bad At This ... For Awhile

If you had started creating your own shit at the right time, ie. the same month you were introduced to the game, you'd be way ahead of where you are now.  But you didn't, and you're older and you've got regular players now who have been sucking at the tit second-hand.  Thus, you will need to beg their forgiveness for your laziness and you will need to inform them that for a little while your world isn't going to be the first-rate puzzle-fest its been for the last however many years.  Chances are, some of them are going to raise an eyebrow at you, making flat out statements about your intellect and your abilities - hey, admit it, some of them don't think you're very bright.  Why?  Well, you've tried playing your own invented adventures in the past and you were really, really bad at it.  So bad, in fact, that there's been a tacit agreement among your players to quit your world if you even think about having an original thought again.

You see, they're only in your world because you've proven yourself to be the very best dunder-headed narrator serving as the vocal link between your players and the unseen and aforementioned designer.  You've been the convenient moneybag who has schlepped your way to the store every couple of months to plunk down the cash to buy the module to make it possible for your players to live vicariously through your blind acceptance of this routine.  They don't give a rat's ass about YOU - anyone reading the module would be satisfactory for them.  Chances are, as they slouch out of your kitchen promising never to return until you see some sense and agree to go back to running someone else's modules, they are right now deciding who will be the module-reader that takes your place.  If you're very, very lucky (as far as they are concerned), they'll let you sit in on the next Captain Dunsel's world.

If you have a backbone (get yourself tested if you're not sure), you'll wave good-bye to those discourteous assholes and accept that for a year or two you'll be running your children, your wife, your grandmother and possibly your dog in your world.  You have just entered the chrysalis stage of dungeon mastering.  This is the period when you'll sit and scratch out dungeon after dungeon, before contemplating the possibility of improving the dungeon generation tables in the DMs Guide.  This will help train you in the creation of tables, encouraging you to read a book or two about caves and caverns, and ultimately about the wilderness when it occurs that you should waste months and months struggling with an outdoor encounter table that might conceivably work.  And when you're done with that, you'll find yourself hip deep in the sketching out of  a world and its inhabitants and you won't even care that you haven't any players.

But nothing is going to work for awhile.  Face it, you haven't done much of this creativity stuff and every attempt you're going to make will fall far, far short of even Jerry Bruckheimer's limited imagination.  But I encourage you to stay with it, to improve and expand your world, at least until you get to the point where working on the actual world is something you'd do even if you never had any players again.

That doesn't always happen.  A lot of would-be independent-minded DMs return to the tit, begging forgiveness from their players and returning to the same hopeless state of mind they're utterly trapped by.  A particular few will raise that state of mind to the Nth degree, as though it is some kind of virtue to speak upon or write scads of drudged up verbiage about someone else's achievements.  I understand there's even a measure of respect or humble worship to be gained by such coattail-riding.  I can't speak to that myself.  I haven't got any experience with tit-sucking.  I was bottle-fed as a baby.

Creativity is a trait that is learned from practice.  If you won't practice - and that being if you won't do the work - you won't get better at it.

But if you do stay with it, the day will come when one of your old players, or one of the new ones you've gained, will say to you, "You have a great world!"  And from this you will realize, at last, that they are talking about the world you made, and not the world you bought from Sal's bargain-bin on 18th Ave and Cheap Street.

The Great RPG

There is a very good reason that sandbox play doesn't work.  It is bound up with the same reason why D&D will never become a truly widespread game.

People suck at it.

This is not a fault of the game itself, or of the rule books failure to properly describe how the game should be played.  I agree that there are inadequacies there, but the best written description slash how-to guide on how to role-play would still fail to lift many an individual's ability to play this game.  The limitation exists in an much larger context, that of life itself, and the way that people approach life.

People suck at that, too.

This is a rather large accusation to make, and will be received contentiously by most, with consideration by some, and with vigorous head-nodding by a very, very few.  I don't propose to convince anyone from Group One - this is the sort that will never play this game, or will cheerfully play it without much introspection, very much the way they move through their lives.  I don't need to convince Group Three; they already know exactly what I'm talking about, and are reading from this point on only to feel comforted that they are not alone in the world.  Group Two could go one way or the other.

Role-play, particularly in the sandbox mode, is the process of assessing one's surroundings and then taking action upon that assessment.  The wider the scope of the game, the more options one has to assess and choose from, and the less certain the outcome following any given action.  Much is dependent upon the DM; a vindictive adjudicator will tip the balance against the player and reduce the willingness of players to take any action at all.  A benevolent adjudicator will typically highlight what actions will yield the best returns, or alternately might ensure that any action would guarantee a reward.  Either, taken to the extreme, makes for a bad gaming experience, but that's not important right now.

If I might suggest, real life is a cold, callous condition of existence, albeit deeply compelling and at times unimaginable blessed.  I remember a bite from Spalding Gray's film, Swimming to Cambodia, that was attributed to Athol Fugard: "Spalding!  The sea's a lovely lady when you play in her ... but if you play with her, she's a BITCH!  Play in the sea, yes, but never play with her.  You're lucky to be here!  You're lucky to be alive!"

My point would be that nature is as heartless a DM as it gets - and setting out to assess the real world and take action in the real world has consequences that no RPG can offer.  Which would be the principal reason why most people occupying their bit of space in the day-to-day world don't assess their situation and they don't take action.

That is ... with a sandbox frame of mind.

I don't know about the gentle reader, but my parents were very much of the railroading mentality where it came to playing the Great RPG of Life.  Get your education, get your job, get your partner, get your house, get your benefits, raise the kids, get your retirement and get your gravestone.  This is the game as outlined to virtually every middle-class child, with public relations support from everywhere, from the teacher and principle right through the minister and soccer coach.  And sad to say, this is the game as people play it.

There are benefits to playing the game this way.  The education gets you the reputation, which gets you the job, which gives you the money to impress the spouse and to buy the house.  Keep your head down, don't make waves, don't step out of the box and you will get your benefits and you will get your retirement and eventual gravestone.  No promises on what sort of assholes your children will turn out to be, though.

Plugging yourself into the mindset makes a really lousy RPG player, however.  Adventure is not a plug-and-play routine; it isn't clear cut and there are no road signs.  It requires a frame of mind that is prepared to dispute the PR and risk the path not taken.  And for those people who have thought along the same mundane life patterns since being teenagers, it isn't likely they're going to understand D&D.  Hell, they have trouble understanding the motivations of movie characters, for gossakes.

I'm going a long way around the barn here, but look ... ordinarily, we have our days planned out for us, even if we do the planning ourselves.  We know we have to be at work if this is Monday.  We know we have to mow the lawn if this is Sunday, because we know it has to be done before the weekend is over.  We know that this being Saturday, it's the only practical day for us to go to the mountains if we want.  And we know that this being Friday, we can drink hard and have plenty of time to recover before we have to work again.

We take the vacation when we're allowed - but every year that is simultaneously the most fun we have and the worst trouble we have ... because it's the small part of our lives we spend outside the box.  The hotel isn't what it was supposed to be, the flight is delayed, the island is being hit by a hurricane this weekend, the window of our car was smashed while we were parked at the beach and so on.  The relief we feel upon getting back home, where life makes sense again, describes our perception of actual role-play right down to the ground.

Which may be the reason why so many D&D players are social drop-outs.  We are not success-focused, we teach our kids how to play the game Friday nights rather than getting drunk, our university backgrounds tend to be more 'liberal' than practical and half the time we're either looking for work or starting a new job.  I don't speak for every reader, obviously ... but there's a connection to be made between having a fascination with the game and living your life on the fly.  I think that many players - those that I've met, certainly - are the sort that if circumstances had been just right, we would have been Jason Bourne; but we were sick the day the C.I.A. checked out our high school (here in Canada, that would be C.S.I.S.).  There's a certain unrealized potential that stalks us - or so we believe - and we make up for that by playing the game.

Those who are happy in their rut will never understand that motivation.  In fact, they will always be a bit fearful of it.  They have learned to associate anything new with stress ... and thus they would find themselves at the gaming table feeling uncomfortable.  They don't rise to the bait of an uncertain situation - instead, it makes them self-conscious of their own perceived stupidity.  They would rather return to their gardens, their pets and their summer cottages, where no measurement is invoked to indicate the success of their contribution - measurements such as character progression or character death.

We are strange people who find an urge to gauge our weekend by such things.  We have no idea how strange we are.

References

A couple of things.

I want people to know that if they find a desire to ask a question in the comments on something that I wrote months, or years ago, they should do so with the reassurance that I will do my best to answer, under that same post.  All comments feed to my email, and I usually check there and not the blog itself, so a comment on something I wrote in June 2008 has as much chance of being noticed by me as a comment on something right now.

I don't have that many people crying out for my attention that I can't answer everyone that asks.  If the day comes and I become a national celebrity (yeah, like immediately before someone shoots me dead), then you might be disappointed asking a question in a comment.  But for now, none of us need worry about that.

Alexis, the Day he becomes famous.

A second point, which has been brought up in three different emails in the past week, would be in reference to the trade tables post from some weeks ago. 

It is a question about the number of "references" that a thing has, the confusion arising from my assertion that the greater the number of references, the greater the value of a particular thing.  If the system has 20 references to grain, and you double that number, shouldn't the price be reduced to half?

The difficulty is in the natural assumption that more references is equal to a greater supply, and we all know that as the supply climbs, price falls.  That is the error.  'References' does not refer to supply at all.  It refers to importance.

I dreamed up the term to describe the number of mentions that different products got from the set of encyclopedias I used in order to create the system.  An author writing about, say, Barcelona, only has a certain amount of space in which to list the various things that the city makes.  He will naturally center on those manufactures that have the greatest importance, as determined by the economic value the item represents.  I'm not suggesting that the author has taken the time to measure this importance, but I am suggesting that there is a sociological habit of grading things automatically.

As a culture, we place a high value on gold, or the manufacture of steel, or certain types of food.  I was virtually guaranteed that anyone writing about Holland would mention cheese and chocolate a great deal, while anyone writing about Spain probably would not; it isn't that Spain doesn't produce cheese and chocolate, it is just that in that region those two items don't amount to very much importance.  In Spain, there are many references to wine, olives, fruits, spices and so on ... things that wouldn't be mentioned in Holland.

If I were pulling the information from a few dozen sources, this would be utterly worthless.  However, I went through the encyclopedia page by page, and identified every article that was written about a city, a province or region, a country, a river, a sea, mountains, plateaus, forests and so on.  And because the encyclopedia I chose was from 1952, the emphasis of the encyclopedia itself was not extraordinarily on science and technology, but upon social science and history - such as it was with encyclopedias in that day and age, when space was still viewed as an impossibility, when oil was not yet discovered in many parts of the world (and much of the industry still ran on coal), when medicine and biology were still comparatively in the dark ages ... etcetera.

Thus, the Colliers Encyclopedia from 1952 is rife with descriptions of far away places, down to the smallest cities and with special emphasis on every geographical and cultural entity that was known to exist in that day.  The total number of articles describing geographical features (and their production, which I also believe was a more important consideration then) exceeds five thousand.  Holland has more than fifty references, and Spain has around a hundred and seventy five.  And I have methodically and pedantically combed through each one, starting with Russia and the old parts of the Soviet Union in 1998, writing down each reference when I came to it, occasionally stumbling across a reference I never heard of before and finding myself pressed to fitting it into the system as need be.

This is why, when finding more than 500 references to wheat and more than 2,300 references to every kind of cereal (including barley, gram, millet, sorghum, teff, tucusso, rye, oats, maize and wheat), I tend to think that the total importance of cereals is a lot greater than the exactly 2 references I've found for paprika.  And yet, pound for pound, the tremendous total value of cereals being 1150 times that of paprika, it is paprika that is far more expensive than wheat.  Paprika, even when it is produced, is not grown in great amounts.

That is why the greater the number of references, the greater the value of the product.  If the thing is mentioned at all, it is accorded a greater value than things which are not mentioned.  It is a sociological logic, similar to counting words in educational textbooks to get a grasp of what words have the greatest familiarity for readers, and therefore should be used in political stump speeches to obtain the greatest possible comprehension from the greatest number of listeners.

My Parents Are Dead

Yessir.  Yes, and I do have a hunger for revenge.  No sir, I wouldn't lie about that.  I very much want to join your party.

Sorry sir?  Yes, I am a dwarf, that's obvious sir, but ... yes sir.  I do hate elves.  Oh, absolutely.  Can I work with them in the same party?  Of course sir.  I'm ready to help them, heal them, keep 'em from falling in pits and all that stuff, and at the same time repeat often and to the point of annoyance that I hate 'em.  Yes, sir, I can count dead as we both fight, if it's important sir.  Well, I admit, I'm not overly laconic ... oh yes sir, I can do the stomping and pouting part fine, but at just the point where I'm supposed to insert a bit of humor, well sir, I never seem to think of anything.  Right sir.  I am willing to work on that.

Do I love gold?  Pretty much sir.  Helps a fellow along, don't it.  I'm sorry sir?  Do I love gold just for the sake of having it?  I don't know, since you put it that way - well, most people do exchange it for things, and most of the time I like to pick up an extra thing or - no sir.  No sir, I'm not trying to be difficult.  Well how much gold would I be expected to faun over, say, in round figures sir.  That much?  I don't know about that ... I suppose ...

Yessir, I want to be part of your party.  I'll hoard whatever gold you tell me to sir.

Do I love ale?  Now, that is an issue, sir.  To be honest, I have a physician that tells me ... well he tells me that it's a lot easier to march long distances if ... pardon me sir, just prattling on.  How many a day would I have to drink?  That many.  Could I have a little time to work up to it, sir?  Maybe one a day to start and then ... okay sir, if you want me to drink ten a day, I'll drink ten a day.  Just let me write that down.

Yes sir.  Got my quill right here sir.  Why, I've always had it.  My father always says that a dwarf ought to have an education, that it's good for him to - sir?  No, I mis-spoke.  I meant to say my father always said ... yes, that's right sir.  Yes he's dead sir.  Yes they're both dead, sir.  I'm feeling an urge for revenge right now sir.  Seriously.

No, sir, I don't have a battle axe.  I've always used a bill hook, sir.  Yes sir, with a much shorter handle - kinda improvised it myself sir.  Well, if you think it isn't right ... I can learn if I have to... though sir, if it's all the same to you, it does sort of take a long time to get the hang of a battle axe.  Would it be okay if while I was learning I could go on using the hook--

No, of course not sir.  I'm really not wanting to be difficult.  Yes, I was told in advance some of the things that were expected ... no, not all the things sir.  I admit that I didn't think that a lot of this was ... yes, sir, it's important if you say it's important.  I do want to join your party, sir.

Yes, about the beard.  I'm sorry sir ... what are you trying to say sir?  If you could just come right out and say - oh, no sir.  No, cut it off years ago.  Well, it gets in my soup, sir.  Itches at night too sir.  No sir.  No, I can't do that sir.  No, it's not a religious thing, I just don't see what difference it makes.  Well hell sir, I'm willing to learn the battle axe, drink 'til I'm drunk on my feet, not spend my gold, hate elves and learn to be funny - I think that's a hell of a lot to ask for already, if you don't mind my saying so.

Well that's pretty much intolerant, sir.  I'll just say it right out, that's as fat-headed as anything I've heard.  To hell with your party, sir.  And even if you do mind it, to hell with you.  Take your party and stuff it.

You don't like that?  You don't like me?  Well you know what, sir, you know who does like me?  My parents, that's who!  Yes, they're alive.  They're alive and they're pretty decent people and I don't have any revenge in me at all.  I think I'll go home right now and have a big bowl of my mother's SOUP!  Without the hair!

I hope an otyugh farts in your face, SIR.

Hey, I Know You

This is a long and varied cliche, but let's do it all at once (I've edited the below to suit my needs - the exact wording can be found here):

"Hey, I Know You!:" You will accumulate at least three of these obligatory party members:

• The spunky princess, rebelling against her royal parent, who is in love with the hero
• The demure, soft-spoken female mage and healing magic specialist who is not only in love with the hero, but is also the last survivor of an ancient race.
• The tough-as-nails female warrior who is NOT in love with the hero (and the only female character in the game who has any deformity, such as a spectacular scar, a missing eye, cyborg limbs and so on).
• The achingly beautiful gothy swordsman who is riven by inner tragedy.
• The big, tough, angry guy who, deep down, is a total softy 
• The hero's best friend, who is actually much cooler than the hero.
• The grim, selfish mercenary who over the course of the game learns what it means to really care about other people.
• The character who is actually a spy for the bad guys, but will instantly switch to your side when you find out about it.
• The nauseatingly cute mascot who is useless in all battles.

And so, we're going to talk about 'roleplaying.'

What I want to say from the outset is that developing a worthy, interesting character, either as a player or as a DM, is a difficult proposition - difficult enough that it has stumped writers for generations, leading to the kind of cliches above that have been presented by everyone from bad 17th century playrights, right through cheesy Hollywood Serials writers and the sort of hacks now writing for video companies.  A good character takes time and it takes enormous effort.  Realistically, it takes the writer who is able to bend the events of unreality in order to make the character seem plausible and likeable.  When I am writing fiction, my chief concern is the motivation of my characters - to make those motivations clear, and to draw my reader into the mindset of the various players in the story, I twist and turn the story in just such a way as to provide the characters to show their bravery and chicanery, their strengths and their flaws, their altruism and their selfishness.

RPGs are shit for producing this sort of nuance.

And thus you are stuck with the sort of crap where Mighty Knight #1 talks in Bravado English ("I have come to rescue the FAIR princess") only to be answered in like manner by Posing Bad Guy #3.  Speaking for myself, I find the whole affair a little vomit inducing ... as do my players, who aren't interested in performing the equivalent of cheap street theatre.  None of them consider themselves to be actors; not a one has any ambitions in that direction.

I have at least had experience with the foolish process of standing in front of audiences and improvising; so I will throw it into my campaigns, delivering a speech by so-and-so or playing up an NPC so as to give the campaign some color.  But I don't demand this of my players for one simple reason.  They don't like doing it.

Quickly I've been covering two different things: it isn't easy to invent a good character, and often players have no interest in trying.  That is because, realistically, most self-aware people know their own limitations, and would feel like a fool playing either the gruff mercenary or the soft-spoken princess - the best they feel they are likely to invent, if pressed to do so.

Now, at this point some jack-hole is going to pipe up in the comments and say, "Hey!  It's fun to be foolish, and an RPG is there to give us the opportunity!  Hooray!"  He probably won't hear me here, now, when I say beforehand, fuck all that.  I know there's a hugely vocal contingent of RPGs who somehow think that D&D is really just a gateway drug to LARP or the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I and my players don't roll that way.  We're the sort of sardonic, cynical bastards who see fuckwits cavorting around in said manner and wonder what's happened with their medication.

'Roleplaying' - for us - does not accurately describe the game as we play it.  We do not view D&D as our great chance to shine the flashlight on our egos, but as a problem-solving game.  I do not think we are alone in this.  I suspect there are many thousands of players who would like to go to conventions without having to dress up like a freak.  I also feel there are many who feel the 'pretending' that has been incorporated as a must-have feature of the game smacks of infantile, childish regression.

You know, back to an age when cheesy characterizations looked fresh and noble.

I can't say I expect to make a lot of points with this argument among a lot of those I've seen; the internet tends to pull the reality-challenged to its warm and porny bosom.  But if the gentle reader does find that they're running in a world that seems to skirt over the issue of roleplaying in favor of straight gamesmanship, realize that you are not alone.

It is enough that we know what our characters can do.

It is enough that we puzzle out the world and gamble our character's talents to that solution.

It is enough to watch our characters grow in power and possibility.  It is enough that we achieve through our efforts and dream up greater goals as the game goes on.  It is enough that we love our characters for the time we've invested.

We need not bark like actors on the lighted stage if it doesn't interest us.  We need not fabricate pathos and angst, nor concern ourselves with motivation.  We can leave that to the playwrites if that is their thing.

We only need play D&D in the way it makes us happy.

Don't Bug Me, I'm Working

Reality intervenes.

Of late I have been furiously working on maps, sketching out large areas and purposefully choosing to work on India, a large region that is habitually forgotten when it comes to myth or culture.  I admit, I would find running a campaign in India a difficult task, despite the reading I've done on that part of the world.  It all seems to sink out of sight when compared with what's needed to know - like throwing stones into the water, hoping someday they'll pile up and let you build a bridge.  If a party ever wound up there, I'd do my best, but I'd fall far short of the real thing, I'm sure.

Sometimes, when I know I should be doing other things, I lose myself in map-making, or rewrites, or some other design feature ... and very little gets posted on the blog because, for the most part, everything is in mid-creation and nothing is good enough to print.  Sometimes it is because I won't spend the time to transform the material into something the web will recognize; I work on computer, but it takes time to reformat a publisher file or to tidy up things from Excel ... and so it doesn't get done.

But I am working, and creating, and thinking up new things that I'll eventually get onto this blog.  I know that many the gentle reader comes here to find the meat and potatoes I've asked for from other blogs, and I do think I've done that well this last month ... but at present the meat is still on the hoof and the potatoes in the field, so there's little to show.

For far too long I have been meaning to write a post on 'Theology' which would fit into the civilization posts, but I need a particular set of resources to write it from, and those books are sitting on a shelf in my study, untouched and gathering dust.  At some point when I'm at home I'll think to write it out.

In the meantime I have my sardonic, hateful nature, meaning that I'll probably write another post about cliches this week and I'll likely choke out a post about something else that annoys me as well - as soon as I can find something that annoys me.  Lately I've been uncommonly content, which is good for my nature and those close to me but lousy as an inspiration for written posts.

Hooks Galore

Because two of my players have officially hit name level, I am now at that point that many people think characters should be retired ... the ‘endgame.’ I’ve read the squad of people calling for a ‘restoration’ of the endgame, as though somehow DMs couldn’t work out for themselves and their players whether this is something the party wants or doesn’t want. And I’ve read about the difficulties (boring accounting) with regards to players building strongholds and having to work through the procedure of working out the production value of their lands, the multitude of soldiers and other hirelings, taxes and general management of the whole headache.


And I think, how small these imaginations be.

It is as though the fiefdom the characters create somehow exists in a bubble. They build their castle, they hire, they pump out food for the hirelings to eat and now and then they fend off some entity that invades. And that, my gentle readers, seems to be it.

A siege mentality IS a dull campaign, particularly when it comes after adventuring, plumbing the depths of the earth and ascending to the skies. Why would the characters now care about stone and food? They have solved great puzzles, turned back the tides of evil, hurled down villains from heights that would dizzy the eagles and they have scourged the seas and lands clean.

And you offer them ... farming.

Now, I don’t downplay the importance of food production, or of fortification building. They have to have somewhere to store their stuff. By now, they’ve accumulated an awful lot of stuff ... and beasts, and possibly princesses (why is it no one ever keeps a cute prince in a tower?). So sure, there’s going to be a few runnings where these living arrangements get hammered out; my party is crying out for this right now, telling me they want a running or two just to do accounting.

No problem, you know I’m ready for them.

But I’m not building the rest of my campaign on accounting, and damn it, I’m not going to launch into another five month battle scenario anytime soon. So what is to be done?

Let’s parse it out:

My party’s land does not exist in a vacuum. They requested some aid from the Graf (or Lord) next door to lend a hand in wiping out the military force equivalent to a sizable town: 450 regulars in all. Despite considerable losses, the Graf’s men who survived improved considerably in strength and power and the Graf walked away with a substantial pile of treasure. Because the Graf lived, and because the party was seen to act bravely and respectful of the Graf’s soldiers and the Graf’s interests, they’ve made themselves a friend – one who is more powerful than he was at the outset.

A friend who was already on the ‘inside’ as regards to the Kingdom’s power structure.

In the game months following the combat, the party can expect to be introduced to a number of interested parties – some who will come to look at the devastation out of interest, and some who will come for the currency the battle generated. For awhile, this is the most interesting thing to happen this season. The party will find themselves visited by the high mucky-mucks of the kingdom: the Archbishop, a Cardinal or two, the Magician’s high councilmember, the kingdom’s general and probably half his staff, the heir to the throne (who has the time and would come to learn), representatives of virtually every artisan’s and merchant’s guild imaginable, the Burgomeisters of a dozen large towns surrounding the fief where the battle took place ... and so on. Because this particular fief shares a border with the Ottoman Turks, there will probably been the right-hand subordinate of the nearest Emir (administering the bordering province) and a messenger from the Sultan himself (on a fact-finding mission). Minor lackeys from a number of kingdoms around (Poland, Hungary, Hapsburg Austria and the Grand Duchy of Kiev) might show up for similar reasons, as those kingdoms learn of the event from their resident ambassadors – very likely, an ambassador might pop around just out of interest. No doubt, the local thieves guild and assassin’s guild will drop by without announcement, along with secret members of a dozen groups such as the Illuminati and the Gnomes of Zurich, the Jesuits and other fraternal orders, the Servants of Cthulhu and heaven knows who else ... skulking around, asking questions, assessing the possible threat offered by these newcomers, all to determine whether they are friend or foe.

Each of these individuals and groups will form a first impression of the party, depending on how that first meeting goes. Each individual will have questions to ask, and expectations, and promises, and offers ... and somewhere down the line, inside information, alliances or threats – depending on how they were affected by the party.

More than that, all of these people will have problems ... investigations that need doing, information that needs finding, groups that need putting down and groups that need capital and support. They will be asking the party to ‘back them’ when they make a threat against such and such. The party will be expected to take a part in ‘posturing,’ or throwing their weight around with little expectation that it really will come to fighting ... for the good of the kingdom, or their allies, you understand.

They may be asked to ‘look the other way’ when they casually put a knife in the Prince in the adjacent city ... and to conduct a search for the murderer in a slipshod manner – something the party will need to accomplish without arousing the suspicion of some do-gooder amongst their own soldiers.

Or asked to pursue, or not pursue, particular persons ... which either way will piss someone off, who won't seek compensation through battle, but through spreading rumors.

After all of that, a stand up fight will be a relief. In any case, anytime the party wants to start one, there will be plenty of opportunities to go around, what with every cretinous power-hungry crew rattling their sabres at each other, not to mention the occasional oblivious group of adventurers stumbling through the landscape haphazardly cutting down a critical member of this secret council or that.

Endgame? What the hell are you talking about?

The Computers And Tao

Mincer of Logic asks, “At what point did you change to managing everything electronically.”


There's an obvious answer, and that would be six years. But that cheats me of being allowed to talk at length about myself, so I’ll take Option B and attend to my own ego.

My first experience with computers pre-dates my involvement with D&D. I was 13 years old, and as part of a unit for school we learned how computers worked and were taught to do basic programming – with punch cards. For those lucky souls who have no experience with it, they were cards that were a little larger than 7x3 inches, where the calculations were accomplished by little holes that were punched into the cards and read by computer. We were taught how the machine worked that punched holes in the cards, and we were taught how it took one card to provide one line of programming.

Yes, I literally grew up in the dark ages.

On some level everyone knew that computers were going to expand and get more complicated, but I want to say that the attitude in 1978 was much the same as the attitude right now – that it is all changing very fast, that most of the ‘big’ changes had already been made, that paper was obsolete and so on. Time marches on but the song remains the same.

I don’t want to get into a history about computers, but we’re going past that particular event at the moment so I want to get my licks in before moving on. Computers got to be more common by the time I entered high school, the cards disappeared and we moved into that glorious time when everyone was told that if they didn’t learn Fortran and Cobal they’d be LOST in the future – incapable of doing, well, anything. But around my last year in grade school a friend of mine got a VIC 20 and we used it for his Traveller campaign ... mostly to do math, like a big calculator.

But I knew enough about basic programming that as I got access to computers through the first half of the eighties, I knew how to use it to generate random results ... I remember spending untold amounts of time programming the random dungeon from the DMG into basic, to the degree that it worked ... though it always seemed to have one more bug in it, so I was always fixing the code. But I am getting ahead of myself, describing something I did about ’87.

I have long, long since forgotten how basic works, so don’t ask me.

My parents, being the odd sort that they are, bought an Amiga while I was still living with them – which was a piece of crap by all accounts. But the word processor worked, so I was writing fiction and working on my D&D world on computer by 1983. Up until then I’d been all paper and pencil. In 1984 I got a job with Gulf Canada as a statistical clerk, calculating well porosities for tapped-dry oil fields in Alberta and finding those that fit a certain set of parameters, all for an economic forecast that the engineering department was putting together for the future of practical drilling. The forecast was finished by March of ‘85 and I was let go ... but in the 9 months that I worked there I was introduced to Lotus ... with which I fell in love. Lotus, for those who don’t know, was the progenitor of Excel.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money for a computer that would run it, particularly since I was pursuing a questionable relationship throughout the Autumn of ’84 with an high maintenance harpy. In March of ’85, also, I fell out with my parents and at last left home. I was 21.

So following three years of destitution, having taken my income from Statistics Canada (whom I worked for in ’86) and throwing it away on my first year of University (started mid-term of Jan ’87) ... and getting married in the interim (Nov ’86) ... the only computer I could afford was a Commodore 64. This is a computer that you could, without any real knowledge about computers at all, open up and diddle around with like a toaster. But it carried me through four years of writing and gaming design, despite my never having gotten a Lotus program for it.

But the University I was attending solved that for me. You understand, I was going to university because I’d been all around the real world and I hated it – like Dan Ackroyd said, they expected ‘results.’ University was a nice womb for me, particularly when they filled the place with hundreds of Macintosh computers, all loaded up with Word and, yes you guessed it, Excel.

As a student I had unlimited access to any computer that wasn’t being used by another student ... and so many nights when I had the chance I would spend long, long hours at the university, working on D&D. Everything was on floppy disk, and I still had my Commodore at home, but between the relatively up-to-date Macs and my own piece of shit, I got a lot done. Virtually all the preliminary work that I did on my trade system (the research part) was done on a University Library computer with the whole Library at my elbow. They were good times.

In ’92 I got tired of being a student (I was starting to deliver results, that pissed off my profs, so I realized it was time to go back to the real world) – but I went on using their computers as an alumnus. In ’94 my wife’s MS ceased to be in remission, reducing her to the status of a quadriplegic, so everything else in life got put on hold. I worked, got some freelance material published, got work as an editor on a local magazine and learned how to work in MS Publisher, and watched my partner drift downhill. The magazine folded and we got very broke – and life got very hard for my daughter, my wife and I. The Commodore stopped working and D&D ceased to be any real part of my life. Then I found a government-provided nurse abusing my wife, I tossed her out the front door and was brought up on charges of assault – for which I was found guilty, because my home was technically the nurse’s place of employment. I couldn’t afford the sort of lawyer that could help me prove the abuse, you understand. My sentence was suspended in favor of my taking anger management classes – because it isn’t good to get angry at abusive caregivers – and all government services for my wife were cut off as long as she lived with me. So we separated, and I went into a very bad tailspin that lasted throughout 1997.

Finding myself alone (my daughter was living with my wife and her parents), and with lots of time, working crummy jobs that I didn’t handle well, I found myself returning to D&D for solace. In early ’98 I started using my brain again, and found the means to raise money so that I could start a business of my own. With a partner, I bought a Pentium III computer and started a small coffee shop magazine, for which I sold ads and provided intellectual content ... reading material on humanities and social science subjects, very much like the blogs I write now. We did very well, we made money, we picked up a reputation and things were looking very good after nine months. Unfortunately, old story that it is, my partner cleaned out the bank accounts to pay a court fine that was levied against him for drunk driving – an incident that coincided with my breaking my forearm and having to spend three months in a shoulder-to wrist cast. Between the two circumstances, with no one else to rely on, the magazine died.

But I had the computer, I had time (again), and in the end of 1998 I discovered the Internet. I did not like it at first – not until I discovered porn (yeh!), and soon after the possible applications for D&D. At that time I had no players, no connections to the community remaining, no relationship with anyone else playing D&D at all – and only the old AD&D books in my possession. I unearthed my papers and the old work I’d done on a variety of procedures and began to coalesce it all together into the single unified concept that I have today. Most of the first level of work was done on the Pentium – the motherboard of which still works, to this day, all 1.2 gigs of it, hooked into a different tower from a 2001 PC that I inherited from my present partner.

And now, as I said in the last post, I am practically hip deep in computers. I was able to turn my experience starting my own magazine into a job working for a national magazine, that paid nicely and made possible the existence I live at present – something in the neighborhood of low middle class.

But I want to finish this all with a last note, directed straight at Mincer.

That economic forecast that took nine months to create back in 1984/5 – I asked one of the engineers working there how long it took to do that same forecast ten years later (just about the time Gulf Canada ceased to exist) ... and he told me it would take about five minutes.

I spent nineteen years working on my world before starting in earnest in 1999. If I had had a Pentium to work with, and the Internet, in 1980, I could have done all of that 19 years of work in about as many months. When I think of all the time I spend scratching out lists by hand, and then having to do it again when I updated the list, and then having to do it again when I thought of a better way, I weep. Pen and paper, for all their nostalgic quality, is a rotten process when it comes to revision.

It is a process, in fact, that prevents revision, since as DM you are loathe to open up those tables again, to consider editing anything ... since it means useless hours copying, sore hand and all. So the tables that get made by the paper and pencil crowd are short, sketchy, limited, unimproved and overall, backwards.

Dump it. Get over the hard part, teach yourself the damn programs and get on with it. Throughout every limitation in my life, where most of the time I haven’t even had a computer, I’ve gone on learning how they work, mostly how to make them work for me.

You owe it to yourself to do the same.

Out With The Old

I was watching an old movie yesterday - The Front Page, with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, based on the play written about eighty years ago.  I recommend it.  The significant point here is, however, that at one point in the film the diminuative fugitive from the law hides himself in a roll-top desk - and seeing that, I remember that once upon a time I had dearly wanted to own one of those.

My uncle had one, and I loved the feel of it - the polished wood, the rolling lid that would come down and lock, the enclosed writing space and all the little drawers.  I imagined myself filling drawers like those with pens, pencils, erasers, little rulers and geometry tools, clips, clamps, tape, little bottles of paint, brushes and a dozen other things.  Tools that would I use for writing, and making maps, and drawing tables and painting miniatures for combats yet to come.

At this stage in my life, where with a little scrimping and saving, I could afford a desk like this.  But I will never buy one.  The computer has killed it.

I no longer have any use for any of the drawers.  I don't draw maps by hand, I don't work with sheafs of paper, I don't need clips to hold them together and I don't have miniatures anymore - the computer does it all.  Every graphic design need I have is managed - with superiority - by the glowing screen and my deft, easy movements with the mouse.  I don't even write with pen and paper any more.  Once, I had a massive callus on the middle finger of my right hand.  I would show it to people, who would open their eyes and whisper, "wow ..." as it was the size of a raisin.  I built it up through thousands of hours with pen, scratching out pages and pages of material for fiction writing and for D&D.  But it's gone now.  I rarely use a pen more than once a week now - and it always feels strange to have one in my hand.

Moreover, the rolltop desk isn't designed for a computer.  It isn't deep enough and it isn't wide enough - none that I have seen would be.  I need space for the keyboard, the tower, the two monitors I always work with, the mouse pad, the desk lamp, the books piled on both sides of the keyboard and mousepad that I'm referring to as I create, the extra lap-top when one more screen is required ... and my coffee.  Working on anything is a complicated, crushed dance that demands I don't spill my drink into anything critical - which doesn't always work out.

I am a modern designer.   I apply all the same features of design to the game that I ever did when I was designing layout for magazines ten years ago - awful, thankless work that it was (avoid if at all possible).  It is getting simpler in that with the scanner I have (something else that wouldn't fit on a roll-top desk, not to mention the printer), the books are more practical to digitalize and then refer to on-screen.  Not always, but more and more often - as scanners have softly improved over the years.

So the process isn't nostalgic, it isn't comforting and homelike, it is brutally technological and getting moreso by the decade.  I need a room twice the size of the one I'm working in now just to stretch out and get comfortable - which isn't going to happen anytime soon.

What would be really fabulous would be a room so large that the desk where I always worked was automatically at the head of a table that would seat at least eight to ten people.  Where I could swivel one of the screens around and start playing without having to schlep my books or modify my daily workstation.

Sadly, I live in an apartment, with a marvellous view of the downtown core, immediate convenience to the heart of the city and without any rooms of real dimension.  It's all about trade-offs.

Still, I might get it together to move into a house someday, with a very large, single-roomed basement.  Sounds like heaven to me.

Girls Are Geniuses Too

I'd like to throw out a quick encouragement for readers to have a look at the new link on the right, Girl Genius.  This is something I started reading about two years ago; but after reading fifteen or twenty panels, I lost interest and quit.  There wasn't a lot of text, the continuity and transitions tended to be jumpy and overall the storyline seemed like it was going to go places that didn't interest me.

I was so wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, out of boredom, I took another crack at it.  Almost immediately after the point when I'd first quit, the story started to kick in, and after about forty panels I was completely hooked.  As a story it is crazy complicated, with many, many characters and a great deal of in-story references that must be grasped to get what the story is about (and the artist seems in no way willing to stop adding characters and complexity) ... but it is funny, clever, smart and the story lines do eventually get wrapped up - or so I assume, because its two weeks later and I'm still reading.

That's because the first panel begins in November, 2002, and the happily insane artist has been producing three panels a week for the last eight years.  I'm about half way through the story at present, thoroughly enjoying that I have another comfortable week or two of reading ahead of me.  The comic is still in production, so at some time I will catch up and find myself hanging like everyone else for my weekly fix.

Give it a good try.  For those fascinated by steampunk, this is required reading.  I kid you not.

Kleptomaniac Hero

I confess.  Where it comes to the RPG cliche, "The Higher the Hair, the Closer To God," I have nothing to say.  It is a visual cliche, I don't have any real connection with anime and I'm just going to skip it.

That brings us to:

"Garrett's Principle:" Let's not mince words: you're a thief. You can walk into just about anybody's house like the door wasn't even locked. You just barge right in and start looking for stuff. Anything you can find that's not nailed down (or on fire) is yours to keep. You will often walk into perfect strangers' houses, lift their precious artifacts, and then chat with them like you were old neighbors as you head back out with their family heirlooms under your arm. Unfortunately, this never works in stores.

Morality in D&D has always been highly questionable, but all the more so when characters of so-called 'good' alignment casually walk off with the same treasure as any other character at the adventure's end.  Thou shalt not kill ... actually, its more of a guideline.  Thou shalt not steal ... listen, on the QT, this one is really for the common folk - don't you worry about it, I know you're going to have to take stuff to get the job done.

I don't play alignments, so for the most part I don't give a shit about whether my players are decent people or not - nor do they.  And treasure IS a central feature of the game's dynamic, along with ripping off the prized possession of every temple and isolated tribe from here to Panjot.

Admittedly, some players do possess a certain righteousness where it comes to treasure - thinking about the second Indiana Jones film, the 'right' thing is done by taking the stone from the evil cult and giving it back to the peaceful village ... but no one questions, ever, how this particular peaceful village obtained the stone in the first place.  They obviously did not dig it out of the ground.  Given the early history of India, I find it more likely that the bad people who like to burn people up are actually the legitimate owners ... having probably been given the stone by Shiva thousands of years earlier - who's nickname is, after all, the 'Destroyer,' and not the 'Happy Village Giver.'

Origins are important.  It is particularly laughable when Indiana, at the beginning of movie 3, shouts righteously about the Cross of Coronado (or whatever damn thing it was), "THAT SHOULD BE IN A MUSEUM!"  And then makes sure that it goes to one - an American museum, of course.  Not a Mexican Museum.  Or a Spanish Museum.  Oh no.  Let's not get crazy with our righteous indignation.

My point is that treasures actually originate from somewhere.  Tell me if this sounds familiar.  A village is raided by a party of seventy-five kobalds; the villagers appeal to the strong-looking party members to help them, and the party goes out and does that deed well, slaughtering the bad guys and plundering the treasure. They return to the village, who cheer and welcome the conquering heroes with a great feast.  The heroes re-equip and head on their happy way.

So let me get this straight.  The kobalds steal the villager's wealth; then the party steals the villager's wealth from the kobalds, calling it treasure.  They don't give ANY of it back to the village, and in gratitude for this great achievement, the villagers give food and entertainment.  Hurm.

Naturally, parties view that sort of selflessness as 'payment' or some such ... the village is rid of the kobalds, right?  Heck, they can make more money next year.  I need a sword now.  What's the problem?

Players do have a bit of a blind spot where it comes to this sort of thing.  The treasure I described in the last post, that my party just collected from the drow and their goblin horde was itself collected from neighboring hexes - and the people dwelling in the party's fief - over the previous year.  Some 500 ordinary human and elven villagers (men, women and children) were systematically massacred one village at a time, and 800 more elves, humans and other residents were driven off from an area of about 900 sq.m., in order to amass the coin and other treasure found ... but I'm sure the party hasn't considered giving a single coin to the distressed families.  Not yet.  I'll point it out, and they'll hand over some token sum.

But in fact ALL of it originated otherwise from the villains who were just killed.  However well-intentioned the party might be, a considerable number of residents have lost their homes and their possessions and won't see them returned.  Which is all well and good, this is D&D.  But is it heroic?

Face it, the answer is no.  I don't have a problem, I've always argued the players aren't expected to be fucking heroes, haven't I?

Not that there aren't proud players out there who adhere to Francis of Assisi's inspiration of poverty, who would hand back the whole kobald treasure to the village - or, at least, their share of it.  Most times, these wonderful selfless players sort of overlook their association to the more possessive members of the party, while spouting such 'worthy' rhetoric as, "Each must come to understand the goodness of generousity for themselves," or "I am here to help them see the light."

Uh huh.  To put it another way, their character is there to shore up the left flank, and help these as-yet-selfish bastards the opportunity to enrich themselves, with your character as dupe.  You know, Father Francis didn't hang out with the Pope, or the Medicis, or any of the mulititude of self-serving Italians who were around in his day.  You don't aid charity by helping plunderers plunder.  Just a small point there.

Yet this is D&D, and we have to overlook things like hypocrisy and such ... good ol' Francis would have made a pretty dull player character.

As a DM, however, I'd suggest making the local NPC's a little less grateful to players who are just thieves who steal from the local thieves.  How about when the players return to the village, the villagers tone down the joyous celebration for a bit until the party answers a simple query: "How much of OUR stuff did you get back?"

It's a fair question.