Where it comes to character generation, I've long held the belief that certain aspects of the character should not be chosen by the player. These would be things like the height and weight, eye and hair color, the profession of one's father, the total amount of coin available to the character at the start of the campaign, or the character's place of birth. I feel this way because these things are NOT a part of our choice as beings. No person gets to pick where they're born, or whether they're born poor or wealthy, or if one's father is a git or not. These are the breaks ... and a player should be pushed to play characters who are less than convenient. It builds, if the gentle reader will pardon the expression, "character."
If it happens that some players get lucky, and their character is a small lord in charge of a fiefdom at the start of the game, rather than a bum with no wealth whatsoever, then tough tookies. Life isn't fair. Overcome, adapt, win. That's the game.
There are two elements of character creation, however, that I do let the players pick, though it breaks the above logic. I would rather not make the concession, but until I get players who ask for it, the concession stands:
You get to pick your race, and you get to pick your sex.
I might put up another post about the race issue after this one. Race is one of those things that most players are flexible about. My place of birth tables, however, and the size of my world, and the relative rarity of demi-humans therein, would tend to favor humans for the most part. I could easily roll ten random characters by place of birth and have them all come out as human, particularly if the starting point were somewhere in central Germany, or India say. For the sake of players being able to play other races with more frequency, I make the concession.
But that is not the reason the concession is made regarding women characters in D&D. I think we all know the reason. Men are not for the most part comfortable playing women.
I have mentioned before, I have several women playing characters in my world, and they quite comfortably mix up the genders of their characters. They play men or women with equal interest, and don't seem to mind if I have NPC's hit on either, or if in my 17th century campaign I have male assholes make innuendos or generally insult them.
Men, on the other hand, seem to get their back up about that sort of thing. They seem to get quite uncomfortable over a whole range of potential sexual juxtapositions and circumstances.
This is not to say that male players rush to have their male characters rush into erotic circumstances, either. D&D is surprisingly conservative in the "love" motif. It's nice when eyes meet between a female and a male in the midst of a quiet moment while at the bar, listening to the local bard spin some tale. A few bits of chivalry and gentle friendliness are welcome interludes between slaughtering orcs. Nobody minds if Eowyn's eyes water a little when she finds Aragorn is alive.
But having Eowyn and Aragorn fuck hard and messy behind the king's throne in a few choice moments would spoil everything. We can be really sure that a typical male player isn't going to describe in detail how his female mage has a prediliction for cocksucking.
Straight up, I've played D&D with the same sort of people Zak boasts about, because I too have a long and questionable sexual history, nicely stored in the fuzziness of privacy now that I'm an old man not wanting to come across as an old lech. I've had players whose favorite moment for "backstabbing" was doing it doggy-style, and players who approached the game as an opportunity for quenching their cross-gendering sexual appetites. But this is NOT the norm. I think we all know this.
I think it can also be argued that many a face is going to fall uncomfortably when male players are told that, sorry, you've been a woman, and not a particularly attractive one at that. I don't have numbers, but I'd be willing to bet a study done on the subject would demonstrably prove an increase in female characters for male players when the charisma climbed above 15.
I'd like to live in a world where a male player could be handed a woman and see it as an opportunity, and not as an inconvenience. Granted, my world is remarkably sexist. I don't run a Gloria Steinum version of the 17th century. I do have women fighters and pirates and clerics and such, but they DO get pushed around a bit by sexist pigs in my world and they DO have to push back if they want to succeed. It isn't that I'm sexist, you understand. If a woman wants to play a man, and not get all that shit, they're free to do so. But my experience has been that women players who play women LIKE being able to bury their mace nastily into the skulls of their former male oppressors, and I'm not going to take that away from them. It is a vicarously satisfying victory, and I've had quite a few women who simply got off on it. Putting up a straw male chauvanist for a woman to cut down is just as satisfying for her as putting up the sort of straw asshole that he likes cutting down - namely, smug, self-satisfied villains.
The experience isn't as satisfying for a male player, however. He tends to wonder what the hell is wrong with me as a DM, and why is he stuck playing this obviously inconvenient stereotype (men, I am sorry to say, still view women as a stereotype). A woman has had a lifetime learning ways to circumvent morons. Men, not so much.
Do I sound like a chauvanist? Funny, I don't think so. I'm saying up front, women are more adaptable to this game where it comes to sex. They don't get uncomfortable if things get sexual. No matter what the NPC is like, women just cope with it, using the tools available, and move on. They don't get uncomfortable or embarrassed. That may have something to do with the sort of women who play D&D. I can think of conventions where there were 3,000 boys and about a 150 girls. If you're in this subculture, and you're a woman, you've already learned emotional tae kwan do.
Guys, on the other hand, have a huge flippin' blind spot where it comes to this stuff. No doubt, they'll deny it in the comments. A woman will run a male like a male, but a guy - if he runs a female character - will run a female like a male.
It's a bit disappointing. Yet so long as it exists, I will make the concession, and continue to allow players to choose the gender of their characters.
Sometimes, illogic is easier.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Infravlogging
My February vlog, late. An answer to the Infravision Question, which will probably not make anyone happy, and a bit about treasure tables. Overall, I'm feeling more comfortable as I do these.
What I Would Do With Money
There's nothing wrong with fantasizing. It's a healthy, encouraging, creative endeavor, and I firmly endorse it. That's how I got into writing in the first place: fantasizing. Now and then I want to indulge ... and I don't need too much justification to do so.
For example, yesterday I found myself wondering what I might do with a tidy sum like a million a year, if I had no responsibilities. I am the sort that loves to travel. Moreover, I'm more of a journey kind of fellow, rather than the destination type.
You know what they say, though. That travel exhausts. You can do it for only so long before its just another cathedral, its just another big dam holding back water and its just another festival with costumes. I suppose. I've never had the opportunity to get truly sick of travelling. I'd like to give it a try.
Something interesting occurs to me, however, and as long as we're thinking about things we'd like to try ... just now I'm running a campaign online in the town of Munster, Germany. There actually is a Munster, of course; and there actually is a cathedral. Now what might it be like to be in Munster right now, but still running my online campaign. Might be fun to take a tour around Munster for a bit, capture a few old streets for youtube, get a good look at the set-up the cathedral offers - one thing about youtube, you never really get a look at the things you want to see. You can find video of the cathedral you want, but since the video isn't being taken by a Dungeon Master, it isn't quite as helpful as you'd like.
Pacing the cathedral, filming exactly what you'll need for the game, and from every angle - now that would be something. Go out and get what you need, then sit down and run the game. And if the party sets out for Arnsberg - YOU set out for Arnsberg, too. And then Turkey, and the Ukraine, or wherever.
"A man was killed today while ascending the Congo River, apparently under instructions from a group of North American white collar workers. When inquiries were made, one New Jersey resident said, 'We wanted to explore the interior of Africa - and he was our dungeon master. It's too bad; he ran a half decent game ... but at least now I can get back to my Traveller campaign.' The so-called dungeon master's wife was killed also."
Hm.
An obvious solution for that would be if I had an income of ten million a year. Then I could comfortably pay a $60K wage to players for the period of a year, say, along with all travel costs, and import those players to Munster, also. Then, if they took it upon themselves to visit the Dark Continent, they'd get killed along with me.
Being randomly executed in the Congo aside, wouldn't you give up your ordinary routine for twelve months to tramp around Germany, learning to ride a horse or a wagon and make your way around the backroads of the countryside? Adventuring full-out. Covering the ground, then sitting down for a few hours in the evening to play out a battle or two, chalking up the day's successes or difficulties ... examining step-by-step the caves in Slovenia or the slopes of the Carpathians? Wouldn't the gentle reader consider playing D&D on the ground, as it were, and doing more than picking the crossroads to be taken than just in one's imagination? Especially if you were earning money to send back home while it was happening?
Of course - if I were making one hundred million a year annually - that might really get interesting. By that time I'd need a considerable staff to really run properly. That staff would no doubt include a fleet of writers and casting agents, whose sole purpose was to design a host of characters who would approach the party at random, chatting them up, threatening them, acting as villains, stealing things off the party (I knew a few magicians once who'd have made great sneak thieves), selling odd items at street corners and such. A sort of trundling, ongoing movie, with the players as the main characters while this structure took place around them. They could find themselves in castles (rented), in villages (hastily constructed), aboard ships ...
No, no, I think we really need to increase this budget to a billion a year. That way, we could really construct some profound sets. The villages could be elaborate set-ups, with hundreds of players tramping through, maybe thousands ... and the ongoing campaign as it rolled through Europe would act as a continuous economic boost, flooding the next town along the route with wealth as the party decided to embark for Egypt or wend its way north into Poland and Russia. Hundreds of filming crews would follow along, transmitting the game as it happened to millions of viewers, selling advertising world-wide, as the game was translated into a hundred languages and vicariously debated and argued over ten millions cups of coffee every morning. Other campaigns would sprout up, cheaply run or even more elaborately, crisscrossing the globe on medieval ships built for the purpose. Various campaigns might slam against one another as global-internet events, smashing away at each other in imaginative LARPing events that only huge piles of money could buy. Rumours would abound that some of these campaign crossovers would be resolved in 'snuff' contests ... but who would really believe that?
Sigh.
Well, it really is just fantasy, isn't it?
For example, yesterday I found myself wondering what I might do with a tidy sum like a million a year, if I had no responsibilities. I am the sort that loves to travel. Moreover, I'm more of a journey kind of fellow, rather than the destination type.
You know what they say, though. That travel exhausts. You can do it for only so long before its just another cathedral, its just another big dam holding back water and its just another festival with costumes. I suppose. I've never had the opportunity to get truly sick of travelling. I'd like to give it a try.
Something interesting occurs to me, however, and as long as we're thinking about things we'd like to try ... just now I'm running a campaign online in the town of Munster, Germany. There actually is a Munster, of course; and there actually is a cathedral. Now what might it be like to be in Munster right now, but still running my online campaign. Might be fun to take a tour around Munster for a bit, capture a few old streets for youtube, get a good look at the set-up the cathedral offers - one thing about youtube, you never really get a look at the things you want to see. You can find video of the cathedral you want, but since the video isn't being taken by a Dungeon Master, it isn't quite as helpful as you'd like.
Pacing the cathedral, filming exactly what you'll need for the game, and from every angle - now that would be something. Go out and get what you need, then sit down and run the game. And if the party sets out for Arnsberg - YOU set out for Arnsberg, too. And then Turkey, and the Ukraine, or wherever.
"A man was killed today while ascending the Congo River, apparently under instructions from a group of North American white collar workers. When inquiries were made, one New Jersey resident said, 'We wanted to explore the interior of Africa - and he was our dungeon master. It's too bad; he ran a half decent game ... but at least now I can get back to my Traveller campaign.' The so-called dungeon master's wife was killed also."
Hm.
An obvious solution for that would be if I had an income of ten million a year. Then I could comfortably pay a $60K wage to players for the period of a year, say, along with all travel costs, and import those players to Munster, also. Then, if they took it upon themselves to visit the Dark Continent, they'd get killed along with me.
Being randomly executed in the Congo aside, wouldn't you give up your ordinary routine for twelve months to tramp around Germany, learning to ride a horse or a wagon and make your way around the backroads of the countryside? Adventuring full-out. Covering the ground, then sitting down for a few hours in the evening to play out a battle or two, chalking up the day's successes or difficulties ... examining step-by-step the caves in Slovenia or the slopes of the Carpathians? Wouldn't the gentle reader consider playing D&D on the ground, as it were, and doing more than picking the crossroads to be taken than just in one's imagination? Especially if you were earning money to send back home while it was happening?
Of course - if I were making one hundred million a year annually - that might really get interesting. By that time I'd need a considerable staff to really run properly. That staff would no doubt include a fleet of writers and casting agents, whose sole purpose was to design a host of characters who would approach the party at random, chatting them up, threatening them, acting as villains, stealing things off the party (I knew a few magicians once who'd have made great sneak thieves), selling odd items at street corners and such. A sort of trundling, ongoing movie, with the players as the main characters while this structure took place around them. They could find themselves in castles (rented), in villages (hastily constructed), aboard ships ...
No, no, I think we really need to increase this budget to a billion a year. That way, we could really construct some profound sets. The villages could be elaborate set-ups, with hundreds of players tramping through, maybe thousands ... and the ongoing campaign as it rolled through Europe would act as a continuous economic boost, flooding the next town along the route with wealth as the party decided to embark for Egypt or wend its way north into Poland and Russia. Hundreds of filming crews would follow along, transmitting the game as it happened to millions of viewers, selling advertising world-wide, as the game was translated into a hundred languages and vicariously debated and argued over ten millions cups of coffee every morning. Other campaigns would sprout up, cheaply run or even more elaborately, crisscrossing the globe on medieval ships built for the purpose. Various campaigns might slam against one another as global-internet events, smashing away at each other in imaginative LARPing events that only huge piles of money could buy. Rumours would abound that some of these campaign crossovers would be resolved in 'snuff' contests ... but who would really believe that?
Sigh.
Well, it really is just fantasy, isn't it?
Friday, February 10, 2012
Limpets
A limpet is a species of saltwater and freshwater snail, a mollusk, whose shell is conical in shape, and whose peculiar nature causes it to adhere firmly to a rock surface at a level somewhat equal with the water's surface. Waves then, which flow over the limpet, provide the limpet with its food and oxygen, and the limpet in turn survives this pounding by having a powerful, muscular 'foot' aided by a natural adhesive 'glue.' Moreover, as tides will drop the water level, limpets are also able to clamp their shells tight enough to a surface as to create a 'bubble' of ocean in which they can live, despite their environment having hot and dessicated.
It is difficult to remove limpets from rock. The shell and structure of the limpet is so strong that you can strike the limpet with a hammer and not affect it. It takes unaccountable effort to pry a limpet from a rock. The effort requires causes most natural predators, such as birds or crabs, to leave them alone. A limpet will even 'bite' by bringing the anterior end of its shell down upon the foot of a predator, such as a starfish or sea snail. A limpet is a stubborn, tenacious, simple-minded creature that wants nothing more than to stay put and eat.
There is only one simple way to make a limpet move. Take away its food supply. Make it uncomfortable enough that it will move on its own.
Why am I writing all this out? I am making a point about human beings.
There is only one way to bring about change. If you want something to change, you have to make it uncomfortable. You have to take away its food supply. You can't make a limpet move by making it more comfortable. You can't induce change with praise. You can't even induce chance with violence. A hammer just makes it more intractable. You have to make it's belly hurt. You have to make a human being feel shame. You have to show that rip down whatever that human has ever believed, and you have to do it in such a way that said human cannot retreat back into his or her bubble. You have to drain that human being's shell of water and food. You have to make that human being WANT to move on its own.
There is no other way.
The Wall Street movement of last Fall failed because it made the wrong people uncomfortable. It only made people working on the street uncomfortable. It only made small businessmen uncomfortable. It only made the cops uncomfortable, and the city managers uncomfortable. But it didn't worry the banks any, because it didn't make any difference in their lives. The banks don't care if the people on the street are uncomfortable. The banks drive the herds forward by creating discomfort themselves.
If you want to make the banks uncomfortable, have every half-poor person in a hundred miles of New York drive their cars into the city, and then leave them there. In the middle of roads, on bridges, on sidewalks. Stuff the city full with 50,000 derelict cars, and have every owner ready to pay the fee to get their car back again when its over.
Buy wrecks for $100 and put enough gas in them to get them to Wall Street, then just walk away.
But better than that, have a General Strike. Ruin all business in the City of New York ... in every city in America ... for a day. For two days. Strike until all hell breaks loose. Scare the living shit out of those people. Invoke mob rule. It's been done before. Again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
You don't make change with giving comfort. You don't make change by placating a human being's ego. You don't make change with pleas or contrition.
Humans beings are not rational. They are not reasonable. They cannot be taught. They cannot be convinced. They cling with their one powerful foot to their one meme of existence, and given the chance they will clamp down and live happily in their bubble all their lives.
I don't intend to respect that ideal. Whenever possible, I will make every limpet I can reach as uncomfortable as I can.
It is difficult to remove limpets from rock. The shell and structure of the limpet is so strong that you can strike the limpet with a hammer and not affect it. It takes unaccountable effort to pry a limpet from a rock. The effort requires causes most natural predators, such as birds or crabs, to leave them alone. A limpet will even 'bite' by bringing the anterior end of its shell down upon the foot of a predator, such as a starfish or sea snail. A limpet is a stubborn, tenacious, simple-minded creature that wants nothing more than to stay put and eat.
There is only one simple way to make a limpet move. Take away its food supply. Make it uncomfortable enough that it will move on its own.
Why am I writing all this out? I am making a point about human beings.
There is only one way to bring about change. If you want something to change, you have to make it uncomfortable. You have to take away its food supply. You can't make a limpet move by making it more comfortable. You can't induce change with praise. You can't even induce chance with violence. A hammer just makes it more intractable. You have to make it's belly hurt. You have to make a human being feel shame. You have to show that rip down whatever that human has ever believed, and you have to do it in such a way that said human cannot retreat back into his or her bubble. You have to drain that human being's shell of water and food. You have to make that human being WANT to move on its own.
There is no other way.
The Wall Street movement of last Fall failed because it made the wrong people uncomfortable. It only made people working on the street uncomfortable. It only made small businessmen uncomfortable. It only made the cops uncomfortable, and the city managers uncomfortable. But it didn't worry the banks any, because it didn't make any difference in their lives. The banks don't care if the people on the street are uncomfortable. The banks drive the herds forward by creating discomfort themselves.
If you want to make the banks uncomfortable, have every half-poor person in a hundred miles of New York drive their cars into the city, and then leave them there. In the middle of roads, on bridges, on sidewalks. Stuff the city full with 50,000 derelict cars, and have every owner ready to pay the fee to get their car back again when its over.
Buy wrecks for $100 and put enough gas in them to get them to Wall Street, then just walk away.
But better than that, have a General Strike. Ruin all business in the City of New York ... in every city in America ... for a day. For two days. Strike until all hell breaks loose. Scare the living shit out of those people. Invoke mob rule. It's been done before. Again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
You don't make change with giving comfort. You don't make change by placating a human being's ego. You don't make change with pleas or contrition.
Humans beings are not rational. They are not reasonable. They cannot be taught. They cannot be convinced. They cling with their one powerful foot to their one meme of existence, and given the chance they will clamp down and live happily in their bubble all their lives.
I don't intend to respect that ideal. Whenever possible, I will make every limpet I can reach as uncomfortable as I can.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
A Symposium on Infravision
Let's talk about infravision.
I think I'll throw this one open. I'd like to know what you think. Andrej in my campaign, who is also James C., challenged the way I do things, and I am open to being challenged. Here's what James wrote:
James makes good points, and it deserves discussion. Here are some relevant questions I'd like answered:
1) Is infravision definitively the detection of infrared light, or is it a differently originating ability that is merely similar to infrared light.
2) If it is the detection of infrared light, is it near-infrared, mid-infrared, or long-infrared? For definitions, and for general information, read the wikipedia entry. Is it thermal only, or can one detect dipole moments?
3) Should infrared be just as good as seeing in daylight? Should there be any restrictions to what can be 'seen'?
I think I'll throw this one open. I'd like to know what you think. Andrej in my campaign, who is also James C., challenged the way I do things, and I am open to being challenged. Here's what James wrote:
"My feeling on infravision has long been that its application is arbitrarily limited somewhat by most DMs considering it thermal vision only, and further being limited to the extent of thermal imaging available with mind-20th century technology. There is more than just heat in the infrared range and all bodies (i.e. matter, objects) can both absorb, reflect and emanate infrared energy, which is simply a kind of light humans can't detect. Just as the human eye and brain can discern a multitude of colors (i.e. frequencies) and shadows (amount) of "visible" light... wouldn't one anticipate the same level of sophistication in the same organs that can "see" light beyond the normally visible spectrum?"
James makes good points, and it deserves discussion. Here are some relevant questions I'd like answered:
1) Is infravision definitively the detection of infrared light, or is it a differently originating ability that is merely similar to infrared light.
2) If it is the detection of infrared light, is it near-infrared, mid-infrared, or long-infrared? For definitions, and for general information, read the wikipedia entry. Is it thermal only, or can one detect dipole moments?
3) Should infrared be just as good as seeing in daylight? Should there be any restrictions to what can be 'seen'?
4) If (3) is taken for granted, should the 60 foot limit be thrown out? Is any range limit logical? And if there is one, does infravision end dead without any ambient radiation detected by the eye further out, as there must be with visible light?
5) Again, if (3) is taken for granted, what is the difference between infravision and ultravision?
6) Should it automatically be assumed that infravision-capable creatures are able to see perfectly out-of-doors, or should visible light spectrums be limited? What is the changeover time between infrared and visible light vision, if a user needs to switch from one to the other? Does visible light underground 'blind' infravision users longer than normal visible light users?
5) Again, if (3) is taken for granted, what is the difference between infravision and ultravision?
6) Should it automatically be assumed that infravision-capable creatures are able to see perfectly out-of-doors, or should visible light spectrums be limited? What is the changeover time between infrared and visible light vision, if a user needs to switch from one to the other? Does visible light underground 'blind' infravision users longer than normal visible light users?
Okay.
These don't represent all the possible questions, but they would seem to me the most pertinent for game purposes.
Please argue your pet position. Please restrain anecdotal references or personal experiences, and stick to arguing why one position is better for gameplay that another. Please consider the problem from a game perspective, rather than what "real" infrared vision would be like. The problem here is how to manage the game, not how to solve philosophical questions about scientific optics.
Go on. Take a shot.
Please argue your pet position. Please restrain anecdotal references or personal experiences, and stick to arguing why one position is better for gameplay that another. Please consider the problem from a game perspective, rather than what "real" infrared vision would be like. The problem here is how to manage the game, not how to solve philosophical questions about scientific optics.
Go on. Take a shot.
Mamma
Most people in roleplaying get their start through modules and generated content for good reason. Just now, there isn't any other way to start. The module format is so pervasive that finding a world that does not use some sort of pregenerated content is vitually impossible - and new DMs follow in the ways of the DMs they've had the chance to play under.
it's interesting that, having noted the above, the greatest mass of prefabricated ware for RPG's is oldware. Five years, ten years ... even thirty-plus years old, still used in whatever rehashed form the DM must. The Keep on the Borderland first came to my attention when I was in high school, which was a very long time ago, I can assure you. It gets instant recognition in the Community. It couldn't get more accolades heaped upon it if it were written by Dickens.
Forty years of prefab oldware creates one hell of a populist sentiment, to use Beedo's words. The "populism" accumulates as pressure on new DMs to fall in with the established format: begin by running a module, and someday you'll get good enough as a DM that you'll be ready to ... adapt modules for future runnings.
What else can an established DM tell a neophyte? World creation and sandbox gaming is not something you fall out of bed at 15 and just start doing ... well, it isn't something most players start doing. Particularly since most of them will never SEE it being done. Most will have their first experiences with a DM firmly clutching prefab oldware in hand, reading from (or having memorized) the text, extolling the virtues of what a GREAT module this is, and probably the GREATNESS of the store from which is was purchased, and perhaps the GREATNESS of the designers. Young players are quite easily impressed with such things. Young players take such pronouncements as proof of fact when later on they 'graduate' from Player to DM, getting their own copies of the oldware and waving it under the noses of noobies like they themselves used to be "... and the spirit of time is transferred across the universe to a new defender, and the power of evil is contained for another generation ... and a new Tarakian is born to protect the next."
Or some such justification.
As such, the new players never have any reason to question the books as they are handed down from on high. I'd guess that a considerable number of those defending the prefab method do so from a perspective of one part of logic mixed with twelve to fourteen parts of teenage nostalgia. THEY played "First Quest" with their very first adventure ever, and cue the teardrops staining their cheeks and cue the quivering lips as they remember that shining moment that enlightened their formerly dreary lives. "Don't take our memories away!" screams the subtext, followed by an insistence that they can buy whatever they want because this is a free country.
It is free. And in this free country people contribute all kinds of mediocrity to the general malaise that permeates the dull, mouldering tapestry that universal expression provides. I don't buck the trend. There's little point in trying to teach a pig how to waltz. You get nowhere and it annoys the hell out of the pig. All I want to be able to do is stand next to the couple dozen people (if there are that many on the internet) while I point and say, "look at that fucking bunch of pigs over there." I don't expect any of them to learn anything.
I was lucky. MY first experience with the game when the prefab crap was just coming into existence, and I played my first five years of this game with people who had tried (successfully or unsuccessfully) to run their own campaigns. MY first experience with D&D was with someone who had made his world from scratch, who eschewed modules, and who spat on corporatism ... until he reached middle age, that is, and ultimately did very well as the vice-president of West Coast distribution of Magic, the Gathering. At least, that's what he told me he was doing when I last saw him, which was sometime in the age before the common Internet ... and he could have been lying out his ass. I can't find the guy's name associated with the game anywhere on the net now.
I digress.
I didn't play a module in any game until I did so in a Traveller campaign ("Prison Planet") a fellow was running, and it took me about an hour to find a loophole that ended with me strafing the planet in a stolen navy ship screaming into the com-link, "I'M A MODEL PRISONER!" It was kind of fun. It was mostly fun making the ref of that game look like a bleeding idiot, which we did quite a lot. Poor Irwin. He never could take anyone's advice where it came to running prefab shit or his own.
Again, I digress.
I suppose that not finding modules very interesting to play in (when they were obvious railroads or death traps), or rather easy to get on the other side of (when they were loose and role-play oriented), did eventually combine with a changing universe in the 1980s when more and more new players in the game rushed out to the store to buy their drugs before sitting down with a piece of paper and a brain. True, many of those people would have run a much worse campaign than they could buy prefab; but buying prefab guaranteed they'd never run anything better.
Thinking about the nostalgia of youth and a person's first prefab experience, and the nostalgia that entails, let me point out that a long, long time ago I sucked on a tit once, too. I won't argue that I don't have a certain nostalgia for the owner of that tit. Still, I'm not much interested in sucking my mamma's tit now.
That whole weaning off phase - the one that takes some folks way too many years, when you start seeing your mother as a person and not the facilitator of all your dreams, can take awhile. It's often loaded with moments of embarrassment, and failure, and dispair. The world is mighty unforgiving of everyone's inadequacies, and it sure is easier to rush back home to that tit when things get hard (heh heh).
Mamma WOTC understands. Mamma kiss it better. Mamma'll get out that big ol' tit and give babykins what he needs. And don't forget, babykins ... Mamma knows best.
it's interesting that, having noted the above, the greatest mass of prefabricated ware for RPG's is oldware. Five years, ten years ... even thirty-plus years old, still used in whatever rehashed form the DM must. The Keep on the Borderland first came to my attention when I was in high school, which was a very long time ago, I can assure you. It gets instant recognition in the Community. It couldn't get more accolades heaped upon it if it were written by Dickens.
Forty years of prefab oldware creates one hell of a populist sentiment, to use Beedo's words. The "populism" accumulates as pressure on new DMs to fall in with the established format: begin by running a module, and someday you'll get good enough as a DM that you'll be ready to ... adapt modules for future runnings.
What else can an established DM tell a neophyte? World creation and sandbox gaming is not something you fall out of bed at 15 and just start doing ... well, it isn't something most players start doing. Particularly since most of them will never SEE it being done. Most will have their first experiences with a DM firmly clutching prefab oldware in hand, reading from (or having memorized) the text, extolling the virtues of what a GREAT module this is, and probably the GREATNESS of the store from which is was purchased, and perhaps the GREATNESS of the designers. Young players are quite easily impressed with such things. Young players take such pronouncements as proof of fact when later on they 'graduate' from Player to DM, getting their own copies of the oldware and waving it under the noses of noobies like they themselves used to be "... and the spirit of time is transferred across the universe to a new defender, and the power of evil is contained for another generation ... and a new Tarakian is born to protect the next."
Or some such justification.
As such, the new players never have any reason to question the books as they are handed down from on high. I'd guess that a considerable number of those defending the prefab method do so from a perspective of one part of logic mixed with twelve to fourteen parts of teenage nostalgia. THEY played "First Quest" with their very first adventure ever, and cue the teardrops staining their cheeks and cue the quivering lips as they remember that shining moment that enlightened their formerly dreary lives. "Don't take our memories away!" screams the subtext, followed by an insistence that they can buy whatever they want because this is a free country.
It is free. And in this free country people contribute all kinds of mediocrity to the general malaise that permeates the dull, mouldering tapestry that universal expression provides. I don't buck the trend. There's little point in trying to teach a pig how to waltz. You get nowhere and it annoys the hell out of the pig. All I want to be able to do is stand next to the couple dozen people (if there are that many on the internet) while I point and say, "look at that fucking bunch of pigs over there." I don't expect any of them to learn anything.
I was lucky. MY first experience with the game when the prefab crap was just coming into existence, and I played my first five years of this game with people who had tried (successfully or unsuccessfully) to run their own campaigns. MY first experience with D&D was with someone who had made his world from scratch, who eschewed modules, and who spat on corporatism ... until he reached middle age, that is, and ultimately did very well as the vice-president of West Coast distribution of Magic, the Gathering. At least, that's what he told me he was doing when I last saw him, which was sometime in the age before the common Internet ... and he could have been lying out his ass. I can't find the guy's name associated with the game anywhere on the net now.
I digress.
I didn't play a module in any game until I did so in a Traveller campaign ("Prison Planet") a fellow was running, and it took me about an hour to find a loophole that ended with me strafing the planet in a stolen navy ship screaming into the com-link, "I'M A MODEL PRISONER!" It was kind of fun. It was mostly fun making the ref of that game look like a bleeding idiot, which we did quite a lot. Poor Irwin. He never could take anyone's advice where it came to running prefab shit or his own.
Again, I digress.
I suppose that not finding modules very interesting to play in (when they were obvious railroads or death traps), or rather easy to get on the other side of (when they were loose and role-play oriented), did eventually combine with a changing universe in the 1980s when more and more new players in the game rushed out to the store to buy their drugs before sitting down with a piece of paper and a brain. True, many of those people would have run a much worse campaign than they could buy prefab; but buying prefab guaranteed they'd never run anything better.
Thinking about the nostalgia of youth and a person's first prefab experience, and the nostalgia that entails, let me point out that a long, long time ago I sucked on a tit once, too. I won't argue that I don't have a certain nostalgia for the owner of that tit. Still, I'm not much interested in sucking my mamma's tit now.
That whole weaning off phase - the one that takes some folks way too many years, when you start seeing your mother as a person and not the facilitator of all your dreams, can take awhile. It's often loaded with moments of embarrassment, and failure, and dispair. The world is mighty unforgiving of everyone's inadequacies, and it sure is easier to rush back home to that tit when things get hard (heh heh).
Mamma WOTC understands. Mamma kiss it better. Mamma'll get out that big ol' tit and give babykins what he needs. And don't forget, babykins ... Mamma knows best.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
D.I.Y.
While JB on his blog wallows about trying to nail down the Building of a Better D&D (I don't think he's got it, myself), I'd like to address an ignored comment from this post here, from scadgrad:
"Not only does the resultant fallacy completely ignore the role of the DM (as JB points out), but more importantly it IGNORES the crunch/tweaking outside of actual game time that occupies much of the modern day player's experience as they "customize" their perfect build."
The emphasis is my own. And this needs emphasis. This one phrase says more about the commercialism of the last 40 years than does ten million words written about editions and skills and attacks of opportunity. If we are going to stick a post in the ground and identify WHERE D&D WENT WRONG, the post should be firmly hammered into the middle of scadgrad's observation.
On a typical week I run about five to seven hours of D&D, depending on how focused my groups are - this includes the online campaign, and does not include time spent during a running chatting about things that are not D&D, bathroom breaks and time half the crew spends outside having a smoke. Seven hours of PURE D&D running a week, that's about as good as it gets.
On an a-typical week, over Christmas, through the time in summer I usually take off as the parties scatter on vacation, I get in NO running time whatsoever. But D&D does not stop, oh no! D&D, for me, never stops.
That's because I work on D&D between 20 and 60 hours a week, every week, summer and winter, diligently, consistently, and with great relish. I can testify that my party players work on their characters during these off times as well - not nearly as much as I do, but upon rewrites, construction designs, artwork and so on they probably each put in between 2 and 10 hours a month.
But as scadgrad says ... does anyone in the industry give a shit?
No, they don't. They don't because they adopted a business model that made sense to them: "People should be able to sit down, anytime, anywhere, and without any pre-planning whatsoever, be able to run a game on the spot. We will make that possible!"
Prepackaging. Prefabrication. Conformity. A great landscape of uniform, bland preformed cookie-cutter adventures, with all the latitude that corporate consciences and imaginations can provide: to the extent that the market itself has become dogmatic in their thinking, ruled by factions laid down by editions and public relations hype.
We have products. We have everything we need to sit down as READ off pages to our players, defining their fun for the evening, defining our slotted, factory purposed roles in the great corporate game plan. Anyone can be a DM! Anyone can play! Play anywhere! Play anytime! Play! Play! Play!
But most of all, Buy, Buy, Buy.
Where are the tools that lets the amateur make his own world? "Fuck boy, we don't sell tools, we sell GAMES. Buy this one and be a vampire! Buy this one and be a superhero! Buy this one and be a Lovecraftian God! Don't waste time making your own world. We have thousands of worlds on our shelves. Rush on down and pick up the one that FITS YOU PERSONALLY!
Oh, I know there are many who do buy, and who swear by these products, and who dance around pitching their glories to other people. But I can't help thinking at the core of my being, every time I read or hear about anyone buying anything prepackaged for "their" world (if it can be called that): what a poor, deluded cripple; what a shame they still haven't learned how to do it themselves.
Not fair, I know. So not fair. So self-righteous. So pretentious. Who am I to say a person shouldn't buy an "imaginitive, marvelous product?"
I'll tell you: I'm a DM who does it himself.
See, I just haven't seen this imaginitive product yet. That's really the crux of it. I hear tell over and over about these wonderful products that the manufacturers create ... and then I go down to my local game store, this massive two story building that's been selling roleplaying games for literally 35 years, where there ARE thousands of games on the shelves, where the books can be opened and read and looked over at will, where the staff doesn't harrass you if you hang around for hours and hours (seriously!) ... and in all the hours I have spent there, over all the years that I've spent there, I still have yet to find one product that isn't in truth a piece of glorified shit.
Honest. I open up these books and start reading down their lists of skills or their outlines for what this fantasy world tries to be about, and all I see is cheap, crass, crummy, hackneyed, cliche regurgitated garbage written in high school English. All the art I see is high-school binder art. I know I'm supposed to see so much more than this, but I guess its just that I'm comparing these written words to the words written by all the world's writers, and not those who write in roleplaying games. I guess its because I'm comparing the art to the art produced by all the world's artists, and not just the artists of roleplaying games. I guess I just can't compress my measuring tools into this small a space. I guess its that I don't find myself limited by what OTHER people think D&D ought to be.
Because you see, my experience as a DM isn't based on how players reacted to the Tomb of Horrors when I ran it. Or how they reacted to Third Edition when we switched. Or what my players think about Paizo or White Wolf or S/W. My experience as a DM is based upon how my players reacted to MY world. MINE. Do you understand? When something went wrong, I didn't put my booties on and rush down to the store to buy something better! I sat at my computer at my table and I fixed it. Me. I did the fucking work. And I learned how to do the fucking work, because I didn't farm it out. I didn't lean on a crutch. I didn't spend my time looking for a tit to suck. I worked. I designed, and then I redesigned, and then I redesigned again. I did it and did it and did it MYSELF, all by myself, and now I've gotten so fucking good at it that everything the manufacturers print looks like incomprehensible shit to me.
See, all these cripples buying all this shit? I don't think they know a damn thing. I don't think they've ever HAD to know a damn thing. They've been on the tit too long. And I think that all of us who have for the last forty years been doing it ourselves KNOW this. And I think that yes, it does make us feel superior.
But only because we are.
"Not only does the resultant fallacy completely ignore the role of the DM (as JB points out), but more importantly it IGNORES the crunch/tweaking outside of actual game time that occupies much of the modern day player's experience as they "customize" their perfect build."
The emphasis is my own. And this needs emphasis. This one phrase says more about the commercialism of the last 40 years than does ten million words written about editions and skills and attacks of opportunity. If we are going to stick a post in the ground and identify WHERE D&D WENT WRONG, the post should be firmly hammered into the middle of scadgrad's observation.
On a typical week I run about five to seven hours of D&D, depending on how focused my groups are - this includes the online campaign, and does not include time spent during a running chatting about things that are not D&D, bathroom breaks and time half the crew spends outside having a smoke. Seven hours of PURE D&D running a week, that's about as good as it gets.
On an a-typical week, over Christmas, through the time in summer I usually take off as the parties scatter on vacation, I get in NO running time whatsoever. But D&D does not stop, oh no! D&D, for me, never stops.
That's because I work on D&D between 20 and 60 hours a week, every week, summer and winter, diligently, consistently, and with great relish. I can testify that my party players work on their characters during these off times as well - not nearly as much as I do, but upon rewrites, construction designs, artwork and so on they probably each put in between 2 and 10 hours a month.
But as scadgrad says ... does anyone in the industry give a shit?
No, they don't. They don't because they adopted a business model that made sense to them: "People should be able to sit down, anytime, anywhere, and without any pre-planning whatsoever, be able to run a game on the spot. We will make that possible!"
Prepackaging. Prefabrication. Conformity. A great landscape of uniform, bland preformed cookie-cutter adventures, with all the latitude that corporate consciences and imaginations can provide: to the extent that the market itself has become dogmatic in their thinking, ruled by factions laid down by editions and public relations hype.
We have products. We have everything we need to sit down as READ off pages to our players, defining their fun for the evening, defining our slotted, factory purposed roles in the great corporate game plan. Anyone can be a DM! Anyone can play! Play anywhere! Play anytime! Play! Play! Play!
But most of all, Buy, Buy, Buy.
Where are the tools that lets the amateur make his own world? "Fuck boy, we don't sell tools, we sell GAMES. Buy this one and be a vampire! Buy this one and be a superhero! Buy this one and be a Lovecraftian God! Don't waste time making your own world. We have thousands of worlds on our shelves. Rush on down and pick up the one that FITS YOU PERSONALLY!
Oh, I know there are many who do buy, and who swear by these products, and who dance around pitching their glories to other people. But I can't help thinking at the core of my being, every time I read or hear about anyone buying anything prepackaged for "their" world (if it can be called that): what a poor, deluded cripple; what a shame they still haven't learned how to do it themselves.
Not fair, I know. So not fair. So self-righteous. So pretentious. Who am I to say a person shouldn't buy an "imaginitive, marvelous product?"
I'll tell you: I'm a DM who does it himself.
See, I just haven't seen this imaginitive product yet. That's really the crux of it. I hear tell over and over about these wonderful products that the manufacturers create ... and then I go down to my local game store, this massive two story building that's been selling roleplaying games for literally 35 years, where there ARE thousands of games on the shelves, where the books can be opened and read and looked over at will, where the staff doesn't harrass you if you hang around for hours and hours (seriously!) ... and in all the hours I have spent there, over all the years that I've spent there, I still have yet to find one product that isn't in truth a piece of glorified shit.
Honest. I open up these books and start reading down their lists of skills or their outlines for what this fantasy world tries to be about, and all I see is cheap, crass, crummy, hackneyed, cliche regurgitated garbage written in high school English. All the art I see is high-school binder art. I know I'm supposed to see so much more than this, but I guess its just that I'm comparing these written words to the words written by all the world's writers, and not those who write in roleplaying games. I guess its because I'm comparing the art to the art produced by all the world's artists, and not just the artists of roleplaying games. I guess I just can't compress my measuring tools into this small a space. I guess its that I don't find myself limited by what OTHER people think D&D ought to be.
Because you see, my experience as a DM isn't based on how players reacted to the Tomb of Horrors when I ran it. Or how they reacted to Third Edition when we switched. Or what my players think about Paizo or White Wolf or S/W. My experience as a DM is based upon how my players reacted to MY world. MINE. Do you understand? When something went wrong, I didn't put my booties on and rush down to the store to buy something better! I sat at my computer at my table and I fixed it. Me. I did the fucking work. And I learned how to do the fucking work, because I didn't farm it out. I didn't lean on a crutch. I didn't spend my time looking for a tit to suck. I worked. I designed, and then I redesigned, and then I redesigned again. I did it and did it and did it MYSELF, all by myself, and now I've gotten so fucking good at it that everything the manufacturers print looks like incomprehensible shit to me.
See, all these cripples buying all this shit? I don't think they know a damn thing. I don't think they've ever HAD to know a damn thing. They've been on the tit too long. And I think that all of us who have for the last forty years been doing it ourselves KNOW this. And I think that yes, it does make us feel superior.
But only because we are.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Latitude
From the 10,000 word post:
"A preferred setting will be that which allows as much latitude for your players as is reasonably possible."
Latitudo is a Latin word, meaning extent, width or size, and came into popular usage in the late 14th century in description of the "breadth" of the known world. So when I say that the game requires "latitude," I mean that it requires living space.
I do not mean merely that the boundary of your world must be a hard distance to walk in a lifetime - though that doesn't hurt. I mean also that your world needs facets within it that make living possible. Most of these facets exist within the original books of the game, though they are for the most part expressed very simply. Your world needs to contain places within it that are of great convenience to the players; places which they can come to recognize, and which fit together logically so that the players can adapt themselves. It helps to think of the world as a set of player 'rights' ... things the player is entitled to expect upon joining your world.
Players have a right to resupply. This requires a town, and probably lots of towns, full of food, weapons, tools & equipment, healing centres, informational bureaus, men-at-arms ... and most of all, 'friendlies.' The player needs to be able to settle in a place which has a relative degree of consistency, and someone there the player can tell his or her troubles to. A sympathetic ear. A helping hand. Someone who can buy their stolen junk and who can encourage them to go out and get more junk. When you are setting up your towns, think about what it is like to live in a place where people get to know you and trust you. Don't just imagine a lot of surly, unhappy NPC's ... stuff into your town a few people who are able to like the party, and hail them as they return. A party should be made to feel welcome once in awhile.
Players have a right to security. If you want a good, long-term game, you can't harangue your players night and day like a boot sargeant, kicking them out of every bed they try to sleep in or assassinating them at every opportunity. If you want moments of danger to have effectiveness, you have to mix them up with moments of safety. This is not to say that every place will always be safe, all the time ... but give a party a break. Let them crawl HOME, let them lick their wounds, and let them sort themselves out and gather their shit again. Letting a party breath will aid them in a sense of purpose, and will encourage them to 'get through this bad time' with a sincere, real goal in mind. If they truly feel they have a home, then getting back there will mean something. Don't take that away from a party.
Players have a right to danger. Having made the point above, now I must make this point also. The players have the right to seek danger and to find it, if they're so inclined. Said danger ought to include in it a measured increase, such that it takes several deliberate steps on the player's part to get his or herself into a real pickle. This is what's patently wrong with the touch-a-wall-and-die concept of D&D. It has the effect of making a player little more than a zero or a one on the DM's ledger. There's no GRAY area ... and worse, there's no "You got yourself into this, you damn fool, now get yourself out." By letting a party see the danger coming, and letting them choose to meet that danger, you shift the responsibility of having that danger kill the party from your shoulders onto the party's shoulders. This is incredibly important for a good game. I cannot stress this enough. If a party is going to have any latitude of play, it has to incorporate a responsibility for their actions - and the possibility of redressing that possibility!
You see, the touch-a-wall-and-die scenario does indeed retain some sort of responsibility. Not a very meaningful one: the whole "You touched a wall? What kind of idiot are you?" moral stream of thinking is somewhat lacking in real drama. But the damning part is that there is no repentance. If the player never touched the wall, there's no knowledge of successfully averting a 'stupid' action (and it's hardly practical for a player to avoid touching every wall in the universe); if the player successfully saves, then the die made the difference, NOT the player; and if the player dies, what has the player learned: To not touch walls. This is a very dumb lesson. It certainly wouldn't cut much ice with Aesop.
Danger must be a step-by-step process by which the player hazards his life by moving forward into something that simultaneously looks both 'dangerous' and 'manageable.' That is the knife edge that sells the play. (1) Indiana Jones opens the door and starts down the passage; it is, after all, just a passage. (2) The floor is crunchy, so he lights a taper - and sees there's about a million bugs; but they're just ordinary bugs, and they're not biting him, so he keeps going. (3) He finds a secret door, but it's just an empty room, so there's no reason not to go in ...
And so on.
Players have a right to reward. There a lot of DMs who fail to grasp this. They've read a word or two from Grandfather Gygax and they insist that sometimes monsters ought not to have treasure. And I agree with that. But I didn't say 'treasure,' I said 'reward.' If the players kill a dangerous giant wolverine whose been terrorizing the local people, of course the wolverine has no treasure. It's a dumb animal. It might have a hide worth selling, but probably not after its been hacked with swords - and 'wolverine' fur, while warm, isn't known for its luxury.
However ... the PEOPLE are going to be happy about it, aren't they? And while they may not have a lot of coin, they are going to overflow with good will. That promises a place of safety, and it promises notariety, and it promises other opportunities at danger and greater reward. It is a fool of a DM who thinks the only recompense to a party's action is treasure. Fame, loyalty and, best of all, good will are extravagant rewards. Don't discount them when you consider the party's ledger.
Let me add this: if you can't figure out how to make a party's feat translate into a reward of this kind, you're not doing your job. Someone should find out what's been done, and that someone should be believed. NPC's are not just cut-outs for your towns - they're the best part of your world.
In Conclusion,
As you are constructing your world on paper, keep these four things in mind.
Draw out places of resupply: towns, villages, hamlets, ordinary houses, an army post, a manor house with its attendant peasants, mining camps, outposts or a crossroads inn. Supplement this with travelling peddlers, caravans, an ordinary adventurer ready to trade - anything that lets the party have an opportunity to better their situation in between dangers. No matter how deep the wilderness, or how off the beaten track they are, there's some logical way of letting them get at least enough to stay alive. It doesn't mean you have to have an omnipresent mega-mall Box Store following the players around on four legs, but it does mean you'll have to be a little clever when they're out of food, out of weapons, out of healing salve and out of pocket. This is YOUR responsibility, O DM. Figure out something that will let them keep going.
Set down places where bad shit doesn't happen, and let the players find them. Defensible caves or uninhabited (possibly weakly inhabited) deserted fortifications where the party can hole up for a few days; a farmer's community not being hourly attacked by beasts of every kind; a town where the party can get a meal in a tavern that doesn't include bullies, pickpockets, aggressive bartenders or knife-wielding bar wenches (is there any other kind?). Sometimes, you know, a bar is just a bar. Sometimes, the wench who sleeps with the Ranger doesn't have VD, and isn't shilling for her assassin boyfriend. Sometimes, just sometimes, a gesture of help really is a gesture of help. People can be considerate, warm, giving, generous and legitimately friendly. Taverns can actually want a stranger's money, and will actually return ale just for the purposes of business. Not every interaction has to include an ulterior motive.
Set out places of danger, and make them reasonably evident, and reasonably avoidable. Yes, of course occasionally you'll want to ambush a party, but warn the party first that bandits do tend to inhabit those roads. Let the party get itself in deeper ... they'll want to! You won't have to dangle much of a carrot in front of their nose. You will, on the other hand, have to make these places of danger seem practical, convenient, and sufficiently lucrative to the party's sense of success. There's no point in making them seem (on the surface) unimaginably dangerous, or indecently hard to get to. Moreover, they shouldn't waste the party's time ... when they reach the danger, let them experience the danger. Don't baffle them or hold them up with empty, purposeless rooms. Carry the party to the matter at hand without unnecessary delay.
And finally, as I say. Make it worth their while after the fact. Reward them.
With a little practice, you'll start seeing how to design your world on the ground to let them take the best advantage of these things. Your world will only get better from there.
"A preferred setting will be that which allows as much latitude for your players as is reasonably possible."
Latitudo is a Latin word, meaning extent, width or size, and came into popular usage in the late 14th century in description of the "breadth" of the known world. So when I say that the game requires "latitude," I mean that it requires living space.
I do not mean merely that the boundary of your world must be a hard distance to walk in a lifetime - though that doesn't hurt. I mean also that your world needs facets within it that make living possible. Most of these facets exist within the original books of the game, though they are for the most part expressed very simply. Your world needs to contain places within it that are of great convenience to the players; places which they can come to recognize, and which fit together logically so that the players can adapt themselves. It helps to think of the world as a set of player 'rights' ... things the player is entitled to expect upon joining your world.
Players have a right to resupply. This requires a town, and probably lots of towns, full of food, weapons, tools & equipment, healing centres, informational bureaus, men-at-arms ... and most of all, 'friendlies.' The player needs to be able to settle in a place which has a relative degree of consistency, and someone there the player can tell his or her troubles to. A sympathetic ear. A helping hand. Someone who can buy their stolen junk and who can encourage them to go out and get more junk. When you are setting up your towns, think about what it is like to live in a place where people get to know you and trust you. Don't just imagine a lot of surly, unhappy NPC's ... stuff into your town a few people who are able to like the party, and hail them as they return. A party should be made to feel welcome once in awhile.
Players have a right to security. If you want a good, long-term game, you can't harangue your players night and day like a boot sargeant, kicking them out of every bed they try to sleep in or assassinating them at every opportunity. If you want moments of danger to have effectiveness, you have to mix them up with moments of safety. This is not to say that every place will always be safe, all the time ... but give a party a break. Let them crawl HOME, let them lick their wounds, and let them sort themselves out and gather their shit again. Letting a party breath will aid them in a sense of purpose, and will encourage them to 'get through this bad time' with a sincere, real goal in mind. If they truly feel they have a home, then getting back there will mean something. Don't take that away from a party.
Players have a right to danger. Having made the point above, now I must make this point also. The players have the right to seek danger and to find it, if they're so inclined. Said danger ought to include in it a measured increase, such that it takes several deliberate steps on the player's part to get his or herself into a real pickle. This is what's patently wrong with the touch-a-wall-and-die concept of D&D. It has the effect of making a player little more than a zero or a one on the DM's ledger. There's no GRAY area ... and worse, there's no "You got yourself into this, you damn fool, now get yourself out." By letting a party see the danger coming, and letting them choose to meet that danger, you shift the responsibility of having that danger kill the party from your shoulders onto the party's shoulders. This is incredibly important for a good game. I cannot stress this enough. If a party is going to have any latitude of play, it has to incorporate a responsibility for their actions - and the possibility of redressing that possibility!
You see, the touch-a-wall-and-die scenario does indeed retain some sort of responsibility. Not a very meaningful one: the whole "You touched a wall? What kind of idiot are you?" moral stream of thinking is somewhat lacking in real drama. But the damning part is that there is no repentance. If the player never touched the wall, there's no knowledge of successfully averting a 'stupid' action (and it's hardly practical for a player to avoid touching every wall in the universe); if the player successfully saves, then the die made the difference, NOT the player; and if the player dies, what has the player learned: To not touch walls. This is a very dumb lesson. It certainly wouldn't cut much ice with Aesop.
Danger must be a step-by-step process by which the player hazards his life by moving forward into something that simultaneously looks both 'dangerous' and 'manageable.' That is the knife edge that sells the play. (1) Indiana Jones opens the door and starts down the passage; it is, after all, just a passage. (2) The floor is crunchy, so he lights a taper - and sees there's about a million bugs; but they're just ordinary bugs, and they're not biting him, so he keeps going. (3) He finds a secret door, but it's just an empty room, so there's no reason not to go in ...
And so on.
Players have a right to reward. There a lot of DMs who fail to grasp this. They've read a word or two from Grandfather Gygax and they insist that sometimes monsters ought not to have treasure. And I agree with that. But I didn't say 'treasure,' I said 'reward.' If the players kill a dangerous giant wolverine whose been terrorizing the local people, of course the wolverine has no treasure. It's a dumb animal. It might have a hide worth selling, but probably not after its been hacked with swords - and 'wolverine' fur, while warm, isn't known for its luxury.
However ... the PEOPLE are going to be happy about it, aren't they? And while they may not have a lot of coin, they are going to overflow with good will. That promises a place of safety, and it promises notariety, and it promises other opportunities at danger and greater reward. It is a fool of a DM who thinks the only recompense to a party's action is treasure. Fame, loyalty and, best of all, good will are extravagant rewards. Don't discount them when you consider the party's ledger.
Let me add this: if you can't figure out how to make a party's feat translate into a reward of this kind, you're not doing your job. Someone should find out what's been done, and that someone should be believed. NPC's are not just cut-outs for your towns - they're the best part of your world.
In Conclusion,
As you are constructing your world on paper, keep these four things in mind.
Draw out places of resupply: towns, villages, hamlets, ordinary houses, an army post, a manor house with its attendant peasants, mining camps, outposts or a crossroads inn. Supplement this with travelling peddlers, caravans, an ordinary adventurer ready to trade - anything that lets the party have an opportunity to better their situation in between dangers. No matter how deep the wilderness, or how off the beaten track they are, there's some logical way of letting them get at least enough to stay alive. It doesn't mean you have to have an omnipresent mega-mall Box Store following the players around on four legs, but it does mean you'll have to be a little clever when they're out of food, out of weapons, out of healing salve and out of pocket. This is YOUR responsibility, O DM. Figure out something that will let them keep going.
Set down places where bad shit doesn't happen, and let the players find them. Defensible caves or uninhabited (possibly weakly inhabited) deserted fortifications where the party can hole up for a few days; a farmer's community not being hourly attacked by beasts of every kind; a town where the party can get a meal in a tavern that doesn't include bullies, pickpockets, aggressive bartenders or knife-wielding bar wenches (is there any other kind?). Sometimes, you know, a bar is just a bar. Sometimes, the wench who sleeps with the Ranger doesn't have VD, and isn't shilling for her assassin boyfriend. Sometimes, just sometimes, a gesture of help really is a gesture of help. People can be considerate, warm, giving, generous and legitimately friendly. Taverns can actually want a stranger's money, and will actually return ale just for the purposes of business. Not every interaction has to include an ulterior motive.
Set out places of danger, and make them reasonably evident, and reasonably avoidable. Yes, of course occasionally you'll want to ambush a party, but warn the party first that bandits do tend to inhabit those roads. Let the party get itself in deeper ... they'll want to! You won't have to dangle much of a carrot in front of their nose. You will, on the other hand, have to make these places of danger seem practical, convenient, and sufficiently lucrative to the party's sense of success. There's no point in making them seem (on the surface) unimaginably dangerous, or indecently hard to get to. Moreover, they shouldn't waste the party's time ... when they reach the danger, let them experience the danger. Don't baffle them or hold them up with empty, purposeless rooms. Carry the party to the matter at hand without unnecessary delay.
And finally, as I say. Make it worth their while after the fact. Reward them.
With a little practice, you'll start seeing how to design your world on the ground to let them take the best advantage of these things. Your world will only get better from there.
Monday, February 6, 2012
D&D and My Father
I thought the cathedral might get a few more comments, but I suppose it is what it is, and there's very little to say about it. Myself, I continue to be astounded by just how large it is, in relation to a human being. I'd love to have an all out free-for-all battle take place there, with hundreds of persons fighting simultanously in a dozen rooms ... but that's just me.
I found myself thinking about how such things can easily be seen as 'wasting my time.' I remember my father, just about the time I graduated High School, having with me that talk fathers have about their sons going to university, and particularly mentioning how I would come to see, "As you get older" in his words, that D&D was a useless waste of time ... and that naturally I would learn to focus my attention on important things. It's a little bit funny. I am right now just about the age my father was when he gave me that chat - so I can fairly argue that I have all the benefits of his perspective when he denounced D&D as time-wasting. I have to say, my father was somewhat deluded.
Now, this isn't just a thrown out phrase about not liking my father. I mean exactly that word: deluded. There have been a couple of times that I've mentioned my father on this blog - I don't see much mention of fathers or mothers around the community, so that's rare. Just now I'm feeling a bit nostalgic, so if the gentle reader has the time, let me tell you a bit about him (and some of this might repeat stuff from elsewhere).
He grew up among farmers and he was descended from farmers, but he was not one. His divorced mother, who died when I was 12, was a one-room schoolhouse teacher who moved about from small town to small town in the 1930's and 40's. Some of these 'small towns' had less than 100 people in those days, places like Barrhead and Dixon and Markerville, for anyone who might happen to know mid-country Alberta. His mother was a no-nonsense, sharp-nosed woman, as they used to say, who was both intolerant of ignorance and extremely bright. I got to know her in my teens from the notes she wrote copiously in the textbooks that were bequeathed to my father, which sat upon shelves unread except by yours truly. Funny how you can get to know people after they're dead.
She drove my father with a stick towards an education, and it worked. He eventually left Alberta for the United States, being unable to get a 'worthwhile' Engineering degree here in the 1950s, and attended the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. For those of you who may not know, this was and is a prestigious school in the field of Engineering. My father experienced all the classic parts of pre-hippie university life - fraternities, pranks, girls, ballrooms, boarding houses and ultimately finding and meeting my mother ... but that's another story.
My father graduated with honors from the School of Mines, and thereupon was set upon the path of "important things." But let me back up a bit.
In the meantime, and between time, of going to university, my father worked a variety of occupations that helped set his mind in the path of responsibility. Two occupations in particular - the first was that of a roughneck, meaning that he built and took part in running oil derricks during his summers in Alberta. This is back when derricks were still made of wood, and were insanely dangerous places, much more so than now. The other job my father took, one particular summer, was fighting forest fires in the Rocky Mountain country.
So you see, my father was no pansy.
When he stepped out of university, he was offered a job with the Gulf Oil Company, which used to be a big, big player. It's long gone now. My father worked for Gulf for 42 years, right up to his retirement. He was offered management positions, but he turned them all down. The only thing he ever wanted to be was an engineer ... and that's what he was, and is ... though now the only engineering he does is a pet project he works on to keep his mind active. He's shown it to me, explained it all in detail (the technical stuff way over my head, naturally) ... and it has no real application. His words, not mine.
Now all this ought to sound quite impressive. My father has a wall full of plaques and awards and notations and so on, all testament to the achievements he's managed throughout a lifetime. Probably his biggest contribution to the oil industry was a little project that was dropped on his desk in 1974 ... a little thing called "enhanced recovery." This was an idea some geniuses thought of, suggesting you could pump water or gas or even oil into a field where the pressure had dropped off, and make that field productive again. You see, as you pump from an oil field, you rely on the pressure of the earth on that field to push the liquid up the pipe ... steadily, that pressure drops off, and you wind up with a lot of unrecoverable oil beneath the ground that can't be obtained. However, by pumping gas into the field, that pressure climbs, the oil resumes flowing out and you increase the field's production by some percentage points. Believe me, worldwide, a few percentage points is a LOT of oil.
No one believed in this in the 1970's, and the other engineers in my father's department called it "enchanted recovery." Back then, he and one other fellow consisted of the entire research team on the idea.
Now, of course, the idea has since revolutionized the industry.
But I will tell you something: I very much doubt my father had anything to do with that. Not because he didn't make his small contribution, but because I understand how business works now. These things carry the stamp of inevitability. There were probably hundreds of people working on it in 1975, and probably thousands by 1977. And as that number increases, the contribution by any one person means less and less - particularly when you consider that if my father hadn't made whatever contribution he made, someone would have made it.
That sounds harsh, I know. Its a fact of business and even science that we rarely want to accept as reality. We all want to believe that we're important. Otherwise, we are just wasting our time. But of course, my father wasn't wasting his time. He was paid well for the time he spent.
What's funny about this whole game of "important things" and "time wasting" is where my father is now. He's turning 76 in about a month, and he really is in a strange place, for him. See, he has a massive amount of intellect, and absolutely nowhere to spend it. He works on this project of his, but he does it in a state of such isolation that its impossible to see it as anything different than just "wasting his time."
Oh, now, don't jump on me. It's his time to waste, and he's entitled to that. I'd be the first person to argue it. I'd like to see my father put his work on the internet, and write a blog about it, but he won't do that because, well, he won't. If you have a father past 70, you know how that is. I only question the whole "important things" argument he made himself 29 years ago, to me. You see, time is tricky. The whole world simply moved on and right over my father's so-called "life of importance," the same way it is moving over my life and your life. In our 40s we make our lives out to be so DAMNED important ... but in reality we're all just sitting at our jobs and making the wheels turn in order for the pay we get. The same way anyone else who happened to have our job would do. Do you remember my father's wall of accolades? It sounds very impressive, but I've been in other engineers' studies in other engineers' homes - and guess what. If you keep at any job you're going to accumulate those same plaques and statues. And when you are 76, you can do your best to look at them proudly ... but to do that you'll have to forget that the people who gave those to you are gone from the "important" world themselves, and no one remembers anything about anything you ever did. The works you wrote and the time you spent, that all just goes away. This is true even if you're Shakespeare, and you were alive four centuries ago. Steadily, patiently, less and less people remember who you were, until no one does.
What amuses me about all of this is how my father believed when he was 47 that there was only one path, one accepted route to "important things" ... when in fact, nothing is really important when you gain any perspective on it. Or, at least, no single individual is. People talk about what a horror it would have been had there never been a Shakespeare, and I only think that if that were true, we'd all be getting together this evening to see a good Ben Johnson play, or maybe Christopher Marlowe. Or perhaps some fellow named Karl Schwartz would have astounded the world in the 1630s by putting together an incredible collection of really brilliant works. They might even have been better - who can say?
But of course that's nothing compared to the tens of thousands of would-be Schwartzes who actually produced crap beyond anyone's capacity to remember ... and no one wants to be forgotten like Karl Schwartz was forgotten. We all want to feel "important." And when we see our children marching down a disastrous road, obsessing over something we don't understand (as my father with his background couldn't possibly), and which we are CERTAIN is a phenomenal waste of time, we sit our children down and explain to them that they need to get their head out of this wasting of their time and into something that we do understand. We do this with only the best of intentions.
But you see, my father was deluded. He was brainwashed by the schoolmarm and the university and the frathouse and the oil company into thinking that "important" meant making contributing to a particular industry and making money at it ... but he wasn't prepared for the world he lives in now. He doesn't really understand what's going on, or why the younger people around him are behaving as they are behaving. This isn't unusual, of course, for someone his age ... but it always seems strange to me. Someone as smart as he is ought to be able to figure this out - but his life never gave him the tools.
Such as understanding why I might not "grow out of" D&D. Turns out, for me, D&D was not as unimportant as it was to him. Yes, it will never make money for me the way engineering made money for him ... but I think that what I've lacked in money I've made up for in companionship, and fun, and comprehension about the world. I am nothing like my father. I don't expect to be 76 and uncomprehending. So far, I haven't really had a lot of surprises about what it would be like to be 47. I honestly didn't think I'd live this long, and that's probably the strangest thing. But I think I can, with an open mind, get a good grasp on 76 before I get there.
We'll see, of course.
I found myself thinking about how such things can easily be seen as 'wasting my time.' I remember my father, just about the time I graduated High School, having with me that talk fathers have about their sons going to university, and particularly mentioning how I would come to see, "As you get older" in his words, that D&D was a useless waste of time ... and that naturally I would learn to focus my attention on important things. It's a little bit funny. I am right now just about the age my father was when he gave me that chat - so I can fairly argue that I have all the benefits of his perspective when he denounced D&D as time-wasting. I have to say, my father was somewhat deluded.
Now, this isn't just a thrown out phrase about not liking my father. I mean exactly that word: deluded. There have been a couple of times that I've mentioned my father on this blog - I don't see much mention of fathers or mothers around the community, so that's rare. Just now I'm feeling a bit nostalgic, so if the gentle reader has the time, let me tell you a bit about him (and some of this might repeat stuff from elsewhere).
He grew up among farmers and he was descended from farmers, but he was not one. His divorced mother, who died when I was 12, was a one-room schoolhouse teacher who moved about from small town to small town in the 1930's and 40's. Some of these 'small towns' had less than 100 people in those days, places like Barrhead and Dixon and Markerville, for anyone who might happen to know mid-country Alberta. His mother was a no-nonsense, sharp-nosed woman, as they used to say, who was both intolerant of ignorance and extremely bright. I got to know her in my teens from the notes she wrote copiously in the textbooks that were bequeathed to my father, which sat upon shelves unread except by yours truly. Funny how you can get to know people after they're dead.
She drove my father with a stick towards an education, and it worked. He eventually left Alberta for the United States, being unable to get a 'worthwhile' Engineering degree here in the 1950s, and attended the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. For those of you who may not know, this was and is a prestigious school in the field of Engineering. My father experienced all the classic parts of pre-hippie university life - fraternities, pranks, girls, ballrooms, boarding houses and ultimately finding and meeting my mother ... but that's another story.
My father graduated with honors from the School of Mines, and thereupon was set upon the path of "important things." But let me back up a bit.
In the meantime, and between time, of going to university, my father worked a variety of occupations that helped set his mind in the path of responsibility. Two occupations in particular - the first was that of a roughneck, meaning that he built and took part in running oil derricks during his summers in Alberta. This is back when derricks were still made of wood, and were insanely dangerous places, much more so than now. The other job my father took, one particular summer, was fighting forest fires in the Rocky Mountain country.
So you see, my father was no pansy.
When he stepped out of university, he was offered a job with the Gulf Oil Company, which used to be a big, big player. It's long gone now. My father worked for Gulf for 42 years, right up to his retirement. He was offered management positions, but he turned them all down. The only thing he ever wanted to be was an engineer ... and that's what he was, and is ... though now the only engineering he does is a pet project he works on to keep his mind active. He's shown it to me, explained it all in detail (the technical stuff way over my head, naturally) ... and it has no real application. His words, not mine.
Now all this ought to sound quite impressive. My father has a wall full of plaques and awards and notations and so on, all testament to the achievements he's managed throughout a lifetime. Probably his biggest contribution to the oil industry was a little project that was dropped on his desk in 1974 ... a little thing called "enhanced recovery." This was an idea some geniuses thought of, suggesting you could pump water or gas or even oil into a field where the pressure had dropped off, and make that field productive again. You see, as you pump from an oil field, you rely on the pressure of the earth on that field to push the liquid up the pipe ... steadily, that pressure drops off, and you wind up with a lot of unrecoverable oil beneath the ground that can't be obtained. However, by pumping gas into the field, that pressure climbs, the oil resumes flowing out and you increase the field's production by some percentage points. Believe me, worldwide, a few percentage points is a LOT of oil.
No one believed in this in the 1970's, and the other engineers in my father's department called it "enchanted recovery." Back then, he and one other fellow consisted of the entire research team on the idea.
Now, of course, the idea has since revolutionized the industry.
But I will tell you something: I very much doubt my father had anything to do with that. Not because he didn't make his small contribution, but because I understand how business works now. These things carry the stamp of inevitability. There were probably hundreds of people working on it in 1975, and probably thousands by 1977. And as that number increases, the contribution by any one person means less and less - particularly when you consider that if my father hadn't made whatever contribution he made, someone would have made it.
That sounds harsh, I know. Its a fact of business and even science that we rarely want to accept as reality. We all want to believe that we're important. Otherwise, we are just wasting our time. But of course, my father wasn't wasting his time. He was paid well for the time he spent.
What's funny about this whole game of "important things" and "time wasting" is where my father is now. He's turning 76 in about a month, and he really is in a strange place, for him. See, he has a massive amount of intellect, and absolutely nowhere to spend it. He works on this project of his, but he does it in a state of such isolation that its impossible to see it as anything different than just "wasting his time."
Oh, now, don't jump on me. It's his time to waste, and he's entitled to that. I'd be the first person to argue it. I'd like to see my father put his work on the internet, and write a blog about it, but he won't do that because, well, he won't. If you have a father past 70, you know how that is. I only question the whole "important things" argument he made himself 29 years ago, to me. You see, time is tricky. The whole world simply moved on and right over my father's so-called "life of importance," the same way it is moving over my life and your life. In our 40s we make our lives out to be so DAMNED important ... but in reality we're all just sitting at our jobs and making the wheels turn in order for the pay we get. The same way anyone else who happened to have our job would do. Do you remember my father's wall of accolades? It sounds very impressive, but I've been in other engineers' studies in other engineers' homes - and guess what. If you keep at any job you're going to accumulate those same plaques and statues. And when you are 76, you can do your best to look at them proudly ... but to do that you'll have to forget that the people who gave those to you are gone from the "important" world themselves, and no one remembers anything about anything you ever did. The works you wrote and the time you spent, that all just goes away. This is true even if you're Shakespeare, and you were alive four centuries ago. Steadily, patiently, less and less people remember who you were, until no one does.
What amuses me about all of this is how my father believed when he was 47 that there was only one path, one accepted route to "important things" ... when in fact, nothing is really important when you gain any perspective on it. Or, at least, no single individual is. People talk about what a horror it would have been had there never been a Shakespeare, and I only think that if that were true, we'd all be getting together this evening to see a good Ben Johnson play, or maybe Christopher Marlowe. Or perhaps some fellow named Karl Schwartz would have astounded the world in the 1630s by putting together an incredible collection of really brilliant works. They might even have been better - who can say?
But of course that's nothing compared to the tens of thousands of would-be Schwartzes who actually produced crap beyond anyone's capacity to remember ... and no one wants to be forgotten like Karl Schwartz was forgotten. We all want to feel "important." And when we see our children marching down a disastrous road, obsessing over something we don't understand (as my father with his background couldn't possibly), and which we are CERTAIN is a phenomenal waste of time, we sit our children down and explain to them that they need to get their head out of this wasting of their time and into something that we do understand. We do this with only the best of intentions.
But you see, my father was deluded. He was brainwashed by the schoolmarm and the university and the frathouse and the oil company into thinking that "important" meant making contributing to a particular industry and making money at it ... but he wasn't prepared for the world he lives in now. He doesn't really understand what's going on, or why the younger people around him are behaving as they are behaving. This isn't unusual, of course, for someone his age ... but it always seems strange to me. Someone as smart as he is ought to be able to figure this out - but his life never gave him the tools.
Such as understanding why I might not "grow out of" D&D. Turns out, for me, D&D was not as unimportant as it was to him. Yes, it will never make money for me the way engineering made money for him ... but I think that what I've lacked in money I've made up for in companionship, and fun, and comprehension about the world. I am nothing like my father. I don't expect to be 76 and uncomprehending. So far, I haven't really had a lot of surprises about what it would be like to be 47. I honestly didn't think I'd live this long, and that's probably the strangest thing. But I think I can, with an open mind, get a good grasp on 76 before I get there.
We'll see, of course.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
A Cathedral as Dungeon
Just for fun, I've been putting together this map of the actual Sankt Paulus Cathedral in Munster, Westphalia, Germany. The image above has it superimposed over a hex map, the hexes having a 5' foot diameter. Sadly, because the Cathedral was bombed during World War II, I had to consider that changes that were made since 1650 (my world's existence) as accepted for the campaign's use. I've also made a few other changes to make it more 'game-worthy.'
For perspective, you can find a tiny dot to the left of the Altar Isle in the right center of the Nave. This is the size of an actual person.
Grey lines are stairs. Yellow blocks indicate windows emplaced into the stone. Two thin lines indicate doors. The central blue space amid the cemetery is a pond. Green spaces are outdoors.
Incidentally, this is the church used for this part of the online campaign.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Enough Fetish - Let's Play Instead
From the 10,000 word post, in reference to choosing a setting for a D&D campaign:
"No one appears for a football game in order to watch the field. The field is lacking as an entertainment medium. It's sole purpose is as a measuring device to determine who wins and who loses."
This, I felt, deserved a few words of its own.
Very often, in fetishizing a setting such as we read in books or see captured in a film, we tend to attribute a greater importance to that setting than it really deserves. This is the meaning of a 'fetish' - to take an ordinary object and embue it with supernatural power, such as a cross or a book. This supernatural fetish takes hold of a culture and continues to manifest itself in ridiculous traditions, such as having a President swear to be a good President with his hand resting on a Bible - as though the swearing itself means nothing if it is not supernaturally 'enforced' by the Bible's presence.
Consider a setting familiar to most gentle readers: Middle Earth.
Here we have a host of so-called 'well-known' places ... the Shire, Fanghorn, Mirkwood, the Lonely Mountain, Gondor and so on. We've read the books and watched the movies and we perceive we have a definite idea of what these places are like.
But remember that Rohan does not look like "Rohan," not really. Remember that what it looks like is New Zealand.
Fact is, as a setting rich with interesting places to see for D&D, it's actually pretty crappy. If you don't believe me, get out your copy of The Hobbit and then copy out everything the book says about the Misty Mountains. Don't embellish, just write out the actual descriptive words from the book. Good. Now how long did that take you? A couple of weeks? A day or two? Did it take as much as an hour?
The reality is, there's almost nothing, really. Tolkein knew he didn't have to extensively describe the mountains, because he was writing a book, and not an RPG setting. He knew his reader would fill in the greater details from the reader's familiarity with mountains in Norway, or Switzerland, or Poland, or America ... or New Zealand. That's why encyclopedias of Tolkein like this one are loaded with oblique references of what King Durin VI or Azog or Balin did that happened in the area of the Misty Mountains, but virtually not a thing about the mountains themselves. The mountains ARE mountains. There's nothing really special about them.
But is it different for an RPG? I'll tell you truly, no. I run the real world, and my setting does take advantage of a cultural reflection in people's minds of the Alps or the Urals or the Andes ... but most people have not spent great gobs of time in those places, and even if they have - we're still talking mountains here. I have lived most of my life in and around the Rocky Mountains, and though I've camped overnight hundreds of times around them, and tramped up and down their slopes in summer and winter, I can't make the mountains themselves interesting or exciting for very long, not to people sitting around a kitchen table.
The mountains aren't important. Middle Earth isn't important. If you think that by running Middle Earth you will be running a setting that is amazingly more interesting than a setting of your own cobbled-together imagination, you will be amazingly disappointed. We are talking about a big, empty map, with less words written about what's actually there than you'll find in the smallest pocket travel guide, and in the whole it won't matter. What will interest your party isn't the magic word "Rohan," but instead the seventeen orcs standing fifty feet away.
Settings are deathly dull, in case you didn't know. This is why a dungeon that presents empty room after empty room makes for a dismal night of running - even if the last room found is full of creatures and treasure. What you really want is a setting where EVERY room is full of some kind of creature, and some kind of treasure (informational, if not pecuniary), because living things that threaten or cooperate are only about ten thousand times more interesting than four walls with a door.
Advice like this will not stop would-be DMs from scratching out walls and doors, one juxtaposed with the next, ad nauseam, as though the shape of a hall or a room somehow in itself creates excitement and drama. In roleplaying this truly is a fetish - otherwise, how can you explain representations of a campaign environment like this:
Nevermind that a culture that would devise something like this would soon murder one another over arguments of who had to get up and walk half a mile to fetch the water for dinner, the actual contribution this set-up offers for dramatic momentum in a campaign is sincerely suspect. I know, oh I do know, that DMs swear vehemently by such maps. No fetishist in the world patiently carving stone into the shape of a woobie doll compares with a 17-year-old DM composing a map for a serious long-term dungeon crawl. But is this necessary? Are all the doors and the turnings and the choosings of lefts over rights and rights over lefts really conducive, or is it just habit? Wouldn't it be better if the party could get straight to the matter of fighting and bargaining and chasing and fleeing from the creatures themselves, who were spaced apart by simple straight passages that did not require 90 minutes of navigation? Or is it that the boring bits are a way for DMs to mock players who'd rather be going up levels than going down staircases?
Or as my offline party likes to say, "You have now gotten through the maze that allows you to reach the next maze."
So streamline your world. Make it less about your world and more about the people in it. A conversation with a wall is very, very boring. A conversation with seventeen orcs, MUCH more interesting.
"No one appears for a football game in order to watch the field. The field is lacking as an entertainment medium. It's sole purpose is as a measuring device to determine who wins and who loses."
This, I felt, deserved a few words of its own.
Very often, in fetishizing a setting such as we read in books or see captured in a film, we tend to attribute a greater importance to that setting than it really deserves. This is the meaning of a 'fetish' - to take an ordinary object and embue it with supernatural power, such as a cross or a book. This supernatural fetish takes hold of a culture and continues to manifest itself in ridiculous traditions, such as having a President swear to be a good President with his hand resting on a Bible - as though the swearing itself means nothing if it is not supernaturally 'enforced' by the Bible's presence.
Consider a setting familiar to most gentle readers: Middle Earth.
 |
| Some Americans can indicate the location of Rohan on a map more easily than they can Romania. |
But remember that Rohan does not look like "Rohan," not really. Remember that what it looks like is New Zealand.
Fact is, as a setting rich with interesting places to see for D&D, it's actually pretty crappy. If you don't believe me, get out your copy of The Hobbit and then copy out everything the book says about the Misty Mountains. Don't embellish, just write out the actual descriptive words from the book. Good. Now how long did that take you? A couple of weeks? A day or two? Did it take as much as an hour?
The reality is, there's almost nothing, really. Tolkein knew he didn't have to extensively describe the mountains, because he was writing a book, and not an RPG setting. He knew his reader would fill in the greater details from the reader's familiarity with mountains in Norway, or Switzerland, or Poland, or America ... or New Zealand. That's why encyclopedias of Tolkein like this one are loaded with oblique references of what King Durin VI or Azog or Balin did that happened in the area of the Misty Mountains, but virtually not a thing about the mountains themselves. The mountains ARE mountains. There's nothing really special about them.
But is it different for an RPG? I'll tell you truly, no. I run the real world, and my setting does take advantage of a cultural reflection in people's minds of the Alps or the Urals or the Andes ... but most people have not spent great gobs of time in those places, and even if they have - we're still talking mountains here. I have lived most of my life in and around the Rocky Mountains, and though I've camped overnight hundreds of times around them, and tramped up and down their slopes in summer and winter, I can't make the mountains themselves interesting or exciting for very long, not to people sitting around a kitchen table.
The mountains aren't important. Middle Earth isn't important. If you think that by running Middle Earth you will be running a setting that is amazingly more interesting than a setting of your own cobbled-together imagination, you will be amazingly disappointed. We are talking about a big, empty map, with less words written about what's actually there than you'll find in the smallest pocket travel guide, and in the whole it won't matter. What will interest your party isn't the magic word "Rohan," but instead the seventeen orcs standing fifty feet away.
Settings are deathly dull, in case you didn't know. This is why a dungeon that presents empty room after empty room makes for a dismal night of running - even if the last room found is full of creatures and treasure. What you really want is a setting where EVERY room is full of some kind of creature, and some kind of treasure (informational, if not pecuniary), because living things that threaten or cooperate are only about ten thousand times more interesting than four walls with a door.
Advice like this will not stop would-be DMs from scratching out walls and doors, one juxtaposed with the next, ad nauseam, as though the shape of a hall or a room somehow in itself creates excitement and drama. In roleplaying this truly is a fetish - otherwise, how can you explain representations of a campaign environment like this:
 |
| The people who dug these passages - did they want to spend every minute of their lives on their feet? |
Or as my offline party likes to say, "You have now gotten through the maze that allows you to reach the next maze."
So streamline your world. Make it less about your world and more about the people in it. A conversation with a wall is very, very boring. A conversation with seventeen orcs, MUCH more interesting.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Tailoring
From the 10,000 word post:
"Fundamentally, the first step is to present a setting. Without burying ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented, the principle purpose of the setting is to 'ground' the campaign in something tangible that can be incorporated into the player's imaginations. If the player cannot visualize the setting. or how to move or interact within that setting, then the setting is worthless to your game. Flogging a setting for the sake of novelty over the principles of interaction is a poor proposition, and will result in a sharp decrease of momentum once the novelty departs. Your setting cannot exist for the sake of itself - it exists to give the players identifying markers upon which to play. "
Very well, let us bury ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented.
Most obvious are settings which have come down from fiction authors, who have contrived lands and cities and gods and monsters which seem to fit perfectly with a D&D setting. Tolkein has conveniently provided us with descriptions of Middle Earth, so that players at the table can picture the Inn at Bree, or the White City, or the Lonely Mountain. The flavour, too, of the land is laid out so that each player at the table - who has read the books - can imagine how their characters might think or act in such a place. And the same can be said for the other vistas, neatly listed for you in the infamous Appendix N.
Then of course there are the pregenerated worlds, convenient for your use. These are even better than the post-fictional worlds, since the 'grittiness' doesn't depend upon a few mere books with inconvenient time spent on plots and characters that won't ultimately be useful to the DM. The Outer World, Greyhawk ... even Dragonlance ... these offer so much MORE detail for your use. Enough, in fact, that you may never get to read all the possible materials that might be of use to you - and a seemingly bottomless well is a good thing, yes?
Even better, if your players are equally familiar with the pregenerated setting, then they should be able to visualize it. Better still, if the infrastructure of that world is sound and consistent, your party will be able to judge their actions against what they think the consequences will be ... that will be reassuring for them, and will increase their willingness to take risks. Overall, that's good for the momentum of your campaign.
Why, then, should novelty be a poor proposition?
If you have travelled, or can conceive of travelling, to a vastly different culture, you can see the difficulty at once. Let us say that we snap our fingers and appear in the deepest corner of New Guinea, or in a heavily populated part Ulaan Bator in Mongolia. What are the social rules? How should we behave so as not to offend anyone? Are we in danger, or is this ultimately a safe place? Upon what am I to base my expectations when I attempt to address the residents, or ask for a place to stay, or even to buy things from the market?
A common tactic that many adopt when finding themselves faced with these questions is to bull their way through. Westerners are famous for stepping on toes and brazenly insulting locals by demanding that things be handled or taken for granted in the same way they are in rural Devonshire or suburban Ohio. This has led a great many people into situations of great distress ... but that's what embassies are for. Thankfully, there IS a Devonshire and an Ohio, where people understand why we might have acted the way we did.
But if we extend the question to a unique, isolated world scene that has popped out of a DM's imagination, what then? As a player, how am I to judge what is right and what is wrong?
Often, a DM will take the trouble to provide a long list of contrived social moraes and institutions, which the players are to imbibe and hopefully channel through their roleplay. The only thing is: creating an entire cultural milieu is an incredibly daunting task - just consider the length of the Bible, or the complete Upanishads and the Vedas besides. It's just not possible to create a new reality with a few pages of 'traditions,' based upon nothing more than the DM's imagination. Thus, whenever it's tried, the proposed novelty relies upon the crutches of the social system we ARE familiar with - only with the uncertainty of where the DM's conception ends and where the usual social values begin. Inevitably, the DM's vision fails and the world either dies on the vine, or the more familiar values assert themselves and take over.
There's a reason for this. Our social values, norms, virtues and what have you, exist because they have proven to endure the test of time ... and that test has been thousands upon thousands of years. Something that's been in existence for a few weeks in a DM's notebook can hardly stand against that. Parties will return to the only behavior they know how to exhibit - their own - and the world will either bend to that behavior or the world will die.
Every author and filmmaker learns through trial and folly that there are some realities that must be adhered to when presenting an alternative "reality" to a modern audience. Concepts like love, loyalty, right-and-wrong as we understand it, attitudes towards sexuality and family - these must be maintained or else your audience will depart. It does not matter if it makes no sense in the context of the story. If Spartacus fights the Romans, it must be for the sake of an American-style freedom. If the poles of good and evil are to be maintained, the men who fight against Mordor cannot be demonstrated to be fornicators and idolaters. There can be drinking, but it is happy drinking, and taverns are happy places. Such are the expectations of the audience.
Yes, there is a disconnect here. Our social expectations do include an amount of unpleasant, undesireable expectations - there are drunks in the world, and people do rise up against corrupt governments only to be as corrupt themselves. Good and evil are outdated, outmoded - even ridiculous - concepts to many of us. And still they won't work for your players, because that is not the game they want to play. Even if your world is dark and gritty, it is dark and gritty only where those things are on display to be stamped out and the world made better. Your players will still need fantasy and sunshine if they're going to keep playing.
What I am saying is that if you will have a GOOD world, that world will be recognizable. I don't mean it follows the pattern of what your players see on their commute to work each morning. I do mean that bad people will present themselves in the way you would expect bad people to do so ... perhaps lying in the beginning, perhaps apparently virtuous and well-meaning - but always with that moment of treachery that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what makes them who they are. And they will have familiar, appreciable motivations - greed, power, wrath, pride. These motivations will likely not fall into the lusting, perverse categories. Your players will not appreciate it.
Obviously this does not merely apply to people. Rivers should be expected to run from the mountains to the sea. The sea should be expected to have waves. Grass will grow, and clouds will roll across the sky, and rain will be composed of water. Oh, you can play around with these things ... but if you play too far from the norm, you will only exhaust your players. Your world will become a laughing stock, as the rivers flowing up into the mountains will inspire first jokes, then exhaustion. An uphill flowing river is a like a joke that is funny once. After awhile, it loses its novelty and just becomes an inconvenient, tired thing that the parties have to be reminded of again and again, because they've forgotten. You will smugly report that it is raining mustard again, and the party will stare at you with dull eyes and dull expressions. "Yes, so, what of it," will be their opinion.
You will not make a good world with gimmicks. That the mountains are grey or green or off-pink with purple edges will not make any difference in even the short run. You won't get anywhere populating your world with weird and unfamiliar denizens. Birds of different feathers and conceived breeds do not inspire the imagination, they shut it down. Your players will not ponder your concoctions any further than the questions, "can we kill it, can we eat it, can we sell it." And in answer to those questions, your birds might as well be eagles and mackaws. The human imagination ponders that with which it has already developed a fetish. People like penguins and turtles and panda bears because they have grown up in a world rich with references to those things. Your players will not get excited about your sznifloos, because they did not receive stuffed sznifloos for Christmas, years ago.
If you will insist on creating all these things to make your world uniquely your world, you are climbing an impossible hill that offers no view. You're not tapping into the ready-made reservoir of player emotions already held in their minds for creatures that do impress them. An ordinary hippopotomus may seem too mundane for your world - but everyone knows what they are, and everyone can guess what they would do when stumbling across one. What does one do with a sznifloo?
Stop and think. If you were a tailor, and a man entered to have a suit made for himself, would novelty be your primary concern? Or would it be to fit your customer excellently, so that as he moved about in the suit you had made, and felt its sleeves upon his arms, and the reassuring grasp of the fabric about his shoulders, he marvelled at what a good tailor you were. It is little understood by DMs that the actual world fits us rather like a good suit - with food that we can grow and eat, and animals we can domesticate or shepherd, and aspects we appreciate and adore. True, the world is a nasty, scary place - but we have been fashioned biologically for this world, and it is that biology that makes it such a good fit.
Take the clothes made by others - novelists and game designers - and make alterations as you will, or mark your fabric and create your conception from scratch ... but set aside your grandious conceptions of novel artistry, and concentrate instead on just being a damn good tailor.
"Fundamentally, the first step is to present a setting. Without burying ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented, the principle purpose of the setting is to 'ground' the campaign in something tangible that can be incorporated into the player's imaginations. If the player cannot visualize the setting. or how to move or interact within that setting, then the setting is worthless to your game. Flogging a setting for the sake of novelty over the principles of interaction is a poor proposition, and will result in a sharp decrease of momentum once the novelty departs. Your setting cannot exist for the sake of itself - it exists to give the players identifying markers upon which to play. "
Very well, let us bury ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented.
Most obvious are settings which have come down from fiction authors, who have contrived lands and cities and gods and monsters which seem to fit perfectly with a D&D setting. Tolkein has conveniently provided us with descriptions of Middle Earth, so that players at the table can picture the Inn at Bree, or the White City, or the Lonely Mountain. The flavour, too, of the land is laid out so that each player at the table - who has read the books - can imagine how their characters might think or act in such a place. And the same can be said for the other vistas, neatly listed for you in the infamous Appendix N.
Then of course there are the pregenerated worlds, convenient for your use. These are even better than the post-fictional worlds, since the 'grittiness' doesn't depend upon a few mere books with inconvenient time spent on plots and characters that won't ultimately be useful to the DM. The Outer World, Greyhawk ... even Dragonlance ... these offer so much MORE detail for your use. Enough, in fact, that you may never get to read all the possible materials that might be of use to you - and a seemingly bottomless well is a good thing, yes?
Even better, if your players are equally familiar with the pregenerated setting, then they should be able to visualize it. Better still, if the infrastructure of that world is sound and consistent, your party will be able to judge their actions against what they think the consequences will be ... that will be reassuring for them, and will increase their willingness to take risks. Overall, that's good for the momentum of your campaign.
Why, then, should novelty be a poor proposition?
If you have travelled, or can conceive of travelling, to a vastly different culture, you can see the difficulty at once. Let us say that we snap our fingers and appear in the deepest corner of New Guinea, or in a heavily populated part Ulaan Bator in Mongolia. What are the social rules? How should we behave so as not to offend anyone? Are we in danger, or is this ultimately a safe place? Upon what am I to base my expectations when I attempt to address the residents, or ask for a place to stay, or even to buy things from the market?
A common tactic that many adopt when finding themselves faced with these questions is to bull their way through. Westerners are famous for stepping on toes and brazenly insulting locals by demanding that things be handled or taken for granted in the same way they are in rural Devonshire or suburban Ohio. This has led a great many people into situations of great distress ... but that's what embassies are for. Thankfully, there IS a Devonshire and an Ohio, where people understand why we might have acted the way we did.
But if we extend the question to a unique, isolated world scene that has popped out of a DM's imagination, what then? As a player, how am I to judge what is right and what is wrong?
Often, a DM will take the trouble to provide a long list of contrived social moraes and institutions, which the players are to imbibe and hopefully channel through their roleplay. The only thing is: creating an entire cultural milieu is an incredibly daunting task - just consider the length of the Bible, or the complete Upanishads and the Vedas besides. It's just not possible to create a new reality with a few pages of 'traditions,' based upon nothing more than the DM's imagination. Thus, whenever it's tried, the proposed novelty relies upon the crutches of the social system we ARE familiar with - only with the uncertainty of where the DM's conception ends and where the usual social values begin. Inevitably, the DM's vision fails and the world either dies on the vine, or the more familiar values assert themselves and take over.
There's a reason for this. Our social values, norms, virtues and what have you, exist because they have proven to endure the test of time ... and that test has been thousands upon thousands of years. Something that's been in existence for a few weeks in a DM's notebook can hardly stand against that. Parties will return to the only behavior they know how to exhibit - their own - and the world will either bend to that behavior or the world will die.
Every author and filmmaker learns through trial and folly that there are some realities that must be adhered to when presenting an alternative "reality" to a modern audience. Concepts like love, loyalty, right-and-wrong as we understand it, attitudes towards sexuality and family - these must be maintained or else your audience will depart. It does not matter if it makes no sense in the context of the story. If Spartacus fights the Romans, it must be for the sake of an American-style freedom. If the poles of good and evil are to be maintained, the men who fight against Mordor cannot be demonstrated to be fornicators and idolaters. There can be drinking, but it is happy drinking, and taverns are happy places. Such are the expectations of the audience.
Yes, there is a disconnect here. Our social expectations do include an amount of unpleasant, undesireable expectations - there are drunks in the world, and people do rise up against corrupt governments only to be as corrupt themselves. Good and evil are outdated, outmoded - even ridiculous - concepts to many of us. And still they won't work for your players, because that is not the game they want to play. Even if your world is dark and gritty, it is dark and gritty only where those things are on display to be stamped out and the world made better. Your players will still need fantasy and sunshine if they're going to keep playing.
What I am saying is that if you will have a GOOD world, that world will be recognizable. I don't mean it follows the pattern of what your players see on their commute to work each morning. I do mean that bad people will present themselves in the way you would expect bad people to do so ... perhaps lying in the beginning, perhaps apparently virtuous and well-meaning - but always with that moment of treachery that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what makes them who they are. And they will have familiar, appreciable motivations - greed, power, wrath, pride. These motivations will likely not fall into the lusting, perverse categories. Your players will not appreciate it.
Obviously this does not merely apply to people. Rivers should be expected to run from the mountains to the sea. The sea should be expected to have waves. Grass will grow, and clouds will roll across the sky, and rain will be composed of water. Oh, you can play around with these things ... but if you play too far from the norm, you will only exhaust your players. Your world will become a laughing stock, as the rivers flowing up into the mountains will inspire first jokes, then exhaustion. An uphill flowing river is a like a joke that is funny once. After awhile, it loses its novelty and just becomes an inconvenient, tired thing that the parties have to be reminded of again and again, because they've forgotten. You will smugly report that it is raining mustard again, and the party will stare at you with dull eyes and dull expressions. "Yes, so, what of it," will be their opinion.
You will not make a good world with gimmicks. That the mountains are grey or green or off-pink with purple edges will not make any difference in even the short run. You won't get anywhere populating your world with weird and unfamiliar denizens. Birds of different feathers and conceived breeds do not inspire the imagination, they shut it down. Your players will not ponder your concoctions any further than the questions, "can we kill it, can we eat it, can we sell it." And in answer to those questions, your birds might as well be eagles and mackaws. The human imagination ponders that with which it has already developed a fetish. People like penguins and turtles and panda bears because they have grown up in a world rich with references to those things. Your players will not get excited about your sznifloos, because they did not receive stuffed sznifloos for Christmas, years ago.
If you will insist on creating all these things to make your world uniquely your world, you are climbing an impossible hill that offers no view. You're not tapping into the ready-made reservoir of player emotions already held in their minds for creatures that do impress them. An ordinary hippopotomus may seem too mundane for your world - but everyone knows what they are, and everyone can guess what they would do when stumbling across one. What does one do with a sznifloo?
Stop and think. If you were a tailor, and a man entered to have a suit made for himself, would novelty be your primary concern? Or would it be to fit your customer excellently, so that as he moved about in the suit you had made, and felt its sleeves upon his arms, and the reassuring grasp of the fabric about his shoulders, he marvelled at what a good tailor you were. It is little understood by DMs that the actual world fits us rather like a good suit - with food that we can grow and eat, and animals we can domesticate or shepherd, and aspects we appreciate and adore. True, the world is a nasty, scary place - but we have been fashioned biologically for this world, and it is that biology that makes it such a good fit.
Take the clothes made by others - novelists and game designers - and make alterations as you will, or mark your fabric and create your conception from scratch ... but set aside your grandious conceptions of novel artistry, and concentrate instead on just being a damn good tailor.
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