Thursday, April 10, 2014
Roll 'Em
Because we are setting up a fundraiser in June to pay for printing costs and the price of travelling to Toronto this August, we are looking for additional things to sell. My daughter commissioned this T-shirt design, which we plan to have on sale within six weeks. Let me know what you think of it, and make a suggestion or two about what catchy expression it needs:
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Bad Bubble! Bad Bad Bad!
If you're finding lately that people are giving you a hard time for your interest in role-playing games, or if you worry about how socially leprous they are, or whether or not you feel free to comment about them in the public space where you work or play, then you should have a close look at this:
This is a screenshot from a pro-anorexia website, in which people with eating disorders join together to share tips, give support and discuss their day-to-day activities in order to jointly pursue the practice of remaining true to their disorder. Please take note, this is not for people who want to stop being anorexic. This is for people who love it, who don't want to stop doing it, and who want to talk to others about that. The general discussions forum on the website that I took the above image from lists 821,176 replies at the time of this writing. 3 replies came in over the time it took to write this paragraph.
What must be recognized is how this differs powerfully from the liberal sensibilities message that permeates the society, which rails that people must not take part in any sort of destructive activity, including self-destructive. These people do not care. They do not care about your opinion nor mine regarding activities they embrace.
I wish I could find an online group of role-players who were that dedicated about their passion.
Because I'm not a journalist, but a blogger, and I have no institution to which I must genuflect in order to write this post, I don't have to now provide a packaged sort of phrase about the morality of the above. I have been a journalist. I may again be a journalist, if a job ever materialized again for me in this paper-dead culture. But I don't consider myself a journalist right now, and thank you, I don't want to be one. That is because, partly for reasons I gave last Wednesday, journalism is a corrupt, institutionalized information-delivery system whose cracks have begun to show.
I do not know about the reader, but recently I have begun to notice how mythological the depiction of journalism is of late. Here I am thinking of journalists as they appear in shows like Kevin Spacey's House of Cards or Antoine Fuqua's collapsed vehicle Boss ... in which journalists are still depicted as though this were the 1970s All the President's Men and not the modern ridiculousness of the New York Times, the lately corrupt and dead News of the World, or television's Fox News or CNN, where speculation and idiocy have replaced investigative journalism. No one, anywhere, has the budget or the time or even the inclination for investigative journalism, which is more than evident in the total lack of useful foreign news that can be gotten from a North American vendor (I am including the Canadian press and media in this). It is terribly convenient for drama to still imagine an editor who can throw on a coat and rush out to talk to a source, but it is silly in the extreme. No one does this any more, and anyone who tried would quickly be fired.
I include Aaron Sorkin here with his completely out-of-date The Newsroom, which is a sometimes painful so-called political drama show where everyone ACTS like the world still works like it did in 1965, while simultaneously LAMENTING that the world does not work like it did in 1965. It is a bizarre mix of cognitive dissonance, both of the writer and anyone who is apparently funding the show, to an audience clearly out of touch with the internet - but then, I said yesterday that television hates the internet.
Because I am not a journalist, I don't have to justify any of the above except to say, 'my opinion.' The only value my opinion has is that it strikes a chord with people, who presumably are nodding their heads as they read along. I am, therefore, preaching to the choir ... but there are worse places to preach.
One thing that the media really, really hates is the 'bubble.' That is, the one you live in, where you only read the things that interest you, or that you agree with. This is bad for you, very bad. Mostly because it means you won't be listening to the advertising that funds the media, because the very WORST thing about the bubble is that you're not interested in buying things you don't like, either. Basically, the media can't reach you, they can't preach to you, they can't program you and they can't put a bug in your ear to waste your money on their products.
This is bad for them, very bad.
It does mean, however, that you'll spend your morning, or your evening, floating around a lot of free content on the net that has been written today about D&D and other things that fascinate you, instead of watching a lot of bad programming and reading a lot of bad journalism that doesn't fascinate you. Oh, the bad, bad bubble.
When someone tells you that something is bad for you, the first thing you should wonder is what are they selling?
This is a screenshot from a pro-anorexia website, in which people with eating disorders join together to share tips, give support and discuss their day-to-day activities in order to jointly pursue the practice of remaining true to their disorder. Please take note, this is not for people who want to stop being anorexic. This is for people who love it, who don't want to stop doing it, and who want to talk to others about that. The general discussions forum on the website that I took the above image from lists 821,176 replies at the time of this writing. 3 replies came in over the time it took to write this paragraph.
What must be recognized is how this differs powerfully from the liberal sensibilities message that permeates the society, which rails that people must not take part in any sort of destructive activity, including self-destructive. These people do not care. They do not care about your opinion nor mine regarding activities they embrace.
I wish I could find an online group of role-players who were that dedicated about their passion.
Because I'm not a journalist, but a blogger, and I have no institution to which I must genuflect in order to write this post, I don't have to now provide a packaged sort of phrase about the morality of the above. I have been a journalist. I may again be a journalist, if a job ever materialized again for me in this paper-dead culture. But I don't consider myself a journalist right now, and thank you, I don't want to be one. That is because, partly for reasons I gave last Wednesday, journalism is a corrupt, institutionalized information-delivery system whose cracks have begun to show.
I do not know about the reader, but recently I have begun to notice how mythological the depiction of journalism is of late. Here I am thinking of journalists as they appear in shows like Kevin Spacey's House of Cards or Antoine Fuqua's collapsed vehicle Boss ... in which journalists are still depicted as though this were the 1970s All the President's Men and not the modern ridiculousness of the New York Times, the lately corrupt and dead News of the World, or television's Fox News or CNN, where speculation and idiocy have replaced investigative journalism. No one, anywhere, has the budget or the time or even the inclination for investigative journalism, which is more than evident in the total lack of useful foreign news that can be gotten from a North American vendor (I am including the Canadian press and media in this). It is terribly convenient for drama to still imagine an editor who can throw on a coat and rush out to talk to a source, but it is silly in the extreme. No one does this any more, and anyone who tried would quickly be fired.
I include Aaron Sorkin here with his completely out-of-date The Newsroom, which is a sometimes painful so-called political drama show where everyone ACTS like the world still works like it did in 1965, while simultaneously LAMENTING that the world does not work like it did in 1965. It is a bizarre mix of cognitive dissonance, both of the writer and anyone who is apparently funding the show, to an audience clearly out of touch with the internet - but then, I said yesterday that television hates the internet.
Because I am not a journalist, I don't have to justify any of the above except to say, 'my opinion.' The only value my opinion has is that it strikes a chord with people, who presumably are nodding their heads as they read along. I am, therefore, preaching to the choir ... but there are worse places to preach.
One thing that the media really, really hates is the 'bubble.' That is, the one you live in, where you only read the things that interest you, or that you agree with. This is bad for you, very bad. Mostly because it means you won't be listening to the advertising that funds the media, because the very WORST thing about the bubble is that you're not interested in buying things you don't like, either. Basically, the media can't reach you, they can't preach to you, they can't program you and they can't put a bug in your ear to waste your money on their products.
This is bad for them, very bad.
It does mean, however, that you'll spend your morning, or your evening, floating around a lot of free content on the net that has been written today about D&D and other things that fascinate you, instead of watching a lot of bad programming and reading a lot of bad journalism that doesn't fascinate you. Oh, the bad, bad bubble.
When someone tells you that something is bad for you, the first thing you should wonder is what are they selling?
Monday, April 7, 2014
The Miserable Plight of Producers Who Know Best
Right now, I would sincerely, very sincerely, like to write something on agile design, but as that is just too damn close to where I am in the book right now, I have to let that go.
The regular reader will have noticed that I haven't written a straight post since last Wednesday, and it would be fair to assume that that's because I've been busy and I haven't had time and that I've been putting my resources towards other things and so on. That would be total bullshit, but it's a fair assumption.
The real issue would be that since Wednesday, I have been unable to stop thinking of new ways to write Wednesday's post again. I am myself still geeking out over the philosophical premise I advanced ... and if I had written a post yesterday or Friday or any time before now, I would have hammered on the points I'd already made to no real purpose.
The best I can manage at this time is to discuss something else Clay Shirky said just five months ago, while talking about agile design and the crash and burn of Obama's .gov website for health care. It was regarding the expectation of producing a program for the general public that would be perfect for launch-day, and how the idea that 'failure is not an option' is an idea that no engineer would embrace, as depicted in the film Apollo 13. The error was that the government withheld everything about the .gov launch until the last possible moment, with the expectation that it would be 'perfect' upon launch, and of course it wasn't. Public tests were not made, the disaster was augmented by the President's poor choice of speech on the day of the launch and the whole thing proved to be an unmitigated mess ... primarily because it was envisioned as something that would happen all at once, and thus make a sweeping change.
The alternative that Shirky argues, and indeed that most any engineer would argue, is that the process needs to be halted - however painful that is - as often as it needs to be halted, that failure IS an option, indeed, an expectation, and that ad hoc dates need to be suspended over the course of the product being made right. As Shirky says, would you rather jump from the first floor forty times, or from the 40th floor once. Too often, we're still thinking of product launches in terms of jumping from the 40th floor and hoping that we'll fly.
The reader should, from that, be able to conceive of the post that then goes on to talk about how the game world needs to be constructed in dimensions of one first-floor addition at a time, instead of trying to make the whole world at once and launch it, but I already said, I'm not talking about agile design. Instead, I'm going to make Shirky's point again, pedantically, because damn it that's where I am right now.
The problem is, I think, that people perceive the launch of anything in the way that performances are prepared. The cast is gathered, they're taught their lines, the scenes are blocked and the various aspects of the production are created and finished for Opening Night. Before the curtain goes up, there is great tension from the need to give a perfect performance. That is because everyone knows, from Hollywood if from no place else, that if the critics don't like the performance, the show will close and everyone will have to go back to dishwashing or drywalling.
It is actually a lot of shit, and particularly funny shit in the fact that Hollywood and the movies repeatedly portrays the theatrical stage in these terms mainly because the stage is competition. It is, incidentally, the same reason that television and the movies are so repeatedly ridiculous about their depiction of the internet and computer games - there's a financial reason to downplay, for the audience, any reason to be interested in those obviously dumb and ridiculous things. Movies and their portrayal of theatre is no different.
Remember that the movies are all about doing it until you get it right. Thus it seems poignant to point out that theatre is obviously a lot less practical, because you can't do another take and if you don't do it perfect, the critics close you down and you all go home.
Plays in the good old days did not, however, actually open on Broadway (though they do now, which is probably why so many of them are so crappy). What they used to do was open in Cincinnati, or Cleveland, or Buffalo, where presumably the hicks lived, and where the show and its cast could be tested. Plays, particularly comedies, take more than rehearsing to an empty house to sort out and reach their peak quality. Timing, staging, the reliability of the performers and so on are things that can take months to smooth out ... and the best place to do that was in some reasonably sized city where an audience could be obtained as guinea pigs for an expected number of bad performances while things were improved. Once everyone in Buffalo said the play was crap, the idea was then to move on and insult everyone in Peoria, Indianapolis and Schnectady, until the play started to get some positive local reviews in time for it to move to either Philadelphia or Boston, the last stop before it hit New York.
So, in effect, plays were, like computer programs, tested first, until they were finally put on stage in the only city that really mattered. New York mattered because people came from all over the country, and from across the Pond, to visit New York, where they would take in a play. People did not come from all over the country to see a play in Kalamazoo, so it didn't matter if the play bombed there.
Here's what I'm saying, that will not be included in the book. If you're going to make a world, than what you want to do is drag your world over to some venue, preferably in Utica, because its a funny sounding name for a city, and have a bunch of people who don't matter, and about whom you don't give a fuck, play in it and give you feedback. Then, make changes. That's the critical part. Make Changes. When people in Syracuse or Waterbury didn't laugh at the neck-tie scene in the 2nd Act, they changed the necktie scene or they got rid of it. They didn't say, "Well, the neck-tie scene worked in my opinion, the people of Waterbury just don't understand quality theatre." Well, some people said that. People who then went on to become plumbers and car salesmen after their producing careers ended in a sad, miserable, empty-theatre mess.
But, I know, the reader is not going to do that. Because if there's any argument that's out there that will never change, it is that DMs know best. Even if the table empties of players. The DM always knows best.
The regular reader will have noticed that I haven't written a straight post since last Wednesday, and it would be fair to assume that that's because I've been busy and I haven't had time and that I've been putting my resources towards other things and so on. That would be total bullshit, but it's a fair assumption.
The real issue would be that since Wednesday, I have been unable to stop thinking of new ways to write Wednesday's post again. I am myself still geeking out over the philosophical premise I advanced ... and if I had written a post yesterday or Friday or any time before now, I would have hammered on the points I'd already made to no real purpose.
The best I can manage at this time is to discuss something else Clay Shirky said just five months ago, while talking about agile design and the crash and burn of Obama's .gov website for health care. It was regarding the expectation of producing a program for the general public that would be perfect for launch-day, and how the idea that 'failure is not an option' is an idea that no engineer would embrace, as depicted in the film Apollo 13. The error was that the government withheld everything about the .gov launch until the last possible moment, with the expectation that it would be 'perfect' upon launch, and of course it wasn't. Public tests were not made, the disaster was augmented by the President's poor choice of speech on the day of the launch and the whole thing proved to be an unmitigated mess ... primarily because it was envisioned as something that would happen all at once, and thus make a sweeping change.
The alternative that Shirky argues, and indeed that most any engineer would argue, is that the process needs to be halted - however painful that is - as often as it needs to be halted, that failure IS an option, indeed, an expectation, and that ad hoc dates need to be suspended over the course of the product being made right. As Shirky says, would you rather jump from the first floor forty times, or from the 40th floor once. Too often, we're still thinking of product launches in terms of jumping from the 40th floor and hoping that we'll fly.
The reader should, from that, be able to conceive of the post that then goes on to talk about how the game world needs to be constructed in dimensions of one first-floor addition at a time, instead of trying to make the whole world at once and launch it, but I already said, I'm not talking about agile design. Instead, I'm going to make Shirky's point again, pedantically, because damn it that's where I am right now.
The problem is, I think, that people perceive the launch of anything in the way that performances are prepared. The cast is gathered, they're taught their lines, the scenes are blocked and the various aspects of the production are created and finished for Opening Night. Before the curtain goes up, there is great tension from the need to give a perfect performance. That is because everyone knows, from Hollywood if from no place else, that if the critics don't like the performance, the show will close and everyone will have to go back to dishwashing or drywalling.
It is actually a lot of shit, and particularly funny shit in the fact that Hollywood and the movies repeatedly portrays the theatrical stage in these terms mainly because the stage is competition. It is, incidentally, the same reason that television and the movies are so repeatedly ridiculous about their depiction of the internet and computer games - there's a financial reason to downplay, for the audience, any reason to be interested in those obviously dumb and ridiculous things. Movies and their portrayal of theatre is no different.
Remember that the movies are all about doing it until you get it right. Thus it seems poignant to point out that theatre is obviously a lot less practical, because you can't do another take and if you don't do it perfect, the critics close you down and you all go home.
Plays in the good old days did not, however, actually open on Broadway (though they do now, which is probably why so many of them are so crappy). What they used to do was open in Cincinnati, or Cleveland, or Buffalo, where presumably the hicks lived, and where the show and its cast could be tested. Plays, particularly comedies, take more than rehearsing to an empty house to sort out and reach their peak quality. Timing, staging, the reliability of the performers and so on are things that can take months to smooth out ... and the best place to do that was in some reasonably sized city where an audience could be obtained as guinea pigs for an expected number of bad performances while things were improved. Once everyone in Buffalo said the play was crap, the idea was then to move on and insult everyone in Peoria, Indianapolis and Schnectady, until the play started to get some positive local reviews in time for it to move to either Philadelphia or Boston, the last stop before it hit New York.
So, in effect, plays were, like computer programs, tested first, until they were finally put on stage in the only city that really mattered. New York mattered because people came from all over the country, and from across the Pond, to visit New York, where they would take in a play. People did not come from all over the country to see a play in Kalamazoo, so it didn't matter if the play bombed there.
Here's what I'm saying, that will not be included in the book. If you're going to make a world, than what you want to do is drag your world over to some venue, preferably in Utica, because its a funny sounding name for a city, and have a bunch of people who don't matter, and about whom you don't give a fuck, play in it and give you feedback. Then, make changes. That's the critical part. Make Changes. When people in Syracuse or Waterbury didn't laugh at the neck-tie scene in the 2nd Act, they changed the necktie scene or they got rid of it. They didn't say, "Well, the neck-tie scene worked in my opinion, the people of Waterbury just don't understand quality theatre." Well, some people said that. People who then went on to become plumbers and car salesmen after their producing careers ended in a sad, miserable, empty-theatre mess.
But, I know, the reader is not going to do that. Because if there's any argument that's out there that will never change, it is that DMs know best. Even if the table empties of players. The DM always knows best.
Suicide Girls
I learned yesterday that someone I trust was backstage at a Suicide Girls concert over the weekend, and that in talking to them she learned that there are a couple of D&D enthusiasts in the troop. My Advanced Guide was mentioned and this blog was, I'm told, immediately found and bookmarked ... which would explain the mysterious jump in page views I saw Friday night.
I am feeling very good about the future just now.
Hm. Are they reading this now, I wonder? I hope so. I think they're great.
I am feeling very good about the future just now.
Hm. Are they reading this now, I wonder? I hope so. I think they're great.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Crowdbouncing II
It would be best to think of this as more of the last post; I am still on about the same things.
In the Clay Shirky video I posted this morning, he talks about the manner in which wikipedia came into existence as an alternative to a web encyclopedia that was supposed to be called 'Newpedia' ... which would be a researched, fact-checked information tool that would have articles that were a trustworthy source of information. And this, too, relates to the 'old way' of doing things.
The old way of thinking says that we absolutely should never, ever print anything that isn't corroborated and TRUE, because if we do people trying to base what they know on what we say will be misled and that will lead to disastrous consequences. If you're led to think, for example, that swimming right after you eat won't lead to cramps, then you'll go swimming, get a cramp, and die. For that reason, fact-checking is a critical, no-nonsense business and people who don't take fact-checking seriously should be held at the same level as murderers who have committed manslaughter. You can believe that in the newsmedia where I worked, that was precisely the attitude.
The problem is, of course, that bad information still slipped through. Swimming after eating doesn't produce cramps, except that a certain number of people are going to get cramps while swimming, and a certain number of those cramp-getting people are going to get those cramps right after eating, so it will seem like there is a connection there. The same connection was made when people screamed that silicon implants caused breast cancer, because some women with implants got cancer right after getting the implants. As it happened, the incidence of cancer didn't actually increase, but the invention of the implant allowed an association to be made that had never existed before (because there were no implants in existence), and people - news media included - rushed at that association at full muster.
The thing about news media, and I've mentioned this before, is that it relies on corroboration of facts by asking experts if something is true. If you can find two experts (or three, or four, or however many you need depending on the splash the story will make) who both have credibility to agree on a story, then you have corroboration and you can print that story. The problem is, if it happens that all your experts are screwed up because they all read a report ten years ago that has long since been proved false, but they still believe it, you will have no trouble corroborating your story no matter how many people you need. And thus bullshit gets printed.
Now, the belief in getting things RIGHT before moving forward has permeated through the culture, to the point where if someone in the public eye gets something wrong, that someone deserves to be vilified for not first fact-checking whatever it was they said - with the addendum that if someone admits they don't know something that everyone is expected to know, we can vilify for that too.
Then along comes Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't pre-suppose that the content will be right when it's published ... but instead relies on people fixing it after the fact. It includes the simple rationale that sometimes we're wrong, and then we're educated, and then we're as right as the people who were right from the beginning. It doesn't matter that we were wrong before - that's in the past and it's meaningless. What matters is what we believe now.
This is one of the reasons I'm not worried about saying something today that disagrees with something I said three years ago. So what? We're all wrong about things. There's a whole archive about getting lyrics wrong. We go our little way, we think we're right - heck, we're even so damn sure we argue with other people and shout them down because damn it, we know. Then we find out we didn't, and we're a bit sheeping, and we move on.
Having an opinion does not mean that for the rest of your life you must be shackled to that opinion. That might perhaps be a reason why people are unwilling to change - because they'll still have to pay the price for being wrong anyway. Right up to my mother's death she continued to believe that the basement window got busted because I was playing ball in the backyard - though I told her that I'd kicked in it when I was 15 because I was locked out and I needed the report that I'd left on my bed if I didn't want to fail 10th grade Biology. Even though I told her, my mother had been telling herself the other story for so long that the next time that window came up, she still believed it was a baseball. (It all seems so silly anyway. So what if I had failed that class? It's hard now even to imagine why I was so desperate, but I was 15 and full of hormones).
We think a group of thoughts, then the world changes, and we change, and we think different thoughts, and some of those different thoughts are going to be captured in blog posts we wrote years ago. Who the hell knows what I will think ten years from now. All I can be sure of is that I'll have reason to believe the things I'll believe then, that I don't believe now.
I tell the reader; it doesn't matter what you've done, or what you've failed at, or what you believed. It matters what you do going forward. Yes, you'll make mistakes; but the internet offers changes to those mistakes, just like wikipedia, and once the changes are made, it won't matter what the page used to say.
The only thing that will matter is what you believe now.
In the Clay Shirky video I posted this morning, he talks about the manner in which wikipedia came into existence as an alternative to a web encyclopedia that was supposed to be called 'Newpedia' ... which would be a researched, fact-checked information tool that would have articles that were a trustworthy source of information. And this, too, relates to the 'old way' of doing things.
The old way of thinking says that we absolutely should never, ever print anything that isn't corroborated and TRUE, because if we do people trying to base what they know on what we say will be misled and that will lead to disastrous consequences. If you're led to think, for example, that swimming right after you eat won't lead to cramps, then you'll go swimming, get a cramp, and die. For that reason, fact-checking is a critical, no-nonsense business and people who don't take fact-checking seriously should be held at the same level as murderers who have committed manslaughter. You can believe that in the newsmedia where I worked, that was precisely the attitude.
The problem is, of course, that bad information still slipped through. Swimming after eating doesn't produce cramps, except that a certain number of people are going to get cramps while swimming, and a certain number of those cramp-getting people are going to get those cramps right after eating, so it will seem like there is a connection there. The same connection was made when people screamed that silicon implants caused breast cancer, because some women with implants got cancer right after getting the implants. As it happened, the incidence of cancer didn't actually increase, but the invention of the implant allowed an association to be made that had never existed before (because there were no implants in existence), and people - news media included - rushed at that association at full muster.
The thing about news media, and I've mentioned this before, is that it relies on corroboration of facts by asking experts if something is true. If you can find two experts (or three, or four, or however many you need depending on the splash the story will make) who both have credibility to agree on a story, then you have corroboration and you can print that story. The problem is, if it happens that all your experts are screwed up because they all read a report ten years ago that has long since been proved false, but they still believe it, you will have no trouble corroborating your story no matter how many people you need. And thus bullshit gets printed.
Now, the belief in getting things RIGHT before moving forward has permeated through the culture, to the point where if someone in the public eye gets something wrong, that someone deserves to be vilified for not first fact-checking whatever it was they said - with the addendum that if someone admits they don't know something that everyone is expected to know, we can vilify for that too.
Then along comes Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't pre-suppose that the content will be right when it's published ... but instead relies on people fixing it after the fact. It includes the simple rationale that sometimes we're wrong, and then we're educated, and then we're as right as the people who were right from the beginning. It doesn't matter that we were wrong before - that's in the past and it's meaningless. What matters is what we believe now.
This is one of the reasons I'm not worried about saying something today that disagrees with something I said three years ago. So what? We're all wrong about things. There's a whole archive about getting lyrics wrong. We go our little way, we think we're right - heck, we're even so damn sure we argue with other people and shout them down because damn it, we know. Then we find out we didn't, and we're a bit sheeping, and we move on.
Having an opinion does not mean that for the rest of your life you must be shackled to that opinion. That might perhaps be a reason why people are unwilling to change - because they'll still have to pay the price for being wrong anyway. Right up to my mother's death she continued to believe that the basement window got busted because I was playing ball in the backyard - though I told her that I'd kicked in it when I was 15 because I was locked out and I needed the report that I'd left on my bed if I didn't want to fail 10th grade Biology. Even though I told her, my mother had been telling herself the other story for so long that the next time that window came up, she still believed it was a baseball. (It all seems so silly anyway. So what if I had failed that class? It's hard now even to imagine why I was so desperate, but I was 15 and full of hormones).
We think a group of thoughts, then the world changes, and we change, and we think different thoughts, and some of those different thoughts are going to be captured in blog posts we wrote years ago. Who the hell knows what I will think ten years from now. All I can be sure of is that I'll have reason to believe the things I'll believe then, that I don't believe now.
I tell the reader; it doesn't matter what you've done, or what you've failed at, or what you believed. It matters what you do going forward. Yes, you'll make mistakes; but the internet offers changes to those mistakes, just like wikipedia, and once the changes are made, it won't matter what the page used to say.
The only thing that will matter is what you believe now.
Crowdbouncing
The last entrepreneurial venture that I embarked upon was a reader's theatre performance I organized in 2001, to raise money to cover the cost of living over that summer. There was an internet at the time, but it was far less connected that it is today; I did not know about blogs, I don't believe even myspace existed (if it did, I never saw it) and there was definitely no you-tube. As such, I was still doing things in the "old way," which means going with your gut, managing the meagre amount of market research you could with no money, advertising in the print media if at all, and getting people to hawk for the performance using the phone.
The old way sucks.
I cannot figure out why people continue to embrace print media. I've earned literally more than two hundred thousand dollars working for and selling to the print media, and I don't miss it. I haven't bought a newspaper in years, I absolutely have no intention of buying any advertising in it for this upcoming summer and I'm glad not to have to work with web presses (which I commissioned work from all through the 90s). I had an argument with a printer just the other day who is still doing things the "old way," who got upset with me when I asked why his prices couldn't compete with Lulu and Amazon online. He must be running his print business as a hobby.
What I really love about the present day is the marketing opportunities. God damn, I love free marketing. In the old days, if I had an idea for something - say, a button - I'd have to ask a few friends, a sales rep I might know, maybe an editor, people who were at least connected to sales somehow. Now, I can just put the button idea up on face-book, or here:
... and bad or good, I get instant response.
I think there's something very powerful about being able to think through everything in the public eye. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the public, or even allow your vision to be distracted, but you can get a lot of insight - or confirmation - from others. I wouldn't call it 'crowdsourcing,' however, since I'm not looking for the ideas to come from the crowd. It is really more like crowdbouncing ... and I think it's the most important entrepreneurial tool that's come around with the internet.
There's just one thing, however. You have to be prepared to 1) look stupid; and 2) get abuse. I don't think 'take' abuse is the right word, because I'm not inclined to take it, or give it any respect, but yes, fact is the abuse is going to come.
It also means that if you're going to crowdbounce your world on your blog, you've got to be a lot more clear about what you mean to do, and how you mean to do it. And being clear takes a lot of work. More to the point, you're going to make a lot more errors when you try to be clear, because you're nailing down more specifically what you hope to do. As an example, when I first put together the post that went through all my maths for my trade system (oft linked), I made something like 20 errors. They're not errors I make in excel, but trying to write them out, and be clear, in a 4,000+ word post, I wound up getting confused and making mistakes. Okay. It was embarrassing, but not crippling, and as the mistakes were pointed out I went back and fixed the post and sorted each one out until people stopped finding mistakes. I crowdbounced that puppy and now I refer back to it all the time.
The same thing goes for the occasional typos that turn up, or sentences that don't quite make sense. I'm typing around 50 words a minute while I'm inventing, and going back to change a word or two, and errors happen. The bullies of the internet would like to believe that pointing these errors out is proof positive that I or you or anyone is an idiot or at least a bad writer, but the fact is, pointing out my errors is editing. Editing is a normal, healthy part of writing. Editors are also hard to come by. Hell, I wish I could put my entire book up on my blog and ask all the readers here to edit the living shit out of it. Find those pesky missing words that always seem to get dropped from my text, find the errors, find the non-sequitors and mirror words like flaunt vs. flout, so I can FIX them in the text and put out a solid text in a week or so, without having to pay some freaking editor $500+ to take five weeks at it. Unfortunately, doing that, who would then buy the book?
But my world, your world, we're not selling those things, so we should feel free to draw them out down to the silliest level, to show other people what we're doing, and get back criticism. Sometimes I think I should just always have the camera running while I'm working on my world - provided I don't have to explain exactly what I'm doing - just to make a record of how long I am at doing this shit, and how patient I have to be. That's a bit over the top. I can easily spend forty hours a week working on a map or two, and that's hardly compelling video. How hard up would the gentle readers have to be to need that?
I'm only saying, there's always room for improvement, and having the whole world at the doorstep to say how is a good thing.
Clay Shirky in the video below makes some salient points about the sort of criticism that works. Have a look; he makes a clear distinction between what makes for valuable criticism, and what doesn't.
I want to emphasize this statement from Shirky, however: "The most important resource you've got is your own ability to change your mind." To do that, you have to create opportunities for your mind to be changed. In the old days, that meant going to the library, opening books, and reading. And while the internet has removed the first part of that sequence, and made the opening part easier, and increased the likelihood of finding a book that will change your mind, you're still limited by that process to what you happen to read. If the page title isn't something that compels you, then you'll never read that page, and your mind will never be changed by that article.
The benefit to having the internet is that ANYONE can butt their way into your consciousness and say, "You're wrong, let me tell you why." It also means that there will be a lot of people who will butt in and say, "You're wrong, stop what you're doing." This second group of people have to be ignored for the sake of the first group. You want people to grab you by the collar, you want people to slap you and say, HEY, what the hell were you thinking when you wrote this - don't you know about [blank]? So long as the second part of the statement is there, so long as they have [blank] to show you, then there's a real possibility that you'll realize you have been wrong ... AND you know what you have to follow up with and what you have to read in order to be right.
The problem with criticism is that all too often, the critics understand the first part, but they don't have the second. They know you're wrong, but they don't know how or why or where you have to go in order to get the right answer. Some of them will try to explain why you're wrong, but without a logical argument, it soon becomes clear they're talking from feelings or anecdotal results they've gotten, which has a lot more to do with who they are than it does with what they know.
Parsing though cloudbounced comments isn't easy, but it is definitely worth it. Particularly if you're not wrong. I put up that button idea on my facebook, and four people responded with liking it. Facebook is terrific that way. It understands that people want to be able to 'like' something without committing themselves to a comment. Just as people on this blog often write, "I don't have anything to add, and I feel silly just saying I like a thing."
I tell you, I have come to a lot of understandings in the last six years of blogging. I've had my wars with bullies, I've been a bully, I've made enemies, I've made friends, I've been the monkey dancing and my writing has improved vastly, mostly from having to again and again explain my thoughts as clearly as possible. I've gotten older, too, in that time, and I've had the opportunity to speak to more really smart people in the last six years than I had in the 16 before that. I have a little more wisdom than I had.
I am less sure that I'm right. Often, I think I must be, but I am realizing that getting further and further from what books can tell me about this game, or anything else I might write, I'm less and less sure of myself. This recent Advanced Guide; there is nothing like it out there. I can't find it, at any rate. So I feel like I'm ... out in space, if that makes any sense. I try to talk to people about it, and I find I can't even do that. Each of the excerpts I've compiled on the blog say much more in context ... but I can't begin to explain the context without pushing the book out and saying read this.
Researching it, writing it, defending parts of it, is making ME a better DM. There's no question about that. I'm far more conscious about things I do, than I was before.
An argument I've been making, largely off line, is that we do address criticism or explanations in all the wrong ways. Something I've become acutely conscious of in creating the book isn't in saying, "You're doing it wrong, do it this way." Inherently, some will read large parts of the book that way, but it's not the direction I'm taking. The bigger problem in explaining how to DM better, I think, is that we have no idea why what we're doing is working.
I think most DMs with experience, who are still at it after eight to ten years, have adjusted and figured out how to run a good game. I believe that's got to be true, or else there just isn't a reason for them to still be doing it. There are too many distractions in the world that pull people away from play; if a game is out there, and it's been ongoing for a year, that's an incredible achievement in a world where just about everything that's out there is a distraction. I think we have to acknowledge that, and think along lines that incorporate that reality into what's doing in the game world.
At the same time, I would wager that most of those DMs can't really explain what they're doing well enough to make it valuable for someone else. I believe that the constant argument, "there's no one right way to play D&D" is really an expression of our mutual frustration at not feeling that we're able to learn much from the way someone else plays. Not because we can't - but because there's no format, no framework, no language that yet exists to tell us HOW to learn. Without that positive frame, what we have is a belief in confrontation ... far too much emphasis on being told that we're doing something wrong, and too little emphasis on what we're doing right, and how easy it is to change our minds and fix things when that's crowdbounced back at us.
It isn't just a question of saying, "You run a good world." What's needed is to be able to explain, "You run a good world, and here's why I think what you're doing is working." That isn't there. I don't see that anywhere on the net. I don't hear anyone making that argument.
We've got to start by looking at ourselves and trying to look past the strategy, the planning and tactics, the tools or our technology or our overall vision, and at the base structure of what we're doing. How are we addressing other people at the table. How are we modifying our voice to make things better understood. How are we helping new players or answering questions or making concessions about our visions for the greater good, and most importantly how are we communicating those things to others.
People need to stop being fearful or embarrassed or uncertain or polite about giving positive comments. Positive comments aren't about feeding ego, they're not about being sycophantic or approving - they are about providing road signs that say, "You're going the right direction." Most of us out here aren't sure we are. We're spinning out the words and the points in the "old way," without the marketing feedback we want, that makes blogging worthwhile, hoping we're hitting our target and not knowing if we are.
There are easy ways to help. If you liked the post, say why. If the idea seems right, say that the writer is going in the right direction. If that's too much, google+ the damn page. Yes, google is an evil empire, but its a tool if you're too embarrassed to say why you like something. We all hate the negativity of the internet. You have a simple set of resources to inject positivity. Use them.
The old way sucks.
I cannot figure out why people continue to embrace print media. I've earned literally more than two hundred thousand dollars working for and selling to the print media, and I don't miss it. I haven't bought a newspaper in years, I absolutely have no intention of buying any advertising in it for this upcoming summer and I'm glad not to have to work with web presses (which I commissioned work from all through the 90s). I had an argument with a printer just the other day who is still doing things the "old way," who got upset with me when I asked why his prices couldn't compete with Lulu and Amazon online. He must be running his print business as a hobby.
What I really love about the present day is the marketing opportunities. God damn, I love free marketing. In the old days, if I had an idea for something - say, a button - I'd have to ask a few friends, a sales rep I might know, maybe an editor, people who were at least connected to sales somehow. Now, I can just put the button idea up on face-book, or here:
DMs Do It
While Running
I think there's something very powerful about being able to think through everything in the public eye. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the public, or even allow your vision to be distracted, but you can get a lot of insight - or confirmation - from others. I wouldn't call it 'crowdsourcing,' however, since I'm not looking for the ideas to come from the crowd. It is really more like crowdbouncing ... and I think it's the most important entrepreneurial tool that's come around with the internet.
There's just one thing, however. You have to be prepared to 1) look stupid; and 2) get abuse. I don't think 'take' abuse is the right word, because I'm not inclined to take it, or give it any respect, but yes, fact is the abuse is going to come.
It also means that if you're going to crowdbounce your world on your blog, you've got to be a lot more clear about what you mean to do, and how you mean to do it. And being clear takes a lot of work. More to the point, you're going to make a lot more errors when you try to be clear, because you're nailing down more specifically what you hope to do. As an example, when I first put together the post that went through all my maths for my trade system (oft linked), I made something like 20 errors. They're not errors I make in excel, but trying to write them out, and be clear, in a 4,000+ word post, I wound up getting confused and making mistakes. Okay. It was embarrassing, but not crippling, and as the mistakes were pointed out I went back and fixed the post and sorted each one out until people stopped finding mistakes. I crowdbounced that puppy and now I refer back to it all the time.
The same thing goes for the occasional typos that turn up, or sentences that don't quite make sense. I'm typing around 50 words a minute while I'm inventing, and going back to change a word or two, and errors happen. The bullies of the internet would like to believe that pointing these errors out is proof positive that I or you or anyone is an idiot or at least a bad writer, but the fact is, pointing out my errors is editing. Editing is a normal, healthy part of writing. Editors are also hard to come by. Hell, I wish I could put my entire book up on my blog and ask all the readers here to edit the living shit out of it. Find those pesky missing words that always seem to get dropped from my text, find the errors, find the non-sequitors and mirror words like flaunt vs. flout, so I can FIX them in the text and put out a solid text in a week or so, without having to pay some freaking editor $500+ to take five weeks at it. Unfortunately, doing that, who would then buy the book?
But my world, your world, we're not selling those things, so we should feel free to draw them out down to the silliest level, to show other people what we're doing, and get back criticism. Sometimes I think I should just always have the camera running while I'm working on my world - provided I don't have to explain exactly what I'm doing - just to make a record of how long I am at doing this shit, and how patient I have to be. That's a bit over the top. I can easily spend forty hours a week working on a map or two, and that's hardly compelling video. How hard up would the gentle readers have to be to need that?
I'm only saying, there's always room for improvement, and having the whole world at the doorstep to say how is a good thing.
Clay Shirky in the video below makes some salient points about the sort of criticism that works. Have a look; he makes a clear distinction between what makes for valuable criticism, and what doesn't.
I want to emphasize this statement from Shirky, however: "The most important resource you've got is your own ability to change your mind." To do that, you have to create opportunities for your mind to be changed. In the old days, that meant going to the library, opening books, and reading. And while the internet has removed the first part of that sequence, and made the opening part easier, and increased the likelihood of finding a book that will change your mind, you're still limited by that process to what you happen to read. If the page title isn't something that compels you, then you'll never read that page, and your mind will never be changed by that article.
The benefit to having the internet is that ANYONE can butt their way into your consciousness and say, "You're wrong, let me tell you why." It also means that there will be a lot of people who will butt in and say, "You're wrong, stop what you're doing." This second group of people have to be ignored for the sake of the first group. You want people to grab you by the collar, you want people to slap you and say, HEY, what the hell were you thinking when you wrote this - don't you know about [blank]? So long as the second part of the statement is there, so long as they have [blank] to show you, then there's a real possibility that you'll realize you have been wrong ... AND you know what you have to follow up with and what you have to read in order to be right.
The problem with criticism is that all too often, the critics understand the first part, but they don't have the second. They know you're wrong, but they don't know how or why or where you have to go in order to get the right answer. Some of them will try to explain why you're wrong, but without a logical argument, it soon becomes clear they're talking from feelings or anecdotal results they've gotten, which has a lot more to do with who they are than it does with what they know.
Parsing though cloudbounced comments isn't easy, but it is definitely worth it. Particularly if you're not wrong. I put up that button idea on my facebook, and four people responded with liking it. Facebook is terrific that way. It understands that people want to be able to 'like' something without committing themselves to a comment. Just as people on this blog often write, "I don't have anything to add, and I feel silly just saying I like a thing."
I tell you, I have come to a lot of understandings in the last six years of blogging. I've had my wars with bullies, I've been a bully, I've made enemies, I've made friends, I've been the monkey dancing and my writing has improved vastly, mostly from having to again and again explain my thoughts as clearly as possible. I've gotten older, too, in that time, and I've had the opportunity to speak to more really smart people in the last six years than I had in the 16 before that. I have a little more wisdom than I had.
I am less sure that I'm right. Often, I think I must be, but I am realizing that getting further and further from what books can tell me about this game, or anything else I might write, I'm less and less sure of myself. This recent Advanced Guide; there is nothing like it out there. I can't find it, at any rate. So I feel like I'm ... out in space, if that makes any sense. I try to talk to people about it, and I find I can't even do that. Each of the excerpts I've compiled on the blog say much more in context ... but I can't begin to explain the context without pushing the book out and saying read this.
Researching it, writing it, defending parts of it, is making ME a better DM. There's no question about that. I'm far more conscious about things I do, than I was before.
An argument I've been making, largely off line, is that we do address criticism or explanations in all the wrong ways. Something I've become acutely conscious of in creating the book isn't in saying, "You're doing it wrong, do it this way." Inherently, some will read large parts of the book that way, but it's not the direction I'm taking. The bigger problem in explaining how to DM better, I think, is that we have no idea why what we're doing is working.
I think most DMs with experience, who are still at it after eight to ten years, have adjusted and figured out how to run a good game. I believe that's got to be true, or else there just isn't a reason for them to still be doing it. There are too many distractions in the world that pull people away from play; if a game is out there, and it's been ongoing for a year, that's an incredible achievement in a world where just about everything that's out there is a distraction. I think we have to acknowledge that, and think along lines that incorporate that reality into what's doing in the game world.
At the same time, I would wager that most of those DMs can't really explain what they're doing well enough to make it valuable for someone else. I believe that the constant argument, "there's no one right way to play D&D" is really an expression of our mutual frustration at not feeling that we're able to learn much from the way someone else plays. Not because we can't - but because there's no format, no framework, no language that yet exists to tell us HOW to learn. Without that positive frame, what we have is a belief in confrontation ... far too much emphasis on being told that we're doing something wrong, and too little emphasis on what we're doing right, and how easy it is to change our minds and fix things when that's crowdbounced back at us.
It isn't just a question of saying, "You run a good world." What's needed is to be able to explain, "You run a good world, and here's why I think what you're doing is working." That isn't there. I don't see that anywhere on the net. I don't hear anyone making that argument.
We've got to start by looking at ourselves and trying to look past the strategy, the planning and tactics, the tools or our technology or our overall vision, and at the base structure of what we're doing. How are we addressing other people at the table. How are we modifying our voice to make things better understood. How are we helping new players or answering questions or making concessions about our visions for the greater good, and most importantly how are we communicating those things to others.
People need to stop being fearful or embarrassed or uncertain or polite about giving positive comments. Positive comments aren't about feeding ego, they're not about being sycophantic or approving - they are about providing road signs that say, "You're going the right direction." Most of us out here aren't sure we are. We're spinning out the words and the points in the "old way," without the marketing feedback we want, that makes blogging worthwhile, hoping we're hitting our target and not knowing if we are.
There are easy ways to help. If you liked the post, say why. If the idea seems right, say that the writer is going in the right direction. If that's too much, google+ the damn page. Yes, google is an evil empire, but its a tool if you're too embarrassed to say why you like something. We all hate the negativity of the internet. You have a simple set of resources to inject positivity. Use them.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Function
"Desirably, a DM creates a world based upon a vision they have. My friend John, I remember, had created a milieu in which the land comprised of large masses of stone, miles across, that floated in an undefined airy space. The players could remain where they were, isolated, or they could glide to other ‘rocks,’ a risky venture involving riding the air currents either upwards or downwards.
"This sounds compelling, but what I’ve described is as far as John’s imagination took him. The coolness of the idea was not followed by a well-formed structure that gave the rocks coherence. Individually, the rocks bore too much resemblance to one another, so we quickly began to resist risking our lives only to leap to another place that was pretty much the same as what we were standing on. John’s vision failed because while the idea was appealing, there wasn’t enough function incorporated into the world’s formulation.
"That is why, before making a world, we must understand what function the world will serve. We need a motive – one that is stronger than merely providing a ground upon which the characters will stand. There are a wide number of factors we want to consider, such as size, movement, uniformity of space, density of features and population, strangeness, aggressiveness and special interests. We want to know how large the world will be. We’ll need to establish how movement will take place, by what means and with what tools, systems or beasts of burden, along with the difficulties in the terrain or space that will matter. There’s the question of how uniform the world will be in its design. Different parts of the world could be relatively homogenous, or they could be radically different, even metaphysically different. Cultural norms can vary. The ethics of one group of citizens could be wildly different from those a mere county away. We need to ask ourselves if the various cultures and entities live in closely packed groups, or scattered … and if the features of the world are themselves stacked one atop another, or whether it’s a twenty-day journey just to see something new. We should have a clear idea of how strange the world is … in terms of physics, biology, geology and so on. Perhaps the inhabitants of the world are affected by climate or physical forces quite differently than we are. The world, therefore, should be established as either predominantly natural, supernatural, or a mix of the two. Then yes, there is the matter of aggressiveness – the world could be benign in nature, or deliberately designed with the kill dial set to 11. Finally, there’s the question of what the players might be especially interested in: the world might be based on pirating, zombie fighting, the investigation of vice, political oppression, rebelling against an empire, surviving for just another day in a distopian landscape, adhering to a fine-tuned social system and so on. This last, in particular, should meet with the party’s expectations, if the world is going to survive.
"In mulling over these questions, we’re questing for a cause-and-effect relationship between the world’s creation and the manner in which the players will react to that world. Rather than simply making a world and insisting with argument that the players view that world with a particular emotion – say, with awe – the better practice would be to design the function of the world so as to invoke awe automatically. No one needs to tell the buyer that the appeal of a lava lamp is in how it looks; if the world is going to inspire awe, it must be awe inspiring.
"Function, then, is always incorporated into the world with an eye towards the desired behavior of the player.
"Consider my own world. I have already described it as immense. The purpose of the world’s immensity is to convey a feeling of subordination … the players view the world as far too vast to ever be ruled – or even explored – within the player’s lifetime. Thus the players, seeing great armies squatted upon empires stretching their dominions over millions of square miles, and tens of millions of occupants, cannot help feeling a certain insignificance where it comes to history and events. I could as easily have produced a very small world, that in turn would have trasmitted feelings of claustrophobia and restraint. I could have then filled that world tightly with people, so that the party felt robbed of any privacy. Alternately, I could have contrived a world full of open, empty spaces, where the denizens lived in isolated communities … so isolated that the party would soon discover that no matter where they went, they would always be provided with a fresh start once they went there. It might take a long, long time to pull up stakes and begin again, but that option would have been open to them.
"I did not create either of those worlds, but I could have.
"It was my decision to choose cultures and forms of inhabitation that the party would find familiar – and therefore comforting—so that although the world would be incomprehensible as a whole, small parts of the world could act as safe havens. Because the world was full of familiar people with familiar motivations, the party would be able to relate to them. I might have created peoples that were terrifying, or who behaved erratically, so that the party had to treat the natives xenophobically, never knowing for sure who they could trust or who might be an enemy. The inhabitants might have been fanatics, encouraging the party to either embrace their cause, or risk being seen as enemies. The whole world might demand the party ‘pick a side,’ with concommitant rewards and consequences being inherent no matter what decision they made."
*I do go on to talk more in the book about function, and how my world addresses it, but I felt this was sufficient to get across the purpose of function for the present. The book will be available for purchase in July, 2014.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Knocks
At the age of 11 my father began pressing me to enter the school science fair. He hadn't pushed me into sports, or music lessons, or even scouts, though I had touched base with some of those and found I either liked or did not like them. The science fair, however, mattered to him - he felt it was critical for my future. He still had ideals, then, about my pursuing engineering or research. So naturally I succumbed to pressure; I was free to choose whatever subject into which I wanted to invest in, and at the time human biology was my chief fascination.
The goal seemed clear. I would research the human heart and the circulatory system. I would build a model, which would be complex and interesting, along with a presentation that would impress people. By the end, I'd learn how the heart worked, both intellectually and mechanically, as I tacked the hands-on process of making my exhibit.
It happened that I was wrong. The science fair wasn't about that at all. It was about explaining what I'd learned again and again, all day long, to other children and parents who had a minimum of understanding, who didn't actually care or who couldn't quite get it. Now and then it was a person who knew all about it, who wanted to see if I had done my work. It was a strange combination of deliberately measuring myself against people both dumber and smarter than me - and most of all learning how to defend the knowledge I had, with words, not with demonstrations. The fair was a performance ... one based upon the reality that knowing things or making things took a second and third place to communicating things. That first fair, and the others that followed, were an education in marketing. Sad thing was, I wasn't very good at marketing science, and my father was not granted an engineer for a son.
When I went into university, I had only a general idea of what courses I wanted to take. I had a deep fascination with geography, and another with history, but I'd had a conversation with a fellow named Mike - who would later be the best man at my wedding - in which he convinced me that the place I belonged was humanities. Thus in my first year I took a smattering of courses in philosophy, religious studies, languages (Russian and English) and in classical studies. The last seized my attention, and for the next seven years - being the professional student that had been my dream - I would embrace Herodotus, Thucydides, Suetonius, Plutarch, Livy, Polybius, Xenophon, Tacitus, Ovid, Vergil, Homer, Catullus, Hesiod, Pliny and many, many others. As I did, reading through not only the histories, but also a host of authors who did not hesitate to be biased with their assessments of those histories, I thought I was learning about Rome, Greece and ancient history. As it turned out, however, that wasn't what I was doing at all.
Most people would consider Polybius and Thucydides to be dry stuff, but that's nothing compared to the books of commentary written by modern authors on ancient writers. I read through tons of that stuff, shelves and shelves of books, to keep up with horrifically dry lectures delivered by professors who were as bad at marketing their own subject as I had been at science.
Yet somehow in the dusty, wearisome, bromidic pursuit of knowledge I was learning to read. Not just in the sense of passing over the words and understanding what was being said, but in dissecting the material at the level of the author's decision to write the sentences in the order that they were written, or in terms of how the material's guts were meant to impress themselves upon the reader. Why these choices were being made and not those, and how a perfectly innocent little aside could reveal things that an untrained mind wouldn't see.
We don't hesitate to understand that engineers looking at a bridge can evaluate and replay for themselves the bridge's construction, the process by which its made, the difficulties presented by the precise place on the bank where the bridge sits, the purpose of each pylon's shape, considerations made for the wind and on like that. There are those, however, who raise an eyebrow doubtfully that a person can look at a paragraph of writing and do the same thing, recognizing each verb choice, each subjunctive, the repetition of certain prepositions and so on, and how these are used to construct thoughts and overcome structural problems. It is another expertise, and no less understood to most readers than bridge-building is to most drivers.
Now you, the role-player reading this post, wondering perhaps at this time if RPG's or the subject of world-building is ever going to be addressed ... what are you learning? You think you are passing your time playing a game that interests you, that takes up perhaps a little more time than you have, which isn't all that serious, or which might dig at you a bit like an old filling that isn't worth having a dentist repair. It is a hobby, nothing more.
Yet, you are learning from it. You're learning how hard it is to launch into a long-term project with uncertain goals and uncertain rewards. You're discovering your limitations, in that creatively your imagination far surpasses your ability to sit down, night after night, grinding that imagination into something whole and meaningful. You're being forced, session by session, to acknowledge your limitations, to accept that there's only so far you can go in playing the game, mostly because you haven't any knowledge to draw upon except your own fumbling experience, both in the effort of being a DM and in watching other DMs fumble around at their worlds. There's some notion in your heart that something really profound is in the doing of the thing ... but you look at the complexities and interplay of a map like Middle Earth and scratch your head in wonder. You lay out the towns and the rivers, the shires and the horse-plains, yet it never quite gains the romance of Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains.
There are other things you're learning, too. You're learning how to manage people. You're learning that for some people you need to draw a line on what's acceptable, and you're learning the consequences of not drawing that line. You're learning that making your own way and your own world does not always play well with players who can't understand what you're doing - and you find you're not able to explain it to them.
Step by step you're realizing if you can't work it out, if you can't figure the means to get more players, or make the world equal to the maturity of the players you do have, it's all going to slip away from you and you'll have to quit playing. Not because you don't want to play, not because you wouldn't do this in the old age rest home if you could, but because its impossible to live up to standards you can't point at and say, "those are the standards." Worse, even if you have the least handle on them, you haven't the words or the evidence to force someone else's attention on those standards and comprehend why those are the standards needed.
You're getting older and the bloom is falling off the rose. You're getting older and the world you ran at 15 isn't enough for you. It still seems enough for many of your players, but you're in your 30s now and you've been running this same structure, these same combats, the same interplay between fighter and spell-caster for long enough to find it's not justifying the stress that sessioning is producing. You know, in your heart, there's something deeper there; there's a more meaningful, emotionally rich land worth exploring, but except for one or two others like yourself, the community seems blind, dumb and stupid. It's not, but it seems that way.
The players are drifting away because they're maturing too, and they're growing as tired as you of the same goal posts. But they can't say it, because they feel foolish saying it. They feel they're the only ones in the world that feel this way, as they pretend to feel this way just as everyone else does. They're trying their own solutions, pretending to be people they're not because they don't know how to be more interesting being the people they are.
We're all learning things as we play. We're learning that people, even when they really want something, are guarded, suspicious ... and uneasy about revealing their thoughts to others who are aggressive, needy and beggared in their need to have a good time pretending. We're learning that being the DM over this assortment is trying. We're learning that even at a game, managing humans is work. We are getting a first-hand course in how damned hard it is only to manage ourselves.
Don't be too hard on yourselves. No one ever told you how. This is why education without a structure is called a School of Hard Knocks. You learn things you never expected to learn. And you either square your shoulders and take the world by the throat, or you bow your head and excuse yourself for having gotten in everybody's way.
The third option is just a lot of stumbling around looking like an idiot.
The goal seemed clear. I would research the human heart and the circulatory system. I would build a model, which would be complex and interesting, along with a presentation that would impress people. By the end, I'd learn how the heart worked, both intellectually and mechanically, as I tacked the hands-on process of making my exhibit.
It happened that I was wrong. The science fair wasn't about that at all. It was about explaining what I'd learned again and again, all day long, to other children and parents who had a minimum of understanding, who didn't actually care or who couldn't quite get it. Now and then it was a person who knew all about it, who wanted to see if I had done my work. It was a strange combination of deliberately measuring myself against people both dumber and smarter than me - and most of all learning how to defend the knowledge I had, with words, not with demonstrations. The fair was a performance ... one based upon the reality that knowing things or making things took a second and third place to communicating things. That first fair, and the others that followed, were an education in marketing. Sad thing was, I wasn't very good at marketing science, and my father was not granted an engineer for a son.
When I went into university, I had only a general idea of what courses I wanted to take. I had a deep fascination with geography, and another with history, but I'd had a conversation with a fellow named Mike - who would later be the best man at my wedding - in which he convinced me that the place I belonged was humanities. Thus in my first year I took a smattering of courses in philosophy, religious studies, languages (Russian and English) and in classical studies. The last seized my attention, and for the next seven years - being the professional student that had been my dream - I would embrace Herodotus, Thucydides, Suetonius, Plutarch, Livy, Polybius, Xenophon, Tacitus, Ovid, Vergil, Homer, Catullus, Hesiod, Pliny and many, many others. As I did, reading through not only the histories, but also a host of authors who did not hesitate to be biased with their assessments of those histories, I thought I was learning about Rome, Greece and ancient history. As it turned out, however, that wasn't what I was doing at all.
Most people would consider Polybius and Thucydides to be dry stuff, but that's nothing compared to the books of commentary written by modern authors on ancient writers. I read through tons of that stuff, shelves and shelves of books, to keep up with horrifically dry lectures delivered by professors who were as bad at marketing their own subject as I had been at science.
Yet somehow in the dusty, wearisome, bromidic pursuit of knowledge I was learning to read. Not just in the sense of passing over the words and understanding what was being said, but in dissecting the material at the level of the author's decision to write the sentences in the order that they were written, or in terms of how the material's guts were meant to impress themselves upon the reader. Why these choices were being made and not those, and how a perfectly innocent little aside could reveal things that an untrained mind wouldn't see.
We don't hesitate to understand that engineers looking at a bridge can evaluate and replay for themselves the bridge's construction, the process by which its made, the difficulties presented by the precise place on the bank where the bridge sits, the purpose of each pylon's shape, considerations made for the wind and on like that. There are those, however, who raise an eyebrow doubtfully that a person can look at a paragraph of writing and do the same thing, recognizing each verb choice, each subjunctive, the repetition of certain prepositions and so on, and how these are used to construct thoughts and overcome structural problems. It is another expertise, and no less understood to most readers than bridge-building is to most drivers.
Now you, the role-player reading this post, wondering perhaps at this time if RPG's or the subject of world-building is ever going to be addressed ... what are you learning? You think you are passing your time playing a game that interests you, that takes up perhaps a little more time than you have, which isn't all that serious, or which might dig at you a bit like an old filling that isn't worth having a dentist repair. It is a hobby, nothing more.
Yet, you are learning from it. You're learning how hard it is to launch into a long-term project with uncertain goals and uncertain rewards. You're discovering your limitations, in that creatively your imagination far surpasses your ability to sit down, night after night, grinding that imagination into something whole and meaningful. You're being forced, session by session, to acknowledge your limitations, to accept that there's only so far you can go in playing the game, mostly because you haven't any knowledge to draw upon except your own fumbling experience, both in the effort of being a DM and in watching other DMs fumble around at their worlds. There's some notion in your heart that something really profound is in the doing of the thing ... but you look at the complexities and interplay of a map like Middle Earth and scratch your head in wonder. You lay out the towns and the rivers, the shires and the horse-plains, yet it never quite gains the romance of Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains.
There are other things you're learning, too. You're learning how to manage people. You're learning that for some people you need to draw a line on what's acceptable, and you're learning the consequences of not drawing that line. You're learning that making your own way and your own world does not always play well with players who can't understand what you're doing - and you find you're not able to explain it to them.
Step by step you're realizing if you can't work it out, if you can't figure the means to get more players, or make the world equal to the maturity of the players you do have, it's all going to slip away from you and you'll have to quit playing. Not because you don't want to play, not because you wouldn't do this in the old age rest home if you could, but because its impossible to live up to standards you can't point at and say, "those are the standards." Worse, even if you have the least handle on them, you haven't the words or the evidence to force someone else's attention on those standards and comprehend why those are the standards needed.
You're getting older and the bloom is falling off the rose. You're getting older and the world you ran at 15 isn't enough for you. It still seems enough for many of your players, but you're in your 30s now and you've been running this same structure, these same combats, the same interplay between fighter and spell-caster for long enough to find it's not justifying the stress that sessioning is producing. You know, in your heart, there's something deeper there; there's a more meaningful, emotionally rich land worth exploring, but except for one or two others like yourself, the community seems blind, dumb and stupid. It's not, but it seems that way.
The players are drifting away because they're maturing too, and they're growing as tired as you of the same goal posts. But they can't say it, because they feel foolish saying it. They feel they're the only ones in the world that feel this way, as they pretend to feel this way just as everyone else does. They're trying their own solutions, pretending to be people they're not because they don't know how to be more interesting being the people they are.
We're all learning things as we play. We're learning that people, even when they really want something, are guarded, suspicious ... and uneasy about revealing their thoughts to others who are aggressive, needy and beggared in their need to have a good time pretending. We're learning that being the DM over this assortment is trying. We're learning that even at a game, managing humans is work. We are getting a first-hand course in how damned hard it is only to manage ourselves.
Don't be too hard on yourselves. No one ever told you how. This is why education without a structure is called a School of Hard Knocks. You learn things you never expected to learn. And you either square your shoulders and take the world by the throat, or you bow your head and excuse yourself for having gotten in everybody's way.
The third option is just a lot of stumbling around looking like an idiot.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Need
No comments at all to that last post. I could feel it was on the mark as I was writing it, but perhaps it just wasn't fair. Rebuilding a kitchen is typically considered a less-than-ideal thing ... something we do because we are tired of the kitchen we have, or that it is so old it's not in keeping with our present income. It isn't 'fun.' And building a world ought to be, huh?
Building a world for me is more of a compulsion than fun. I don't have any desire to stop; and even when I'm overloaded with work and I can't work on the world, I keep thinking of new angles and new possibilities that I'd like to add to an existing generator, or apply to things like the sage tables or the monsters' list. When I get hung up on writing, or blocked as they say, I find myself going back to maps to get my head straight.
And it's work. There's no way around it. I'm literally feeling it in my shoulders and the tightening of my hands as I line up river after river, or shift things around in excel to make room for more calculations, more notes, more more more.
Maybe building a world isn't for everyone. Maybe I'm preaching to a room full of people who don't see the sense of it. Maybe the only reason why I'm still working on my world after all these years is because I'm crazy, and no sane person would do this. Maybe there really isn't a need for a world, I've just convinced myself there ought to be because I can't stop.
Seems that a world just ... matters. To the players, it's a home. It's the place they keep their stuff. I just can't envision a campaign without one.
Building a world for me is more of a compulsion than fun. I don't have any desire to stop; and even when I'm overloaded with work and I can't work on the world, I keep thinking of new angles and new possibilities that I'd like to add to an existing generator, or apply to things like the sage tables or the monsters' list. When I get hung up on writing, or blocked as they say, I find myself going back to maps to get my head straight.
And it's work. There's no way around it. I'm literally feeling it in my shoulders and the tightening of my hands as I line up river after river, or shift things around in excel to make room for more calculations, more notes, more more more.
Maybe building a world isn't for everyone. Maybe I'm preaching to a room full of people who don't see the sense of it. Maybe the only reason why I'm still working on my world after all these years is because I'm crazy, and no sane person would do this. Maybe there really isn't a need for a world, I've just convinced myself there ought to be because I can't stop.
Seems that a world just ... matters. To the players, it's a home. It's the place they keep their stuff. I just can't envision a campaign without one.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Start, Then Stop Starting
Let's come back to design, then. Off-line, the section I've been working on refers to different functions the world needs to address: aesthetics, material, cost, style, purpose and so on, breaking down those aspects in order to offer the worldbuilder at least an idea of what ought to be considered. At the moment, I'm finding it rough work, as I consider just how far I want to go with it - overview, or into depth on the individual subjects - and if the latter, how much depth? But that's my problem, not the reader's.
Fundamentally, I want the DM to see the world in terms of being a project, such as building a house. The costs are a lot less, but the failure for a lot of would-be makers would come from simply refusing to understand the dimensions of what's being planned. I see someone on a blog producing a map, much like I described in this post, then following that up by plugging in some homemade modules here and there, spackled on the map. There's a dungeon in this gap between the mountains, there's a ruin here by the forest overlooking the river, this town over here is deserted, there are grottos by the ocean here, and there you go. Cue the party marching from one part of the map to the next and we have a campaign, yes?
Actually, what we have is something that doesn't even hang as well together as the plot of Hangover II. We have a lot of disconnected ideas that hopefully will be made meaningful in that they are all represented by circles on a pretty map. Go campaign!
Try to imagine rebuilding your kitchen, randomly putting in the connections for the fridge, stove and washing machine without paying any attention to the ergonomics of the arrangement. Imagine that you randomly draw the walls where the kitchen table is going to fit, without any actual plan for the table's size or the number of chairs needed to support your family. Imagine that you're going to do it all yourself, but that you're sure you can just 'figure out' the power outlets or the gas connection.
A couple of years ago a house down the street from my parents, that I had passed thousands of times on my way to school as a kid, just blew up. Turned out the contractor hired to re-drywall the dining room put his power saw into the wall to start cutting out a section of the old drywall so he could get started. He got about two feet. Power saw + electrical conduit = BOOM.
That's how most DMs worldbuild. 'Course, nobody dies. But somehow, the world just never takes shape. The makers do begin to understand that it is somehow a monumental task, but as Giordanisti said in the comments section of the above post, where do you start?
Well, where would you start if you were rebuilding a kitchen? With the hammer and the saw? With the demolition of the old kitchen? Would you get up one day, drag out the tools and the six pound sledge and then start wailing away at the cupboards? Dishes be damned?
No. You make a plan. One that includes all the things you want your kitchen to include. But you're not going to have access to parts of the kitchen while you're rebuilding it, and that's going to be inconvenient. So part of your plan has to include more than just the fact that you'd like the kitchen to look like this - your plan ALSO has to include the order in which you redesign your kitchen. What is done, when, with how much time, so there will still be access to the fridge and stove for as long as possible.
What I'm saying is that while you're making a plan for what your world will contain, you also have to include in your plan how you're going to run part of that world while you're making the rest of it. My world isn't done - but I run my world continuously. And the players don't really notice that it's not done. How does that work?
For me, it's because I run the real world, so I have a loose understanding pre-built even though it isn't finished. But I've also done a lot of pre-made mapbuilding and made lists of what hex will contain what far into my future. I also have it built so that those places I don't really need are only partially created. I can go in and build more if I need it ... and most importantly, on the same premise as the world that is already built.
Most important of all, I'm not changing my plans as I go. Ask a contractor sometime, what drives them right up the fucking wall? It is people who do not know what the hell they want, and set about trying to change the plans long past when it's practical to do that. Then not understanding why they don't have a kitchen yet, even though it's been 9 months, and wondering why the $35,000 charge has bounced to $90,000.
If you're not going to change your plans - and you shouldn't, ever, change your plans once you implement them - then the very, very FIRST thing you have to do in designing your world is settle on what that world is going to be, and then living with it. If you had your kitchen rebuilt, and it cost you $35,000, and it wasn't quite what you wanted your kitchen to be, what would you do? Rebuild it? No. You'd learn to live with it. That's what we all do. We live with the car we have, we live with the city and neighborhood we find ourselves in, we take it as fact that the state is going to be Republican until the end of time, we recognize that in order to be happy and resourceful and productive, there are things we can't change, or in the very least the change wouldn't be worth all the goddamn effort and money.
But because the world isn't 'real,' because it isn't made of something solid and tactile, because it can be changed without the change costing a dime, whenever the tiniest thing comes up, the first thing a worldbuilder does is scrap all their plans so they can start again. And again. And again and again and again and again. People are great starters. What they are really crappy at is - no, not finishing - accepting that they're on the right road and just getting there. No, the road isn't perfect. Yes, the road fucking winds around and yes, it seems to be taking all freaking year to get there, and sure, there ought to be a lot more roadsigns so you knew where the hell you were. But stay on the damn road, you idiot. DON'T GET DISTRACTED by that stupid little side path that seems like a short cut but is really going to just sink your vehicle in a lot of stupid, worthless mud.
I can write a lot of advice on how to make a world. I can give the directions, I can get you there ... but I can't make you drive the way I tell you. If you're going to insist on driving like an idiot, no, you're never going to get to the place you wanted to be. But then, you really didn't want to be there, did you?
Well, I'm floating between two metaphors, but what the hell, this is only a blog post. I ain't writin' for the fuckin' New Yorker. Here's the real reality about kitchens and roads and projects. People don't start them. They don't, because they've already learned from experience that starting is the way to disaster, because they can never be happy with ever doing anything, or going anywhere.
So in fact, they do learn to live with things. They learn to live with the memory of a lot of shit they never did.
Fundamentally, I want the DM to see the world in terms of being a project, such as building a house. The costs are a lot less, but the failure for a lot of would-be makers would come from simply refusing to understand the dimensions of what's being planned. I see someone on a blog producing a map, much like I described in this post, then following that up by plugging in some homemade modules here and there, spackled on the map. There's a dungeon in this gap between the mountains, there's a ruin here by the forest overlooking the river, this town over here is deserted, there are grottos by the ocean here, and there you go. Cue the party marching from one part of the map to the next and we have a campaign, yes?
Actually, what we have is something that doesn't even hang as well together as the plot of Hangover II. We have a lot of disconnected ideas that hopefully will be made meaningful in that they are all represented by circles on a pretty map. Go campaign!
Try to imagine rebuilding your kitchen, randomly putting in the connections for the fridge, stove and washing machine without paying any attention to the ergonomics of the arrangement. Imagine that you randomly draw the walls where the kitchen table is going to fit, without any actual plan for the table's size or the number of chairs needed to support your family. Imagine that you're going to do it all yourself, but that you're sure you can just 'figure out' the power outlets or the gas connection.
A couple of years ago a house down the street from my parents, that I had passed thousands of times on my way to school as a kid, just blew up. Turned out the contractor hired to re-drywall the dining room put his power saw into the wall to start cutting out a section of the old drywall so he could get started. He got about two feet. Power saw + electrical conduit = BOOM.
That's how most DMs worldbuild. 'Course, nobody dies. But somehow, the world just never takes shape. The makers do begin to understand that it is somehow a monumental task, but as Giordanisti said in the comments section of the above post, where do you start?
Well, where would you start if you were rebuilding a kitchen? With the hammer and the saw? With the demolition of the old kitchen? Would you get up one day, drag out the tools and the six pound sledge and then start wailing away at the cupboards? Dishes be damned?
No. You make a plan. One that includes all the things you want your kitchen to include. But you're not going to have access to parts of the kitchen while you're rebuilding it, and that's going to be inconvenient. So part of your plan has to include more than just the fact that you'd like the kitchen to look like this - your plan ALSO has to include the order in which you redesign your kitchen. What is done, when, with how much time, so there will still be access to the fridge and stove for as long as possible.
What I'm saying is that while you're making a plan for what your world will contain, you also have to include in your plan how you're going to run part of that world while you're making the rest of it. My world isn't done - but I run my world continuously. And the players don't really notice that it's not done. How does that work?
For me, it's because I run the real world, so I have a loose understanding pre-built even though it isn't finished. But I've also done a lot of pre-made mapbuilding and made lists of what hex will contain what far into my future. I also have it built so that those places I don't really need are only partially created. I can go in and build more if I need it ... and most importantly, on the same premise as the world that is already built.
Most important of all, I'm not changing my plans as I go. Ask a contractor sometime, what drives them right up the fucking wall? It is people who do not know what the hell they want, and set about trying to change the plans long past when it's practical to do that. Then not understanding why they don't have a kitchen yet, even though it's been 9 months, and wondering why the $35,000 charge has bounced to $90,000.
If you're not going to change your plans - and you shouldn't, ever, change your plans once you implement them - then the very, very FIRST thing you have to do in designing your world is settle on what that world is going to be, and then living with it. If you had your kitchen rebuilt, and it cost you $35,000, and it wasn't quite what you wanted your kitchen to be, what would you do? Rebuild it? No. You'd learn to live with it. That's what we all do. We live with the car we have, we live with the city and neighborhood we find ourselves in, we take it as fact that the state is going to be Republican until the end of time, we recognize that in order to be happy and resourceful and productive, there are things we can't change, or in the very least the change wouldn't be worth all the goddamn effort and money.
But because the world isn't 'real,' because it isn't made of something solid and tactile, because it can be changed without the change costing a dime, whenever the tiniest thing comes up, the first thing a worldbuilder does is scrap all their plans so they can start again. And again. And again and again and again and again. People are great starters. What they are really crappy at is - no, not finishing - accepting that they're on the right road and just getting there. No, the road isn't perfect. Yes, the road fucking winds around and yes, it seems to be taking all freaking year to get there, and sure, there ought to be a lot more roadsigns so you knew where the hell you were. But stay on the damn road, you idiot. DON'T GET DISTRACTED by that stupid little side path that seems like a short cut but is really going to just sink your vehicle in a lot of stupid, worthless mud.
I can write a lot of advice on how to make a world. I can give the directions, I can get you there ... but I can't make you drive the way I tell you. If you're going to insist on driving like an idiot, no, you're never going to get to the place you wanted to be. But then, you really didn't want to be there, did you?
Well, I'm floating between two metaphors, but what the hell, this is only a blog post. I ain't writin' for the fuckin' New Yorker. Here's the real reality about kitchens and roads and projects. People don't start them. They don't, because they've already learned from experience that starting is the way to disaster, because they can never be happy with ever doing anything, or going anywhere.
So in fact, they do learn to live with things. They learn to live with the memory of a lot of shit they never did.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Doomed to Fall Short
Given yesterday's post, and the concurrent opinions expressed there that reality in combat is something unobtainable - and in my opinion unwanted - from a role-playing game, why does this particular will o'wisp continue to seize the designs of rule makers? What is this certainty that if a game is more real, the game will be made better?
Aesthetics. Despite the cold calculation in strategy or tactics that we may wish for, those alone will not create a compelling game. The game must be beautiful. It must evoke emotion. In the mind's eye of combat, there is something precious in the thrill of holding a mace, spying the enemy's skull, and picturing the swinging of that mace into that skull and producing a spray of jewelled red droplets, meat and bone. The crunch as the brain-case gives way, the escape of air from the lungs of the victim as he sinks beneath our gaze, and our own voice screaming at our men to "get them." Our enemy, now a carcass, drops lifelessly at our feet and we leap over it's cold meat, swinging the soaked mace and waving our forces on, on to further killing and decimation.
There is a powerful urge to somehow codify the above description into a rule set, so that we will know where the mace hits, we will know how bloody the mace is, and so we will somehow know how precisely destructive we are. The rule set will tell us, we hope, how damaged our armor is, how sore our arm has grown over the last hour with hit upon hit, how hard our heart pounds in our chest and how loud is the rush of blood in our ears. Somehow, we think that if only we can make a rule set cover the various angles and elements of battle a little more grittily, a little more down to the nap as it were, we'll feel what is happening a bit more strongly, and we won't be as displaced from our characters - characters that are only sheets of paper with graphite strokes, only collections of numbers and notes, nothing more than a desperate attempt to codify life, and make it something that we can see in our minds.
Though we try, however, a rule set will not do this.
This knowing ... this deep, profound desire to know and feel and grasp with our minds a greater context than what we are limited to by being in a room with coke and cheezies on the table, is an age-old ideal, going far back in the history of creation, imagination and aesthetics. Pygmalion was nothing more than a sculptor who dreamed so hard of his own work coming to life that for him it did, only to bring him much sorrow and misery in the process. This has been a constant theme in the pursuit of fetish ... that we must be careful what we wish for. No battle veteran of real war would wish to return to the moment of battle - but we adore the idea of Conan, eyes shining in the moment of bloodlust, unconcerned with the visions of that horror-scape and uncrippled with the terror that descends from actual experience. Conan has no PTSD. We understand that. We don't want reality. Reality would produce Pygmalion's misery. We want Conan's fantasy, where none of the principles of reality exist. Only ... we don't know how to make it happen.
We've tried descriptions. We've tried adding images to our games. We've tried miniatures, with paint and cool action-like stances. We've tried costumes at the table. We've tried lighting and theme music and speaking in old timey voices, with old timey sentence structure. We're out of things to try. All we have left is the dim hope that somehow a rule set will accomplish what imagination and desire and fetishistic compulsion cannot. But like all the rest, it is a will o'wisp.
I wonder, though, how it is that we don't do a few simple things at the table to reduce some of the noise. That fellow working for months on his rule set to make combat more believable is completely unaware of the player at his table wearing a Michael Jackson "THIS IS IT!" tee-shirt; or a Nebraska Huskers football jersey. Or the sideways-turned New York Mets hat. Those things, for some reason, are never named as spoilers for the 'reality' of what's happening. Nor is the cluttered pig-sty of the apartment where the game is played, or the coke, or the cheezies. It's interesting that in the quest for realism, there's no compulsion to drink only water and unpasteurized milk, eating unleavened bread and shredded meat (if there's an effort made with the victuals, it's always something alcoholic and often made by someone not good at fermenting mead).
Fact is, we're doomed to fall short of the fantasy. Some people accept that. They make do with what they have. Others cannot accept it, they want something more, so they complain about the lack of realism, or the failure of the DM to 'capture' the full-force of the role-play, because they cannot do it on their own. The fantasy can never be manufactured for the player unable to manufacture it for themselves. It just isn't possible. I cannot make you or any player feel the power of my fetish. I can, at best, alter the environment, adjust the lamps and the 'feel,' but in the end the last long step towards belief is out of my hands.
P.S.
What I'd like to see are descriptions of aesthetic woes, such as the tee-shirt the really annoying guy across from the reader was wearing, or the worst sort of places imaginable where you were forced to play, that destroyed visually the verisimilitude of the campaign. Those stories would be good for a laugh.
Aesthetics. Despite the cold calculation in strategy or tactics that we may wish for, those alone will not create a compelling game. The game must be beautiful. It must evoke emotion. In the mind's eye of combat, there is something precious in the thrill of holding a mace, spying the enemy's skull, and picturing the swinging of that mace into that skull and producing a spray of jewelled red droplets, meat and bone. The crunch as the brain-case gives way, the escape of air from the lungs of the victim as he sinks beneath our gaze, and our own voice screaming at our men to "get them." Our enemy, now a carcass, drops lifelessly at our feet and we leap over it's cold meat, swinging the soaked mace and waving our forces on, on to further killing and decimation.
There is a powerful urge to somehow codify the above description into a rule set, so that we will know where the mace hits, we will know how bloody the mace is, and so we will somehow know how precisely destructive we are. The rule set will tell us, we hope, how damaged our armor is, how sore our arm has grown over the last hour with hit upon hit, how hard our heart pounds in our chest and how loud is the rush of blood in our ears. Somehow, we think that if only we can make a rule set cover the various angles and elements of battle a little more grittily, a little more down to the nap as it were, we'll feel what is happening a bit more strongly, and we won't be as displaced from our characters - characters that are only sheets of paper with graphite strokes, only collections of numbers and notes, nothing more than a desperate attempt to codify life, and make it something that we can see in our minds.
Though we try, however, a rule set will not do this.
This knowing ... this deep, profound desire to know and feel and grasp with our minds a greater context than what we are limited to by being in a room with coke and cheezies on the table, is an age-old ideal, going far back in the history of creation, imagination and aesthetics. Pygmalion was nothing more than a sculptor who dreamed so hard of his own work coming to life that for him it did, only to bring him much sorrow and misery in the process. This has been a constant theme in the pursuit of fetish ... that we must be careful what we wish for. No battle veteran of real war would wish to return to the moment of battle - but we adore the idea of Conan, eyes shining in the moment of bloodlust, unconcerned with the visions of that horror-scape and uncrippled with the terror that descends from actual experience. Conan has no PTSD. We understand that. We don't want reality. Reality would produce Pygmalion's misery. We want Conan's fantasy, where none of the principles of reality exist. Only ... we don't know how to make it happen.
We've tried descriptions. We've tried adding images to our games. We've tried miniatures, with paint and cool action-like stances. We've tried costumes at the table. We've tried lighting and theme music and speaking in old timey voices, with old timey sentence structure. We're out of things to try. All we have left is the dim hope that somehow a rule set will accomplish what imagination and desire and fetishistic compulsion cannot. But like all the rest, it is a will o'wisp.
I wonder, though, how it is that we don't do a few simple things at the table to reduce some of the noise. That fellow working for months on his rule set to make combat more believable is completely unaware of the player at his table wearing a Michael Jackson "THIS IS IT!" tee-shirt; or a Nebraska Huskers football jersey. Or the sideways-turned New York Mets hat. Those things, for some reason, are never named as spoilers for the 'reality' of what's happening. Nor is the cluttered pig-sty of the apartment where the game is played, or the coke, or the cheezies. It's interesting that in the quest for realism, there's no compulsion to drink only water and unpasteurized milk, eating unleavened bread and shredded meat (if there's an effort made with the victuals, it's always something alcoholic and often made by someone not good at fermenting mead).
Fact is, we're doomed to fall short of the fantasy. Some people accept that. They make do with what they have. Others cannot accept it, they want something more, so they complain about the lack of realism, or the failure of the DM to 'capture' the full-force of the role-play, because they cannot do it on their own. The fantasy can never be manufactured for the player unable to manufacture it for themselves. It just isn't possible. I cannot make you or any player feel the power of my fetish. I can, at best, alter the environment, adjust the lamps and the 'feel,' but in the end the last long step towards belief is out of my hands.
P.S.
What I'd like to see are descriptions of aesthetic woes, such as the tee-shirt the really annoying guy across from the reader was wearing, or the worst sort of places imaginable where you were forced to play, that destroyed visually the verisimilitude of the campaign. Those stories would be good for a laugh.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Spikes
Watching an episode of Connections last night, describing the battle of Agincourt, I made my own connection. James Burke was describing the French cavalry riding onto the spikes the English had set into the ground, and all at once I remembered an episode of a terrible show from four or five years ago. This being the internet, I was able to find that episode - be warned, it's quite grisly. For those who can't view the episode, an instructor runs blindly into the end of the javelin he's just thrown.
Perhaps this has been obvious to many of you, but I've simply never considered it before. There was always something odd about the cavalry willingly running onto those spikes ... but in a flash, I realized they probably never knew what hit them.
Think about it. The field is muddy, it's been raining all day and night before, as it usually does in late October in northern France. The stakes themselves are probably the same color as the ground, as they've been fixed by muddy soldiers with muddy hands. The knights are riding on horseback, with helmets, so all they can see is what's visible through visors - and their eyes are seven or eight feet above the ground. If the spikes are five feet long, and bent at just the right angle, they're practically invisible.
My thinking would be they never knew what hit them. The horses would hit the stakes at full gallop, throwing the knights at twenty five miles forward into more spikes ... those that weren't spiked would still hit the ground on the fly, points of the armor digging into the muddy ground and breaking limbs, landing on their weapons, the straps of their helmets grabbing at their necks and breaking them. Most would have the wind blown out of them, meaning that before they could even adjust to the fact that they had just been thrown, there would be peasants standing over them. Imagine you're on a horse, you're thundering at the enemy, and then you're flat on your back, in pain, and through the slits of your visor you look up, and a gnarled, grisly, pathetic-looking minion is raising a mace ... and you're done.
That must have been unbelievable to see. The front line of ten thousand knights - two thousand, say - breaking against the wall of spikes, that you can see but they cannot, crashing to the ground with an enormous, unbelieveable noise, horses screaming, your commanders shouting to rush forward to that maelstrom of metal and flesh and mud, to "KILL THEM, KILL THEM ALL!" How would you ever forget that? How would you forget the nightmare dream of that moment?
I was going to write a post about the mess of battle, the perception of the combatants and the disconnect between combat mechanics and real life, but I think I'll just leave this post here, and write about those things later. The reader has enough to think about already.
Perhaps this has been obvious to many of you, but I've simply never considered it before. There was always something odd about the cavalry willingly running onto those spikes ... but in a flash, I realized they probably never knew what hit them.
Think about it. The field is muddy, it's been raining all day and night before, as it usually does in late October in northern France. The stakes themselves are probably the same color as the ground, as they've been fixed by muddy soldiers with muddy hands. The knights are riding on horseback, with helmets, so all they can see is what's visible through visors - and their eyes are seven or eight feet above the ground. If the spikes are five feet long, and bent at just the right angle, they're practically invisible.
My thinking would be they never knew what hit them. The horses would hit the stakes at full gallop, throwing the knights at twenty five miles forward into more spikes ... those that weren't spiked would still hit the ground on the fly, points of the armor digging into the muddy ground and breaking limbs, landing on their weapons, the straps of their helmets grabbing at their necks and breaking them. Most would have the wind blown out of them, meaning that before they could even adjust to the fact that they had just been thrown, there would be peasants standing over them. Imagine you're on a horse, you're thundering at the enemy, and then you're flat on your back, in pain, and through the slits of your visor you look up, and a gnarled, grisly, pathetic-looking minion is raising a mace ... and you're done.
That must have been unbelievable to see. The front line of ten thousand knights - two thousand, say - breaking against the wall of spikes, that you can see but they cannot, crashing to the ground with an enormous, unbelieveable noise, horses screaming, your commanders shouting to rush forward to that maelstrom of metal and flesh and mud, to "KILL THEM, KILL THEM ALL!" How would you ever forget that? How would you forget the nightmare dream of that moment?
I was going to write a post about the mess of battle, the perception of the combatants and the disconnect between combat mechanics and real life, but I think I'll just leave this post here, and write about those things later. The reader has enough to think about already.
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