The Drawing Board

Take this phrase in reference to creating a world for a role-playing game:

"Working without an empirical framework feels like 'cheating' . . ."

In response, let me quote my encyclopedia about empiricism:

"The doctrine that all knowledge of fact is derived from experience.  Experience is made up of the following elements and the relations between them: 1) sensations; 2) memories; 3) willfully created images; 4) emotions and feelings; 5) acts of will; and 6) thoughts, judgments and beliefs (including expectations) about the first five.  Empiricist philosophers defend their doctrine by successively examining all alleged types of factual knowledge and, for each of these types, either reducing it by analysis to terms of experience, or else rejecting it as not really knowledge after all, but only an ungrounded belief.

A classic example of empiricim is Hume's analysis of the concept of causality, published in 1739.  It had been believed, for instance, that when one touches a hot stove and suffers a burn, one can observe two relations between the touching of the stove and the pain of the burn; first, the touching precedes the pain in time, and second, the touching causes (produces) the pain.  But Hume analyzed the concept of cause and found that it was composed of two parts: 1) the time relationship between the touching of the stove and the subsequent pain; and 2) the expectation that pain will follow such an act, since in the past a similar contact has always been followed by a similar pain 

This analysis involves both reduction and rejection.  What we actually do experience, when we say that we know causality, is reduced in the above manner to sequence and expectation.  But if anyone clings to the belief that there is something more to causality, such as a "necessary force" or "power" whereby a cause inevitably "produces" its effect, this belief is flatly rejected on the ground that a close scrutiny of experience reveals no such force, and that therefore the quoted terms have no meaning."

I fully acknowledge that there is a strong sentiment to relate game design to the empiricism of the "real world" ~ the effort to do so is all over the internet, not only with relation to RPGs but with dozens of other passions as well.  And I can personally empathize with that sense of "cheating" . . . otherwise, I would not be plotting cities on a map using latitude and longitude as a guide.  I like that the placement of things on my maps, or in my trade system, or related to any system I create, reflects the real world.

But we have to face it; no matter how impressive my maps may happen to be, or how extensive my trade system may be, none of it is ever going to get recognition from anyone who is "empirically respected" in the real world.  I really don't have to worry about cheating anyone.  Reality has as much to do with game design as "necessary force" has to do with empiricism.  Reality is a bugbear.

My maps are useless empirically.  My trade system has no relation whatsoever to the actual movement of goods and services.  If I make an adjustment anywhere in that system, no one suffers.  Hell, for the most part, the player can't begin to imagine the processes that lead to a given substance having a given price . . . so I can't even take pleasure that my small audience will understand what I'm doing.  Empirically, I'm a total failure.  I have to be.  Nothing about what I'm doing can actually be applied to anything except to what I'm doing.

It makes a game.  That is all.  And I have to keep my focus on that truth continually, or it won't even accomplish that much.  That is the mistake that many would-be game designers keep making.  The sense that they're "cheating" someone ensures that they are also cheating themselves and their players.

We have to keep focused on what we're actually doing.  We're not writing a thesis on the practical use of weapons and their comparison; we're not building a model that will prove the superiority of one weapon over another.  We're not providing a framework that will enable a medieval simulationist to run a Tudor farm for five months . . . hell, if we were, we better get the hell out of numbers and graphs and go buy a damn farm in England.  Monopoly is not an accurate representation of real estate metrics in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the 1920s.  Chess is not an accurate representation of political and religious influence in war during the Persian/Sassanian era of the 6th and 7th centuries.  Game design is not, not I say, an academic pursuit.

And to this, let me add that I've been at this game design thing a long, long fucking time.  I can afford to get a little interested in a reflection of accuracy (at best, a semblance, nothing better!) because I've smashed dozens of would-be systems in the past, all of them because they sucked as game systems.  I have my eye firmly on the principal importance of everything that I make: that a player can understand it, a player can use it and a player can feel the importance of its use.  When something doesn't work, I don't hesitate to smash it, no matter how much work went into it . . . because that's how design works.

We go back and back and back to the drawing board.  And we remember that games are about variables and constraints, decisions and payoffs.  It is not about proving or demonstrating that a pole-axe is a better weapon than a battle axe.  We want to get close to reality, but in the long run, reality is the first head on the chopping block.  It has to be.

Let me explain it another way.  Those designers who have put together massively detailed and complicated games, researched extensively and exhaustively, did not start with those games.  They started with tools like playing cards and game boards; they learned game theory first, they got good at it, and then they went on to try new and different things.  They had critics, they had powerful voices ready to correct them when they were wrong, they had a passion that needed servicing and they had the wherewithal to go back to that drawing board a hundred times if need be.  THEN, after all that, they decided to start researching a game they felt like creating.

I could add that they didn't spend half their lives reinventing the wheel.  More to the point, they learned their business first, then dared to subvert it.  Try to keep that in mind as you apply yourself to your business.

Answers

I don't want to distract from my last post about England, as I'm deeply proud of that ~ but I can see that there is a strong resistance to the idea of letting time pass rapidly in a game, for reasons I hadn't considered.  Thus I find myself addressing it again.

It seems that most do not seem to understand what I'm saying. I would say that Samuel Kernan has the right idea, stated in the second comment: "I could see a certain group of players interested in spending less time engaged in resolving combat . . . they might spend more time ordering others to do violence than actually engaging in fights themselves."

Yes, that's very much a part of it.  To which Embla responds, it sounds like a lot of accounting; and Agravain adds that there's a lack of a framework.

Um, what do these people think this blog or the wiki is intended to accomplish?  Put together a thousand pages on the subject, build up a sage ability system intended to create a framework, figure out where every detail fits into the class system . . . and then have that ignored utterly, as I'm told there are "absolutely zero rules" about managing a manor.

Really.  None at all.  And let me just point out that all that material was in a book in a common, every day, ordinary library.  Like this one.  Or this one.  Or this television series.  Or this television series.  That's right, there's nothing out there, zero ~ because when DMs don't have a rule for something, they throw their hands up in the air and they tell the players, "NO, that can never, ever happen, because I don't have a rule for it."

Or we could, like, educate ourselves and just make something up.

And yes, it could be a lot of accounting.  D&D is accounting: subtract the hit point, subtract the arrow, add the gold, add the experience, increase the hit points, divide the treasure by the group, buy things and add them to a list, change the numbers for what adjustments to make to the die . . . what is all this but accounting?  What we really mean is that is sounds like boring accounting, as in, no one will necessarily die, so who cares?

I'm curious, why did Farmville get to be so popular?  Why do games like the one I keep mentioning, Europa Universalis, get invented?  Because, on the whole, RISK wasn't gritty enough so we wanted Hearts of Iron.  Fable II is grittier than Fable I.  Urban Empire over Tropico.  Project Sylphead. Factorio.  Complex games, where logistics are forced on the user, because we want to spend all our time decided on tiny, tiny details, in order to affect a larger landscape.

Why should D&D be any different?  Don't the armies have to eat, don't we need farms to grow food, can't we decide how big we want our farms to be based on our income, can't we designate an amount of seed to be planted and amount of yield to be obtained?  Hell, you want crop yields for everything from beets to yams, it's called Google.  Google isn't robust enough?  We can send our players off on their phones to look that shit up, no?  Irrigate the land, costs money, more yield, right?  Roll a die for blight, roll a die for hailstorms, roll a die for perfect weather, give the players a bumper crop, let them feed their army.  I'm confused ~ why can't this be done without having to run each day of watching the plants grow?

LTW is worried that the players will ask, "How many rich merchants or nobles have I befriended?"  What is wrong with the answer, NONE.  No rich merchants.  No nobles.  Why?  Because meeting those people requires an effort and that is role-playing.  It doesn't come for free.  Meeting the farmer that's your neighbor over the back fence, yeah, no problem, his name is Fred.

But how many rich merchants and nobles are in the area?  Easy.  People all around talk about them constantly, having rarely even seen them.  There are three.  Two rich merchants and one noble.  The merchants names are Jack and Hank, one owns a huge flock of horses, cows and pigs, the other owns virtually all the land in the region.  The noble's name is Bob.  He's a total asshole.  He got his money from his Dad.  What else do you want to know?

Heirs?  Yeah, they each have one.  Or, at least, they've got one lined up.  You can be pretty sure it isn't YOU.

I guess this is "a lot of work" because the reader has totally ignored me about taking advantage of the work I've already done, creating a trade system, creating a wiki, putting it all online (yes, I've been a complete asshole this way) and explaining in over 2 million words of blog how to do it.  Yes, I can see how that's a real bitch, having someone stamp down a pathway for you so you can stand fifty feet from me in the snow and claim "there's nothing, nothing at all, to tell me how to do this!"

Sorry, that is pretty cheap of me.  Sincerely, sorry.  Sometimes, just sometimes, I just feel I'm writing for the air.

Let me try to explain about "manorial management mechanics."  You have some land. You buy something to grow or raise on it.  It costs you.  Then you look up on Google how long it takes to grow into an adult, how long it takes before we can kill it for meat, how much meat it produces, how much we have to feed it, how many people can watch how many animals, how much room it needs and so on.  Then we buy the feed, we build the barn, we hire servants, we build a slaughter house, we find out the price we'll get from a local merchant and then we pocket the cash.  Is that so hard?

What system?  Why, the one that already exists, everywhere.

A couple of months ago I had a question about how sharply you can turn a horse at a gallop.  I looked online but I couldn't get a good answer.  So I picked up a phone and I called the International Horseshow Venue here in the city and asked to talk to someone who knew about horseriding.  I was in a conversation in three minutes.  I explained that I was designing a game and that I was working out a mechanic to do with horses.  How sharp can you turn a horse moving at a gallop?  360 degrees.  Basically, as sharply as you want.  There is no limit, not in terms of the horse's ability to turn on a dime.  I got the low-down on that.  You can rear the horse and turn it in the other direction in a space about as wide as my combat hex.  The real problem isn't the horse's ability to pivot, but in how much time in a round the rider has to dedicate to managing the horse.  Can't swing a sword if you're veering off in the direction you've just come.

Now, here's my point.  There it is, the whole world, and all the Answers in it, on your phone, on your desktop.  And the reader is asking, "Where am I going to get these answers the players want?"

Really?  Gee.

I guess I just see this whole game far, far too differently than other people. I guess I'm just some special autistic idiot, who has some ridiculous notion that if a player says, "I want to do this thing that I'm perfectly able to do as an ordinary human being," I'm supposed to make that happen.

I just don't want to answer, "Um, no, sorry, I never thought about that until this very minute, so I can't let you do that.  Yes, I suppose there must be small bits of land for sale; yes, I suppose that a merchant probably would be interested in buying sheep from you if you buy a ram and a ewe and get them to mate and produce a bunch of lambs.  Sure, yes, if you want to run them in a meadow, I guess there must be meadows around ~ I mean, heck, what do the other shepherds do?  And yes, the merchant has a name, and yes, the merchant has family and friends, and yes if your charisma is 14 he's probably going to look at you better than the average shepherd.  That sounds logical.

But, look, I can't actually let you keep following this line of reasoning because it sounds pretty hard to keep up with.  It's a lot of work for ME.  You understand.  So listen ~ let's just put on a sword or something and walk down some stairs to an empty square room with a trap and a puzzle in it that I got from a local game store.  That's really more my speed.  Okay?  Fine?  Good.

No, no, no.  I don't want to hear any more about sheep.  If you want, I'll let you buy a lamb and you can keep it in your backpack on the next dungeon adventure.  That's as far as I'm going.

Is this me being nasty and cold and mawking?  Yes, yes, I admit that.  But I'm not trying to make anyone feel stupid, I'm trying to wake you the fuck up.  It is a much, much bigger world out there than the one you've been fed.  And in some ways, it starts when TIME isn't necessarily as rigidly played out as the game normally demands.  This is all I'm saying.  We can measure time any way we want ~ and we can use the endless resources of the whole universe to answer the player's questions, one by one.

Hell, I was doing that long, long, long before I had a trade system.  I only built the trade system so that I wouldn't have to pull a number out of my ass.  But before the trade system was built, my ass was all I had.  This was 1983.  There was no internet!  But I sure as shit wasn't going to tell a player I didn't have an answer when they asked for something.

At Last, Britain

Sorry to say that I took French leave on my online games for two days; people must be wondering what the hell I'm doing, what I'm up to.  I apologize.  I've been a bit down, a bit distracted.  It's encouraged me to focus on something I love, namely this.  I've finally finished off that corner of England that I left undone back in October, I've added the market city icons and all the roads on the two islands.

The Islands offered a lot of different challenges.  This last, to add roads, makes England look like a modern road map.  There are simple reasons for that.  Most of England is, first, near to the sea.  I think I remember reading that no part of Britain is more than 72 miles from the sea.  This encourages trade, since every port all around the two islands encourages the creation of a line of cities across the island to a port on the other side.

Second, the islands are largely flat.  This makes travel overland far easier in England, in particular, much easier than it is for nearly every other part of the world.  Few hills to climb, and few substantial rivers to boot, made nearly England terrifically accessible.  Only Wales and Scotland offer difficult terrain.  The corners of Ireland, on the other hand, were a refuge for rebels and tribalism (and poor in land), so that it was politically resistant to trade rather than geographically.

I'm glad to have this part of the world behind me.

In terms of trade, the map above creates this land travel map:

The small distances represent the number of market days between the various markets, due to both distance and terrain.  The next stage after this, before I can add Britain to my trade system, is to figure out the sea distances between this and the rest of Europe.

I was also going to say, I started working on this map sheet about ten years ago, about the winter of 2006/07:

Steadily, I've added pieces.  I remember when it was just Poland, on the right side of the map.  Then I added Bohemia and Moravia, Hungary, the parts of Yugoslavia, and finally Germany.  I remember what a headache Germany was.

I've talked about adding pieces on this map on the blog: Switzerland, the Low Countries, France.  I remember working on Italy and it just took up a tiny piece in the bottom right.  And now, at last, I've finished that tiny piece of England on the top left.  Done at last.  This is my biggest map, in terms of sheer complexity and memory.  This thing is 4 mb of data.

Fast-Forward Time

The title of this post comes from an answer to my previous post, written by Ant Wu:

"Having a player resource that is unchanging like a college, academy, or conservatory is nice, but may not be completely believable. It is a game-inspired resource, not necessarily a narrative one, especially if you can just fast-forward time."

It does strike me as odd that the writer perceives that a narrative is something anathema to "a fast-forward," but that is not my goal here.  Nor do I want, especially, to dispute the writer's point.  I only throw it up to highlight the apparent dismissive idea of fast-forwarding the campaign ~ as though it is, somehow, a sort of cheat, or bamboozle, or reach around that circumvents the all-important tempo that the players must subscribe to if they are to role-play.

Suppose that we are running in a campaign ~ yours, perhaps ~ and we have accumulated a comfortable pile of wealth, enough to sustain ourselves for at least a year.  And suppose the question arises, "You arrive at the little town of Liddick.  What do you wish to do?"

And if we, the party, wish to answer, "We settle down," is that allowed?

I suspect that in most campaigns, it isn't.  I suspect that most DMs would ask, "Do you wish to retire your characters?"  I suspect most DMs would quickly transform Liddick into a town full of adventure.  Suddenly, there would be hidden passages leading to dungeons, there would be criminals of every stripe come to rob we players of our money, a host of intrigues, unexpected hordes invading the town and what not.  I feel confident that we would be compelled back into the narrative because it must be so, else what is a DM for?

Yet suppose we don't have a DM that rattles the cage, but that we adopt the ordinary, expected lives of everyone else in the local community.  What ought to happen?  Rolls for wandering monsters?  Day-to-day encounters?  With what?  We're in a town.  We're paying our bills, paying our taxes, buying food for ourselves, investing in the local economy, perhaps buying some land, perhaps buying some animals, perhaps taking a little time to improve ourselves.  Where is the wrong in that?

But there is "wrong" ~ one can hear the implication in Ant Wu's words: especially if you can just fast-forward.

Now, I don't mean to deconstruct the writer; I very much doubt that his intentions included any special read into this particular assemblage of words.  We are dealing here with an habitual perspective, not a premeditated one.

The passage of time in most campaigns is fixed.  Time passes very slowly in the dungeon, then at a median pace between the dungeon and town, then very fast in town.  It can take four or five sessions to play out an hour or two in a dungeon.  It can take just enough time to describe the journey (the first time) between the town and the dungeon, where we roll the possibility for an encounter or two, potentially filling up one whole session.  Then, in the space of an hour or two, a week goes by in town.  Then we are headed off to the dungeon again.

In most campaigns, this is it.  Town, road, dungeon, road, town.  We might vary it with town, road, town, road, dungeon, road, town, road, town, road, dungeon, road, town and so on, but the pattern is there.  The game, according to every source we can read, every source we can buy, every source espoused by the manufacturer, fits the formula.  The town for supply.  The road (path, trail, whatever) for narrative and creating tone.  The dungeon (ruin, caves, lost city, whatever) for the actual game.  This is it.  More to the point, for the general community, not only is this all we're allowed, this is all we're entitled to want.  If we want anything else, if we challenge the formula, we are a pariah upon the very community in which we dare to commit our voices.  There's no room for us.

So why would the passage of time ever need to pass more quickly?  To what purpose?  Getting to know the community, establishing an enterprise, castle-building and anything else not having to do with a dungeon are not game elements ~ that is why the rules for such things always stress two conditions: how much does it cost to build and how much does it cost to maintain.  There are never any rules for what it produces, who it attracts, what status is offered or what purpose it might serve, because the fundamental reason for the player castle's existence is that it is a money sink.  It costs, thus emptying the player's wallet, thus requiring more dungeoneering.

Fast-forwarding to things like the harvest, or the taxes we might gain (always described as paltry), or an education we might pay for, these things circumvent the strict town-road-dungeon formula.  They seem, therefore, weird, different, even surprising.

Yet isn't life-span just another resource that should be available to the players?  Isn't the number of years they have left just another limited supply ~ apparently unlimited at the start of the game, but steadily less and less so as the player moves towards the age when they will lose their strength, constitution and dexterity benefits.  Why shouldn't this, and this alone, be the only meaningful price to pay ~ along with, of course, the price of feeding and supporting oneself?  Why is this never considered?  Players in the game never seem to age . . . primarily because they are go-go-go all the time, living fast and dying young.

Why not live slow?  Why shouldn't we enjoy a little good life, a few months, a year, between our adventures?  Why shouldn't we make friends in the community, engage ourselves in their struggles, gain their perspective, apply ourselves to preserving them as well as ourselves, all the time living a year a session, until we reach our sixties?  Why must everything fit the timeline of the dungeon?

By my count, most games I've seen hardly last forty sessions.  If each session covered the events of a full year, a campaign that ran every two weeks would last 18 months.  And would the DM not be challenged to come up with a meaningful set of events to make a year seem important?  Would the players not be put to problem solving, if the challenge was how to steadily expand their assets year by year, rather than their experience or the number of magic items they possessed?  How would the game actually be any different?  Would we not still be role-playing?

Apparently not.  Perhaps we can't imagine four persons engaged in a unified struggle against an enemy unless they also happen to be trapped in a room between hosts of monsters.

College Life

So I had some energy to work on the bard today ~ this is a long, long struggle that does not feel like it is going to end.  However, I did fill out some important points and make some important pages, including copying some material from the blog and making it official on the wiki.  For anyone interested, I include pages on Art vs. Product, Sukha, Upeksa, Making Art (needs much more work), Criticism & Composition, Tutoring, Conducting and Audition.

It is this last I want to talk about.  It was the first I started on today and it started off the rest of the work.  The idea came to me just recently, with the idea that a "college" could be a resource for a player character, but one that could only be accessed through the character having a specific kind of knowledge and only by the character applying for access.  In terms of the bard character, the main resource I'd expect a player to access would be to give modifiers to the creation of making art and towards improving the quality of the bard's performance.  Basically, drop by the university, let a few weeks of game time pass, take a few courses, then head off to the next adventure.

This is the kind of thing that could be done in fifteen minutes of a campaign.  All too often, I find that players treat time similarly to the way they do in real life.  I very rarely have players who realize that they can, if they want, simply decide it is four or five months later, enabling them to spend a winter in a state of half-slumber until the spring arrives, or take part in farming to raise food for a half-years' campaigning, or some other reason that simply calls out for the party to sit and LEARN for a time.

This seems anathema to most party thinking, however.  They seem to think that I'm going to run the three months of the dead of winter as though it is happening in actual time.  I don't know if its because other DMs do this, or players cannot reconcile the movement of time without relating to it as though the time is really passing.  I don't know what is wrong with players thinking, "We spend the next three years tilling our land, building up our homestead, getting to know the neighbors, finding out how the world works in this corner of the globe and generally relaxing, perhaps getting married and raising a few kids before heading off.  But there must be something wrong with that, because players don't do it.

All the same, I'd like to extend the college idea to other classes.  A cleric may have access to a seminary or a monastery, a fighter to a military academy, a mage or illusionist to a magic academy, a thief or assassin to a guild of sorts (or some equivalent I haven't considered yet) and a monk to yet a different monastery or perhaps an ashram.

The benefits could be legion.  As yet, I'm sure I haven't conceived of most of them, yet.  Still, perhaps this is the way to have access to spells such as resurrection or remove curse, to the restoration of spent magic items, to trusted sources of information, to small improvements in the character's sage abilities or status . . . in all, each of these resources could insist upon a yearly stipend that would, in turn, provide unlimited access to various benefits, even though these benefits would be geographical in nature and tend to tie a player down to a specific region.  As it says in the description I gave for Audition, the player could have access to only ONE seminary, college, academy or conservatory.

Some might dispute the phrase, ". . . all colleges throughout the game world will be informed of the acceptance."  But why not?  I conceive of a magic book that would exist in every such institution, that would define membership by requiring individuals to sign in upon arrival.  The book might betray a non-member, or it may transfer knowledge of the membership to every other similar book in the world, all of which are interconnected by design.

Therefore, we may have access to a wonderful conservatory in Edinburgh, but right now we happen to be in Egypt and it hasn't been much use for a while.  Still, one day when we get a chance we'll be going back there ~ and when we do, we'll have a lot of questions to settle.  Perhaps we may even spend a few months getting them settled.

Answering a Question About Spears

In the interest of shaking off this funk . . .

Training to fight and defend in a mass formation, in which the presence of friendly combatants on the left and right offer greater stability and defense during combat.

The formation is a straight line, offering a front of defense against an enemy, to help protect the defenders while the advance or fight. The skill enables the single combatant to take advantage of the formation, learning to move with it and in it without creating gaps or weakening the front that it gives the attacker.




This front, or "wall," ensures that each combatant in the line (with the exception of those upon the ends) can be attacked by only one enemy per round. Because the front is largely created from the use of shields and one-handed weapons, where the amount of flank being shown is minimalized, the use of large shields in the line provides an extra +1 armor class adjustment over and above the usual benefit from such a shield. Thus, members of the phalanx are harder to hit when in formation than they would be as scattered combatants.

Additionally, when the phalanx consists of two rows of friendly combatants, there is an adjustment to the usual stunning rule: in this case, a defendant is not driven back one combat hex when stunned. The other members of the formation, themselves trained, will support a stunned defendant so that ~ although they will not be able to fight the following round ~ they will be able to retain their position in the line.

Finally, those with phalanx training will be trained to use a spear with only one hand. Normally, the spear is a two-handed weapon ~ but with proper training, received with this study, the weapon can be balanced with one hand when acting within the formation. Because the formation requires that only one hex must be defended against, the spear's point needs to move less, and thus it can be handled. Outside of the formation, the spear must still be used with two hands.

The formation requires that all the participants have a minimum of 10 points of knowledge in martial discipline.

See Martial Discipline

More Drama

Just two months ago I wrote about my father and Alzheimers.  This last few days the situation has changed again ~ and I write about it now only because I am a writer and this is how my peculiar therapy works.

The home where we put my father has been increasingly having trouble with his condition.  It isn't just a matter of his disappearing from the "house" where he has been living since November, which has happened a couple of times ~ it is also that he has become increasingly violent and, well, the real truth of it is psychotic.

Starting with Friday, he was moved out of the facility and into the hospital, first into the care ward and from there into the psychiatric ward, where he has been under restraint since Saturday.  At this point, he is beyond communication.  We are told that he is convinced that this is all a plot to end his life.  We are also told that he believes he is living in the year 2046 and that, apparently, some science fiction book he has read at some point in his life is fueling his paranoia.

There are simply no words.  The facility where he was living has let it be known that he won't be able to go back there.  He will need to be placed into a more severe facility.  At the moment, there are none available; this means he will be put on a waiting list.  However, he needs to be fully assessed before even the waiting list can be a possibility ~ and whatever the case, he may be forced to spend the rest of his life under restraint, whatever happens.

This whole final act of my father's life ~ a man who was an outstanding professional in his field, who received more than twenty awards of service and recognition, who was once the president of the Canadian National Science Fair, because he enjoyed science and the education of children, is right now screaming in a closed room about . . . nonsense.

So.  I'm just working on my equilibrium right now.  It is a difficult time.

Fighting Women

I don't ordinarily publish posts like this, but as I've been looking at hundreds of pictures of armor lately, trying to find good representations for the armor I use in my world ~ near impossible ~ I have been also been looking at an assortment of other pictures.

Basically, women fighters.  I have a couple of these in the online campaign of late and I was asked lately what a 18 strength woman fighter would look like (see the comments section).  I felt I could put up a sequence of pictures, as most everyone does who isn't interested in writing a lot of words, to engage the discussion on women in armor.

I've sought a collection where the armor worn is legitimate, and where the women look like they actually could put up a fight.  I've emphasized real over a staged, presented depiction, to get a sense of what this might look like on the battlefield, since D&D is not necessarily a sexist representation of a medieval/renaissance battleground.

I'm not necessarily concerned with authenticity here. I have been on the wiki, but here I just want a vague representation of what the battle maiden might look like. Basically, for the most part indistinguishable from a man.

This woman, for instance, could easily be mistaken for a man at a distance, until coming face to face with her.  The loose clothing around the legs is the same, the stance is the same, the helmet conceals most of the features and if she's a long time fighter, she has the bulk to carry it through.

There are women who are fighting, exactly like this, all over the world, enjoying the opportunity to grunt and dish it out with the men, as hard as they can, with all the subsequent bruising and soreness that follows the next day.

Now one thing that has to be noted, there's no particular reason why she can't show some skin.  Men do.  It is a question of heat release, after all.  Fighting, as I've been arguing lately, is a heat-generating process, and carrying all that extra padding and covering will only serve to produce first a tremendous discomfort and then afterwards a possible hypothermia.  I'm not sure, but I wonder if there isn't a common concern for hypothermia at events where in the evening it grows a lot cooler than it has been during the day, where people who are walking around in sweat-soaked wet armor have a tendency to pass out.  I hardly know anything about it, but it seems probable.




This next is the kind of thing I was definitely looking for.  Here the woman is exhausted, showing the fight she was just in.  Or at least I like to think so.  She gives all the look of someone who could have lost her match, her face is showing a sense of discontinuity, as though her mind is thinking over the match and not in the present.  It's easy to imagine her moving over the grass, helmet and shield hanging loosely from her grip, but a natural, comfortable rhythm in the greaves and heavy dress.


I was looking for women who weren't necessarily the most charismatic.  I don't think that matters.  Part of the issue of dressing every woman up in partial armor is that it emphasizes the need for a hot body, pert breasts, pretty limbs and so on.  Here the issue isn't how good she looks, but how good she fights.  Can she beat the hell out of the other person.  In a stand-up battle, that's key.





There's some of that with the woman on the left, here.  She's either been in a fight or she's gearing herself up for one.  She's relaxed, ready to go (possibly again), eyes watching the battle going on with a comfortable, confident air.  I especially like this picture, I like her apparent willfulness, the easy way her hand rests on her knee.  The ring, however, would be a bad idea in a real fight.

With my turns around comic and fan conventions the last couple of years, I can't help being impressed with the quality of armor being made.  Yes, it is made of modern materials, certainly anachronistic with the period, but when it comes to smashing each other in open fields, like so many are doing, the source of the materials or their museum-legitimacy don't matter much, do they?

I do like it when the armor looks thoroughly abused.  Yes, it's suggestive of the authentic, but it speaks to the character of the person as well.  We know that the actual armor of the actual person in the picture is likely fashioned to look broken, bent, banged up and burnished right from the start ~ but what does it look like when we think of it inside the narrative, when the character is told that the woman coming towards the party right now looks like she's fought a war single-handed.  I think it says something more than just the combatant can't afford new armor.  Armor, like any other clothing, becomes comfortable with wear, it becomes like a second skin.  That's not something you get from a new suit.  Sometimes, you'd rather trust to the old standby if it means that in the middle of a battle you're not worried about the many parts of your body that are threatening to chafe on you.




Here's another example of banged up armor.  I had my doubts if I ought to have included this picture, as the woman here might look a little made-up and staged for the picture.  Still, I wanted to include it just for the armor.  I like a suit with some dents in it.

Note, for instance, the apparent state of the padded cloth on the inside of her elbows ~ torn and frayed, filthy, certainly not the standard trope where depicting fantasy characters in pictures.

There isn't near enough dirt where it comes to actual characters in the actual world.  Baths were rare and, where no central heating existed, potentially life threatening.  That old phrase about "catching a chill" used to mean something serious.  William T. Sherman died of pneumonia brought on from exposure to the rain while carrying the coffin of Joseph E. Johnston, and that was 1891.  Colds and catching pneumonia used to be a very serious thing.  People avoided baths like the plague, they wore the same clothes on the road for weeks, even months at a time without washing them.  For the most part, travellers ~ adventurers ~ were filthy.


I'll finish with this one, because I am getting tired.  I don't know what special point I can make about it.  The money purse is a nice touch.  The quarterstaff is a bit too much of a prop, I think ~ a real one would be a lot smoother, less painted.  Some of the documentaries I've seen would argue it should be a lot thicker, too, but I don't really know about that.  Dimension is one of the hardest things to be historically certain about.

So here I'll part with the subject.  I couldn't just post pictures, it wouldn't be like me.  Chances are I'll have to mess around with blogger for half an hour after I post this, trying to get the words to appear in the right places next to the pictures, as the blog program is anything but design-friendly.

I'll try not to do this sort of thing often.  It's not the highest class of intellectual character.  Not really.

Lurkers Corner ~ Classic D&D

I have no particular comments to make ~ but for anyone who might have fallen away, the Juvenis campaign has just discovered they're in a dungeon.

UPDATE:

Just an extra word on an effort I took up tonight to try to nail down the various issues with different armors that I use.  The descriptions for these have never been precise and there never has been a proper metric for how they're made and what they incorporate.  With the addition of CLO and the changes I've recently made to encumbrance, there always has to be some sort of push back for players that decide to load up on armor class.  I've unbalanced that part of my game a little with these changes.  Used to be, higher armor class meant moving slower.  I'm adjusting that now to a higher armor class tires the character out sooner and starts to cause damage, while pretty much enabling combatants to move faster while wearing heavier armor.

To get this properly set in place, I need to know precisely what those armors are now, so players can make a choice that fits their needs.  The amount of exhaustion they feel has to match the improvement of armor class to make the game experience measured.

Be Capable of Harm

I was recently asked a question by a DM about his not being able to get his players interested in game hooks.  Whatever he tried to entice them with, they weren't buying.  He didn't know what to do.

I have posted this scene before, but that was four years ago so what the hell.  It's good for another go around:



On the other post that I wrote, brief as it was, I got a great comment from Yagami, whom I haven't heard from for a while:

"It seems to me often that these people have little experience in leadership roles. I have managed in my life...and it is a difficult role. And it is made difficult by the fact that people do not, generally, take seriously someone they do not find to be capable of doing them some sort of harm. Harm, in this case, of course meaning repercussions of a negative kind, not physical injury."

This is followed by a bunch of supportive statements about working and my blog that I don't need to repost here.  The key is that a DM must also be a threat.  If the players are not finding the obstacles to be, well, big enough to stop them in their tracks, then the DM has missed the object.

I have found three ways of making obstacles big and frightening.  I've written some about all three of these, but it doesn't hurt to cover the basics again.

First, make the obstacles BIG and FRIGHTENING.  If the party is walking by some great plot hook on the road, with a "ho hum" attitude, then the obvious failing is that this particular plot hook did not bash the players over the head.  This has to happen!  A bunch of big, nasty things step out on the road and no, they're not going away and no, they're not going to be ignored.  They've been paid to be there, to take care of this party, for gawd knows what reason (think of something!).  They've seen the party walking along and those look like real nice weapons and that looks like real nice armor, and those packs are nice and full.  And yes, we're going to take them.  And no, we're not a bunch of little goblins.  We're big, frightening bugbears, with axes twice the size of ordinary, able to do twice the damage, we smell, we're unhappy and yes, that is a baby's head on a chain hanging from the leader's ear.  And there are a lot of us.  More than there are of you.

Second, make the obstacles UNCERTAIN.  Don't paint up all the details, make sure that there are plenty of very disquieting things about this situation we've stumbled upon that suggests that we'd be stupid to walk away from this.  Use all the senses.  Far too many DMs are concerned with just two things: what the party sees and what the party is told by NPCs.  These things are nice but they won't carry all the water we want to carry.  The party should be hearing things that aren't seen, that are making noises that suggest, "Oh Shit, this is bad.  This is very bad."  The party should be smelling things that are just plain bad.  The party should be quietly munching dinner after dark, only to have something move wrong in their mouths, to make them look down and see that they've just bitten through a dark green worm with unpleasant red veins.  What does that mean?  Omg, we don't know, do we?  We better do something about it, but we don't know what, so I guess that means we're in pretty deep already and it is dark.  "Holy crap, something just walked across my foot!"

Finally, make the obstacles INSURMOUNTABLE.  This is key.  Create one, perhaps two obstacles that are so big, so massively connected, so well resourced, that no mere party of characters will ever be able to take them on.  The party's only chance will be staying out of sight, staying out of notice ~ and occasionally, that will mean killing a witness that might just walk back and tell the huge, terrifying, unknown enemy that we're in this town, on this day, staying at this inn.

I have several ways of creating this last entity.  I want some big, faceless organization that has nothing specifically against the party, except that the party just happens to be in the way of their plans and, well, it's nothing personal.

I want some very high level person who just happened to have something invested in that group of orcs that the party killed four months ago, that were carrying that pretty yellow stone that the party got ten gold for.  Unfortunately, the yellow stone matters, it's location matters, and the only group of people who have any idea where that stone is right now is the party . . . who foolishly got rid of it, not knowing how important it was to She Bitch of the +5 Strap-On.  Whoever the hell she is, wherever the hell she hangs her hat, whatever the hell she might have against the party for some reason.  Whatever it is, it is very definitely personal.

Finally, I want some miserable little bastard with a grudge, an unreasonable grudge, the sort that he's willing to grind and grind for years at a time, at just enough of a distance to steal things out of the party's kit, to add things to the party's kit, to spread rumours about the party and do whatever he has to do to just makes things a little harder.  It's personal for him, too, and best of all he's not interested in telling anyone.  One thing the party will eventually realize; someone has it out for them and it is getting awfully annoying and utterly impossible to ignore.

If we're offering ideas that the players scoff at and shrug their shoulders at, then we're not digging in.  The players aren't scared.  They don't think the DM is a threat.  They see the plot hooks a mile off and they can see there's no teeth in them.  They're walking all over the DM because they know, deep down inside, the DM is the sort that can be gotten around.

The obstacles are too small.

The Bardic Struggle

Having figured out what the bard's art does [the gentle reader is not bored of these constant posts about the bard, are they?], I'm free to map out how the bard creates art and how to measure the effects of the art created.

The most obvious thing to do would be to create a study/skill called "create art," in which the bard would gain points.  As the points mounted, the bard would create better and bigger art, in a very linear manner.  This is standard RPG design.

Frankly, I find this remarkably stale.  In it, everyone's path is precisely the same, there's no room for personality and we don't even have the flexibility of being able to choose from a wide range of spells.  It is dull, dull, dull design and it is exactly the reason why the bard character comes out so flat.

Remember what I said before: we want the player to feel what it is like to be an artist.  Part of that feeling is a sense of inadequacy that the bard must start with, then overcome by virtue of multiple possible strategies.  It is the same inadequacy that a spellcaster feels at not having enough spells to protect themselves or the fighter feels at being easily thumped down to zero hit points.

Only the goal here is to restrain the bard from being able to make art like a Fable character pounding a hammer on a forge.

The very pinnacle of creation game play.

To that end, I've decided to frustrate the bard all to hell by dividing up the creative process and spreading it over several studies in the same field.

Because a character in the Senex Campaign is a bard, who has chosen poetry as their art form, this post will deal with that particular example.  Other art forms will require a moderate adjustment to this formula (which will be interesting to do), but I see no reason to worry about that until I get a player character interested in pursuing one of those other forms.

Too, I should explain that a bard has four fields of interest, three of which are not creative.  So for this post we're specifically speaking about how a bard makes "art" and "product," and not how a bard researches matters in depth (which will produce other effects I will eventually create), how a bard teaches others (the college option) or how a bard gets into the world of business (as a producer, agent, stage manager or general techie).  I'm building the "bard" character so that one does not even have to create to be a member of the class.

Let's just stick to what we usually think of as a bard.

The poet who chooses "Artistry" as the field has four choices of study: conceptualism, creativity, performance and practicality.  I'll just quickly run these down.  Conceptualism is the effort to make work that pleases oneself, the sort not likely to be understood or appreciated by others.  Creativity is the ability to think theoretically about art, to understand what it is but with no capacity to actually make work.  Performance is the ability to present work, but without a personal comprehension of how that work is made.  Practicality is the ability to make useful work that an audience on the whole would like, but doesn't allow the first sense of aesthetics.

In short, they're all meaningful . . . but they are all distinctly lacking if the poet wants to write really terrific poetry.  To do so, the poet needs all of the above!  And this is where strategy arises.

At first level, the poet can pick one of the four ~ but only one ~ in which case the poet will gain enough points to be considered an "amateur" in that particular study (+1d12/level above 1st).  As an amateur, the poet will be able to write conceptual poetry for themselves (potentially massing enough work for later on when it can be refined and published).  The poet will have the capacity for creativity without actually making any work.  The poet will be able to perform, but it will be other people's stuff.  And finally the poet will be able to write nice, practical poems, along the lines of greeting cards.

BUT, the poet also gets 1d8 -1 points of knowledge per level in the other three studies.  10 are needed for amateur ability, so the poet might become an amateur in one of the other three at 2nd level.  The poet might not.  The odds say that probably one of them will reach amateur status by the time the poet reaches 3rd level ~ and probably all of them by 5th.

Conceptualism + Creativity will mean inspirational, self-styled poetry that could sell if published (conceptualism without creativity, not a chance).  Conceptualism + Performance would be the opportunity to meaningfully recite one's own personal poetry in public, increasing the poet's personal sense of worth.  Conceptualism + Practicality has the possibility of making an empathic connection to other persons, so that poetry written only for the poet might also strike other specific persons the same way.

Creativity + Performance does not increase the poet's repertoire, but it increases the level of the performance, changing that 1% x.p. bonus to 2%.  Creativity + Practicality improves the quality of practical work and its overall worthiness.

Finally, Performance + Practicality contributes to one's personal fame and listener donations.

Remember, at the same time, we are talking amateur status with each of these.  As one becomes an "authority," the pattern changes again.  It takes 30 knowledge points to become an authority, which one can do with a primary study by 3rd level ~ but it can easily take 8 levels or more to become an authority in something with an average of 3.5 points per level.  And that drag will be felt, particularly if the character just can't get their practicality up.  There's only so much one can do as an amateur.  To create really meaningful work, one has to increase one's knowledge and thus one's capacity for skilled artistry.

See, we can't make inspiration, great poetry (Sukha), if we can't work ~ and one of the skills that comes with being practical is "focus."  That is, the ability to sit and work and work and work without turning aside from the project and getting distracted.  If we can't do that, if all we can do is frivolously dick around, we'll never startle the world.  We'll never make our party as happy as they'd like.

But if we don't have conceptualism in our bucket, we'll be miserable.  Making our own art makes us feel better, it gives us a greater sense of value, it supports us when times are tough.  And if we don't have performance in our bucket, most will never know that we're a great poet.  This is 17th century.  People don't read!

And if we don't have creativity, we'll never have the inspiration anyway.

So figuring out what we can do will depend less on our skill set and more on our limitations.  We will be waiting to learn things we don't know, to make things we can't make and to hope one day we'll figure out just the hell all this shit works.

Like an artist does.

The Bardic Mini-Game

With proposed changes to the bard of late, I have seen several express a concern about the bard character becoming its own "mini-game" ~ enabling bards to play while other players sit on the sidelines and watch.

I can understand that concern.  I'm against such gaming on principle.  All players deserve attention during the game and it is up to the DM to find ways to ensure that a particular character or character class doesn't get this kind of privilege.  That people go to this place, however, this concern that the game will suddenly become bard-centric, is an expression of how other character classes created by other RPG designers suddenly became all the rage, excluding other classes.

I think that is because most RPG designers are "bored" with the old character classes.  They need something new to base the whole game on because they've become dried old prunes on the cleric or the mage, having run out of ideas, and now that they have a NEW character class to waffle on until they get bored of that, naturally everything in the game must now become about the new class.

This isn't me.  I have tons and tons of cool shit left to add to the cleric and the mage ~ and all the characters, really.  It is only that right now I happen to be talking about the bard, a class I'm trying to rescue from the dustbin of game design by making it actually relevant.

Does it mean that the bard will have some character to swing around in the game once it's been fleshed out?  Yes.  But do consider how much time is spent in the campaign listening to the cleric harp on about religion or the mage about spells, or the fighter about weapons, armor and fighting.  These classes have their "mini-games" already; it is only that we're used to the amount of time dredged up for pissing contests between hit point totals and the need to sacrifice something as soon as possible, so let's all go on a quest to do that.  No one is carping about the "mini-game" of yet another fallen paladin that has to drag the party on yet another bloody quest to get a lost virtue restored.

And let's face it: having another reason to quest, having another character class that deserves consideration, having another conversation at the table about what's relevant and what can we do now, won't be a bad thing.

To my mind, the way I will design the "work" the bard does, it won't be any different from a cleric building a temple, a fighter building a castle, a mage building a laboratory, a thief building a guild or any of the other establishment things that any character class might get want.  I think another part of the issue is that its imagined the bard will, almost immediately, be rushing around creating art and being famous.

That is not how this is going to be.  Like a 1st level fighter that is little better than a squishy mess waiting to happen, a low-level bard will enjoy an artist's path: being ignored, having little practical ability, the frustration of too little ability for too much ambition and ultimately waiting, waiting for the day when they're actually able to make the show they might dream of having.  It isn't handed to them on a silver platter.

In short, they've got to adventure like everyone else.