1. It is an Open-Ended Medium. "No matter the skill or cognitive level of the child, sand is an appropriate play object." "There is no specific right or wrong way to play with sand."
2. It Stretches the Imagination. "Older children can expand their creativity and imaginations through the designs of a variety of buildings, towns and castles." (!)
3. It Promotes Physical Development. [We an insert mental for physical, so that this quote still applies]: "Most children do not notice the physical involvement of sand play because they are too focused on their play and the task."
4. It Encourages Social Skills. "[Children] are often faced with problems involving sharing tools, negotiating for play space, and compromising on what to build in the sand."
5. It Promotes Cognitive Development."Children learn to problem solve as they try to figur out how to prevent their towers from continually falling over or their moats from collapsing in on themselves." "Children learn more vocabulary words that fit specifically to sand play, as well as chatting with other children in the sand play area."
6. It Teaches Mathematical Concepts. "Through trial and erro, children are able to make predictions about which type of container holds more or less sand." "With maturity, children can learn how many scoops of different sizes it takes to fill a container."
7. It Encourages Scientific Experiments. "Observe as the children make their own experiments to discover information not only about sand, but also about basic scientific principles."
8. It Incorporates Artistic Expression. [Can't say there was a good quote here].
Clearly, a lot of D&D players need to spend more time sitting in a sandbox, missing skills they should have learned a long time ago.
I'm thinking of how (2) perfectly describes my present experiments with infrastructure. It has me thinking, too, about how a setting ought to work. As a DM, once my imagination has shaped the sand, producing a modelled environment, I then enable the players (no, not the characters, I mean the players) to shrink down and begin clambering over the sand pit, which is now huge for them. They see themselves as characters, but it is they themselves who must manage the towers, the creatures crawling among the grains and the unknown distances between the various features I've created.
Yes, I could take my hand and sweep sand over them, but that would only return the players to their normal sizes, accomplishing nothing. To retain the desired experience of the sandbox, I have to let the players search on their own, with as little further influence from me as possible.
This was my original concept, dreamed up when I was a young DM of 16, of getting myself "out of the loop." I've referred to this many times on the blog. It means that my immediate will and prejudices are not part of the experience they players are having. I continue to cling to the idea that the world could be, in some way, self-perpetuating ... and that is how I try to design the structure of my world from day to day.
That way, when the players take an action, I don't have to think, "What should I do to keep them interested?"
I can think instead, "How would this world, this space, this setting, logically respond to what the players have just done?"
DMs are largely consumed with the philosophy that it is their role to make the players reactive. We can see this philosophy voiced continuously by virtually every pundit in the game universe. Take this example from Colville's video yesterday:
"... it's our job as Dungeon Masters to tell the players, 'what.' [garbled] ... Kalarel the Vile is collecting dead bodies and building a giant tower of undeadness, so he can summon Orcus, he thinks. That's the what. That's what you have, what you can do to stop him."
There it is. Not "what do you do?", but "How will you do this?"
But I think a far better philosophy is that it is the players' role to be proactive, and the DM reactive. Where the dialogue ought to go like this:
"Kalarel the Vile is collecting dead bodies and building a giant tower of undeadness. You have no idea why. Elsewhere, there's a town festival that is supposed to happen next week, and people are fervently making costumes. It's too late to buy any. Oh, and the town was unable to ship its beer supply out last week, and now it is too late in the season, so beer everywhere is half price."
And then, nothing. Not "what do you do?" Just, here, the things you notice about the setting is this. I'm ready to answer questions or transition your instructions, once you give me your instructions.
Guys like Colville are so sure they have this DMing thing sorted ... but they're really not thinking through the principles outlined in the sandbox above. It isn't about the sand's agenda. It is about what the designers see in their minds.
Post Script: I do recommend finding me on facebook. I'm the only Alexis Smolensk in the English-speaking world, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding me.
"An episode I did about the sandbox vs. the railroad ... it implied that sandboxing is better than railroading and that's not true ... as someone else said, I think in one of the comments, 'You know, rollercoasters are on rails and people seem to like those.'
"Railroading - we can talk about railroading in a pejorative sense, meaning the players' choices didn't matter. And that is the thing that frustrates players, when they feel like they weren't the stars of the show, it wasn't their actions that mattered. I think this gets back to the 'your story vs. their story' video I did. Obviously, I'm behind the idea of using adventures because I'm a huge proponent of them, I always have been. I think that going and spending ten bucks to get a great adventure that someone has already done all the work for, done all the maps and all the NPCs are all spelled out, all you have to do is change names, maybe, and where it's set so it's appropriate to your world ~ so obviously I don't think having an adventure ready is bad.
"But having it, having a plot, knowing what's going to happen, having set-piece encounters laid out, is not railroading. It's just being ready. Railroading is a result of not listening to your players, I think mostly; saying no too often; and leaving them with the feeling that the NPC's in the world are more important than they are and that they didn't really matter to what happened, or their choices didn't matter, or they didn't have choices."
Now, let me be forthcoming. There is another thread in this video, in which Colville talks about saying "yes" to the way in which players solve problems, which Colville argues fits logically into the above statement. Paraphrased, that argument goes, so long as the players are free to decide for themselves how to overcome obstacles, putting the obstacles in their way is not railroading.
Why This Sounds Right
Role-playing as an activity is understood to be an adventure-oriented framework, one in which fictional characters pursue some sort of goal. Our thoughts turn at once to a series of dangerous obstacles which must be surpassed, in order to get the McGuffin, or some piece of information, which will reveal the location or nature of some other person, place or thing, which logically waits behind another series of dangerous obstacles.
As such, the "adventure" structure is primarily linear. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is. We understand from our experience with films and novels that the characters must seek A to get B, to use against C, before D can be obtained which will bring about the end of E and save F. The multiplicity of combinations belies any argument than a linear narrative structure must be either boring or predictable.
Given this, Colville is not wrong where he describes the DM's solution. To manufacture the adventure, we must create obstacles. Overcoming the obstacles is interesting and a large part of the dopamine rabbit press-button-receive-pellet process that encourages play and enjoyment. Letting the players determine how to overcome the obstacle is important to a sense of self-actualization, so taking that feature out of the adventure does create the feeling that the players are puppets. Giving them a set of problems, then asking that the problems be solved, is a perfectly reasonable expectation on the part of the DM.
As alluded, rollercoasters are fun. As are crossword puzzles, where there is only one answer that can solve the dilemma. Very often, RPG players will gripe about DMs who refuse to permit multiple solutions to problems, yet many popular and enduring games and activities are made this way. There is only one way to put together a jigsaw puzzle. There's only one way to win at golf. No one can say they have climbed a mountain without having stood on the top of it.
So again, Colville is right to argue that the "game" for players is to figure out how to put the ball in the hole or how to get to the top, or how to sort the pieces and look at them as to figure out how they go together.
What This Has to Do with Railroads and Sandboxes
In Colville's other video about railroads and sandboxes, which he links at the beginning of the video above, he explains what he thinks a sandbox is:
"That's the end of the game. The entire thing was the players' idea. John had a completely different adventure in mind, but when the players came up with their own idea, he rolled with it. As a result, even though John had to do some trickery behind the scenes, and the party relied on his friend's high level wizard too much, and there was the whole dragon thing which was supposed to be the final battle, and it happened off screen ... that is a classic example of a sandbox campaign."
For years now, since long before I started blogging in 2008, the RPG community has been struggling to define the difference between a "railroad campaign" and a "sandbox campaign." I've made a few tries at it myself. It occurs to me today, however, after watching the video, that I've been thinking about it all wrong. Instead of defining one type of campaign vs. another, let's ditch RPGs completely and recognize that these two things are metaphors. Therefore, let's define what a "railroad" is and what a "sandbox" is.
A railroad is a permanent road laid with rails, commonly in one or more pairs of continuous lines forming a track or tracks, on which locomotives and cars are run for the transportation of passengers, freight and mail.
The creation of the railroad was more than an industrial process. Mass transport had an energizing effect on the population, expanding culture, the spread of ideas, the sheer pleasure of taking an excursion, opportunities for people of purpose or desperation to leave one part of the world for another, while retaining communication with their roots ... trains were phenomenal. They changed the way we thought, the way we designed cities, the way we viewed materialism and much, much more. More to the point, knowing when and where the destination was served as a terrific selling point for people who wanted to go.
And now,
A sandbox is a box or receptacle for holding sand, especially one large enough for children to play in.
The presence of sand, whether or not contained in a box, has no distinct motivation for its use, no measurable intent, no service that is performs, no out-of-box problem that it has been designed to solve, no preconceived level of enjoyment that it gives. It simply exists. Yet there is something in the human nature, most recognizable in young children, that compels activity.
What's Wrong with Colville's Definition
At no time, and in neither video, is Colville describing a sandbox. It is clear that he, like most, have no idea why the word "sandbox" has inserted itself as a metaphor for a particular kind of campaign. Sandboxes are not about solving problems, overcoming obstacles, obtaining prizes or succeeding at campaigns. When playing in a sandbox, the mind conceives of an image or idea, then we attempt to recreate that image in sand.
A sandbox campaign, therefore, is not a linear process. It is nothing like any module that has ever been created for a DM, since the creation of the module itself belies the principle that we are pouring a structureless tool into a box and allowing free association and creativity to produce something.
I have to confess: deconstructing the videos above and writing this post has crystallized my thinking on game play in a manner that I think is new to me. And that is why we deconstruct things. To figure out how they work.
I don't think, now, that I have ever run a sandbox campaign. I have suggested campaigns like this, every now and then on the blog, but just now I don't even think that the mustard farmer scenario I proposed with my fifth post fits the bill. A sandbox campaign would have to lack an adventure entirely, since once the adventure is proposed we are immediately on some sort of road to a known and intended destination.
We've been caught up, I think, in trying to define "railroad to Auschwitz" as a railroad and "railroad that is pleasant and fun" as a sandbox. That's demonstrably wrong. Whether or not we can free ourselves from the cars and see the journey, or feel reassured about the destination, is immaterial where describing the campaign is concerned.
A sandbox is much, much more like our own lives. It's a situation where we're interacting with a lot of people, trying to gather our resources to make our lives comfortable, dealing with shit that comes up, that often has nothing to do with our plans but often affects people we don't want to see suffer or in pain. And all the while, trying to figure out what we DO want, how to get it, whether or not we will lose ourselves in the process, while spending effort and material in the process of making more material.
We shouldn't be surprised that people don't want to run a game like this. Where in the hell would we start? Yet arguably, such a campaign would be far, FAR more relevant to a "character-driven" campaign, where the unimportant bullshit of having to travel to some distant place to find a thing to stop a person from destroying a place, none of which has to do with our "characters," could be thrown aside. Like a drama, rather than an adventure, our characters would sit around and talk, discuss, figure out who we like, what we want to stop, what the meaning of life is and so on ... and get really, really involved in characterization.
Characters in adventures are stock, really. Their motivations are pre-made and their agenda is greed or self-sacrifice. These are pretty easy concepts for us to get our heads around. Adventure characters don't feel crippling pain or permanent loss and confusion. They always get over it. Everything for their motivation is served on a silver platter and they never, ever feel that it's all for nothing. Real character-role-playing is upsetting, uncomfortable and lacking in resolution. We don't watch and read adventures for the characters, but for the simple, straightforward, unthinking lack of complexity that enables us to escape all that real personality-driven stuff we hate in real life.
Concluding Thoughts
Given this, does the advice given in the video count as "bad advice"? I think it does, because it misleads the listener into thinking that, so long as the players feel like they're the star of the show, then I can lay the tracks down anyway that I want, pretending to myself that the destination, and all the McGuffins and Clues along the way, are evidence of the players' sense of freedom. This is like saying that if I drive the train, I'm in charge of where it goes. I'm not. Even if we argue that there are multiple tracks and switches, there are hundreds of other trains on this track and we'd be crazy to willy-nilly flip a switch and head off at random.
Colville is arguing, however pleasantly and intelligently, that he has to make a game this way because he has the right to do so as a DM, or rather, he can't think of another way to do it. And he has neatly argued himself into a justification, that so long as there's more than one way to drive the train, and so long as he's willing to let players drive a train from the back car because he's so, so flexible as a DM, then magically we've stopped moving on tracks.
For myself, there's a certain logic in this. I wrote a couple months ago about motivating players into a sort of railroad. Now, I find, I have to change my mind about, and admit that it is a railroad, though much less restrictive than Colville's examples. And I was very knee-jerk and defensive about it, too ... but this is me, admitting that I was wrong, so please blow trumpets as necessary.
Now I'm going to think about how to run a sandbox. I think that's what I'm trying for, with the infrastructure-development system. BUT ~ and let me be very clear ~ players are apt to create their own railroads, without being told to do so. Choosing to set themselves on the path to find a McGuffin and obtain some clues is not how a sandbox works; it only shows a willingness for players to buy their own tickets for the destination they choose. That's nicer than being told which train we're going to board, but it is STILL a railroad.
Here it is. And already I'm finding it weird to be typing on a new keyboard. I had this sort of system a few years ago at a job, so I did accustom myself to it once before, but for now it sounds like gunshots (I type really hard, always have. I actually started on a manual typewriter back in 1976, because it's what my parents had).
Specs ... not much. Quad core, as I said, and a 4 gig ram (couldn't quite manage the 8) and a terabyte hard drive. Had the port necessary for my extended monitor and just enough to buy microsoft office 365 for a year. This is all I care about ~ am not a computer geek.
Now it is just the struggle to deal with all the stupid crap that comes with a new computer. Turning the touchpad off, getting rid of the auto-starts for programs like skype, replacing gawddamn Bing with Chrome, turning off features, turning on features, trying to find passwords for programs that have to be transferred over, etcetera ... a high mountain to climb. I'll have this feeling like home in a few days.
It's wonderful. I'm very happy. It feels like I have been waiting for a marshmallow for a very long time and it has finally been given.
Winston Rowntree recently did a piece about waiting for things to happen. But my thoughts go to what it feels like after it happens ... so I cut this piece out of one of my movie files and posted it on youtube. It's hokey, sure; but it is how you guys have made me feel. Like a day like this came.
I'm going to buy my computer today. I need one that includes office, as virtually everything I do is in word, excel or publisher. I use the office picture manager a good deal to cut and clean up pictures. The second monitor that I connect to my laptop has an old VGA HD-15 adapter, so I'm going to need a cord that adapts that to a VGA HDMI (or I may have that reversed, but that's the idea).
Apart from that, I should be fine. I only play games on Steam, so I don't need any ancient piece of hardware like a disc drive. I'd love more than a terabyte of memory, but 8-gigs of ram and a quad-core are far more than enough power for me and what I want to do.
Let me thank my readers again ... and assure you that the computer will enable me to do a number of things that I haven't been able to do. I feel encouraged about a number of projects that I can put into motion before spring - including, at long last, the opportunity to find somewhere less stressful in order to write.
I wonder if I can explain how difficult it is to work on something in depth as a novel in a world of continuous interruption. Perhaps I don't have to.
There's always a chance I won't come back today with a computer; that it won't have the features I need or that some unforeseen problem will present itself ... but I hope that the next time I write something on this blog, it will not be on this keyboard.
The compulsion to keep posting material from my infrastructure-development system is fairly strong ... I've always liked to share. I'd hoped the post earlier this week would be enough to satisfy me, but I guess not.
It occurs to me that it might be instructive to expand on other settlement hexes, larger than the type-5 (I'm just going to assume the reader understands these references ... details can be found on the link above). Therefore, let's give a look at four hex descriptions, all from development-6 cultures, for bigger settlement hexes.
Settlement-4
Described is a small town, loose in arrangement, the quiet sort of burg where we'd expect to find a relaxed, convivial atmosphere. People work, but the focus is on living ~ not on industry or money-making. Still, it's a good deal more connected than a settlement-5 hex, which we looked at before.
Note that we're feeling a little pressure to find money, but that individuals donate to the town rather than the town actively taxing the population. There are guards at the gates now, but "lightly supervised" means that they notice people coming and going; no harassment. There's a chance, still, for a monolith, because this town has been around for a long time (and the monolith would date from hundreds, perhaps a thousand years ago).
There is a town market, now, which will sell raw foods and forage, as well as other raw materials like wool or wood, but not most things one would associate with buying equipment. The town has no specialist artisans, and is fairly backward, being Dev-6, so a lot of things just don't exist here.
The town is full of green space: actual fields full of growing plants, numerous places where the vegetation would be thick enough to hide within, presuming we don't find a few teenage locals exploring their sexuality. The houses would be collections of gardens, quiet spaces, sprawling yards and low walls between friendly neighbors. Note that clan and tribal identity is gone now. Outsiders bring news and new things, so they are treated as welcome rather than with suspicion. Besides, they are particularly common during the seasonal festivals.
From here, as the population grows denser, we begin to lose this idyllic scene.
Settlement-3
While the civic efforts described for all of these are the same from table to table, the maintenance and replacement of structures differs as we compare an earlier settlement with a later one. For example, we're steadily replacing old wattle and daub houses with vernacular houses or those that are half-timbered (and half stone). Here the term describes those houses which begin to develop a sprawling, multi-use purpose, such as the English Hall House of the Tudor era. The half-timber house, in turn, is similar to what most people think about when thinking about traditional D&D housing. While the vernacular might be more luxurious (relatively), the half-timbered house will ultimately be built upwards and in rows, creating a higher building density for towns and cities.
The town has now become a collection center for the surrounding region. Being Dev-6, there are no water or wind mills, but there are animals so some milling can be accomplished. Animals are gathered together for slaughter, grains for cleaning, fruit for pulping and making wine, milk for cheese and so on. All this "industry" produces a need for shipping out of town, the development of taverns for day workers, a tighter layout for the town overall and a change in the governorship. Now money counts, not age and wisdom.
With all the animals coming into town, the Town Market of settlement-4 hexes is augmented by a stockyard, where a party could buy animals and some basic equipment for managing them.
The distinct individualism noted describes a viewpoint that we're familiar with but which only occurred in large towns and cities back in the day. The notion that one's attitude, rather than one's upbringing, could influence one's future is a staple in town life. That is because towns provide opportunity which the rural culture does not.
Settlement-2
Details are increasing as the population density increases. Health and happiness are a factor, as they both drop (though not enough to be troublesome, not at this development level). The layout grows denser, and though there is little stone or simple material for road surfacing, earthen cobblestones begin to make an appearance.
Taxation is required, now. The gates are firmly supervised, which means that people are verbally shaken down before entering. There are inns as well as taverns. Foreigners appear in larger numbers and marriages with outsiders happens often enough that it loses its distinctness. Food supply takes a jump, as does wealth.
Basically, this is just a deepening of other details; the town is less friendly, more money oriented, provides more services and, on the whole, is a less healthy place to visit. Unlike a country town, which is comfortable, the residents here are business and labor minded, with expectations that "success" means getting out of the town and living comfortably in the country. All these features just increase as the population reaches the highest expected density:
Settlement-1
Plenty of labor and wealth as the city's wealthy become better organized as guildmasters. Even those wealthy who are not part of a guild are necessarily influenced by guild money, just as politicians now are heavily influenced by the money of corporations. Monopolies control various industries (so that certain items made in the town can be purchased). Heavy taxation is common. There are city folk who are paid to watch the population (town guard) and those that do it as organized volunteers (town watch), the latter to be sure their personal wealth is protected.
Socially, there's very little leeway for those not willing to compete. No one wants to give up income to someone else who might want to start a new venture. The guards at the gates treat everyone who enters like a criminal. Health and happiness take a serious 2 point hit, meaning that the place, without some other mitigating factor, could be a real sewer.
Gardens and orchards exist, but are likely very private. Foreigners are everywhere. The city has decided that there are not enough seasonal festivals in a year and has decided to create a big, extra festival to bring in more money, probably celebrating a political event, since at Dev-6 there is no organized religion as yet.
The atmosphere is far less rigorous culturally than one might imagine. Think of it as a boom town, or a dock city that might have been found in the New World colonies before they became "civilized." Plenty of raw materials pouring through the town, plenty of money being made, but little intellectualism and responsibility.
Last Thoughts
There you have it. Four different kinds of settlements, factored by size, none of them including a single church, palace or higher cultural feature. Those things will start to appear with development levels of 7 and up ... which will, of course, mean that the cities themselves will change. These four places above will share certain characteristics of more developed cities, but they won't be the same! We still have plenty of opportunities for creating different, interesting combinations, producing more suggestions for how adventures might be developed.
I'm writing this post to expand on some well-chosen thoughts put forward by William Murrill and DropOwlBear on the previous post. I needed room to stretch out.
William writes,
"... other times people are convinced that it's [quirky role-play] an alternative avenue to pursue when it's incredibly unclear how to improve the game mechanically."
I am completely certain of this. It's the argument I've made when explaining that yes, it is possible to build metrics and good rules that expand game play, but that people just aren't doing it because no one knows how. There are no classes, no resources and no company drones who consider this angle of game-play to be practical (read, money-making). Every step the game has made since the early 1980s has been a stumbling repetition of all that has gone before ... and having gotten to here, where it now requires a monstrous shelf to contain all the modules that have been written, the self-perpetuated belief that this was the only path that could be taken has discouraged even the question of an alternative.
The first seven years of this blog consisted of me having flame war after flame war with people who believe that "role-play" was, is and always will be the Holy Grail of game play. And the lack of a rational approach to game design has led to disaster. William writes,
"I've learned these game systems are insufferably bad and that the false dichotomy created to excuse their existence further muddies the waters on what the heck players and DMs/GMs are trying to accomplish. Those aspiring to run or play games often get the impression that they're only better at it based on their funny voices or 'character quirks' as the systems on their own are fairly boring."
The opinion that game systems are crap is self-justifying. Game systems ARE crap. The original D&D was far too thin, AD&D was filled with prejudicial, poorly considered and outright broken features, 2e pissed all over the stuff that worked and retained most of the dreck, since it had no mandate to fix what was broken ... and the remaining three editions just continued to follow 2e's lead. The brains were not applied to the game's problems, but to the never-ending demand for product, product, product, so long as it was pretty and vaguely talked about something my character could do.
The talking in funny voices as an avenue to pursue was the greatest widespread setback when the game was introduced. The game, whatever RPG we might play, depended on people to be creative, imaginative and ambitious. Well guess what? People just aren't. They may want to be, they may hunger for that sort of impulse, but they are shit on the ground where it comes to getting there themselves. So from the point of view of a board room, which could not take the stand of, "Well, the game is not for everyone," the insistent droning mantra has been, "We must make this game something everyone can enjoy."
This Sisyphean expectation explains why RPG game mechanics aren't properly made: because the logic that a game, to be fun, must appear on the surface to be anything but fun, doesn't fit a corporate mindset. A game company could never have invented Golf. From a fan service perspective, Golf makes no sense. In fact, no game company, EVER, has invented a good game. They had to steal.
Yet this group of suits keeps thinking they can re-invent D&D.
DropOwlBear writes,
"... for a lot of these people, their motivation behind playing the game is the character acting part. The ostensible humor of their character getting to react to a character halting combat to strap on her 'fighting leathers' is more appealing than the act of fighting itself."
Yes, I think that's true. I can easily see the whole table cracking up, having a good time, finding this particular sport worthy of putting the game on hold, just so the player could show her smarts. Much, much better than just another dreary, tedious dungeon module walk-through at a convention campaign. Which itself is key, I think. When people begin to discard the particulars of a game, any game, it happens when the game ceases to be fun.
To throw in a personal anecdote, because it is my blog, I once got pulled into a golf tournament (oh yes, I golf, when I can, and quite enjoy the game) with a collection of strangers, most of whom turned out to be highly competitive jock assholes. In the foursome I was designated to join, there were two who styled themselves as participating in the PGA, and a fellow much like myself who saw golf as a splendid, outdoor past-time.
By the 5th hole, Dave and I were already pretty sick of the other two, who decided to stop acknowledging our existence because we did not play "well enough" for them. Along about then, we made up our minds to start drinking, since the game was pretty much a wash and we had ceased to care. Golf, for us, very quickly became a drinking game, with beers at slices, beers at water hazards and beers at missing the ball on the tee three times in a row. Golf is not the sort of god that gazes kindly on a drinking game. But shit, did we have a lot of fun. Particularly as we were oh-so-furiously glowered at by the two jocks.
When the game is shit, people will find another game. Oh yes, they will. But this other game is NOT golf.
DropOwlBear writes,
"This probably goes to explain why you get stuff like the "GreatGM" guy talking so much about story themes and advocating for fudging dice rolls, too - especially due to the most popular scenes in our hobby being games built around live streamed shows, combat is seen as a means of generating character drama first, and a means of presenting mechanical challenge second (if at all)."
And here is the dystopian future we should expect from that. The character drama game, lacking rules, lacking boundaries, lacking structure, lacking a specific point or metric, just gets weirder and weirder as the years pass. I had recently said that I felt splatbooks had gotten a whole lot worse than the 90s. Eventually, the structure has to fall entirely by the wayside, where the trend is to drink more, which results in having to drink more. And there is no way, now, for the "official" game to pull out of this tailspin.
All the more reason for me to be a voice crying in the wilderness. And trying to do it without preaching fire and brimstone, as I have in the past. It is frustrating to not rant. And it is going to take a lot more practice for me to not rant well. But if I'm going to have any chance at saving a few true believers, I can't just glower at the drunks.
I am, however, going to discuss what makes them drunk.
Post script,
About Matthew Colville. I've listened to quite a lot of him, now. He has a facility to talking a great deal without making a declarative statement. This makes him hard to deconstruct meaningfully. Much of the time, yes, I agree with what he is saying ... but since he is mostly saying that water is wet, it is hard not to agree. At the same time, it grows rather tiresome to hear only that which has already been established, or that which substantially doesn't matter. I find him a very grey speaker. But I will keep listening and see if there isn't a video that deserves attention.
I'm watching a lot of D&D advice videos, making myself sit through content, parsing it so I can write further posts on how the community thinks. It has taken me nine years to step back from going bat-shit furious at seeing this stuff ... I think that the effort lately to view it calmly, coldly, from the point of view of the giver first before deconstructing its value, has been helpful. Anything that cools down my passion until I can be rational is great.
I have seen some stuff, however, that doesn't fit the format ~ not what we could call "advice." We could call it a belief system about how to play characters, or it could be fallout from many years of finding more and more justification for players to "role-play" characters with little understanding of how personality works, how it is constructed, or how it logically fits into the framework of believable motivation.
Here is a sort of pressure. We are playing a character in a campaign, without any particular skill or training that make us great character designers. Excellent writers spend their whole lives struggling to create a meaningful, memorable, positive character, whose place in a story will produce a strong resonance with an audience. RPG players, however, have no understanding of this. For them, a "great character" is defacto an "original character" ~ that is, one that is different from every other character that might be conceived.
To boot, we've massively expanded the number of races a player can play, in a wild attempt to superimpose a wider range of "unique" characters based, if on nothing else, the increased number of combinations between race, class and morality. If that isn't enough, the game makers have been on a quest the last two decades to invent monsters whose only real purpose is that it enables yet one more monster race the player can have.
As a grognard, I find it all somewhat silly. Whatever we call the character's race, we know that a rose is a rose, and that all character races are just different elements of being human. The "uniqueness" is just empty gloss.
However, let's look at two examples where someone has painted, or imagined to paint, a character of tremendous richness and diversity, gleaned from two different RPGer videos. First, this guy again. He's popular, prolific in his efforts and consistently provocative.
"I had one player, a wonderful role player. She had a paladin, and the paladin would only engage in combat if she was wearing her fighting leathers. Such an impression it gave me, that she had fighting leathers, and she couldn't talk to you if she had her fighting leathers on. So if she wanted to talk, she'd take her fighting leathers off, and put her talking leathers on. Or her drinking leathers. Or her sexing leathers. She had different outfits for each of the incidents that she was about to participate in, and literally combat ground to a halt because this paladin was screaming, 'Wait, I'm not wearing my fighting leathers! Don't anybody move, I'll come back!' And she'd run off and change out of the one bodice and into the other piece of plate mail or whatever it was that she was wearing and she'd come in, 'All right, I've got 'em on, we can carry on fighting now!' And she'd run in and launch into combat."
As a DM, I'd assess how long it took her to get out of sight, and how long it took her to change ... and I would carry on with the combat. Frankly, I see my game world as a threatening, uncompromising place. Those willing to carry forward a combat, to kill, do so with the hope of taking any advantage they can in order that they will survive. There might be some who, under special chivalrous circumstances, might be willing to establish rules for when fighting starts and when it stops, but most of the murderous sort of people one will meet on a road or in a wilderness in my world just want you dead.
As a fellow participant, this is the sort of humor that is 'funny-once.' As it happens, the presenter here does admit that this particular role-playing does happen in a one-off game, over four hours, and not in a longer campaign. I don't see it being very practical as a "character quirk," as suggested, simply because it would be the sort of annoyance that would hold up games and douse momentum overall. It has too much "Me me, me me me, me me me me me" in it's construction, even apart from the time sensitiveness of not always being able to get the clothes off so a conversation can be held, or the clothes on so that a sword can be parried.
Finally, as a communicative mechanism, it's a struggle. What if, in the midst of a battle, the paladin conceives of something the rest of the party ought to know? Or wants to express a desire to heal someone; or have someone get out of the way. Perhaps, however, that's not as much a hard rule as partially presented. After all, right at the end, after she's put on her fighting levels, she's depicted as talking, which we've been told she won't do when her fighting leathers are on.
Seems confusing.
Let's pick up with the other video:
"And my favorite class? Right now I'm playing a kenku cleric. I specifically like playing kenkus, right now, 'cause kenkus are so interesting as a player character. They don't communicate, they only do mimicry, and so communicating with your players, it's kind of for me, it's a new way to think about how to play. Because instead of being like, 'Hey guys, we should go over there and ambush those goblins, instead I have to find a way to communicate ambushing goblins with sounds and mimicry. So it could literally be like, you know, 'Aha' flies up to a tree and looks at the band of goblins and starts making small [bird noises] sounds as if flying arrows are going by. And then, on the players' side of things, that's a whole 'nother level of interpretation that kind of creates camaraderie in a fun and interesting way, because now not only do they have to deal with the challenge, but they have to deal with the communication that comes. And the ranger who is like my 'buddy-buddy' is like we've kind of got a secret code that allows the communication to be a little more streamlined if we're running into real problems."
Some of this is easy to explain. Ivan Van Norman is an actor and producer associated with Matthew Mercer (who describes himself as a voice actor first and a dungeon master second) and Satine Phoenix. There are clearly multiple occasions in which these individuals self-identify as artists and film-makers, rather than role-players ... and I think to some degree the above passage from Van Norman is a strong example of an actor getting excited by an acting role.
However, all these people are technically representing the "official" game, so we have to assume that they are encouraging those audience members at home to run their characters with this same level of "interpretation."
Me, I'm confused. The kenku has been around since the old Fiend Folio (1981), where they are described as having "the head of a hawk." The repeated use of the word 'mimicry' would suggest that at some point kenku were restyled as parrots. However, mimicry in parrots is an instinct, not an example of conscious thought. Conscious mimicry occurs where people deliberately imitate what someone has just said, in order to entertain or ridicule. I'm guessing, without reading the later edition rule, that the kenku/parrot has to use examples of previously spoken speech to communicate ... but wouldn't that include all speech?
When I write these words, I'm mimicking someone from my past. Sooooo ... I'm hopelessly confused about this rule.
A brief bit of research doesn't indicate any particular limitations on what sounds a parrot can mimic.
This sounds, then, like a terrific difficulty to impose on others, for the sake of "fun." I wouldn't find it much fun, not as a fellow player or as a DM. I think I would tell the player to stop it.
These are both examples of play that seems, to me, a desperate attempt to make more out of a game that can traditionally be had with straight role-playing. It seems, from watching examples of these people run games, and the interplay going on between voice actors, producers and such, that "role-playing" is a sort of generalized, clumsy, difficult to enhance improvisational experience, receiving much praise but without much demonstration of acumen or impresario. Having spent hundreds of hours doing this on stage, and hundreds more watching others, I don't find the level of character creation or acting on WOTC videos to be, well, professional. Certainly not as professional as an everyday improv group performing at a comedy club or a theater in a mid-sized city, such as Calgary is (about a million people).
So I am simply at a loss as to how any of this helps. I hope that this does not sound like a rant. I'm really trying to figure out how this approach and philosophy is improving anyone's game play. I can't see it.
Earlier this year, I gave an effort at describing a development-6 culture. I did all right with the development-5, but even one step higher got confusing and hard to express. That has been my problem all along ... and it is due, in large part, to my wanting to be comprehensive in describing the elements of the development.
That's because, if it just skirts the issue, the system really accomplishes nothing. It needs enough detail to meet certain goals:
The information has to elaborate on possible scenarios that could lead to an adventure. Whereas some feel that description is confining, I feel just the opposite. It would be impossible to fully define all the elements, down to the last person, in so many hexes as exist in my world ... so any descriptions are bound to suggest a multiplicity of ideas.
The detail has to reduce the ever-present difficulty of the "empty hex." If people live there, it can't be empty ... it must have some kind of character and feel. That's what we're trying to give in any system that generates a given result.
To some degree, many hexes will have the same characteristics, since these are generated results. Hopefully, however, the details being generated are surface details ... leaving plenty of room for the specific culture, religion, climate, terrain, vegetation, proximity to other places and so on to create enough unique elements that the surface characteristics can be expanded as necessary.
Finally, that areas of one development are distinctly different from another.
For this post, I'm going to compare four different hexes: two within a 5-development space, and two within a 6-development space. Before I get to that, however, I will need to catch the reader up on some points.
Point 1.
Remember that once I presented some maps in which infrastructure played a role? Those maps were based on an idea that within a given hex, there were 7 hexes, thusly:
A given hex of this "group" would either be "inhabited" or "wilderness." If all seven hexes were wilderness, we'd call this a type-8 hex. If one were inhabited, it would be a type-7 hex. Two inhabited would mean type-6, and right down until all the hexes being inhabited would make the hex a type-1.
Now, I've played in all sorts of ways with this since proposing the idea in 2011, some I've discarded and others I've built upon. For the purpose of this post, just assume all four of the hexes I'm going to highlight are type-5 hexes. This means, each hex will be about 37% inhabited and 63% wilderness.
Moving onto Point 2.
I've also created this development (formerly tech) system. I'll just remind the reader the difference between a development-5 culture and a development-6 culture:
Dev-5 is a region based on gathering, with a focus on hunting, fishing and mysticism.
Dev-6 retains characteristics of Dev-5, modified however by the inclusion of agriculture, animal husbandry, archery, mining and the wheel.
That's all I have to go on.
Point 3.
Because some hexes have a designated settlement in the hex, while others don't, I'm making a distinction between these two forms. A type-5 hex that has a settlement is called a "settlement-5" hex; a like hex without a settlement is called a "rural-5" hex.
Now, at this point, I would imagine that your head is swimming a bit. Catch your breath and I'll explain the perameters of the four hexes that I'll be demonstrating in this post. We're going to be looking at the details I've designed for each of the following:
A Dev-5, rural-5 hex. That is, a hex that is 37% inhabited, without settlement, in a development-5 region.
A Dev-5, settlement-5 hex.
A Dev-6, rural-5 hex.
A Dev-6, settlement-5 hex.
The idea is to show how four very similar hexes, all with the same amount of cleared wilderness, from two closely similar development phases (after all, I'm not comparing Dev-5 with D-13), can be given distinct, interesting characteristics. That's the goal, anyway.
I'm going to present these as excel blocks, because this is how I am keeping track of the information. And believe me, there is a lot of information. Just so you know, these blocks all come from a much larger table, as there is a similar block for every kind of hex type, for both rural 1 to 8, and settlement 1-8, as well as details about improvements, buildings, culture, wealth, labor and so on. There's quite a lot ... but we don't have to go into all that right now. Anyway, that's why the edges of these blocks are uneven.
Dev-5, Rural-5
This is an unusual hex in a hunter/gatherer society ... most rural places in regions with this level of population density would never result in a randomly produced rural-5 hex, but just in case I've conceived this. It is "sylvan" in the sense that the natural vegetation, water sources and available forage and animal life is so ideal that it could support a population of a few hundred indefinitely, without their having to move. Well, much. In unseasonable times, the hunters would probably move south, or perhaps to a lower elevation.
The "improvement" indicates that if there is a trade reference here for a product such as fish, a "fishing ground" results, adding +1 food to the natural food supply. If there's meat, skins or animal products, then it creates a "hunting camp," which again creates +1 food. The land itself would probably naturally produce (binary-11) food. Rural-5 means that it produces (binary-111) food. And if there was a fishing ground, it would produce (binary-1111) food. A hunting ground as well would produce (binary-11111) food. In base-10 numbers, that's enough food to just feed 2,170 people the bare necessary calories to ensure not starving. A few hundred people in such a hex would be quite fat people.
Dev-5, Settlement-5
This is marginally a greater chance for occurring that it's rural counterpart, but still represents the pinnacle of the this development. Think of a group of densely made skin-and-wood houses constructed into a natural cliff face, like the Anasazi, but lacking the cultivation elements. Perhaps the early Anasazi, which later advanced. Unlike the rural example, this hex adds much more: 2 food instead of one, and an additional labor.
Now, what is labor? I'm viewing it for the game as the amount of activity (a fifth employed in craftsmanship), as well as the kinetic nature of the hex. The players, wanting to hire a guide, need to find a place with at least one labor. If they want to hire a gang, that might require up to two labor. We can see, as well, what the people are working on, listed under "crafts."
A hex of this status would certainly have a monolith, which isn't as magnificent as one might suppose. It is just a big thing. However, 1 in 100 would have something truly impressive: like a Stonehenge, inexplicably present despite the low population and density. There's very little chance for one: there aren't that many Dev-5, settlement-5 hexes in my whole world.
I think people can appreciate how these two hexes differ quite a lot from each other: but then, we're talking town and country, so that's not surprising. However, I've tried to hit the highlights, so that a DM describing people entering this little settlement has something to build a description on, with an idea to where people are engaged, who runs the place, how connected it is, how they're willing to exchange with the party and so on.
Okay. Let's move to a higher development.
Dev-6, Rural-5
Now, we would expect this to be different. After all, we're agricultural now. The hex is no longer "sylvan" ~ it is a collection of privately owned settlement farms, with light organization, touching but not cheek-and-jowl. Much like Kentucky in the early 19th century, or most of Europe in the 11th. There might be a hamlet, but these would have no more than a dozen domiciles.
The land is similar, but not as ideal. Rural-5 hexes are more common at this regional density; as well, they are used differently. There are a lot more different kinds of improvements (still determined by trade references), these things adding happiness (coffee, sugar, wine), health (mistletoe, salt), food (crops or livestock) or labor (working animals like horses, oxen or dogs). There's an enhancement in the shape of a well, and cart tracks as routes (though not that well maintained, since this is only a rural-5 hex; rural-4 hexes would be better maintained).
This would be a very different place from its Dev-5 counterpart. But that is the idea. We've left that other place and come here.
Dev-6, Settlement-5
Small error in the layout, but oh well.
Now this is definitely getting complicated. Take note, this is only one development stage up. Even working on Dev-7, as I am now, this just expands and expands. But ...
The benefits, one will notice, are the same ~ but there is that increased chance of the rural lands around the city adding so many new references. However, the Dev-6 new techs don't add any notable buildings, not even pottery/granaries, as I envision this development as representive of those 4,000 years between our becoming agricultural and granaries being built. It isn't that the people here don't know what a granary is ... it's just that there's no crippling need to build one. The population isn't that high, so famine is unknown. Granaries do appear at Dev-7.
The enhancements include gardens, which are merely spaces where the natural environment has been tailored, or trees planted, to make a resting place in the evenings, inside the settlement. Governance has dispensed with the chief; organization requires multiple voices. Where is says, tribal and clan identities viewed symbolically, it means that we still recognize ourselves as such and such a clan, but we identify ourselves more strongly as members of the community than as individual families. The rural folk still strongly identify as clans and tribes.
Conclusion
I hope this gets more across about what I'm doing here. This is still just a small piece, like the health table, but patiently I am pulling a lot of this content together. I expect to still be working on this for several years, at least ... but I hope to have a guiding set-up as far as Dev-9 within a couple of months. When I have five development levels generally worked out, from 5 to 9, then I'll start making presentations about what the overall development looks like, on a regional scale.
UPDATE: Thank you. A tremendous outpouring of Christmas spirit makes me feel like I'm in a holiday special. I have enough money now to get a quad-core, 8-gig ram, 1 terabyte computer, which is within $50 of your donations. More isn't necessary; if anyone wants to add a little, for reasons, I won't stop them, as a little more and a little more will always get me towards a better and better computer. But I'm not greedy. No one needs to contribute going forward, as I have enough to get when I wanted. A merry, merry Christmas. You have made my holiday very special!
I hesitate to step forward here, but there are days when I feel I must do something. This, for the benefit of the Gentle Reader, is the total private space in which my partner Tamara and I live:
Complete with cat.
We have full access to the combined living room and kitchen, but most days this is occupied by two to six persons who are playing video games or watching reality programming on the giant screen TV that dominates the room. We're all friendly, but it just isn't possible to get any work done. As I write this now, I can hear the shelling of World of Warships; I have to put in earbuds to escape from it.
Here is a closer picture of the 2007 microsoft vista computer that I do all my design and writing work on:
If you look carefully, you can see a copy of The Princess Bride
hiding behind the screen. Not intentional. I recently quoted it on
the blog.
Note the missing keys, and the steadily ground-away chrome on the computer's bottom right hand side. That is not a smudge. The surfacing has literally been worn away by my right wrist as I write and write and write.
I used this computer more or less continuously from 2007 until 2013, when it was replaced by a Toshiba. Unfortunately, 17 months ago, I dropped a glass of lemonade into the keyboard of the Toshiba and so I have been on this thing, again, since that time.
Here is my point. If you would like to buy me a Christmas present, please help me replace this piece of shit. It has no battery and if I remove the power cord to plug it in somewhere else, it takes 20 minutes for the computer to first warm up before it will turn on. I would like to have a lap top that I can use in a library or a different public place, far away from the constant video game use, where Tamara and I are not cheek-and-jowl, where I can think in silence for hours and hours, where I can concentrate on writing, where I can conceivably finish my book.
It's this that seems to be the problem. Every time I get close to thinking I have the money together to replace this, something comes up; I need a cavity filled or my daughter's mortgage is in danger of not being paid, or Tamara has to have her eyeglasses upgraded and replaced. I'd like to get about 350 together, for a decent Chromebook, but it is just a bridge too fucking far.
So, if you can help, please donate. The donate button for paypal is on the sidebar. Then maybe I can get enough money together so that I can buy a computer in February or March. So I can escape from this small room. It's not the street, it's much appreciated, but it defies a place of comfort for me to work alone.
"We need to now establish the type of campaign that we're going to be running. Now, by type, I literally mean the grand theme, the theme, the main overriding story that's going to allow you to create what feels like a contained narrative within a chaotic space. Now like the master plot, which gives you your singular direction from which you can deviate and move away from, but always come back to, your type or your theme is going to be exactly the same in terms of the functioning of it.
"So if we look at the different types or the different themes of campaign that you can run, you can run a war campaign, you can run a revenge campaign, you can run a justice campaign, you can run an ascension campaign, you can run a restoration campaign, you can run an apocalyptic campaign, you can run a campaign that deals with the idea of love for example. So they're fairly broad ideas in which the narrative is going to sit."
To deconstruct this, I will be referring to parts of the video that have not been quoted.
Why This Seems Important
The process of managing a game is a daunting, often intimidating prospect, that can be moreso if the DM has run games before that collapsed or failed due to moments when "thinking on our feet" proved to be a failing strategy. The habit becomes an emphasis on fighting back the chaos, as this seems the most troublesome aspect of running.
The best way to reduce chaos and create an effective management for a game is to organize and plan. That is the thinking that virtually everyone rushes to when something complicated falls apart after a failed attempt. "The next time I do this, I am going to have a plan." The video here is an example of that thinking: the certainty that, with good planning with a strong story and overriding narrative, I will be able to establish a series of achievable, firm goals that can be met methodically and with my feet firmly on the ground. This way, the confusion, havoc and uproars of my past sessions will be laid to rest, disruptions to the campaign will be minimized and the game will proceed in a predictable, orderly manner. Thank gawd!
Furthermore, this collection of goals will create for us a logical framework from which we can design additional adventures, all upon the same theme, so that when we need an idea, we can return to the scope of ideas contained within that theme. Once we've established that this is a war, then adventures connected with war will spring to mind in abundance, so that we won't be on the hook to come up with something, unlike our previous scattered and stumbling attempts, where we've come up short. How wonderful that is. No more wasted efforts, no more rushing to react to something we didn't expect - this campaign is going to be one that gets results!
Why We Believe in this Strategy
Without a doubt, plans work. They encourage thinking about a problem, which itself is an important step towards being prepared. Part of the problem with relying on improvisation is that it causes DMs to take a pass on thinking about the next game, reducing the overall amount of creativity that has gone into preparing that game's experience.
As well, planning is a specific process, with a specific structure. If we sit down to intricately plan a campaign, it is easier to guess what sort of questions we want answered, both for ourselves and for the players. The very act of planning encourages us to answer these questions for ourselves, so that a DM in the planning process will feel reassured and confident while working alone for days, prior to the event. Planning has a way of focusing our minds on the task at hand. It is comforting. A lack of planning makes us feel incapable and anxious about what's coming. Planning holds our hand and gives us reason to think that we're on top of the problem. In fact, there is biological evidence of this; planning is an executive function of the brain, selecting and successfully applying attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, as I've just explained.
The video argues the value of this very human, very emotionally charged process, basically outlining the traditional steps of planning:
Choose a destination.
Evaluate possible routes.
Decide on a course of action.
We humans have been doing it this way for ten thousand years. We've built the edifice of civilization and culture by designing, organizing, managing subordinates and directing the combined power of human ingenuity and resourcefulness towards the accomplishment of any intended outcome. It seems child's play to apply this principle to a simple matter like running a game.
Why It Won't Work
Some are well ahead of me by this point. Role-playing is an improvisational activity. It can't be "planned" by both the DM and the players at the same time, since the players technically are necessarily removed from what is about to happen on the other side of the door, deliberately by the Dungeon Master. As such, much of the "planning" for the balance of the participants goes into managing the unknown ~ and the results of that planning and execution creates an unknown for the DM that can't be planned for, since ingenuity, random rolls and the gestalt of the group's interaction creates a chaotic, enticing maelstrom ... in fact, the very effect for which we play the game, as uncertainty is utterly, wonderfully fascinating.
The more planning the DM attempts to contain and build a frame around that chaos, the more stale and reactionless the campaign becomes.
A good metaphor could be the incidence of lightning. We can understand why it occurs, we can produce a reasonable means of predicting its strike, but we can't be certain if, or when, it will actually strike. Moreover, we can't control the strike, nor the effects of the strike. None of which reduces the awe-inspiring magnificence of the display, nor the terror-inducing effects of a nearby strike, nor the immeasurable dread we feel if we're caught outside in a place where, it seems certain, that it is going to strike us.
Despite the totality of human achievement, there are some things we do not control, that no amount of planning can manage. And some things should not be planned for: this is why "spontaneity" is treated with such reverence where our emotional-reward is concerned.
Yet that promise that we receive as we plan continues to delude us into thinking that this lightning can be contained in a bottle and that the experience will not be lessened once we manage it. That is because this planning is all done alone, prior to the game, where the echo-chamber of one's own thoughts, vs. the apprehension of the next running, hoodwinks us into following the will o'wisp, again, into the hubris of our false confidence.
The video, above, is a hoodwink. It sounds good. Until one thinks about it.
My infrastructure/trade/development quandary continues apace, very slowly. That is because the problem, and the management of the problem in particular, is very deep and information thick. Still, I did say I would be writing about it on occasion, before eventually releasing some of the content here on the blog, once I have enough to make an impression.
The problem today is defining health. I mentioned this is a couple of posts just recently, here and here. I had said I wanted a number basis for comparing regions of appalling health with those where players would want to visit ... and to make those differences matter to the players in a way that they would really care what the environment was like. I think I have managed to create a general template, which I will outline here in a series of five tables:
Here we have a strictly managed public health policy. The above should be as good as it gets for a Renaissance culture ~ that's my plan, anyway. Rationally, there should be ways to slice the pie thinner, if need be, but this is a good start. As health is a little less well managed, it looks like this:
Not quite as clean or socially respectful, but still maintaining a lot of standards, such as good food, rest, control of disease and services. Still, this isn't the norm; an average health condition should look like this:
Now it is starting to get a little uncomfortable for the players. Adjacent gong pits would mean they were out back of most buildings and noticeable. With five or six players, the chance of someone catching a cold or a minor ailment, though 1 in 80 apiece, is now better than 1 in 14. Comfortable, safe accommodations are harder to find. But still, this seems civilized. In a less seemly part of the world, however, we have this:
This is now quite unpleasant. This isn't a place to rest. If the player is only first level, gaining back hit points from rest isn't possible (by my healing rules). The dead are loaded openly on carts. Getting a clean bed for the night is out of the question. The water tastes funny. The population is rife with disease. A week's stay will mean someone is bound to come down with something. But still, it is better than this:
At low level, player characters, not having been bred here, and toughened to the disease and conditions, would actually lose hit points from attempting to rest. There's nowhere to evacuate one's bowels except in a side lane. Gong is everywhere, as are flies, vermin and the occasional, ignored dead body. The population would be easier to kill, with less hit points and levelled characters, but is that really a blessing?
I suppose it could be worse ... but I'm shooting to make this around the bottom of the scale. I still need a means of generating a number between -4 and +4, but that will take some experimenting with actually describing specific regions of all kinds to get right. For the moment, this measurement scheme is a place to work from. If necessary, I can widen the range of numbers later and, as I say, cut the differences finer, making 7 or 9 degrees of health if necessary.
I hope to create similar tables like this for happiness/unhappiness and culture/uncultured. That's going to take some thought, but that's the goal. For those building and thinking about their own worlds, the above gives a simple scale that a given setting can be assigned, if going through the process of actually measuring a region's health (as I'm doing) is undesirable.
I went looking for an example of the player using a backstory to manipulate a DM's world, and found a doozy. This is marvelous. The Reddit thread is a long diatribe in which a player bemoans a DM of committing the unforgiveable sin of ignoring the player's backstory, outlined at the top of the thread:
"In my recent campaign, there was an army of hobgoblins being a threat to a major city. I wanted to go back my dwarf mountain to get the help of my fathers military who I was a high ranking officer in. I told everyone about it in my backstory in the beginning of the game. Now as I go back to the mountain the dm [sic] disregards my backstory and puts in his own version of my characters home. He makes it so I'm a nobody dwarf and my family name is shared by everyone and nobody knows who I am. Even though i stated earlier about where I am from and who I was before I went into adventuring. How should I talk to the dm [sic]about this. He just makes jokes and says he doesn't care. Mostly because he doesn't want me to do that. What should I do?"
The remainder of the thread consists of others who deeply respect the suffering of the player, who rush to condemn the DM, and who create examples of how they would run the campaign, catering to the player's needs and backstory. From the point of view of many players, including a lot of my readers, the angst and abuse of the player in the thread is no doubt something they feel themselves, as the bad, bad DM broke the rules ... after all, the DM approved the backstory, so the DM is clearly in the wrong.
I won't contest that. That back story should never have been approved.
Oh, your father runs his own military. How wonderful. And you were a high ranking officer in that army. Marvelous. It sure is great when, as a player, you can take five minutes and dream up an army on tap for your needs, whenever you want it. That's what I call earning your way in the game.
It takes half the thread before someone points this out:
I would guess that the probable situation is that neither the player nor the DM are very experienced. The DM no doubt approved of the story because it sounded pretty good at the time, never thinking what the consequences of that might be. At the same time, the player was probably just spiffing around with a story idea ... and then after the fact, realized that he could use it to his advantage. The player is so dissonant about the enormity of the backstory's personal benefit that it's probable the player can't see what's wrong.
That sounds like "new campaign" to me. Hey, we're all just heroes anyway ~ and heroes in stories always get to go back to their father's and get the help of a big, convenient military for the last showdown with the big bad. Can't we all think of about thirty movies that end that way?
The remaining commenters appear to have the opinion that, if the DM approved it, then it has to stand, no matter what. That is complete bullshit. DMs make mistakes. They're human. Even those with a few years experience are capable of missing the consequences of a brief, poorly thought out decision. The only thing that matters here is that Dad's Army (unless it's the British farce) is an UNFAIR advantage and effectively game breaking.
"But he laughed at me!" ... sob, sob, cry, whine ...
If you're a new DM, as I wrote in the previous post for New DMs, stay far, far away from the backstory. A marginally clever player, with a week to think about it, can engineer a piece of work that will spear you in the ass in ways you never thought possible.
