The Sword Teacher

I recently obtained a copy of 1977's The Duellists, directed by Ridley Scott.  Here is a taste:



While the fight shown goes against every Hollywood cliche about swordfighting, it is interesting to note that the fight director, William Hobbs, is also responsible for another favorite film of mine, featuring, again, some unusual swordfighting.  Alas, no decent fight example exists on youtube; I have to leave you with this, which is fair but doesn't begin to compare with the best scenes from the two films, 1973's The Three Musketeers and 1974's The Four Musketeers.



Some old timers might remember the Sean Connery and Robert Shaw film from 1976, Robin and Marian.  I wouldn't count the film as a good one, and the fight scene needed some work, but I know you D&D players.  The scene gives a good sense of fighting with heavy weapons.  And yes, it is William Hobbs again:



There's a reason why I'm not linking Hobbs' name to IMDb, and some of you will have leapt there already.  If so, you'll have found this standard for D&D players, the swordplay of which most of you will be very familiar:



And yes, this sword fight too:



This one too:



Gets a little freaky, doesn't it?  According to his bio, William Hobbs began as an actor in London and was told by Laurence Olivier, "Give it up."  He stayed with Olivier's company, however, as a fight director, and became ~ in my opinion, because he won no awards ~ the best.  His belief, quoting from IMDb, was that "the actors have to be working mentally on a conscious level of coolness, with complete body relaxation and control, so that their acted aggression can be performed with conviction and at the same time in absolute safety."

After Ladyhawke, Hobbs worked on Willow and Dangerous Liaisons (among other movies I won't mention).  The fight scene between John Malkovich and Keanu Reeves is highly reminiscent of scenes I've just watched in The Duellist. 

That brings us to another brilliant fighting film, and excellent throughout, 1990's Cyrano de Bergerac, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.  If you haven't seen the version, shame on you; nothing else compares to this version of the story and no other version I've seen comes remotely close to the depth of the romance or characters.  But here's the highlighted sword fight for today's post:



Hobbs captures every nuance of the poetry and pacing, to perfection.  Sliced apart from the film, the viewer will fail to capture more than a quarter of the full emotion here; I saw it in the theatre in 1990 and was blown away.  If you can see this on a big screen, ever, treat yourself to it.

Hobbs was 50 when he did the work for Gibson's performance in Hamlet, which I've never seen (and won't) and for the obscure 1991 Robin Hood with Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman, which I've never seen.  It's a bit sad to think he's the sword fight "arranger" for the Man in the Iron Mask, which is all flynning ... though I suppose there are some tight moments.  Interesting to think he was working with both Depardieu and Malkovich again.  That might explain an actual Frenchman's appearance in that movie.

After a series of so-so and meh films (and yes, I'm counting Shakespeare in Love in that number, a classic example of a Oscar Best Picture that retains absolutely no interest whatsoever for a modern audience), his last contribution was 2005's Casanova with Heath Ledger.  I saw that film; I cannot remember a sword fight in it.  But the film was pretty forgettable.

If you go looking up his IMDb listing, take note of his stunts, too.  Hobbs was a dedicated film artisan.

He passed away on July 10, 2018, just about a year ago.  The man brought me a lot of enjoyment over the years.

Last clip ... here's the man himself:

What I Learned about Running Estate Design

Between 1988 and 1992, I ran a name-level party with holdings in Viana do Castello in northern Portugal, Bissau on the Guinea coast and Barbuda in the Leeward Islands, all with the express support of the Portuguese king, to whom they rendered service in a peninsular war.  In establishing their holdings, the party fought drow elves living below the Cantabrian Mountains, as well as Spanish insurgents, and they fought various jungle beasts, as well as jackalwere interlopers from the Mali Sahel.  The party possessed two sailing vessels, which they used to work the golden triangle: tools and materials from Portugal to West Africa, labor from West Africa to Barbuda, sugar from Barbuda to Portugal.  They did not traffic slaves; but they bought them from the Futa, freeing them before offering them a new life in the New World.

The party had a good time.

For me, however, all of this was awful.  I had no trade system beyond a list of goods and futile attempts to make sense of the scant numbers I could find (I did not solve my trade system problem until 2003).  I had no map zooming system like I have now, only modern maps of the three areas that I redrew as rather simple representations of what the party was doing.  The maps I worked from were road maps, which had to be ordered special, as a 1:500,000 map of Guinea-Bissau is not the sort of thing one normally finds in a Canadian bookstore.  I had part-time use of a Macintosh 128K and full-time use of a Commodore 64.  And I did not have access to the internet ... what there was of it.

This meant that every question the players had, about hundreds of things, had to be hammered out of random books, guesses, logical proposals, my imagination and a lot of the time out of my ass.  The party would want to build a road inland into the jungle, upgrade the bullfighting arena in Viana, refit their ships for weapons, figure out how much labor they needed to produce so much sugar, have a price for goods bought and goods sold, which had to be different from place to place ~ and not only for the three places they semi-controlled, but for any other place along the way they might stop.  Ship repairs, stores, spoilage concerns, costs for men-at-arms, costs for fortifications, amount of food produced and used, crop yields, the occurrence and effect of storms, teaching religion to the natives, building a church in Africa, building a church in the Caribbean, hiring pirates not to attack their ships, prospecting, making rum, wine production in their vinyards, building schools, building hospitals, building houses, making treaties with other colonies, disease erupting among Europeans living in Africa, disease erupting among the natives in Barbuda ... the list went on and on and on.  Every session began with about twenty questions from the players, who thought of things while we weren't playing, half of which had to be put off until the next running; so that after the players' new questions, I had to give answers to the players' old questions ... and this was never ending.

Those people who argue they can run D&D "on the fly" have never had the kind of parties I've had.  It was not my idea to colonize Bissau ~ the party asked for the town as a gift from the Portuguese king and he was glad to give it to them, provided they kept it peaceful and his ships could rely on the port having supplies.  It was the party's ideas to find an island in the Caribbean without a European colony ~ and as it turned out the French and English didn't form a colony there until 1666, the party was totally free to do so first.  Running an agenda-free campaign, I was on the hook to answer all the questions they asked; and because I was willing to answer, and let them build up as they wished, they were encouraged to expand and expand.

Much of the various systems and rules and game designs I've put in place have emerged from the impotence I felt each week as I found myself with questions that no DM could reasonably answer using the game's books.  Quick, off the top of your head: how big is a bullfighting ring?  Now, how big is the one in Viana?  The map said there was one.  Now, without the internet, find out if it existed in 1650, how big it is, and how much wood and stone goes into it, then estimate a reasonable lack of maintenance so that you can guess how much it would be to make it new, then look at the plans the player has drawn up for you to show how more seats can be added.  Once you've got that, settle on a price per seat vs. the number of visitors, the cost of bulls and matadors, the balance sheet of the enterprise and expected profits for the party, plus status in giving great shows and how that status can be used to gain more favour at court.  Do that off the top of your head, with one player who works in the real world as an accountant and another who works in the real world as an engineer.  Go.

Players could build this.

I was surprised when I began this blog that most players don't ask questions like these, given that all my parties have.  I was surprised to discover that DMs don't seem to have players who are professionals in the real world, who know firm details about things, who are not to be fobbed off on a DM's nonsense demanding "simplicity" as proposed by the old school books.  If I'd attempted to collar my players with the original elementary-school versions of the game, they'd have scoffed and railed at me, and certainly wouldn't have considered me "the best DM they ever played with," which I used to get a lot.  99.9% of the time, I boggle at the willingness of the modern player in the modern game, to put up with the monopoly-level grittiness of the average D&D world ~ and this is what I mean when I say that RPGers are "robbing themselves" of an experience they should want to appreciate.

They claim they're having "fun."  They could be having the philosophical experience of their lives.

When I address the problem of an "estate system" now, I have to stress that we shouldn't be thinking only in terms of European farm country.  My players were hacking out roads and plantations in jungles; they were building docks in river estuaries; they were reworking urban landscapes; they were sawing trees out of the forests on the upper Lima River and using the logs to build towns and harbors thousands of miles away.  A proper estate system can't be measured by any one product; food cannot come from one kind of harvest; the materials produced cannot be limited to what's in the game book's equipment list.  The system has to be air-tight and yet flexible enough to handle a baffling array of possibilities, that might allow a player to send an email in the middle of the night asking, "If I want to capture and train oliphants to defend my settlement of Tarfaya from the hinterland of south Morocco, how would I start?"

Because hey, why not?

In the background, I'm doing some work in creating some proper wiki posts to describe the process of determining infrastructure, which in turn breaks the 20-mile hex into the 6-mile hex, that creates the pattern of settlement for the 2-mile hex, so that I can re-interpret that pattern in terms of the build hex, which I need to establish solid guidelines for the systemic design of estate land values.

So that when I get questions, I'll know how to answer them ... no matter where in the world the players settle.

The Bad High

I've heard from various sources this week about the compulsion to wage war against things we don't like, a compulsion that surely I possess and that others feel.  It has to be remembered that while we get a hit of hormonal comfort when we sense or think things that are good and beloved, there is a like hit that we get from a shared despising of something else.

We're built this way.  We're built to cheer when the primitive beast that is one of our clan caves in the skull of an enemy beast with a rock.  We're built to urge on our clan members to keep hitting with the rock again and again, getting that sweet, sweet oxytocin with every wet crack of the stone.  The body's chemical bonus kept us working as a team, it kept us watching out for each other.  Us, the great Us, and the very bad Them, is hormonal.  And natural.

But nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.  It is well to remember this.  The temptation to give into hate, because it feels good, is a damnation ... one that we are all, all of us, guilty of pursuing.

My purpose in fixing a final word on 5e is not to promote hatred, but to promote indifference.  Not to say, "Don't play 5e," but to say, "I don't care what you do."  You understand?  We not playing 5e on the blog and I'm not talking about it.  It is immaterial to my existence.  I may hate it, but ranting endlessly about it is a waste of my time.  And by extension the same is true of hundreds of other subjects related to D&D that I just don't care about any more.

This has not been an easy place for me to reach.  I don't think I'm here yet.  But I want to be here.  I want to be only here, where the only talk is positive.  But that is damn fucking hard, not because this is the internet, but because I'm human, and I want to get my hate on just like anybody else, for the same chemical hormone as anybody else.

This has got me thinking about the late 1970s, that I experienced and I know a lot of readers didn't.  This isn't about D&D in the 1970s, this is about culture in general, and television in particular.  I was 10 to 16 years old between 1974 and 1980 ... and I don't know why it shames me to admit it, but I watched variety shows, and Fantasy Island, and the Love Boat, and a mess of other ensemble shows.  It's awful stuff now but I was young, and there wasn't much to compare it to.

But there was a condition of television back then that I really, really hated.  Specifically, there were people, very popular celebrities, that I just ... well, we'll just say hated.  If you'll forgive the example, I really hated Sammy Davis Jr.  He was such a phony, cheap, sordid, pandering black sambo insult to my early conceptions of anti-racism and equality.  Maybe it seems strange that I cared about those things when I was a pup, but I was indoctrinated in politics very young.  Debate club at 12, political clubs at 14, aggressive young communist by 15, with Marx in my pocket.

Now if you don't know who Davis was, this won't mean much to you.  His schtick was to be "Black," with a capital B ... every repulsive stereotype of being black, massaging it hardcore every time he opened his mouth.  People thought he was funny.  And cool.  I thought this public persona was a walking atrocity — and I thought of it as a persona, because I couldn't believe that the real Samuel George Davis would present like this.  Going back to his work in the '50s, he didn't; but by the late '70s, his voice was like a fucking dentist's drill.

And because he was popular, he'd turn up on some show I liked.  Some show I waited all week to see.  Only to find it ruined by his presence.  And that happened a lot, with different people.  Charo.  Zsa Zsa Gabor.  Steve Lawrence.  Liberace.  Phyllis fucking Diller.

Now that I've demonstrated myself to be a complete asshole ... again ... what's my point?  It's basically this.  Growing up in the 1970s, there was no way to express that hate.  We really did live in a bubble.  People talk about how we surround ourselves now with people who think alike, and that makes a "bubble," but seriously, I grew up in a time when there was no one to surround yourself with.  You got your hate on for a celebrity, maybe you could find a friend who also didn't like that guy, but friends always end up liking someone you don't like.  

It's like an itch you can't scratch.

The internet lets you scratch that itch all you want.  You can find mountains of hatred for anything or anyone you hate ... and if that doesn't do it for you, you can go stir shit up and find others who will write messages like, "Hey, yeah, I fucking hate that too."

What's more, if all you want is to stir shit up, if you don't even have a belief system you're pushing, it's just goddamn fun.  We piss on them, they bitch, we piss some more, we don't fucking care, we're not invested in what we're defending, we just want to see people get worked up.  It's hormonal.

And now 20, 22 years on the internet, I guess I'm just getting older.  It's harder having something positive to say.  It's way, way easier to rail on someone else's post and make that today's post ... and understand, I've goddamned done that, not long ago, but last week.  And the week before and the week before that.

I look at my blog, I'm trying to think of a post ... and when it doesn't present itself, there are all those other posts on the internet to open and feed off.  There's the 5e handbook, right there, just waiting to be chewed up.

Thing is, though ... I don't get much fun out of it.  I ... feel it too much.  I angst over it.  When people get pissed at me, I don't laugh and point and enjoy myself ... I get sore and defensive and borderline.  I want people to play a better game of D&D.  When they don't, I think they're stealing something from themselves.  I think, whatever fun they're having, what social aspect they appreciate, they're missing the real party.  And I think it's a fucking tragedy ... made worse, because they're so fucking obtuse.

In my mind, I think Sammy Davis could have had a serious career, one where he didn't have to monkey it up for the white folk.  When I was a kid, I hated him.  But as an old man, I don't think it was him at all.

I think those were the tracks laid down for him; by the '70s, whatever he'd had in the '50s was flanderized out of proportion.  And that at the time, riding the tracks seemed the safest bet.  He got to stay in the spotlight.  You weigh the costs against the gains.

I want to apply that to D&D.  I want to argue that Mentzer, Katz and the others of their ilk are just old men trying to stay in the game, and that the guys who work in the company that made 5e are just hanging on to their paycheques and thinking about their homes and retirement.  I want to see how, from their perspective, it just all seems to be working out great.  They don't see any damage.  They don't see any fault.  They made a game, people play it ... that's all it is.

They don't see what I see.  And if they do, they've made peace with their demons.  They've weighed the costs.

I've got to weigh costs too.  I've got to settle on what my boundaries are; and I know part of that is letting go of that hormone.

Post script,

It was hard finding just the right pictures for this.  The celebrities that Sammy Davis worked with, who were close to him, loved him ... which only proves that the version of person he was in the late 70s was all an act.  Going through the pictures of him on line now, that period between 1970 and 1985 has been scrubbed clean; the images are all late 50s and early 60s, when he was close to the Rat Pack, Martin Luther King, the gods of Jazz and so on.  In the '70s, though, his name was synonymous with "the Candy Man," a horrible ditty that went huge at the time but is all but forgotten now ... but anytime he appeared in public, he was expected to sing it.  I notice his footprint online has had the song removed from his popularly remembered persona in the present, who want to believe that he was never forced to go down that road ... the way people want to believe that Stevie Wonder didn't perform those songs in the '80s.

History is funny.

Forester's Perspective

"In the 1950s, Forester wrote only two novels about Horatio Hornblower, so the patience of his fans was severely tested.  And not just his fans; there's a story that whenever his American publishers found their profits threatened, they dispatched an envoy to California with orders to stay with Forester until he finally agreed, however reluctantly, to write another Hornblower.

"Writing was Forester's life.  And he was extremely successful at it.  But he never talks about writing without using words like, hard, exacting and exhausting.  'I would rather be in the dentist's chair,' he claimed in the Hornblower companion.  After completing his daily quota of words, he felt sick, weary, flat.  'There is no pleasure left in life,' he wrote.  'I am drained and empty.' "

historical note by Bernard Cornwall, describing C.S. Forester,

author of Hornblower and the Hotspur

Oh, how I relate.

It is easy to write a blog.  There is little fear of being held to account for what's written, partly because the media's legitimacy is so lowered by people writing about their cats having kittens or the latest rant about paying tolls on an empty highway on a Sunday.  And partly because another post can be smeared on top of the post before, and in good time the bad posts can be smothered out of consciousness in favour of what's new today.  Like they used to say, today's newspapers will be used to wrap fish tomorrow.

But published works have their own significance.  A writer is measured by a novel in much the same way that we are measured for a coffin.  It is impossible to unburden ourselves from that implication, as sentence by sentence we structure a work from beginning to end.  If I write a bad line in a series of blog posts, something that years later makes little sense, no one will judge me as a writer for that; but if I make a similar mistake in a published book, I will be damned for it for eternity.

It is well there is no afterlife.  If there was, I pity Shakespeare for the misery he has suffered in the butchery of his work, the criticism and the groans of undesirious children.  There is no heaven for a famous writer.

Not that I wouldn't want to be one.  Which, of course, is the center of the trouble.  This blog post will not make me famous, it will not cement my value or promote me to the stars.  But there's an idiotically slim chance that my novel might, a chance that can't be rooted from my mind no matter how indifferent I try to be.  And this makes every choice, every sentence, every scene resolution an abiding misery.  Writing is perhaps the only art where, the closer one comes to the completion of the goal, the less pleasant it becomes.

But.  Tasting it now.  I can fucking taste it.

The Determined Dullard

I'd like to take a moment and explain my present stance on 5th edition, calmly.

I've drawn a line.  I'm no longer interested in debating whether or not 5e has merits or content that is worth looking at.  It doesn't.  After nearly 40 years of playing and designing the game, anything "good" that 5e has to offer can be dismissed as not worth bothering about.  An auditorium of people interested in seeing Nickleback in concert may have one or two people with intelligence, but it isn't worth sorting through all the dreck to find them.  Think of it like a gold mine that isn't worth mining ... not because there isn't any gold in it, but because the process of eeking out that gold from a mountain's worth of dross would bankrupt us.

I enjoy a good discussion on virtually any subject, so long as there are factors involved that need further consideration and examination.  But with any subject there comes a point where the examination of the material fails to dredge up any new information or perspective, and further reaches an impasse where more talking and discussion won't change the individual's mind ... for reasons having nothing to do with the argument.

To be perfectly clear, I'm am not saying that we should, at that point, "agree to disagree."  This is one of the most toxic phrases ever invented by humans, because it presupposes that both sides of an argument have equal merit.  They don't.  One person is wrong, or both people are wrong; but there is no possible instance in reality where both people are "right."

We embrace the argument that persons in conflict can both be right because that sentiment makes it possible to work together towards common goals, while mitigating the likelihood of spontaneous violence between stubborn, mule-headed sociopaths.  Of course, spreading a doctrine that "When encountering someone who believes something with such vehemence that they're prepared to scream in my face, I should retreat from the situation and calmly self-inspect my position to see if it has flaws, because plainly there is a perspective that I don't understand," would also work, but it doesn't fit into three meter-friendly words.

My opinion about 5e results from that self-inspection.  I've read the books.  I've compared the books to other games, to other versions of D&D, to the way the English language works and to much material I've read about game theory and game design.  I've played 5e, I've watched others play 5e, I've watched live stream games of 5e and I've seen the way that 5e has affected game store play.  I have read company policy about 5e and I've read interviews about the designers talking about 5e.  And I've read hundreds of threads online in which people defend 5e.

5e is garbage.  Any rational, informed, game experienced person, that being someone who has played multiple RPGs and other non-RPG games, can see almost immediately that it is garbage, without further investigation.  But the kicker to that is, and this is the really important part, further investigation will not reveal that 5e is something other than garbage.

Before I'm going to believe in a thing, I need evidence of that thing.

If you believe that 5e is inherently, on its merits, better than other role-playing games, then you are wrong.  There's nothing to be debated.  Not because I can't explain why you're wrong, or argue the point ~ but rather, because I have argued the point.  And so have thousands of others.  And so, as things stand, further argument is wasted ... because you, the defender, are incapable of the self-inspection necessary to see why you're wrong.

Please address that shortcoming.

[but not here]

June Housekeeping

If I may, I'd like to draw the reader's attention to the sidebar, where I've added a list of links to the most recently completed pages on my wiki.  Going forward, I'll be updating this list as pages are added on the wiki, and cease to copy pages of the wiki here.  The double posting was causing extra work for me and my main point was to get the reader's interest going in the wiki.

It worked.  Page views have doubled there in the last four months, up to about 200 a day.  I think the point was made for some readers that if I wasn't posting here, I was likely posting there ... that's a trend that's bound to continue and just to be sure the reader doesn't miss anything, I'll keep the links updated.

Secondly, regarding my Patreon.

After much soul-searching and research, I'm going to have to bow to the will of the majority and start posting the names of my supporters.  I have the choice of keeping a permanent list on the sidebar or publishing the list of my supporters in a blog post monthly or bi-monthly.  If the reader has any opinions about this, now is the time.  I'm going to make up my mind about it with the 1st of July.

I don't want anyone to feel used, so please, PLEASE, email me at alexiss1@telus.net if you don't want me to post your name.  I don't want anyone killing their donation in order to protect their anonymity.  Above all, I consider your needs and your generosity more important than any decision I might make.

I do plan to provide a "special thanks" list apart from my other wonderful supporters, for those who frightening me with their donations, so please ~ if you're concerned about this ~ feel free to ask in private if you're on that list.

And of course, if anyone has anything to say in the comments about this that needs to be said now, such as a last ditch effort to change my mind or publically shame me, please take this last minute opportunity to say it.  'Course, I accept pats on my head and doggie treats too, if you have them.

Some of you will be glad to know that I got a taste of my own medicine over the weekend:  someone made me feel very stupid, and I would count it as completely lacking in empathy.  Held up a pretty harsh mirror to my face and I've been chewing it over since.  I know that the "feeling stupid" is my own fault, it's my own head fucking with me, and does not originate with the other fellow ... but it is a damn hard thing to shake.  Anyway, there's a little schaudenfreude for the peanut gallery.

I'm pleased about the weather pages on the wiki.  I plan more, but they're in a constructive phase.  I'm thinking of the next matter with players creating an estate and I'm considering rewriting some general history to reshape my world.

For those who may be interested in the online campaign, and who wonder if it is buried forever, I'm sorry: not until my book is finished.  It is progressing steadily.  I was up until 3 AM writing it last night, overcoming a rather delicate scene that I feel went well.  I can almost taste coming around to the last scene ... it is just over the hill.

That's good for now.  Going to work on some other stuff now; I'll keep an eye on the blog.

Estate Scale

Some of you will remember this post from last year, in which I discussed the dimensions and contents of village blocks:

To quickly recap, each hex above is 145 yards in diameter (133 m), which makes a convenient scale for the location of houses, streets, and various other details, if we need to orient ourselves.

I thought this map would be of use in expressing the size of a "build hex," of which I spoke Friday.  Here is the above map in the scale of a build hex:

As you can see, the build hex provides plenty of space, but not so much that it dwarfs the much smaller block.  The build hex is, as I said, 1,304 yards (1,192 m) across ... and the "sub-build" hex is 435 yards (398 m) across.  Incidentally, the sub-build hex corresponds to the size of the fortification improvement that was part of Friday's list.

From this, it's easy to see how the player can begin with a simple cottage in a very large empty, and yet properly affect the surrounding hexes in a steady, growing manner, by clearing or preparing land for farming, setting the location of a mill upon a river, building up a hill or levelling one off to establish a fortification, and yet see these changes in a scale that will still allow the player to draw lines, sketch houses, build roads and streets, define what areas have been searched for valuable materials and so on.

And because the size of the sub-build hex is only 494 steps on your Fitbit, it's easy to see that the party is in no way limited to the size of the build hex where it comes to exploration.  In fact, if the party were to find an outcropping of stone only two build hexes away (2,963 steps) in one direction, and a source for fish in another, both could be exploited by hacking a path (at 4-8 times the speed of a rutted road) to either.  The party could, therefore, build a series of tendrils outwards, ignoring the immediate hexes for specific hexes to be exploited as needed.  The manner in which this is done, and where the roads are built (along with depots, perhaps, and who knows what other improvements the players would care to make) entirely fits with the players' agenda as they expand their territory and interests.

Estate Work will Continue

Before I progress any further with these posts about estate development and management, I would like to explain my motivation and thinking process.

I would rather not adapt these concepts to produce a book, for three reasons.  First, a book will require illustration and I simply don't have the assets for that.  I could produce the assets through kickstarter, as Baron Opal lately proposed, but that would only mean that my readers were being asked to cough up money for someone else, and not me or my work.  If the readers feel motivated to donate, please do it directly to me and not for artwork, but for the things I do.

Second, much of the material I'm basing my work on originates with the game, Civilization IV.  I've considerably adapted the material and expanded its value, but still it is something the game company could haunt me for.  To escape that would require much reworking of the material to produce a less recognizable result ... which would not improve the material, it would only require a lot of skull sweat and clever writing.  I doubt that Fireaxis gives a damn about my writing about the game on a blog, as much as it might if I published a book, so that gives me reason to discuss the material here.

Third, on the blog I'm free to upgrade the material at will, as ideas present themselves and as adjustments need to be made.  The value of a blog is that it provides a living, breathing process of creation, whereas a book calcifies the moment it is published.  I don't see my being able to complete all the ideas I have regarding how to manage an estate within a stale time frame, because I know I haven't, and won't have had, all the possible ideas that will occur to me on this subject.  So again, it is better that I simply blog the process out, piece by piece.

I am keeping a running document on the side that is organizing all the material being discussed here without the sidebars I'm writing.  I find that useful for keeping my thoughts organized; if asked, I can make that document available any time for those interested.

Of course, publishing a book means that I'll be paid for that book.  But that is really up to the reader.  We can remain trapped in the 18th century publishing model forever, or we can realize that I am publishing the equivalent of a book in blog posts every three months.  I leave it to the reader to give value for those "books" in my Patreon and through direct donations.  Providing free material for all gives me a sense of well-being, so I intend to keep doing it, whatever I happen to write about.  For the present, I'm content to write about this subject, just as I've written on other things.

When the reader feels assured that I've written "a book" relating to the managing of estate ventures by player characters, then take a moment and give a direct donation equal to the value of that book.  Were I to create a singular work, I'm sure the cost I'd attach to it would be about the same as my book, How to Run ... about $30.  So take that as a suggested donation, but don't feel bound by it.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on my book Fallow today (remember, retitled from the Fifth Man), along with detailing how both unimproved and improved land is worked.  It is only logical that persons should be able to build a cottage anywhere and then sustain themselves with foraging, hunting and fishing.  Each of these already has a sage ability associated with it, so I'll be basing unimproved figures on those wiki posts.

Be well and keep reading.

Improvements

This material isn't ready for the wiki yet, but I'd like to try it out.

For this next bit, some background:

Labour is measured in points, with 1 pt. = 1 person between the ages of 15 and 65, possessing the necessary sage abilit to be considered "trained."  

Workers who are not trained count as 0.4 points of labour and are limited to crude developments or buildings (see below).  Adult workers older than 65 subtract 0.08 points per year.  Child workers younger than 15 subtract 0.15 points per year.  One trained worker is able to oversee two other workers lacking the necessary sage knowledge so that they can act as nearly trained; each of these semi-trained workers count as 0.9 points of labor each, and will gain 0.01 points per week, towards tasks they’ve already learned.

Build hexes are 1,304 yards in diameter and are nearly one-half square miles in area (305 acres).  The diameter of three build hexes = one 2-mile hex.  A hex this size provides a good context for the size of hide-units discussed earlier.  The largest possible hide on the worst possible land would stretch over three build hexes; the best land would allow three hides to fit comfortably inside one build hex.  Thus the "build hex" defines the manor estate, or at least the kernal of one.

That looks about 1,304 yards in diameter.

The next goal is to construct a time-frame for "improvements" that can be made on the land, such as these listed below (necessary sage study listed in brackets).

I've crunched some numbers on the worker-unit and build-times in Civ-4.  Nevermind the particulars, but the times listed below for the amount of work done seems appropriate from other readings and my gut instincts.  Naturally, these will seem "off" to some, and "dead on" to others; there really are no definitive numbers possible, given that we're speaking of 17th century mechanics, materials and know-how.  Anything can always be adjusted if it does seem like too long a time, but in each case I've tried to error in the ballpark of making the work take longer that it could under ideal circumstances.

That's partly so that any benefits that might accrue to labor skills will retain some realism in construction times.  Do keep in mind that in any of the examples below that the times and labour requested do not include the acquisition and delivery of materials, which would be extra labour and time.  When materials on-site are used, such as earth, sand or general filling material that is presumably available and non-specific, the time to obtain that material IS included in the time given.

         Communal land [faith, leadership, ritual].  Organizes six or more farming families so that materials, ability and experience of the whole group can be applied to every task, intensifying the value of farmed land. Harrowing, fertilization and irrigation of crops can be improved, fostering healthier, vibrant plants and greater crop yields progressively over three years (+⅕, +½ and +1⅓ in succession, remaining at that level thereafter). Requires permanent hayward and 4 adult workers per virgate.

         Cottage [carpentry]. Crude development, with varying immediately available materials used for construction (sod, rough-hewn timber, wattle & daub, thatch, etc.). 1 week’s labour per 10 ft. section of wall or 5 x 5 ft. section of roof. Trade materials optional.

         Fortification [logistics]. Used to solidify and defend a plot of land, not necessarily including buildings, in order to create a fortified camp. This includes earthen or turf ramparts, including baskets filled with dirt or stone, a wooden palisade, trenches, a rampart, stakes, wooden towers at intervals, pits and potential traps. The effect is to reduce practical approaches to one twelfth of the surrounding perimeter, allowing a strong defence. Does not include stonework or castle-making. 150 weeks labour to ready an area of one block, 87 combat hexes in diameter with a circumference of 273.3 hexes (1,367 ft.), which can then be effectively defended by 50 soldiers, two-deep at the entrances, with 6 commanders.

         Hacking [woodcutting]. Clearing a forested build hex sufficiently so that it can be made ready for other improvements, with room for roads, farms, mills and all. Includes some grubbing of stumps. 45 weeks labour.

         Hunting camp (scouting). Crude development, serving as an outpost and slaughtering area for hunting, with smokehouse and post-holes for tents. 2 weeks labour.

         Mine [mining]: Crude development, for preparing a space for the extraction of minerals following discovery of the ore body. Strips surface vegetation, building access shaft, sluice boxes and more so that buried ore deposits can begin extraction. 10d6 weeks labour, as precise location of ore cannot be known without exploration. Requires 2 cub.ft. of wood per 125 cub.ft. of mine space below ground, plus tools and haulage. Following labour spent, mine may be deemed unproductive.

         Orchard [plantation culture]. Crude development for the purpose of producing labour-intensive crops such as citrus, coffee, tobacco, cotton, tree nuts, spices, grapes, hops and so on. Areas must be clear-cut and protection from the elements for labourers, walkways, freshwater wells and in-filling of mosquito infested ponds must be provided. 75 weeks labour per bovate. Requires tools, baskets; materials specific to area.

         Quarry [mining]. Crude development, for preparing for the pit mining of materials found near the surface, most likely building stone. Establishes initial benches for providing access to the richest material. 90 weeks labour before ore or stone can be removed. Requires tools and haulage.

         Road, cobbled [logistics]. Finishes out an existing rutted road with cobblestones, sand and clay, without paving (see below). Produces a hard, pitched causeway that drains in bad weather, providing a good surface for wagons, carriages and horses hooves. Surface is yet rough and is subject to necessary shoring in 6 to 12 years (equals 10% of original work). Width of 9 ft., with 2 ft. roadbed. 1 week’s labour per 1¼ chains of distance (⅛ furlong). Requires 845 cub.ft. of stones and 211 cub.ft. of sand per chain of distance.

         Road, paved [logistics]. Lays broadly rectangular quarried stone overtop of rutted roads, cemented with mortar, to produce a solid, durable causeway that serves as a pleasant and smooth surface for carriages and wagons. Is subject to necessary reworking every 11 to 40 years, but will endure decently for more than a century. Width of 12 ft., with 3 ft. roadbed. 1 week’s labour per 2 rods (½ chain) of distance. Requires 277 cub.ft. of broken rock or gravel, 178 cub.ft. of paving stones, 119 cub.ft. of sand and 20 cub.ft. of mortar per rod of distance.

         Road, rutted [logistics]. Crude development, with digging out and grubbing a route through forested and non-forested land to create a furrow or track sufficient for cart-travel, ending with a serviceable road. The result is often uneven and loads will sway in places. Width of 8 ft., with room for passing. 1 weeks labour per 2½ chains of distance (¼ furlong). Requires 2.2 cub.ft. of crushed rock, stone, broken pottery or other material per chain of distance, for packing soft places.

         Stabling & corrals [animal husbandry]. Crude development, providing shelter and pens for domesticated animals. Enclosure size depends upon animal type. Materials may vary, but usually consist of stiles or broken rock. 2 weeks labour per ton of animal, at a rate of 20 cub.ft. of wood per ton.

         Tillage [farming]. Crude development, incorporating well building, irrigation, fertilization and grubbing of rough-farmed land for good-quality cultivation. 4 weeks labour per bovate. Requires a plough, one shovel per worker and 10 cub.ft. of rough-hewn timber.

         Watermill [carpenter, mason]. A structure that uses a water wheel to drive a mechanical process such as milling, rolling or hammering. Watermills require the development of a backwater, a dammed body of water within a main river, that ensures continuous steady flow through the water wheel channel. The mill encloses a mechanism that turns a horizontal shaft, used to drive machinery. 60 weeks masonry work and 60 weeks carpentry work, each of which requires sage knowledge. Requires up to 240 cubic yards of broken material for dam construction, 350 cub.ft. of mortared stone and 400 cub.ft. of wood, plus tools and shop materials, depending on the purpose of the mill.

         Windmill [carpenter, mason]. Consists of a brick or stone tower, on which sits a wooden cap or roof, which can be rotated to bring the sails into the wind. Typically includes a four-sail frame, with crude cloth work. The interior encloses a mechanism that turns a vertical shaft, used to drive machinery for manufactures, most typically a cam. 60 weeks masonry work and 30 weeks carpentry work, each of which requires sage knowledge. Requires 824 cub.ft. of brick or mortared stone, 200 cub.ft. of wood, plus tools and shop materials, depending upon the purpose of the mill.

         Workshop system [artisan]. Organizes a “cottage industry” to bypass the guild system by creating a homespun rural labour force. Workers in home shops fabricate articles from raw materials, which are brought to a central market to be assembled and sold. A trader supplies raw materials and collects the finished goods. Popular for cloth production, pottery and ceramics and chintz. 11 weeks labour per home-shop. Requires 33 cub.ft. softwood, 150 cub.ft. thatch, plus tools, work table, stools, shop materials.

Obviously, this is expandable, if something else is needed.  I have it in mind that labour is needed to cause the above improvements to produce goods and materials, sort of reversing the Civ-4 way of doing things, since I need actual products to sell, not "hammers."  So the next step would be to go through the above and describe how that production manifests, per worker.

After that, the third step would be to work my way through the vast list of buildings and structures, determining how long they require to put into place, adjusting the size as needed (since obviously a barracks or library of any size can be created).  Like the examples above, I'd want to break down any given building to its core elements, and then allow the player to decide how large the structure would be built according to the player's needs and budget.

I think this hangs together.  I'm counting on the reader to tell me if this sounds clear and functional.

Programming an Estate

Tuesday's post got little response, so I feel I better explain.

In describing the bare bones of managing an estate, there are a host of things we need to know.  These can be broken down into a few general categories: 1) how much of whatever can the estate produce; 2) how much of this will go to the support of the estate vs. how much can be sold; 3) how many people will it take to watch over this production; and 4) how much will we pay in maintenance/wages.

From this, we'll be challenged to use our resources to create permanent assets that we hope will be productive, then produce a profit.  But every time we create an asset, we increase the number of persons that we need.  We increase the cost of maintenance.  We increase wages.  And most of all, we increase the chances that something in the organization will fail.

Make a hand mill, and operate it yourself, you can assess immediately how it needs to be handled and what may be wrong with it.  But hire someone else to work that hand mill, and trouble starts.  Build a watermill to grind grain and there are bigger problems.  Now you're relying on the river to run, and at a certain speed; you're relying on several people to keep the wheel and the cams in working order.  More people, more chance of incompetence, laziness, theft ... and ultimately that something will go wrong, which will be deliberately hidden from you because the worker doesn't want to be blamed.  Suddenly the mill goes up in flame ... or the wheel breaks and jams ... and while you think this was random, it's more likely because of who you hired or how much reliable oversight the mill received.

And the more you build, the more ventures you jump into, the greater your risk becomes.  Someone comes along and creates a friendlier, more manageable program, or delivery system, and *poof* ... Amazon or Facebook are gone.  No matter how big you are, there's no such thing as security.

When asking the question, "How do I manage an estate?" the assumption is usually that the players keep pouring money in so that money comes out, until it is boring.  OR, the DM keeps creating so much trouble with the process, strangling the profit, that the players quit.  We want a system that lets the players manage the troubles, and yet the management itself creates more troubles that the player can foresee, but can't easily escape.

We want the players to be laying in bed at night on a Tuesday, four days from the next game session, running it through their head: "If we shut down the mill in November, and pull the wheel from its mount then, we'll have four months to rebuild the housing ... and if we commit Jerome to it, we can trust him not to screw that up; but if Jerome's working on the mill, we'll need someone else to oversee the mine through the winter ... maybe if we concentrate on shoring up tunnels until we can get Jerome back, and suspend digging the shaft down to the third level; 'course, the second layer's starting to play out, and we'll need a fresh vein if we're going to get the foundry started next summer.  God, it sucks that we're fifty miles from another source of iron.  We should have taken August and September and prospected that south ridge.  Too late now.  Then again, we could still do it, but that's going to need a foreman too.  Who's going to keep a crew of twenty prospecting those hills in December and January.  Davis?  Nah, he gave us trouble on the mine.  Somebody new?  Not sure ... new people can be very unreliable.  I guess I could do it myself, let my henchman run with the party when we tackle the keep.  Then I could be around to oversee Davis every few days, and could plumb the third level.  But if I'm here, why not just manage the mill, and leave Jerome where he is?  Hm."

None of this means a thing if we don't nail down the principles upon which the game is founded.  What land produces how much food and raw materials; how much does it cost to build something; how long do built things last?  How much damage can a random person do, and how do you choose people you can count on?  All the games that we play like this work on the same principles: find the resources, make the resources, allocate the resources, reduce spoilage, fire incompetents when we find them, find ways to make more capital or streamline costs, etc.

The main difference is that, because this isn't a video game, there are no technical limits on what strategies a player can try.  Video games are full of arbitrary boundaries: the map is just so large, the buildings are this big, such and such always costs this much ...

There's no way for YOU, the player, to program the system.  But with a DM, that should be possible.  In fact, that's what makes this format in D&D a massive upgrade.  The player is the programmer.

That doesn't mean we can suspend the niggling bits, however.  A solid, reliable baseline has to be established in something very like concrete ... and that baseline has to be as simple to grasp and understand as it is in any video game.  That's why we don't want to fiddle with comparisons between food calories, soil yields and consumption.  Once we establish what a "person diet" is, we can then adjust one number to manage health benefits, famine, distribution, value, space required and so on.

We want to simplify the base factor so that we can adjust that factor to manage far more complex problems than crop yields.  This is the goal across the system.

We don't need to know the exact cubic footage of mine we've dug; we need a ratio between one miner, production of raw material and the cost to shore up what a miner can mine in a day or week. Then we can produce one number that tells us the cost and the effect at one time.  We can then rate individual miners at 0.98 "ert" [excavation rate], 1.01 or 1.05.  That helps the player decide if this miner needs to be replaced or if it isn't that big a deal.  Replacement means time training, unknown qualities in the green worker and possibly ill feelings among those who are now worried they'll be let go.  It isn't just the ert that matters.

I trust this helps put Tuesday's post in perspective.  I'd rather not write post after post about how to manage fifty different land improvements/buildings that could be emplaced ~ though that would be the goal in the long run.  A goal that, I admit, I've considered for a long time and have been making incremental movements towards.  It's only that my interest was rekindled this week by the retinue post.

My Daughter's Screen

My daughter is a luddite.  She keeps her footprint on the internet to a bare minimum, has no facebook account, barely tolerates email.  She doesn't even want me to say her name online because she'd rather not be found.

But once in awhile she gets an urge to share.  So here is a post written by her, expressing a recent experience she had.

"I would like to scream and rant about all the obvious reasons not to use a DM's screen: the expected elitist perspective of the upper hand that most DM's seek to provide themselves, by providing yet another layer of control to compensate for more BS railroad storytelling ... but let's put that down.

"For the first time in about eight years I unexpectedly found myself playing with a screen.  Currently my party is facing a giant owl and after some debate on how I wanted the "arena" to feel, I decided I would build a three-dimensional landscape. This would allow the owl to move up and down the 3-D plane. 

"Normally, I play very traditionally; hex grid vinyl mat, miniatures, no fog of war.

"Not wanting to put my players where they wouldn't be able to see, I decided I would be the one blocked by the solid side of the cube.  Suddenly, I was in my own isolated world.  Not only was I playing towards them with my arms reaching like a puppeteer, but I was losing their attention in pulling my gaze away, as I ducked behind the screen.

"I remember the days of a screen ... I do.  Hiding behind that orange wall with tables staring me in the face, papers and notes everywhere.  I don't look back on that memory with a fond gloss; I'd rather look back on it like one of many things I did early in the game ("Remember the days I needed a screen?  Haha ... ya, well, I was still learning).

"I pose this to you: how honest are you really?  Both to your players and yourself: have you ever fibbed a roll?  I would be lying if I said I hadn't.  Sometimes you just don't want to kill someone.  You roll the die and pick it up again, pretending you didn't see it.

"That's what a screen is to me.  I separate myself from the player, I see myself as a greater entity rather than a conduit for the game.  I know this is a point of debate, but regardless of how you see yourself, you owe it to your players to be there with them.

"The truth is you are selling them your world and no one would buy from someone who kept saying, after every question,"One second, while I look behind this screen."

Instant Pool

If you haven't seen this fellow work before, this is the most impressive stuff:



It just screams sage ability.  Much of the opportunity comes from the soft woods of the area and the sort of clay that can be carved in this way, neither of which are universal.  Yet still, given that the fellow manages to construct these things in a few days (there are multiple videos from the same artist), I'd love to invest a ranger with this set of skills.