Money

Though I'm told to think otherwise, I don't believe that D&D is just a game of going out to a dungeon or other lair, killing everything and bringing back its treasure.  Nor do I think it is only a game of goofing around in towns, making pretend conversations or telling stories.  I think it is a game of players "making things" ... although, obviously, I'm in the minority here.

Let me walk down a garden path here.  Getting money, having money and spending money are things that virtually all of the readers here do according to a set of principles that we may freely call virtuous.  Let's face it; I think that few hardened criminals, thieves and thugs alike, are reading a D&D blog that uses this many words.  In getting money, few of us here would consider mugging someone or breaking into an apartment for it.  I can't say "none" because, well, who can know for sure.  But the odds are against it.  Following this, most of us keep the money we have in legitimate forms of investment; when we spend it, we do so for ourselves and for others, keeping them fed, maintaining their shelter, helping them obtain their needs.  And when we think about having more money, we don't think about acquiring it in a bad way, or spending that surfeit selfishly on ourselves.  We think about how to provide and expand the opportunities for ourselves and ours.

Bear with me.  Obeying the law with regards to money means we put up with a great deal of unpleasantness: bosses, price gouging, bureaucracy, budgeting and conversations where we have to disappoint the ones we love by saying that no, we can't buy that or have that this month, or perhaps this year.  Virtue is a choice, where we reconcile playing by the rules against the probable result of our playing against the rules going very badly.  This doesn't mean we don't think about breaking the rules.  Or even that we don't break some rules by and by.  It means, however, that daily existence is a nagging headache of having to push ourselves to act responsibly while wishing most of the time that we didn't have to ... and breaking the rules when we can, only to find ourselves feeling guilty afterwards.

As years add up and families grow, this push-pull has us in its grip.  We can easily lose sight of everything except our responsibilities and our vices that relieve those responsibilities.  Week by week, we convince ourselves that if we will give this night or that to something we love, we can put up with the rest of the shit ... but year after year, that deal feels a little more sour, as age and doubt eats up even those simple pleasures of heading out to a bar, catching a concert or sitting with our friends to play a game.  Despite what we might have felt at 20, at 30 and 40, D&D just isn't the cure-all that it was ... because the stresses its trying to cure aren't those we had when we worried about getting a B and not an A in university.

One way or another, we're caught in the grind between doing what we must and doing what we want.  What makes it worse is that both options are transient.  Rush from the job to the family to the driving range to the grocery to the D&D game, and a few weeks from now that effort has already faded.  Do that for ten years and you will look back on the ten years with a sense of loss ... the sense that you've squandered something, though you lived every minute of it as hard as you could.  Perhaps you can look at your house and count ten years of payments; no question you'll look at your children and count ten years of raising them — if you're not nostalgic for those days when they gripped your hand so tightly, or finding yourself fighting with them from breakfast to dinner time.  Some of my readers have gotten a very clear idea of how it feels to be on the other side of ten, twenty or thirty years ... and how appalling empty that can be.

There is a way out of this trap.  I stumbled across it in my childhood without realizing what it was.  Between the balance of virtue and vice, there's a habit we pursue that gives scope to life.  This is creativity.  Not what we pay for, with the money we earn, but what we make with the time we buy.  This might be anything, so long as we can touch it with our hand and share it.  Because until we can hold it, and give it away, it isn't real.  It's as fleeting as the time we spend mowing the lawn every weekend, or driving back and forth from work.  A created thing is something that we can marvel at.  I made this.  I changed this small part of the world.  I contributed something that never existed before.

When I look back on the years I've spent playing, I don't think of the fun or the laughter.  I don't think of the stories.  I think of the pride I have that the memories of other people are permanently affected by the time they spent in my game world; what they saw and what they made in that game world.  The towers they built, the schematics they designed, the characters they brought from weakness to strength.  I made the world and they wrought themselves in that world ... not in a set of forgettable, repeatable adventures, where the players have trouble remembering how many times they've run through the same module.  But as unique, once-in-a-lifetime games, built by their own choices and personal design ... that will never be repeated, anywhere.  Not even in my game world.

All right.  Coming back to the clubhouse.  What does any of this have to do with money?

Money is the fabric of the game world.  Where the players are encouraged to participate in a series of adventures, a la video game quests, then money is used as a score card to decide how successful we were and as a measure of how much preparation we can buy for the next adventure.  Everything we buy, from tools to equipment to potions, only has meaning with regards to how ready we are for whatever the next adventure threatens.

But when the setting is measured by what the party wants to DO ... then money becomes the thing its made to be: a tool that enables a party to build something permanent of their own design.  In that realm, fantasy ceases to be a series of scheduled bouts and becomes a means to make our own game.  To decide what historical or fantastical challenge we want to set for ourselves, limited only by what we've accumulated.

Because D&D isn't bound by the virtues of the real world, how we get the money and how much we have, and how selfishly we spend it, isn't a matter for our concern.  The only thing that matters is how much can we get our hands on, to do the things we want to do.

Naturally, this assumes that if I were to put millions of dollars into the reader's hands, the reader could think of a purpose to put that money towards.  Sadly, that is so rarely the case.  Sadder still, most of the people who have the capacity to use money to make things are ALSO the sort of people obsessed with making money unvirtuously in the real world.  Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, who've never had money and have never imagined they might get it, can only think of spending it in ways where someone else has designed the method.  Come see this villa on this island, where you can do these pre-planned things on the scheduled tours we will organize for you.  Give your money to these charities for these purposes we've established, structured in such a way that all you need do is sign the cheque.  Buy these material items, that everyone with money and no imagination buys.  Visit.  Attend.  Retire.  And stare at the nice walls you've bought.

When I say, you can buy anything in my game world, it is hard for most players to imagine something that wouldn't be used to effect better survival in an adventure.  It is hard to think outside the straight path.  It is nearly impossible to invent your own game ... and so I know.  I'm selling goggles that when put on, make people blind.

Money in a player's hand will buy anything.  It will buy a lot more than can be found on an equipment list.  Occasionally I'm blessed by characters who really understand this.  And it's beautiful. 

Trading on Yourself

 24 million views ...

Most of my advice to artists falls on deaf ears, but I'll keep trying.

If you haven't, take some relaxed time to watch Foo the Flowerhorn's channel.  I don't know him, I'm not a "fish guy," I can't imagine taking the time he does to do what he does ... but he makes videos on a subject that fascinates millions of people, producing celebrity music video numbers.  How?

He knows what he's doing.

Of late, I've become increasingly disenchanted with youtube.  It's not the format, not the length of videos or even the subject matter, though millions are out there trying to make a buck plagiarizing content made by other people ... which is more pathetic than anger-making.  No, for the most part, it's the amateurism.  Content creators see someone else making money — lots and lots of money — playing videogames or creating low-budget animated documentaries, and they think to themselves, "I can do that."  But really, they can't.  And it shows.  The "history channel" guy thinks that history is recounting the events in order, without meaningful commentary or discussing the source material.  The social-media pundit uses the word "everyone" to describe who agrees with her, while flashing up a poll that shows 49% of people on her side.  The film studies guy trashes a movie because the actress wore a Nine Inch Nails tee, but there's no NIN music featured in the film.  Woah, you're right — I should never watch that film again!

Oh, of course there's an audience for a lot of this.  The audience isn't much brighter than the creator; it's the joke with the bear again.  The creator doesn't have to be smart; the creator just has to be less stupid than the viewer.

But, this doesn't last.  Like a television show, creators run out of content; they run out of stories to tell and ideas to share.  They run out of nerve, resisting any chance of offending the viewers they do have.  And like a tv show past its 8th season, the creator starts to crack.  Soon it is going through the motions, making money but oh gawd we're tired ... and worse than that, we started doing this as a teenager and now we're moving into our thirties, and we don't have an education.  We don't know if we can get one.  We've been playing video games, day in and day out, for eleven years ...

In some ways, success is worse than failure.  But we can talk about that another day.

People will tell you that if you want success, do something popular.  Do it regularly.  Make a plan.  Don't expect success right away.  Keep it fresh.  There's nothing wrong with this advice — unless you're counting on success right away because you need it to pay your bills; or if you hate everything popular (that's me!); or you haven't time to do it regularly, or you can't because it's sucking you dry; or you have no idea how to make a plan; and that while you have a desire to make money, you're not really, shall we say ... imaginative.

Well ... if you can teach yourself how to edit videotape, you can go through the entire Marvel film library and take a cut of every time Tony Stark says "Pepper" and clip it together.  Then pretend that's a sign of how creative you are.

Or ... you can do what artists have done for millennia.  You can learn how to do something.  Like the fellow at the top of this post.  You can gather together a set of skills that will enable you to do things that ordinary, everyday people cannot do, but which is fascinating enough to watch for a time.  It matters that very few other people can do it — or are willing to do it.  It matters that you're proud of it; that you believe in it; that you know how to do it; and that when you're confronted on it, you can explain yourself.

This requires an education.  Practice.  And if you're at all interested in doing this seven years from now, passion.  Let me assure you that seven years of your life isn't very long.  It seems long, especially when you're young and you've never done anything for as long as seven years — except go to school.  If and when you get on the other side of those seven years; when you're tired and ready to quit; when you don't know how to tell your thousands of followers that you've got to quit ... that's when you realize the whole rest of your life is an unbelievably long time.  And you've just spent seven of it pissing yourself into a shame spiral.

You can't plan if you don't know what you're doing.  And you can "keep it fresh" if you understand very little about what "it" is.  You can make a bunch of money for awhile acting like a clown, for popularity's sake, but money goes away, and the people who think you're wonderful go away and find someone else that's wonderful.  You can be a one-hit-wonder on the internet, just like in real life.  You can be famous for awhile ... and play your hits for awhile ... until one day you find yourself starting a new iteration of yourself.  Failing.  And then a new iteration.  And failing again.  As you hate yourself, you hate what you've become, you hate the fans that have abandoned you and you just hate.  Until you're at some job where you hope, you pray, that no one will recognize you; and you know you never want to tell anyone that once, 15 years ago, you had 1,675,000 followers on youtube.

Being a creator is great.  I'm a creator.  I'm a little fish in a very, very tiny pond — so tiny that many people haven't heard of my pond.  And in my pond, I swim all the time in the enormous shadow of an entity that receives carte blanche, even if it's done nothing to deserve that in 30+ years, while all the creators of the entity are dead now or pathetically trading on name recognition.  The big voices in my pond are celebrities on the template of Adam West ... fabulously nice guy, made an iconic TV show, toured all the game cons until he passed recently; but absolutely not respected among his "peers," that being other actors (not game-con goers), who did not consider him one of their number.

Still, however small that I am, I know what I'm doing.  I can discuss any part of this game with anyone; I can teach anyone how to play better, if they want to play better.  I can produce and create completely new things, even though I've been at this 40 years.  And I love it.  I feel no shame.  No sense of time wasted.  No regret.  I don't wonder what I'm going to be doing for the next 30 years of my life.  I got my education.  I did my practice.  I found my passion.

I went through a rough patch after 2016.  It can happen to anyone.  When it happens to you, believe me, you want your ducks in a row.  You want people you can count on; you want skills you developed early in life that will keep you alive after.  For me, thank the stars I learned to be a good cook in my 20s, as it kept me alive in my 50s.  I had other skills.  I learned to sell myself, and write.  I can change.  Roll with the punch.  None of which things I would have been able to do if I had been handed internet money early in my life, before learning to do something else.

So be careful.  Get on the net, make your channel, sell your stuff.  But don't stop learning.  Don't stop stretching.  Give good content; and make it of use to other people.  Play to the lowest common denominator, play to the groundlings, and you'll find yourself without anything or anyone and a long, long time left in front of you.  Think a long way into the future, because you're going to be here a long time.

Changing Alignment

This heading can be found on page 25 of the original DMG.  I suggest reading it closely.  The entire passage is anathema to player agency, the right of the player to control his or her own character.  It speaks of the player being in service to some deity and equating alignment with that deity.  It encourages punishments like a loss of level, expectations of atonement, sacrificing large piles of treasure and an assurance that the DM will make the player "acts accordingly."  It is poisonous, abusive and worthless to the spirit of any game that's about advancement, learning from mistakes and the players choosing their own path.

When a player starts a cleric or a paladin in my game, I ask the player to select a religion.  I don't ask the player to adhere to a behaviour towards that religion; nor do religions in my game presuppose a specific outlook.  It should be plain to anyone that in any religion, there are those who — religious leaders included — practice the tenets of the religion and those that don't.  Leaders and followers alike cherry-pick which parts of the holy writings they want to obey, and judging by the results, Gawd, Jeebus and Abbah don't give a good goddamn one way or the other.  My religions obey the teachings of history: it is  perfectly okay for a player cleric to argue that those not born in the religion are heathens and can't be saved (Presbyterianism), that anyone arbitrarily selected can be named demon-possessed, that demon-possessed people can be burned freely, so long as political power approves, that genocide is legitimate so long as the murdered people are "on our land," that rape of heathens isn't really rape, that theft is good so long as it's done in the name of the invoked deity, that those of the same religion can be first cast out and then killed, that torture is a sanctioned means of forcing a blasphemer to confess ... and that doing all this and CALLING oneself good, righteous, holy, saintly, heaven-bound and full of grace is proof positive that the speaker is honest and truthful.

As such, I don't excommunicate player characters for doing any of these things ... because every religion has done every one of these things, and most of the worst practitioners of these crimes are viewed today as virtuous, godly, pious, infallible and spotless.  My religions will excommunicate a player cleric or paladin for one crime, and one crime only:  betrayal.  Not betrayal of their codes, not betrayal of humanity, not betrayal of decency or morality.  No, betrayal of the other religious thieves, pirates, tyrants, autocrats, etcetera, who arbitrarily get to decide the loyalty of those who belong to their club.

So, as a cleric, as long as you don't fuck over your brothers and sisters, you're free to FUCK OVER everyone else.

Welcome to religion.

Now, this isn't a version of religion that we teach little children.  Little children are, and were, taught this version.  And this version.  And this version and this version.  All of them top ten hits in their time.  When we sell religion publicly, we sweep all that nasty truth under the carpet; we pretend that all those people got their comeuppance, or that they were somehow "just bad apples" ... while continuing to live in cities named after them, celebrating holy names in their name and being "thankful" that they cleaned out dem heathens from de good ol' New World.  Most every horror perpetrated in the world has been done in the name of some religion (and, yes, the Eastern ones too!) ... and then justified.

So no, the company obviously has to pretend that clerics are goody-goody people, except those occasional baddies ... and pretend that clerics calling themselves good actually ARE good, because obviously they are.  They said they were!

Then why, the Gentle Reader might ask, would I let player characters behave in this obviously horrendous way.  It should be pretty clear to the reader, from my tone, that I don't approve of religions hypocrisy.  Then why approve of it in my game world?

Because I won't morally judge of my fellow over their choice to commit a fictitious action.

I am not the almighty telling my liberated, agency-starved players what is right and what is wrong.  I believe that humans, specifically the sort of humans whose company I'm willing to keep, are sensible enough to recognize that the pursuit of extreme vice makes a dull life.

As teenagers, I remember, we took much glee in slaughtering hosts of creatures, committing crime, engaging in debauchery, bathing in the blood of our victims and so on.  I remember doing much, much worse things with my peers at 16 then I read about online.  There was no "online," so we had no overarching community to curb our indulgences.  We were a small group making our own fun, laughing at the suffering of imaginary beings, completely unrestrained in our cruelties.

That word there is the key to why.  "Unrestrained."  Like all teenagers, every day was a nuanced form of restraint against everything we dreamed of, hoped for, thought of ourselves and considered important.  Every day we were told to fit ourselves to a standard, obey, behave, work hard for things we didn't want, enslave ourselves to a clock, take shit from authority and eat that shit with a smile.  Our music was violent, our sports were violent and our gaming was violent.  The expression of violence was the expression of freedom, since the constant restraint on our emotions made us inconsolable.  I wish I could explain what it was to be in a world that looked every bit as much like it was burning down as it does now, only without the shallow but visceral support of social media, without the constant presence of choosable programming, without being able to tap a button and hear someone say the things we were feeling inside.  We were alone.  Except for those few moments when we, um, got off the chain.

Getting out of high school, getting into university, getting out from under our parent's thumbs, having the freedom to publicly pursue sex, drink, whatever we liked ... changed everything.  We had other ways to handle stress; and less stress to handle, to be honest, though I've often heard people claim that university was far more stressful than being an imprisoned child.  That's a delusion speaking.  In any case, our gaming shifted away from vice, because our access to the real thing made gaming about it ... silly.  Education made our gaming very different.  Learning gave us choices.  A sense of personal responsibility pushed us towards self-respect and mindfulness.  Players who still wanted to "burn down the bar" got pushed out of our circle.

I can tell players in my game that they can "do anything they want" with confidence that they will do things of which they want to be proud.  That's been the case for 35 years.  So while I say that a cleric doesn't have to adhere to a code, because clerics throughout history didn't, that doesn't matter.  The clerics in my game WANT to adhere to a code.  Their code.  Not mine.

And the idea that I should punish them somehow because their code doesn't perfectly reconcile with mine?

Holy fuck.  What kind of a shithead treats people that way?

Alignment Language

After two-and-a-quarter pages dedicated to alignment, Gygax adds a third of a page to this subject.  And then another half page to "changing alignment," which unfortunately I'll have to tackle later.  In toto, Gygax dedicated 1% of the DMG's content to alignment here; and later, he'll talk about it more.  I can't imagine any subject of less relevance to D&D; or any content that is a greater waste of my time.  But this isn't "my" time; this is the reader's time ... and with alignment continuing to be a central theme in D&D, with hundreds of thousands of DMs, I'm stuck.

Right off, Gygax states,

"Alignment language is a handy game tool which is not unjustifiable in real terms. Thieves did employ a special cant. Secret organizations and societies did and do have certain recognition signs, signals, and recognition phrases — possibly special languages (of limited extent) as well. Consider also the medieval Catholic Church which used Latin as a common recognition and communication base to cut across national boundaries."

He hasn't explained what it is yet and already he's defending its inclusion.  He stresses that the thieves "did" have a cant, clearly having argued with people about it, since he's anxious to hang the concept on it.  Thieves didn't, not really; the essential reliable sources suggest more of a slang than a "language," which we have today and which children still habitually develop.  His phrasing that special languages "possibly" existed doesn't make a strong case, either.  But most idiotic of all is that he thinks "personality" is a logical basis for a language, rather than the examples he gives of societies, cabals and professions.  But then, in his system, all the druids would be of like alignment and all the thieves as well.  As if this were sensible, given what we know of thieves, criminals or other groups that gather.

This language was supposed to be secret and limited to a few score words (again, obviously slang).  In places, the way it's presented is rather ridiculous:

"Druids could discuss at length and in detail the state of the crops, weather, animal husbandry and foresting; but warfare, politics, adventuring, and like matter would be impossible to detail with the language."

My, that's useful.  It's ever so important to keep those needful details about crop growth from becoming common knowledge!  Good thing there are no farmers around to witness the weather and husbanded animals — they might spill the beans.

Consider this line that starts the third paragraph:

"Any character foolish enough to announce his or her alignment by publicly crying out in that alignment tongue will incur considerable social sanctions."

Clearly, Gygax felt the players should metagame their alignments In Game as part of their character's make-up.  It's all so strange, it's no wonder the section has dropped through the cracks, as it were.

I feel an apology is warranted.  It's hasn't been my goal in discussing the DMG to cut into Gygax point-by-point ... but the previous content, spanning four pages, deserves nothing else.  With so many useful and concrete aspects to set up and make practical in my game world, I don't have any interest in devising languages that will enable players to talk about crops or inquire about the health of someone else of the same alignment.  Since when is openly stating in a public forum, "I feel fine, thank you," considered a subversive statement?  I find myself pounding my head on the table.  Any game-writer foolish enough to announce his or her dumbfuckery to this degree by publicly crying out in English words should incur considerable written sanctions!

I'll probably come around to the subject again, when reaching that point in the DMG, but language is very limited as a game feature in role-playing.  The game is communication, between players and between the party & DM.  Any information critical to the game that's stated in another language by another race, or written on a wall, will eventually have to be stated in the language used by the players; so the only real use of an unreadable language is to suspend the time between when the party sees the lettering and when the party discovers what the lettering means.  This is sometimes useful; but very, very rarely.  I suspect it is overused among DMs, as I've had an online player enter my world as a 1st level mage, taking Comprehend Languages as one of his initial three spells.

This baffled me, though I let it slide.  A low-level mage is a spongy punching bag where combat is concerned; they can't fight, they can't take damage, when they do hit it's a pin-prick.  Yet, with three well-chosen spells, cast at critical moments, they can turn the tide of a losing battle and preserve the party.  This takes skill: to recognize WHEN to cast and WHAT to have in one's arsenal.  Stripping that arsenal by one-third in order to take an expositional spell, which will only reveal information that will ultimately become revealed in time anyway, is like my saying you can have only three apps on your phone, period, and you choose one that will tell you when the bus comes.

From the choice, I must extrapolate that the "you don't understand their language" is a well that other DMs go to constantly, so much that it's desperately needful because the experience is so fucking annoying.  When I first began to play, we dutifully wrote down that we understood elvish, orcish, goblinish and gnoll, or whatever the hell else ... which played out as a redundancy whenever we would talk to elves, orcs, goblins or whatever.  "Oh, I speak (blank)," we would say, and then an ordinary conversation would commence, in our table's language ... which spoiled any sense of "specialness" that pretending to speak in another language provided.  I quickly understood what a waste of time this was; why go through the pretense of other languages when we were going to say everything in English anyway?  So I dropped it from my game, never looked back, and never had a player express any wish for me to reinstall the language concept.

Occasionally, I put something on a wall the players can't read.  It makes a nice decoration.  They know they're going to find out what it says anyway, so they don't fret much.  And if someone happens to have a scroll of comprehend languages (who the hell would waste a spell-slot with it?), then it's nice.

That's most of what I have to say on language.  I've said it before, but hell, never hurts to re-iterate a relevant point.

Alignment

There it is.  Page 23 of the DMG.

Can't get out of it.

Sigh.

To give myself some courage, let's post this praise from JB's Blackrazor blog:

"He's [JB's son] using all the AD&D rules he can remember...yes, including weapon length and speed factor, etc...and is keeping careful track of time and light sources and wandering monsters and all that jazz. The main difference ... besides dropping alignment ... is that he is using Alexis Smolensk's experience system, which has been standard in our house since May 2019. It necessitates tracking damage inflicted and received, but that's still a lot easier than it sounds (as even a ten year old Dungeon Master can manage it)"

There.  Narcissistic courage gained.  JB jibed at me a couple of days that I should be proud that his boy isn't using alignment.  I am.  I'm damn proud.

I've tried today to find a semblance of something in alignment; to be merciful on some ground about some aspect of the rule set.  No, sorry, I can't find it.

I know of people who identify as "good" ... Danskin made an excellent 6-part video set about this.  The last video takes its time explaining how the whole good/bad dichotomy is used by human beings to rationalize tremendously shitty things they do, while gratifying themselves with the belief that its okay to do those things, because they're "good."  Think mass shooter here, where the mass shooter doesn't think he's evil, but instead thinks he's good, because he's killing all the evil people.  Good and bad have only subjective meaning, which means its a terrible foundation for describing what sort of person a player character is.  It makes no sense.

Likewise, in large extent, everyone is fundamentally lawful.  A serial killer who's just buried a thirteenth body in a string will go to the pump, fill their car with gas and pay for it, because that's a practical way to behave.  They'll obey stop signs and they'll speed occasionally — we don't put people in jail because they're fundamentally "unlawful" ... every person that's in a jail right now obeyed 99.99% of the laws that exist.  Even if you tried very, very hard to be "chaotic", the so-called opposite of lawful, you'd still accidentally obey 99.9% of the laws we've made as a society because it wouldn't occur to you that a lot of the things you sensibly do have a law saying you should do that thing sensibly.  The only people who are truly "chaotic" also can't function in society.  By that, I don't mean they fail to get along with society, I mean they can't function.  This is why we institutionalise them, or walk wide circles around them, because they have serious mental health issues.  Let's be clear.  One of these people would not make a very good ranger.

Gygax clearly meant something else by the term "chaotic": specifically, anti-social, at least where rangers are concerned.  However, anti-social isn't the diametric opposite of lawful.  Hermits are very careful about building and dousing fires; many of our laws come from the commonsense teachings of people who deliberately lived apart from human society, then wrote books or gave lectures about their experiences.

Finally, the word "neutral" doesn't mean anything.  If you're concerned about your own survival, as you must be if you're a player, you're not neutral by definition.  If you're a druid, the class designated as having to be neutral, and you have a belief system based on the survival of nature and animals vs. humans, again, you're NOT neutral.  "Neutral" is a mock cloak that players put on when they feel apathetic, until they take the cloak off so they can act in a way they care about, only to put the cloak on again while saying, "That didn't happen."  It's bullshit.  Worse, its codified bullshit.

The words used to make combinations that designate alignment AREN'T OBJECTIVE.  It is impossible to hold players to a subjective standard, unless the goal is to subjectively dick them around while pretending that this is all logical.  Since Gygax plainly feels the words are objective, we may reasonably describe him as a cognitively dissonant asshole who loved the inventive mental fuck machine that empowered him to mind fuck his players.

And for this behaviour ... he's praised.  He's monumentalized.  This is a strange thing to do with a profoundly narcissistic prick, but here we are.

Alignment is the bastard child of D&D.  It's a warped pretension that's launched ten thousand reddit arguments and a million memes.  You can't make a television show without some D&Der taking stuffing its characters into an alignment grid.  Alignment is the relentless Floridian sinkhole that will, given time, submerge the entire state.  It's Gilligan.  It's the bear from The Winter's Tale.  It's the albatross around the mariner's neck.

We'll never get rid of it.

Lycanthropy

 All right.  Now that this trail has gone cold, let's pick it up again.

Gygax, as quoted already says in his explanation of The Monster as a Player Character that:

"You have advice as to why they [monsters] are not featured, why no details of monster character classes are given herein."

In the very next section, I shit you not, Gygax provides a page and a quarter (pp.22-23) with rules on how to manage a character that's been made a lycanthrope, how to run the character AS lycanthrope, rules against experience gained when acting as a lycanthrope, what conditions cause a player to turn into a lycanthrope on a given night of the month and suggestions on what should matter to a character's future behaviour if they are turned into, respectively, a werebear, wereboar, wererat, weretiger or werewolf.

Yep.  Gygax — who either has a split personality, or who takes the credit for other things written by other people, or may just possibly be a hypocrite, as I've said earlier — on the page after writing a long diatribe as to why monster characters shouldn't be played, writes an even longer section on how to play this specific type of monster character.

I tried, when I was young, dumb and full of cum, to run these rules.  They don't work.  They don't make a good game.  The player, sick of the sequence, removed the curse after three months of running the character once a week and it was never spoken of in our group again.  In all the time since, I've been hesitant to run were-anythings.  The 3rd level cure disease spell, and the presence of a paladin in the party, makes the "lycanthropy threat" as meaningful as a bad cold; and so, I don't treat it as a disease.  The lycanthrope actually kills the victim; wastes all its hit points; then flees with the victim, to ensure the victim will turn into the lycanthrope: and then the victim is DEAD, period, even if it is killed again.

Thus, lycanthropy is as serious a form of death as any method of reproducing the undead.  What makes death by the nastier of undead especially frightening?  Permanency.  Transformed by a shadow into a shadow, you can't be raised.  When Lucy Westenra is transformed into a vampire, and is killed with a stake by her fiancee Arthur Holmwood, she doesn't transmogrify back into a human and they kiss.  She is dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  If you think that you can always escape death as a player character by shelling out cash for resurrection, don't die by wight, vampire or werewolf.

If the character becomes any of these things, then NO, the character doesn't get to run the monster.  This isn't Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you're not Oz, you're not Spike, you're not Angel.  In this particular case, I am very old school.

When Lucy—I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape — saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in his hands.

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said: —

"Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!"

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones — something of the tingling of glass when struck—which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.

As Seward, Morris and Holmwood realise, it is not Lucy at all — not any more.  She is a monster.  And this is what some monsters truly are ... if not evil, then certainly things so hideous that they cannot be tolerated and let free.  They must be destroyed, even if they were things once loved by the destroyers.

These themes are utterly lost to the seminal gratifications of modern writers, pun intended.  The trials of monster killing is not the childish syndrome of "ought we destroy the monsters?" ... but what do we lose of ourselves when we're forced to murder even the most hideous of things?  What price do we pay in defending decency or rightness?  What are we, once we've seen the worst the world has to offer?  What have we left to hope for?

It is hard to bring a party around to experience this; most, naturally do not want to experience it.  No one wants to be Seward, above, describing Lucy throwing the half-murdered child aside, before attempting to seduce her husband.  But "want" has nothing to do with it.  The underlying horrors of lycanthropy and other unnatural abominations are keys on the piano that the DM can play, if we dare investigate the sounds they make.  And if players can be made to hear that awful music, upsetting as that would be, the payback is an adventure the players won't quickly shelve in their minds.  We use the word "haunt" to describe memories that won't go away.

As a DM, I strive to leave those memories.

I can't do that by reducing lycanthropy to a bad case of warts.

Travel & Encounters

I've finished the 1st draft of my Authentic wiki's Travel page.  At more than 8,500 words, it is the longest page on my wiki.  It covers ten elements related to travel: getting started, being on the road, riding mounts, using vehicles, crossing rivers, finding a place to stay, dealing with town gates and fees, sea travel, weather and, finally, encounters.  This last is a short addition, but I'd like to reproduce it here, then return to writing posts about the original Dungeon Masters Guide.

Encounters

Chance run-ins with other persons, vermin and monsters are more than situations calling for combat. While the interrupt the flow of an adventure, encounters also provide opportunities to provide players with knowledge of the game world. Individuals met on roads or in meeting places will speak of interesting places, tell stories, inform the players about current events and bring news from far away. Vermin tests the players' preparation and enables them to practice their tactics against foes that offer little threat; a well-equipped party should be able to dispatch a few vermin very easily. Monsters make good side quests, or could be part of the adventure coming to meet the players before the players meet them.

It is all a matter of how the DM shapes and manages the game world. If encounters seem too random, then we should make them less so. If encounters seem frivolous, give them a reason for being there. If an encounter on the road isn't a part of the adventure, then make it a part of the adventure. Only a narrow mind believes the only solution to an unsatisfactory encounter is to get rid of it.

Encounters are the natural consequence of travel: to visit new places and see new people. And yes, as the joke goes, to kill them, but also to discover them, to understand them and to learn from them. Encounters must be more than a die roll generating wandering monsters. They must be the reason to travel — the motivation that makes adventuring a worthwhile occupation.

End of April News

Some news, what's happening, ordinary day to day things.

Met my new doctor today; my former doctor retired at the end of March.  This was just a follow-up to my procedure last week and an opportunity to introduce ourselves.  He asked what I did and I explained that I was a writer, that among other things I produced material for Dungeons & Dragons.  The doctor didn't know what that was, so I answered a few questions and he went to look it up on the computer during our brief visit.  This was a very interesting opportunity for me, as I'll explain.

If you don't know, google tailors everybody's searches based on what they've searched for in the past.  If I look myself up on google, I come up first, because I search my own pages all the time and I'm always here.  The doctor, however, had never searched for D&D, ever.  It was a completely virgin search.  He wasn't sure what he was searching for so I had him type "D&D" ... just that.  The official page for the company came up.  I asked him to add "Alexis" to the search and there I was, the 5th result on the page.  Granted, there aren't that many people in the English world with my name, but I still find this very reassuring.

I mentioned on my Juvenis campaign yesterday that I'm planning to relocate to another residence come June 1st.  This is possible in large part from my patreon subscribers and other sources.  There's also been some movement on my book sales and patreon due to the efforts of Mark, who is in part freelancing as a business manager for me.  I met Mark about a year ago online, and since then twice in person; he's here in Calgary.  My book sales are up with Amazon and so in my patreon.  He's even arranged a little funding through a third party to help pay for my running a table at a game con, once those start going again.  I'm looking into Vancouver, Seattle and Portland; no telling if I'll be able to go farther afield or not.  I've started paying Mark a nominal fee for this work; I hope I can give him a little more in the future.

Because of these things, and in part because Tamara became legal in Canada just before covid started, we've gotten ourselves, at last, out of the troubles that began in 2015.  These have been five hard years and, thank you patrons, thank you buyers of my books, we're seeing the light of day at last.  Unquestionably, the support you've given us these last years has made the difference.  Slowly, I'm learning to breathe easy.

I'm hoping that once we move, I can buy some equipment that will let me do some decent recording.  I'm not convinced my future is in podcasting, but there's at least one experiment I'm game to try.  More on that later.

The poster has suffered this last month from other things; it is not dead!  Frustratingly, it's not on time either, but that's how it is with commitments and working.  I hope to have something exciting to show in 2-3 weeks, that my daughter and I expect to blow your socks off.  It's certainly made a stir with those people with whom we've discussed it.

So, with that ... oh, I wanted to say that the Travel page on my Authentic Wiki now makes it the longest page on the whole wiki that isn't about history: it's third longest overall.  6,000 words.

As a side note, this may be the first April in a decade that's passed without my encountering the stupid D&D april challenge.  I hope the concept is finally dead.

Be well.

Assisted Travel Overland

Further content on the Authentic Wiki.

Mounted Travel

Travelling by mount allow many possibilities, including travel by horse, camel, donkey, mule, flying mount, elephant and underwater mount. Further details on these choices can be found through the links given; speed of movement in all cases is calculated in AP. With flying and underwater mounts, because of the surface being ridden upon, base movement rates must be specially calculated.

Riding any animal requires knowledge; those who do not know how must either be assisted or be allowed to ride behind those with ability. There may not be enough people in a party to enable everyone to ride; however, as players increase in level, more sage abilities are accumulated, as well as additional party members. Riding is also a skill that can be taught by characters with instruction, players and non-players alike. Taking the right steps, a group of player characters can eventually get everyone mounted, enabling greater distances covered in a day, while carrying more gear and enjoying greater comfort.

Most animals cannot be ridden continuously for ten hours, however. Excepting camels, most must be watered two or three times a day; depending on the mount, between 1 and 4 hours of the day must be spent leading the animal, resting it's back and slowing travel to a walk. Details can be found by researching the mount used. Horses are the most common mount; they need to be walked four hours out of every ten.

Many unusual animals that can be ridden, such as kailla, giant striders, axe beak or the titanothere pictured, require skills that cannot be found in the usual collection of player character sage abilities. To learn how to ride these creatures, the players must seek out cultural humanoids for whom those sage abilities are native. Druids as they achieve greater knowledge in animals do learn how to ride unusual beasts, including lions, bears, tigers, zebras and more — but this ability involves a symbiotic relationship between the druid class and the animal; such animals cannot be ridden by those of other character classes.

Vehicle Travel

Like with travel on foot and mount, vehicles are also limited by encumbrance to determine their total action points, but their movement is likewise taken into account with the movement table above. Carts need at minimum a cart path or better form of route — though in some landscapes, such as steppe, savanna, veldt and tundra, carts can be navigated through the wild. Wagons need a dirt road or better; sometimes, to enable the passage of these vehicles into hinterland mines and camps, corduroy roads are built as an alternative; these are parallel logs laid side-by-side to make a passable trackway. Carriages can ride on dirt roads but will not stand up to the punishment of corduroy roads.

The best roads are easy on a vehicle's wheels. Break rolls are checks that must be made each day to see whether the vehicle's progress has caused an event such as an axle break, cracked hub or failed wheel brake. These are made once per day. High roads are so easy on wagons that when travelling on them for any part of the day, for game purposes no break roll needs to be made. The break roll on a low road is 1 in 100; on a cobbled road, 1 in 80; on a dirt road, 1 in 60; and on a cart track, 1 in 36 (snake eyes). Cart paths are very hard on carts, with a break roll of 1 in 16 per day (two 1s on 2d4).

Passengers aboard vehicles contribute to their encumbrance, so in some cases speed can be improved by having some of the travelling party walk, or ride animals if they're able, to reduce the load carried.

Fords, Bridges & Ferries

Fords, bridges and ferries represent places where a route crosses over a river, although occasionally a ferry will cross a narrow part of a lake. The appearance of each depends on the type of road being travelled and the size of the river being crossed. River dimensions are expressed as a number of points, with streams having 1-6 points and rivers having seven or more. Very large rivers may have thousands of point. Each point represents a discharge of 1 cubic yard per second; this may represent a stream-bed that 3 yards wide and 1 foot deep, or 1½ yards wide and 2 feet deep. Discharge is used as the measure because streams and rivers will have differently formed beds in different regions.

Fords

Fords are shallow places with good footing where a river or stream may be crossed by wading, in water potentially as shallow as several inches. They may be impassable during high water. Fords tend to be found in low-infrastructure areas, because where infrastructure is high, the one-time ford was used as the best place to build a bridge. Places with the suffix -ford, -furt, -voorde or -brod, as well as other examples, are usually named after a ford that existed there at one time, or still exists. Tolls are not charged on fords.

Some high, low or cobbled roads will be laid below the water level of a stream (up to 6 pts), making these easy places for wagons to cross. Called a Watersplash, they may be exposed or nearly so during the dry season, and are deeper than 18 inches perhaps once a century. Some tidal crossings are also called by this name. Watersplashes are found only in England, Italy and Finland.

Bridges

Bridges are wooden or stone structures built to span a physical obstacle, most commonly a river or gorge. They provide passage for roads where it is otherwise difficult or impossible to cross. Wooden bridges outside of towns are usually private; inside towns, wooden bridges are preferred because of the number needed. Bridges across rivers with 7 or more points on travel routes are built of stone 19 times out of 20, because they need to be reliable in times of war and once built allow for long periods between maintenance. Bridges over streams (1-6 pts.) will be wooden 19 times out of 20.

Where infrastructure is high there will be many free bridges where no toll is charged; these are maintained by the kingdom or republic and are free access because it promotes the movement of trade. Bridges over larger river courses are more expensive and therefore charge tolls. Tolls are also charged on in less infrastructured areas because less resources leave only this option to provide coin for maintenance. A bridge toll is calculated as 1 copper piece (c.p.) per point of river or stream crossed, per person or animal.

Though occasionally bridges are obstructed by traffic, or closed for damage, or experience a broken vehicle which causes delays that may last hours, these things are rare enough they don't need checking. Perhaps 1 in 100 if the DM feels compelled.

Ferries

These are typically barges able to support weights up to ten tons, including wagons, carriages, animals and so forth. They operate by a line that's stretched across the river or stream, which may be a heavy cable as thick as three inches; this rests at water level, enabling river traffic to cross over it. On small streams, where the rope is light, the ferry can be pulled across the river by hand, usually by the ferryman taking hold of the rope at one end and walking the length of the boat. Heavier cables on larger rivers must be pulled by a capstan, which lifts the rope onto the ferry drawing it through a groove in the deck and laying it back into the river. The ferry will usually have a fin rudder that's set to edge the front of the boat towards the current, but usually ferries are set at river locations where the surface current is slow-moving. It is not uncommon to have two ferry barges operating at the same time to speed movement. Typically, a party will wait 2 minutes per river or stream pt. when crossing by this method.

The cost for a ferry is set at 1½ c.p. per stream point per person or animal, regardless of how much is carried (fractions are rounded up).

Boat Docks for Transshipment

When a river is too wide to be crossed any other way, on the most important roads there will be docks where boats or barges can be loaded. The method is inconvenient and costs time, particularly when hauling goods or driving animals. Because use of the watercraft is at a premium, they are competed for — and usually merchants who are part of a guild, and have crossed the river many times before, receive attention before strangers crossing for the first time. Riverboats will work from first light until dusk.

Presume that it takes 1-3 hours to hire a boat, usually because all the boats this side of the river are engaged, and the party must wait for a boat to arrive. It will require 2 man-hours per ton of goods and animals to load a boat; some boats will have harnesses and netting that will allow animals to swim alongside a boat while supported so they do not drown. Players may engage as many boats as they wish, and up to 6 persons may be engaged in loading a boat (so that six persons can load a ton of goods in about 20 minutes). It is not only a matter of getting the goods onto the boat; these must be arranged, balanced and secured carefully for the journey. For game purposes, it also requires 2 man-hours per ton to unload a boat and ready all goods to be road-ready for leaving the river.

Crossings without Services

Some roads leading down to large rivers will offer no services whatsoever for crossing. Merchants who know the journey will plan for this by bringing along materials for building rafts, or carrying actual boats with them to cross this obstacle. A party must make whatever provisions they can, or travel up river until they can find a suitable place to cross.

On the Road

To get out of a town or city, the party can rely on signs attached to houses or posts that will point the right way, so they may find themselves on the right road. The type of road that's found depends on the local population density and infrastructure, with intrinsic details on these matters being covered on the links given. Routes will be made of paving stone, cobbles, pounded dirt-clay or no better than grass and natural surfaces. Progressively less accessible roads will be recognized by ruts for cartwheels, heavy vegetation and the narrowness of passage.

Any intersection that includes at least one dirt road or better will have a road sign pointing the way to distant villages, towns and cities. There is little chance that these signs will go missing or lay broken at the side of the road, as there are locals who will check on their presence once per day. Every five or ten miles along cobbled and stone roads, depending on the region, there will typically be a marker telling the distance to the next down or from the last, posted on the left hand-side of the road.

Movement Pace

Understanding that player characters have a choice about how fast they can walk, or stride, we expect players to notice more if they're ambling more slowly towards their destination. There is a difference between "passing through" a wilderness and actively searching it for a lair or a dungeon. In any case, a full day's movement is considered to be 10 hours. Travelling longer than this in a day is considered a forced march, which can have detrimental effects to the character's health. In all cases, a single hour's movement can be calculated easily by dividing the full day's movement by 10.

Player characters may opt for short bursts of faster or slower movement for an hour at a time. Lesser periods are difficult to track, and so should be discouraged; all long-term movement should be calculated in hours and not minutes.

Ambling

Ambling describes a stride-2 movement, or 10 feet per action point (AP) per round. In travel terms, with necessary rests and reliefs, calculates to 2.6 miles per hour on high roads. The ambling pace allows many stops, opportunities to speak with other travellers and locals, while giving a good sense of the region. Characters who choose to amble will remember the location of roadhouses and water sources; the names of villages; places of interest and even the names of residents. Returning to areas ambled through gives a +2 bonus to wisdom checks in locating these places and a +2 to charisma checks when speaking with residents.

When searching wide areas for unknown sites, such as a dungeon, an ambling pace is mandatory. Each individual or group can effectively search up to 42.7 acres per AP, per day; a single unencumbered person can search 213 acres in a day, while three separate parties can search a square mile of land per day. A 2-mile hex could be searched completely in a little more than 4 days.

Walking

Walking is a stride-3 movement, or 15 feet per AP per round. This is a normal travelling pace, enabling efficient progress without exhaustion. Most ordinary travellers walk at this point. It still allows friendly banter with others moving in the same direction and at the same pace, though it assumes the characters prioritize travel over gazing at the surroundings. The speed is 3.9 miles per hour on high roads. Three rests of 15-20 minutes are taken into account for the distances given. A party moving at this pace will feel moderately footsore at the day's end. Features seen along the way can be found again if the character returns to an area passed through, but without a +2 bonus to wisdom; no bonus to charisma is gained because the character didn't stop to speak to locals.

Hurrying

Hurrying is a stride-4 movement, or 20 feet per AP per round. When hurrying, the players are walking very fast or slowly jogging; they are too focused on the road surface to see much that's going on around them. Others on the road are dodged or passed. Characters moving at this speed, 5.2 miles per hour on a high road, will sweat and feel their equipment rubbing their shoulders and hips raw. A ten minute stop is needed every hour, during which time the characters will be panting and concerned with rehydrating their bodies. Stops will usually occur whenever open water is sighted. Nothing about the country passed through will be remembered if the character passes through this way again. At the end of ten hours, the character will have to sit for half an hour before they can begin to make camp.

Rushing

Rushing is a stride-5 movement, describing the character pushing his or her self to their limits. Distance is 25 feet per AP per round. While the character can run faster, up to stride-8, this is the best speed that can be maintained for hours at a time. Every hour will require 15-20 minutes of rest, or slow movement, to resist becoming stiff. Water must be drunk in copious amounts. Nothing will be remembered from the journey. Because the forward movement it offers is only slightly better than hurrying, this is a stride usually employed in times of desperation, when every minute counts to stave off disaster. At the end of ten hours, the character will be too tired to make camp until an hour of laying prone. If the character fails a constitution check, they will fall asleep for 2-3 hours, so that it may be dark before the character awakes.

Moving as a Group

Though players may wish to travel tightly together, to be ready should an encounter happen, this isn't realistic where individuals are concerned. Different persons travel at different speeds, while stopping to take a rock out of their shoe, visit the bushes, fix their gear, take a drink, follow up a thought by looking at some odd object or a book, and a hundred other distractions. Arguments that arise will also break up a party for a mile or so. We may reasonably expect a party to be in sight of one another, or at least within earshot ... and at the same time be strung out over a distance of 15 to 90 yards. If an exact calculation is needed, roll 3d6 and multiply the result by 5: this will give the present distance between the frontrunner of the party and the last in line. If the DM wishes, a modifier of -1 can be applied to the roll for the first hour in the day.

Each character can then roll a d20, with the highest numbers at the front and the lowest at the rear. Comparing the numbers against the total distance will show how relatively close each player character is to the next. For example, Liam, Garner and Rena are stretched over a distance of 50 yards. On a d20, Liam rolls a 2, Garner rolls a 15 and Rena rolls a 7. Rena is closer to Liam, at the rear, than she is to Garner at the front. Exact distances can be determined by dividing 50 by the largest roll minus the smallest: 50/(15-2) = 3.85. Therefore, Rena is 19 yards ahead of Liam and 31 yards behind Garner.

These distances are not as great as imagined. An encumbered character with 3 AP, running full out at stride-8, can cover 40 yards in a single round. Therefore, even in the worst case scenario, it would take Garner only two rounds to reach Liam or vice-versa, while Rena can reach either in less than a round. Of course, much depends on if the party is surprised, and perhaps isolated from one another by a sizable party of bandits. A possible solution to this danger is to ride on mounts, enabling greater flexibility of movement, or travel in a single vehicle where the party will always be together.

Daybreak

For a bit, while I'm working on the Travel page of my wiki, I'm going to copy some of the material here. To try it out, as it were. This page is meant to describe the rough bones of details related to game travel, in as great a depth as seems practical. I'm going to post parts of the page when I write them, but more can be found by following the link. I will return to the DMG series, when I fail to be distracted by this.  Feel free to suggest details if they occur to you.

Before a day's journey can start, the party will have to prepare themselves, their gear and their means of transportation. This might mean starting from a camp; or from an inn or other public house; or even from their own home. Certain tasks will apply to all three, while the conditions for the party at daybreak will also have peculiar characteristics worthy of detail.

Making & Breaking Camp

All preparation for awaking and getting started in the outdoors begins with making camp the night before. The first concern is cooking. This must be done over a fire, which takes time to build. Wood needs to be gathered before it can be burnt. Failing to build a fire or eat hot food could mean illness from cold weather as well as parasites that are found in uncooked food.

Water needs to be gathered and animals tended. The characters will be busy with airing out their sweaty clothes, banging the dents out of their armour, sharpening their weapons, attending to repairs in equipment that wear and tear demands. Someone will need to take a walk around the camp to ensure the safety of the site, to check that the party hasn't settled near some large beastie's nest. Spellcasters will need time to study. Additionally, since my sage abilities are presumed to increase when a level is gained due to practice and meditation, this is also a part of settling down for the night.

Additionally, the characters will be tired. They are not machines. They will want to rest and enjoy themselves, tell stories, discuss events of the day and make plans for the morrow.

Come the next morning, these things have to be reversed. Gear must be gathered up, the fire kicked out, the tent taken down, the animals readied for travel and hitched to any vehicles the party may be using. The players must wash themselves, put on their dirty clothes, arrange their packs and insundries and stretch themselves for the journey ahead. There's a lot to do before starting off towards the next place.

Waking in a Public House

Most inns or roadhouses will offer some food in the morning, usually porridge, stewed greens and hot tea or coffee. This has a charge of course. The characters will be awakened by a knock on the door that will come half-an-hour after daybreak; this is automatic and it does not matter if the characters are leaving that day or staying over. Characters who don't want breakfast may roll over and return to sleep, but they won't be allowed to make their own hot food on the premises, so if they miss this first meal they will need to seek food somewhere outside the lodging (food won't be served again until evening).

After eating, the characters will return to their room to pack up. One or more persons must visit the stable to collect the party's animals, at a maximum of two animals per person. These animals will be watered, fed and brushed when collected. The stablemaster will sometimes point out any maladies in the animals that might have been noticed. If the party has a wagon, they will have stayed overnight in a roadhouse. Inns have no place to park a wagon.

The characters must settle up any costs with the premises, paying for any damage they've done; then they must drag their things out to the open street and load their animals there. Roadhouses that sit outside city or town walls have a yard, where the animals can be hitched up and things loaded. Inns have a stable but they do not have a yard, so this must be done publicly.

Once loaded, the players must spend a little time reaching the road for travel. This can be a few yards for a roadhouse, but can require a half-hour of tortured streets when getting out of a large city.

Leaving Home

This simplifies some things; the players can sleep in, make their own breakfast and there's plenty of room for hitching the animals. However, it will be necessary to build a fire to make coffee and breakfast, and the animals will have to be watered and readied for the day's travel.

A solution, whatever the situation, is to engage servants to do some of the work. At home, a servant can have the animals ready to go before the player characters awake; their breakfast can be made ready for them, their clothes brushed and laid out, most of the necessary goods already loaded, the axle wheels greased and so on. Some of this work can be done around a camp, with servants to collect wood and water, tend the animals and get the fire started in the morning. At an inn or lodge, personal servants are less useful, as they won't be given access to the inn's kitchen, but they can still fetch the animals and harness them.

The Monster as a Player Character: Part 2

Taking up this matter further.

A person might ask, "Why does it even matter?  Why not just let the baby have his bottle?"

I'm going to tell you a secret about managing people.  People, even hard working people, don't get along very well.  Whenever you give them something they want, you have to look the reward over very carefully, asking yourself, "Is this something that's going to help them work together, or is this something that's going to bend them apart?"  The more you give to a group that bends them apart, the flakier things get.  As Yeats said,

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity."

Yeats is speaking of England imbecilically sending troops to Ireland in 1919, but the metaphor holds.  Don't fuck with things just because they can be fucked with.  It just makes a mess.

There are many tangible, creative ways to prove one's individuality in D&D, through problem-solving, self-sacrifice, risk-taking and group dynamics.  Beware players who opt for reskinning their character superficially as a means of "expressing themselves."  Especially avoid players who use specifically those words as an argument.  As hard as it may be to imagine, if you want to keep a good solid group together, you must clamp down on the wrong kinds of individualism.  Make everyone play by the same rules and make them understand there's a reason why the default settings on character creation deliberately minimize options.  Originality comes from within — and not from which race you play.

Let's pick up Gygax's essay again, from page 21 of the original DMG:

"From all views then it is enough fantasy to assume a swords & sorcery cosmos, with impossible professions and make-believe magic. To adventure amongst the weird is fantasy enough without becoming that too! Consider also that each and every Dungeon Master worthy of that title is continually at work expanding his or her campaign milieu. The game is not merely a meaningless dungeon and an urban base around which is plopped the dreaded wilderness. Each of you must design a world, piece by piece, as if a jigsaw puzzle were being hand crafted, and each new section must fit perfectly the pattern of the other pieces. Faced with such a task all of us need all of the aid and assistance we can get. Without such help the sheer magnitude of the task would force most of us to throw up our hands in despair."

Oh, how I wish that what's said here was respected by the author himself, his company or anyone associated with him!  Is it not bewildering to hear these words spoken about plunking a dungeon next to a village from the man who built his career on such an approach?  Of course, I did not know in 1979, the book fresh in my hands, that these words were written by a fraud and a hypocrite.  Let's not quibble.  I ACCEPTED THESE WORDS AS DOGMA.  Without question, without hesitation, without a week going by between my having this book in my hands and my starting on the task, I set out to build a campaign milieu of the kind described.  Granted, that was in part because my first DM was committed to that ideal, as was every other DM I knew at the time, living as I did in an urban hotbed where I'd spoken to no less than 10 DMs before getting my hands on this hardcover book.  And, without a question, that first effort was an unmitigated disaster (about which we shall not speak).  Yet I do not concede the point; if I asked for a justification, for guidance, for emotional support for the creation of a personally built campaign setting, THERE are the words, good enough to be carved in stone on Gygax's mausoleum ... if the man hadn't been a faker and a cheat.

"By having a basis to work from, and a well-developed body of work to draw upon, at least part of this task is handled for us. When history, folklore, myth, fable and fiction can be incorporated or used as reference for the campaign, the magnitude of the effort required is reduced by several degrees. Even actual sciences can be used - geography, chemistry, physics, and so forth."

 Abso-fucking-lutely.

Gygax is speaking of human essentials and foundations, human behaviour, human habits, culture and mores.  He's saying, so much of the work has already been done for you!  Read, find what works for your setting and steal, baby, steal.  The genius is that these things have already proved their worth with millions of storybook readers and fireside tale-tellers.  Not just in this past few decades but for centuries.  These are things that every writer and inventor steals from!  Again and again we go back to the earliest works, the fundamental themes, the science of human endeavour, learning it, sorting it, shaping it in new ways and expressing it to a willing and anxious audience.  These melodies have proven themselves.  We don't have to sweat and cringe and hope the listeners will approve!  If we play the notes and chords well, if we practice our fingering, if we study and stretch ourselves, the spectators will pound the tables and stamp their feet with joy and approval.

But if we hold ourselves above such things ... if we're "too good" for the mass of human knowledge ... well Gygax has an answer for that too.

"Alien viewpoints can be found, of course, but not in quantity (and often not in much quality either). Those works which do not feature mankind in a central role are uncommon. Those which do not deal with men at all are scarce indeed. To attempt to utilize any such bases as the central, let alone sole, theme for a campaign milieu is destined to be shallow, incomplete, and totally unsatisfying for all parties concerned unless the creator is a Renaissance Man and all-around universal genius with a decade or two to prepare the game and milieu. Even then, how can such an effort rival one which borrows from the talents of genius and imaginative thinking which come to us from literature?"

It is in these words that I find my utter distaste for a game like Call of Cthulhu.  My feeling has long been that basing a role-playing games on a small set of books by a single third-rate author, whatever his peculiar appeal, makes for the dreariest game sessions.  Having read a half-dozen of the man's books, I find them formulaic and clumsy, not to mention hackneyed in plot development.  His plot contrivances, used in the same way in every novel, are painful once recognized.  Everything that is written down is always lost in some convenient way.  Every proof is confounded.  Every would-be witness goes mad, or is never found again.  As a juvenile experiment, Lovecraft has his value.  Every 13-year-old should read him, when they're young enough to be taken in by the mystery and bafflegab.  But an adult who strives to spend every Saturday playing out the same themes again and again?  Please mark such places on a map so I can well avoid them.

A "Renaissance Man" (or WOMAN!) would only become such if they were thoroughly steeped in "the talents of genius and imaginative thinking" that has gone before.  Such a person wouldn't think to throw away human resources any more than did Spencer, Shakespeare or Milton (sorry, I know, three people never heard of, and certainly not influential on fantasy literature).  Yet how often do we hear of yet one more DM on a blog or a podcast chatting on about the "new campaign" they're going to make based upon some profoundly esoteric original theme? — only to never hear of these things actually being crafted or envied after.

Willy nilly, I am not a Jedi or a superhero; I am not a vampire or anything else that sounds like a thing I'd get tired of in a weekend.  I'm a human being.  I like human beings.  I'm interested in playing games where human beings take part, where they pursue human achievements and they don't depend on themes that barely extend over the 357 pages of a book.  My players can burn through a book length's store of material in two or three sessions.  I need MORE.  I need everything.  Less is asking me to compromise in my imagination and I'm not going to do that.

I'll let Gygax finish his end of this argument:

"Having established the why of the humanocentric basis of the game, you will certainly see the impossibility of any lasting success for a monster player character. The environment for adventuring will be built around humans and demi-humans for the most part. Similarly, the majority of participants in the campaign will be human. So unless the player desires a character which will lurk alone somewhere and be hunted by adventurers, there are only a few options open to him or her. A gold dragon can assume human shape, so that is a common choice for monster characters. If alignment is stressed, this might discourage the would-be gold dragon. If it is also pointed out that he or she must begin at the lowest possible value, and only time and the accumulation and retention of great masses of wealth will allow any increase in level (age), the idea should be properly squelched. If even that fails, point out that the natural bent of dragons is certainly for their own kind — if not absolute solitude — so what part could a solitary dragon play in a group participation game made up of non-dragons? Dragon non-player characters, yes! As player characters, not likely at all. 

"As to other sorts of monsters as player characters, you as DM must decide in light of your aims and the style of your campaign. The considered opinion of this writer is that such characters are not beneficial to the game and should be excluded. Note that exclusion is best handled by restriction and not by refusal. Enumeration of the limits and drawbacks which are attendant upon the monster character will always be sufficient to steer the intelligent player away from the monster approach, for in most cases it was only thought of as a likely manner of game domination. The truly experimental-type player might be allowed to play such a monster character for a time so as to satisfy curiosity, and it can then be moved to non-player status and still be an interesting part of the campaign — and the player is most likely to desire to drop the monster character once he or she has examined its potential and played that role for a time. The less intelligent players who demand to play monster characters regardless of obvious consequences will soon remove themselves from play in any event, for their own ineptness will serve to have players or monsters or traps finish them off.

"So you are virtually on your own with regard to monsters as player characters. You have advice as to why they are not featured, why no details of monster character classes are given herein. The rest is up to you, for when all is said and done, it is your world, and your players must live in it with their characters. Be good to yourself as well as them, and everyone concerned will benefit from a well-conceived, well-ordered, fairly-judged campaign built upon the best of imaginative and creative thinking."

There are many things about Gygax I don't like.  One of them is the squirmy way he has of avoiding responsibility.  Like the side-step I addressed with regards to poison, he equivocates.  One moment, he says "squelch" the idea, and the next he throws out an ambiguous, "by restriction and not by refusal."  What's that now?  Oh, and hey, while this is a rule book that I've taken a year of my life writing, that's meant to codify the greatest game milestone in a century, by all means, "you do you."  Bleh.

You are NOT on your own with regards to monsters as player characters.  You're at the mercy of your players, whoever they may be, and if you allow yourself to get jerked around by their sob-stories and pretended curiosity, you deserve the jacking you're going to get.  Remember, while you're letting the player have his bottle, as DM you're the one that has to make this slouching beast fit into your campaign.  You're on the hook for writing the details of monster character classes that Gygax didn't add.  It's your time, your imagination, your patience, your game structure that gets fucked with, while you muddle your way through so your player can strut his fucking hour on your stage.  Remember that. And remember that while you're pandering to this monster-runner, there's a shit ton of things you should be doing that you're not.  So no, friend.  You're not on your own.  You're not that lucky.