Saturday Q&A (jun 8)

JB in Washington State writes,

Regarding The Halfling & the Knight.

I was able to attend a theater production with my family last Wednesday. As (generally) happens when I go to such a show, afterwards I find myself thinking back on my own theatrical "career" and wondering if I could still do the stage thing these days. Would I even want to? And while there's a part of me that loves and longs for the days of being an actor, I think the answer...at least to the latter question...is mostly "no." Not because I'm worried about making a fool of myself, or being brutally critiqued, but because of the WORK involved: the time, the effort, the rehearsals, the memorization, the simple building of chemistry with one's fellow players (not always easy, and often times frustrating). A lot of work for something I am far less passionate about these days compared to A) my family, and B) my gaming/writing endeavors.

Once upon a time, I had that love for acting.

The kind of D&D you wish to play requires that love. The event you describe is less (I think) about any inability to play the game, and far more about the lack of willingness to embrace the game being played.

And in this, I am referring to the druid player (not the others who supported her). The others walking out, that's an issue of social dynamics and a whole different ball o' wax, not pertinent to my response here.

The druid is not an easy class to play. I haven't seen many over the years, and I'm not sure I've ever seen one played well. It does not fit into the easy role that other adventuring classes do. It is somewhat like the illusionist in this way: extremely powerful within its own sphere of control, and much less effective than the other "generalists" of the group. If you go into the game with such a character while simultaneously burdened by a "traditional" outlook (fight the monsters, loot their bodies!) it's bound to be a rough go.

But when one EMBRACES the game, such issues of ineffectiveness cease to matter. You start looking at what your character IS, rather than what she is NOT. If you love living in the (imaginary) world, you must put yourself in the shoes of your character and approach the game from that character's angle, from their point of view. I am a halfling druid...how DO I "adventure?" If you love the game, if you embrace the game, you'll find your place in the world and on the team.

"Spotlight time" is a matter of perspective. One can ALWAYS find ways to get into the spotlight in an RPG. Finding a way to get into the spotlight in a way that is USEFUL and NON-DESTRUCTIVE (to the game, to the group) can be a tricky ask for some folks...but that's the game that's being played. Finding ways to contribute, so that the TEAM (and thus the whole table) benefits. For some character types...the low-level magic-user that's burned all his/her spells, for example...that can be more challenging. But it's not impossible. My most recent game has a 1st level MU whose only spells are "friends," "find familiar" (which he can't afford to cast), and "jump." In three fights he has not cast a single spell, nor done a single point of damage. But he has cared for and guarded the party's pack mule which (carrying their supplies) is their only lifeline in the desert environment they're exploring. And as an elf, he has other abilities (stealth, languages, immunities to charm, etc.) that will enable him to shine in areas where others don't...he WILL get his chance to contribute.

Your player seems to be taking the old adage "don't hate the player, hate the game" too much to heart. You, I grok, have little patience for this: the game is what it is, the player needs to get with the program. I, in my wishy-washy, hippy-dippy fashion, see this as a lack of love going BOTH ways. You need to embrace the player (not coddle her but help her to understand) and the player needs to embrace THE GAME (not just her kewl concept character that is "ineffective" when one tries to pound it into a round hole). More love, that's what's needed...in my opinion.

But I acknowledge that perhaps that won't work. The most recent editions of D&D have definitely bred a style of play where the player's only love is for their own individual character. This style is pervasive and its influence is far reaching. I don't know the relative age of your druid player, or whether or not she came from a 5E or video game background (either one teaches bad precedents). Narcissism is a deeply ingrained part of our culture (well, American culture for sure). It can be tough to overcome it, to retrain and unlearn. My recent strategy of "start 'em when they're young" seems functional enough, but that doesn't apply to adults. With adults you have to find a way to be both iron fisted AND uber-compassionate at the same time. It's a tough tightrope to walk, requiring a lot of effort.

Still, I suppose, folks who are passionate enough don't mind putting in that kind of work.

Answer: I agree that we need to embrace the player.  I agree that that kind of work is necessary.  But I feel strongly that this advice at the end spoils what would otherwise be an excellent series of astute observations and attitudes about game play and one's best approach to the game.

Throughout our lives, we are counselled endlessly to unleash the better angels of our nature, to reach out to others, to express the best parts of ourselves and so on.  And while this is "good" advice, it's legitimate to point out how very, very rarely it produces the sort of result we wish.  Yes, we cast that seed into the ground, and yes the seeds do grow ... occasionally.  But we also cast one shit-ton of seeds upon that ground, sacrificing our time, our wealth, our wherewithal and often our dignity only to be rebuffed and slapped back, and told our "better angels" are manipulative bastards.  We reach out to be screamed at, "DON'T TOUCH ME!"  The best parts of ourselves are recast as patronising, pandering or, to use your word JB, narcissism.

I cannot say just how much money I've spent picking up the check for individuals and whole parties, only to watch friends melt away out of petulance, selfishness or indifference.  Or how much money I've spent in other people's rents to help them over the "hump," or people for whom I've found jobs, or days I've spent buying groceries to make sure a sick friend's fridge is filled with juice and fruit, to help them get by.  And this number of times is dwarfed by the myriad hours I've sat listening as people poured out their hearts but would not take my advice; as people cried on my shoulder but would not take my advice; as people gratefully appreciated my willingness to walk them all the way home so they didn't have to be alone that night ... but would not take my advice.

Where are those people now?  Self-destructed, suffering the aftermath of their drug-addled or alcoholism choices, the aftermath of their failed marriages, the aftermath of their resistance to getting an education or doing anything to improve themselves ... and, thankfully, out of my life, where they now belong.  Because I did the work, I took the time, I showed the uber-compassion, I carried their emotional baggage ... and when, finally, it was plain they were never going to put their baggage down, I decided I'd stop carrying it for them.

But it's this, most of all, that I think betrays you JB.  Because I know you have done all this too, and that your compensation for it has been exactly the same as mine.  Everyone who makes something of themselves, who does the work, who raises a family well, who sacrifices the easy fixes and fails to do the drugs and the liquor and the gambling and what else, has exactly the experience I have now.  We all watch our lives get better while the lives of those people we constantly reach out to gets worse and worse.  We tell them point blank what they need to do, we offer to sustain them until they do it, and for that they bitch in our face about how easy it was "for us" and how hard it is "for them."

The difference between us, JB, isn't that either of us have put in that kind of work; it's how much we're willing to lie to ourselves about what that kind of work can accomplish.  I've never been the sort to tell someone else, "Give to your friend, they need it."  I'll do my giving; I'll do it because that is my nature.  But I won't lie to myself that this time it's going to be different, this time they'll see the light, this time they'll fix themselves and get their shit together ... because they won't.  I don't do my work because I think they're going to get something out of it.  I do it because I'm a mensch.  I'm a human being.  Because it's the decent thing to do.  But not because they're going to suddenly become better because I sacrificed whatever.

You know, Canada is a cold bloody place a lot of the year.  And a lot of the year, we have snow.  Not the 10 feet that comes and goes in the maritimes, but two or three feet that stays for a hundred or so days.  And cars get stuck in this snow, all the time.  If you walk outside in the winter, as I did a lot as a young man, you'll find yourself on the curb next to a stuck car about once a week.

The first winter that Tamara was here, an American whose childhood was spent in Kentucky and adulthood was spent in Michigan, we were walking along a street in early winter and we came across such a person; and without hesitation, I rushed off the sidewalk, threw my sole weight against the back of that stranger's car and, with lots of experience and the strength of a 38 y.o., tossed him out on the street and he went his way.  No thank-you, no offer of a reward, just on his way.  And Tamara was stunned.  She'd never seen anything like it before.  AND, being an American, she was pissed that he hadn't rolled down his window to thank me.

But that's not how it works in Canada.  We don't do it for the reward.  We don't do it for the human connection or the sense of self-gratification.  We do it because there's snow, and everybody does it.  Because there's snow.  This is incomprehensible to anyone who has not lived all their life in a snow-buried country.  We do it because it needs doing.  And when we're in trouble, we know someone will stop because someone always does.  I could tell you other stories about the Canadification of Tamara.

Yes, I did the work with this girl.  And yes, I was offended, angry, betrayed when she instigated the bullshit that ended my D&D campaign.  But afterwards, when my mind was clear, I reviewed much of her behaviour over the months and realised, plainly, that I had let that situation become what it was because I was being patient, kind, compassionate, empathic.  It was my fault.  I should have cleaned her out of my game months before.  Then I would still have a game.  And she could go dump her toxic shit on someone else's party.

 

_____

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  Those giving a $3 donation to my Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466, can submit questions directly to me in the chat room there.

If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.    

Arliss & Bertrand: What Now?

I learned how to change the front image on the guardroom video, so it no longer looks like it did.  This isn't improving the impressions, but the views have taken a tiny jump upwards since yesterday about 33% above the paltry views from before.  The link now looks thus:

Let's see if I can get a response from anyone on this.  Bertrand and Arliss killed 1 hobgoblin in the dungeon; there is another that skipped off to warn those beyond, so the nest is aroused.  According to this page, the number of hobgoblins they may expect to find is 2-8 total soldiers (average 8 h.p.) and 3-10 additional non-combatants (0-8 hit points, as some may be too young to engage).  I think I've solved the generation problem I discussed with this post (I'm so brilliant), so having completed the plundering body table here, I'll be working on that generation table today.  I banged my head on wood design and furniture yesterday, as well as actual job work, so I'm resting today.  Unless something comes in and interrupts me.

Okay, that's the background.  Should Arliss and Bertrand push on?  They can easily open the hooked door; the hinges are on their side, though they're probably crusted over and rusty, and anyway the hook isn't designed to stop interlopers, it's designed to slow them down, which it will.  After that, they could find themselves facing as few as 4 total hobgoblins and as many as 17.  My partner Tamara thinks they should push on.  A few others have made comments on the chat room that seems to suggest this should be their intent, though they haven't stated it outright.  I'll go forward if the balance of people want it that way, let these guys die and roll new characters; or see how it goes and take the campaign from there.  Might just as well make this interactive, as this is easy.

The poll can be found on my patreon https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466.  It costs $1 to play, which gets you the right to answer all future polls so long as you support my patreon.  Sorry.  Just business.

P.S.: 

Here's my take on the space behind the door.

Charlie Brown Lands on His Back Again

I've taken a bold step, creating a short combat video related to the self-play tutorial and dungeon, found on youtube here:  https://youtu.be/cbTPP7MoVyM?si=acqLE3oh8R01aS0v

And predictably, it has face-planted with regards to the public media.  For me personally, youtube will always be Lucy, no matter how many times I line up to kick.

The idea is this: make a video of a combat, a demonstration of the combat rules being played out, not only in one example but combat after combat.  Create a transcript of the combat and post that to my wiki, so that I can add links to the transcript that explain the rules being played.  I think it's innovative, I think it's brilliant, I think there's absolutely nothing like it on youtube or in anything I've ever seen about D&D.

And unfortunately, without noticing it until it was too late, the entrance way and guard room look like a dick pic:

The analytics tell the tale:

For the first hour, the number of actual appearances on youtube, the chances that anyone could click the video and look at it, were under a hundred.  They are now very slowly climbing upwards (my other vids would have more than 10,000 impressions by this time).  Maybe this'll change, but I don't expect so.

Anyway, there's the link, see the video.  I'll be doing another like it, when I'm ready.  I woke up this morning, excited to be creating it, getting it rendered into video and making the transcript, but I see no reason for celebrating now.

It's a good idea.  Fuck you, youtube.

Dungeon Generation

The generator in 1979's DMG begins thusly:

From the start, it's plain that the purpose here is not to provide content for self-play, but for the DM to use the generator to spontaneously create a dungeon for other players.  It recommends amending results to fit the space available.

When I first encountered this in 1979, my immediate interest was to use the generator to create a dungeon that I could adventure through.  In those days, I did not care much about believability.  If one room had orcs and the next kobalds, and the next after that skeletons, I didn't care.  My concern was to run myself through combats, collect treasure, see where the halls and stairs took me, and do so as often as I liked, for as long as I liked, as there was no reason to explain any of the illogic to anyone.

I have in the past ascribed much of my confidence in running combats to the considerable number of battles that I ran through this generator.  Repetition helped me remember the damage done by every weapon, equate the armour with armour class, test the use of spells in game play, read the lists of spells when choosing them for my own characters, test combat strategies, group dynamics and compare many types of monsters against characters of different levels and abilities.

I recognise that many feel that such activities would be boring, or beneath them, or even a little bit shameful, in that it speaks to an obsessiveness with the game that might be uncomfortable.  I was certainly obsessed with the game in those days, when I did not write about it as now, but rather set up endless physical miniatures on a giant dungeon made of taped together graphpaper sheets, drawing the rooms by hand and then running those battles, keeping track with pencil and paper.  This being before 1985, I did not have a graphically-capable computer for this sort of work, there were no video games that could come close to this kind of combat simulation ... and as I remember it, I had lots and lots of time.

A considerable drawback that I found in the DMG generator as written was the completely useless empty spaces it provided.  The first table, "Periodic Checks," provides only a 1 in 20 chance of encountering anything alive:

There is an equal chance of finding a trick or trap.  There's a mere 15% chance of finding a room.  The rest of it is 75% of empty hallways, stairs, side passages, turning passages and the occasional door.

The room content's table is no better:

Of that 15% of chambers or rooms that occur, only 25% have a monster in them.  25% of 15% is 3.75% ... so that only an 8.75% of total rolls in this dungeon have something that can be fought ... and including the "monster only" result on the table above with the wandering monster on the periodic check table,  there's a 74.3% chance (in the whole dungeon) that any monster that IS discovered won't have any treasure.  Though yes, there is a 1 in 20 chance of treasure being found without a monster.  That increases the chance within the dungeon of generating a treasure result to a total of 2.5%.  That is, 1 in 40 rolls we make using the generator will produce a treasure.

No wonder the generator never developed any popularity.  It comes nowhere near the abundance of monsters and treasure that the company's modules provided!  Worse, because it's random, it's easy to fall into a slump where roll after roll, followed by drawing out the dungeon, can mean no meaningful result for actual hours of physical mapping.  I finally gave up as a kid and just rolled a d8 on the chamber/room table, adding 12 to the result.

I think I started with a d10, adding 10, but then I starting thinking, "Fuck it.  What do I want empty rooms for?"

This doesn't represent a failed concept, merely a very poorly rendered one.  Though I've admitted that I couldn't construct a generator myself ... but in all honesty, this hasn't been because I couldn't just move numbers around and improve the DMG version easily, but because every time I've considered this project, I want it to be much, much more than this.

There aren't enough results.  Granted, though, there are only so many kinds of tunnels, only so many kinds of rooms.  There are only so many things to put in rooms, for that matter.  If the reader doesn't believe me, suggest one addition to Table 5, above, that would be practical to roll every 20 times one encounters a room.  Go ahead.

After a lot of thought on this, I've come to the conclusion that the "periodic check/random room" design is the fundamental problem.  Halls and rooms are not randomly built by engineers who make humanoid lairs.  The placement of rooms within those lairs isn't random.  There are right and wrong places to put storerooms, common rooms, private chambers, treasure rooms.  They can't be scattered willy-nilly everywhere.  Every tunnel requires ungawdly amounts of excavation, shoring up, removal of materials, lighting and maintenance.  And the result of an unneeded hallway is tremendously inconvenient where livability is concerned.  Ask yourself if your home would be improved by an unnecessary 20 foot hallway between the bathroom and your bedroom, or your workspace and your kitchen.

By the way, that's a thing that's needed in 1 of every 20 rooms.  A bathroom.  There are none in this generator.  I see no reason why orcs or hobgoblins would be happy without one.

If the generator's going to be of value, it's got to account for the way we build habitats.  Everything else in this post is going to be specifically about humanoid habitats.  While some randomness does exist (my place is different from your place), the functionality of the way these rooms fit together must be accounted for.  We can't have a 180 foot hallway because we rolled a 1 or 2 three times in a row.

But that creates a problem ... not one of the generator itself, but of the possibility of the generator working the way it did for me 43 years ago.  I can fashion a set of generated layouts, and assign random numbers to them, but it means that as a player, I know what the next 3 or 5 or ten rooms are going to be, before opening any doors.  That spoils the "self-play" ideal I've been considering.  Which I admit is somewhat disappointing.

I've been trying to crack this problem.  The front door of a house is easy enough to generate; we've got to get in.  The front hall is pretty obvious; it's the first room inside the house.  I've created tables for both these spaces.  After that, things get complicated.

In the original dungeon generator, you enter a room, you roll 7-12 orcs (all combatants), then you fight them.  But in any believable arrangement of people dwelling together, when the hell would 7-12 of them be gathered in the same random place?  It might be dinner time, but then there'd be dependents as well.  It might be a common room, but again, dependents. It might be the chieftain's hall, but what, all 7-12 of them are always there, all the time, on the off chance that a bunch of adventurers will show up?

And, point in fact, if they are part of a clan, does 7-12 orcs represent the whole number of combatants?  Or are there another 7-12 somewhere else?  And if so, how many rooms have 1-3, 2-5, 1-6 and just 1 by his or her self?  What is the TOTAL number of orcs, combatants and defendents, in this specific lair?

I've decided that it's a first level dungeon, and that the number of orc "soldiers" and dependents equals about 16 to 28.  From there, we generate "logical" rooms that designate some number of these (each room has a spread of humanoids), until all the appropriate rooms AND humanoids are accounted for, whereupon the "dungeon" dead-ends.

OR, some random result along the way provides a threshold to another kind of dungeon, or stairs down introduces us to more of these same humanoids on "level 2," where double the number of orcs we found on the first level dwell (48-84 total).  Another flight of stairs (or other access) downwards increases this number again ... or perhaps allows the incorporation of the orc's masters, ogres or some such.  It's too early to deal with that problem.

The one at hand, presently, is how to generate those logical rooms?  My first thinking is to not assign the total number of humanoids at all, but to assign room types which then provide a final total of monsters when all the rooms are generated.  Of course, this means that somehow we have to decide when this common room is the "last" room, and there isn't a mess or a hall or a treasure room still left to be found.

Seriously, look at the tables.  If there are only 3 hobgoblin warriors and 7 dependents in the whole "dungeon," there would probably be some treasure, but does a treasure room make sense?  A gathering hall?  A shrine?  A chieftain's private apartment?  But how do you know which rooms don't make sense if you don't know, ahead of time, how many hobgoblins there are? 

Which is fine, if we're generating the dungeon for players ... but how do we generate the dungeon for ourselves, to give ourselves the pleasure of being surprised?

Working on that.

Books, End of May

It's been another three months and I've continued reading, with this time around including books I never thought I'd read.  Here's the list and the year in which I'd last read the book.

Call of the Wild, Jack London — 2002

The Commodore, C.S. Forester — 2020

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway — 1991

Firestarter, Stephen King — 1995

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott — never

Night without End, Alistair MacLean — 1985

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen — never

Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein — 2019

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson — never

Only nine books, which seems like I'm slowing down.  I'll be honest; Little Women was a slog.  18 hours long by audiobook, it took me all of April to read it, this after slicing through six books through March.  I appreciate why it appeals; I personally feel it invents the genre of both legitimate modern Christian literature and every sort of magazine story from the Saturday Evening Post through Reader's Digest.  But its just schmaltz from end to end.  I appreciate that the characters become real after a time, that they feel real, that their goals and identities acquire a solidity that many writers I've read simply cannot achieve.  Hemingway wishes he could make characters this strong.

But gawd, what insipid, cloying, miserable little cretinous self-righteous toad stools they are.  It's a whole book of fucking Mrs. Grundy, the book to read if we're ready to explore a world where the end goal is putting the ghosts of our companions into a silver picture frame and crying about them whenever we see their dear little harpsichord, the one they loved so much, standing in the corner, newly dusted every Tuesday in memory of sweet little Beth.  Gag.  Makes me want to get drunk, in a strip club, before going home and fucking a drag queen.  Sorry.  I'm just way too, um, sinful to read a book like this.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, I loved.  I absolutely loved.  I have not read a new story so well constructed, so smashingly built, so piercingly conceptual, in more than a decade.  Absolutely wonderful.  And for none of the reasons that certain kinds of women seem to love it.  Not long after reading it, I stumbled into that piece of shit miniseries (youtube located it for me, because my phone could hear that I was reading the book) with Gemma Arterton, Lost in Austen, which was plainly written by someone who had not read the book.  Not long after, I was shoved into that absolutely crap Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei movie, The Rewrite, where Alison Janney acts with a stick up her ass while she preaches all about Jane Austen — plainly has NOT read the fucking book.  These last three months (read Pride and Prejudice in the first week of March, positively gobbled the book whole) I have been rankled with spastic, idiotic platitude-like ramblings from actual women and characters about the "female liberalism" of Elizabeth, and between laughing my head off and pounding said head on the table, I dare someone to point out one line that clearly would not have been stated by any well-bred woman in the era, as something a well-bred woman would be expected to say at that time.

Apparently women today think women in the early 19th century were the equivalent of burka-wearing 19th century arabs.  A little history, people.  Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, ffs.  In 1819.  While sharing a house alone with two of her male lovers, way, way, way far from family and the clergy.  And was not burned at the stake.  Austen was not writing in the 15th century.

But, the book.  Genius.  Pure genius.  Hard to explain why.  Characters able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.  Characters committing wrongs, without being wrong.  Oh, Wickham and Lydia were doofs, but the balance of the main characters being both prideful AND prejudiced (and no, one character did not represent one while another represented the other — there's some English lit professor bullshit for you), and how smashingly that ended with both being deliciously humiliated and forthcoming and open-minded all at the same time ... oh, the world should make this much sense.

That moment when Elizabeth realises she totally fucked up.  Wow.

Jekyll and Hyde disappointed but, eh, was clever enough.  I got a lot more out of a Farewell to Arms, being older, and could accept the ending much better this time around.  A lot of my memories of the book were out of order, which I suppose makes sense.  I had read the Call of the Wild aloud to Tamara soon after we returned to Canada; she'd never even heard of the book.  Sad to say, it can never be made into a movie, first because it's about the dog, not the man, and second ... the world has decided to believe the wild is a beautiful, Rousseauian place, where nothing very bad needs to take place, ever.  The sheer murderousness of this book can never be presented to a general audience of this present day.  More's the pity.

Firestarter I last read when I was working catering at the university, which is why I know when that was.  I can't seem to leave the Hornblower books alone; I find myself re-reading them.  I could write ten posts about Starship Troopers, but what would be the point?  There are certain books that have emerged into our culture as things that are talked about but never, ever, read.  Every time I meet someone bitching and moaning about the Fountainhead, I ask a very simply question about a prominent, major character of the book and get the answer, "I don't remember him."

Hint: it's the prominent, deeply destructive character that manipulates everything beginning about half the way through the book, whom no one discussing the book ever, ever mentions by name.  I assume because none of them have gotten that far when reading it.

But Starship Troopers ... I have to keep going back to it, because it grounds me.  And I'm not a nazi, I've never been in the military, I'm deeply red liberal (in Canada, where the colours make sense) and socialist.  So, headscratch your way out of that one.

Finally, Night without End.  I don't know if I'm going to read another Alistair MacLean.  I remember that I'd liked the book, but this time around, no, not really.  It reminds me of why I don't like a whodunnit, which the book is.  Combined with one of those action stories where no matter how often the character succeeds, something always goes wrong. Sort of like the last page of the book, the Princess Bride.  Gets tiresome.  Like the writer's thinking, "What can I break next?  I ought to make something break here."  All the while, writing pages and pages of, "It might be Bob.  Or it could be Dave.  Or maybe it's Fred.  'Course, can't discount Janet."  And so the character ponders and ponders, and the book gets larger and larger, until pretty much anyone could have done it, and I just don't care any more.

Anyway, reading an omnibus of Conan stories now.  I'll have more to say about those three months from now.

Saturday Q&A (jun 1)

Griffin writes,

Regarding not using gold for experience for advancement, that might be worth investigating more contemporary non-D&D games. On the other hand, given how little you have in common with other D&D people online (theoretically your peers) I'm not sure you would find the non-D&D people a useful resource for much.

The tricky thing is that a system should still have experience and advancement that is separate from either PC or DM fiat, because people like it when number go up and more abilities are gained. So you need to hook it to something the PCs can do, action > result > (XP). I've pondered it once more (a topic that is a perennial subject with rpg bloggers so it rolls around in my brain occasionally) and have more or less settled on gold means experience because nothing else is as flexible and free of DM fiat (for the most part when the DM assigns the treasure) in my estimation. Though your experience system of points for damage is quite good.

Answer: Yes, and that's what I would rely upon should I choose to stifle the presence of coins and treasure. Mind you, I didn't say that's what I would do, only that it was worth investigating.

As always, experience can be given for a less valuable commodity. The exchange rate need not be 1 g.p. per x.p. If treasure for experience proves to be still required, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of reducing the party's overall income to a point where participating in something as lowly as farming couldn't become a rational way to ensure they're able to resupply themselves with vittles, as opposed to the exorbitant costs for foods at the town market.

For the record, I have nothing whatsoever in common with other D&D folks online, and haven't for a long time. I haven't found a single idea or useful feature from any officially published source, from any publisher, since before 2005. I do have peers, but they don't exist in those corners of the internet.

JB in Washington State writes,

I've pursued similar lines of thought, myself. Not about what the game becomes if followed logical conclusions and PCs end up tied to a plough or busking for coins (I do have an answer for that: not D&D), but rather the "why" of all those treasure hoards that monsters acquire.

And other then dungeons being built from the remains of ruined empires and lost tombs (where the treasure existed long before mindless monsters moved in), my solution to sentient creatures collecting wealth (orcs, ogres, dragons, etc.) is to give them some sort of economy...a USE for the treasure.

Ah, but then why are the players butchering these intelligent beings for their wealth? What kind of game are we playing here?

I've come to treat most of the description found in the Monster Manuals as hearsay from ignorant and/or racist humans...the kind of descriptions found in, say, the journals of historic conquistadors upon encountering hostile indigenous cultures during their exploration. All such descriptions, thusly, must be "taken with a grain of salt." My setting has humanoids that have regular interaction with human locals (usually in especially rural areas) for mutual benefit, and such interaction requires normal units of exchange (coins, etc.). The humanoids, also, mine and craft goods, make use of resources found in forest and foothill. The treasure is there for a reason!

Which doesn't mean the players are immediately motivated to murder and rob. No! Now that the humanoids are more than cardboard cut-outs, they can be dealt with, negotiated with. Players can do jobs for them: slaying pesky monsters of the type that have NO treasure, in exchange for reward, for instance. Of course, they can also have rivalries and warfare and find the usual reasons for murder and looting that all (real world) "adventurers" have found over the centuries: possession of land, food supply, resources, etc.

With such a mindset, orcs found in a tomb or ruin are simply a competing band of looters. They're hoping to carry that chest of coins back to their OWN society, where they will hoard it or spend it or trade it for influence and fame, etc.

So many options become available to the DM who's cut alignment from their game.

Nigel writes,

Regarding Dams ...

This was an interesting post. Thank you. I was on holiday and tried to write this on my phone but it didn’t really work.  The info that follows would be the exception to what you wrote, rather that the rule. I was inspired to do some reading about this. (I won’t dignify this with the word research, as I haven’t done deep dive into primary sources or read much in Czech.)

The Czech Republic (surprise!) has a very long history of fish pond building. It started in the 11th century and grew until the Thirty Years’ War, thereafter it declined before further growth in the 1800s. Wiki covers this reasonably well, e.g. here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishponds_of_the_T%C5%99ebo%C5%88_Basin

(Note that the Trebon basin is just one of several basins. One of the ponds was and still is huge: the Rožmberk Pond, of about 4.9 sq km)

Here’s a verified source with a couple of facts, just the abstract:

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-4001-3_208

With these snippets:About 20,000 fishponds (180,000 hectares) existed on the territory of the present Czech Republic in the 16th century.  Its average annual amount per hectare has increased from 70 kg in the Middle Ages to the contemporary 450 kg.  So yes, barrels of fish absolutely, but most probably carp rather than perch.

Zilifant in Minnesota writes,

Your recent posts about your gaming group disbanding really hit home with me. Since members of my group moved away, I've been without a regular group for some time, and it's been very hard on me. I have tried gaming via Zoom and it's not satisfying for me at all, particularly when my work day is mostly spent in front of the computer and in Zoom meetings. I'm sure there could be folks who frequent my local gaming stores that might be decent players, but honestly every time I go into those stores and overhear the people gaming there it makes me cringe at the ridiculousness of how they're playing and how obnoxious they are. They don't seem like people I could see myself playing a serious campaign with.

I was glad to see your "Loving This Game" post yesterday, which displayed your optimism of finding a new group and getting a new game going soon. I am similarly between gaming groups, but my own outlook is a bit more pessimistic, even though I love this game too and desperately want to find a new group to play with. So my question to you is this: How do you intend to find a new group of players, and what advice do you have for others who are in a similar situation?

Answer:  Like you, I have similar ideals about people in game stores, though I've never actually been on zoom. But speaking as someone who also spends most of his waking hours on a computer, both for work and play, I don't understand why the game wouldn't be satisfying through a screen. I ran games by text on a blog and I absolutely enjoyed the D&D aspects of that process. Zoom, I think, would vastly streamline the problems that a blog created.

BUT ... for the present, I wasn't planning on finding a game group in the real world. It's probable that I can get a game going with humans online anytime I want, but I wasn't thinking about that either. The last few efforts to get something going online proved difficult because while I had willing players, like you, after starting they found it difficult to communicate and maintain their interest online. So, presently, I'm not going this route either.

My third option is to play ... with myself. I think I know how I'm going to do this, but I'm not ready to talk about it while I'm building up the wherewithal to dig in. Said game would be very simplistic, but it would be a way of going back to the roots of my style of play, while testing out and demonstrating aspects of the content existing on my wiki.

Just why people have such trouble with communicating through a screen is a mystery to me. I found it very easy to step away from everything to do with the internet for 7 days. Never opened my laptop, though I had one with me, never checked my email, never sent any email, didn't look at any webpages and didn't care. I did get eager to write, but not to see "what was new" online. There's hardly anything new online. But this said, I'm fully able to perceive you, reading this as I write, without actually needing to be in the room with you. Being in an actual room with you would just muddle our conversation with a lot of visual cues that aren't necessarily relevant to what you and I care to share just now. This is a pure relationship, without all the baggage of our lives and other predilections. Perhaps it's because I'm a writer; I chose a profession where I would do tons of talking to an audience that wouldn't be present when they could "hear" me.

Sterling in Maine writes,

Although lacking in the sorcery part of "S&S," I'm a big fan of Harold Lamb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lamb). He wrote oriental adventure pulp prolifically around that same time as Howard. I think you and some of your readers might enjoy him.

 _____

Thank you for your contributions.

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  Those giving a $3 donation to my Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466, can submit questions directly to me in the chat room there.

If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.    

The Halfling and the Knight

Time I addressed this point from a recent post; hands up, anyone who knew what I was talking about:

"Much of the time, I believe, people have little understanding of what purpose in the game a rule serves, or how that purpose is compromised, leading to a less robust system, when that rule is casually tossed aside. For me personally, whatever a DM may feel about the presence of experience or encumbrance, and the "inconveniences" they bring, casting those things aside does not improve the game. The game is worse without them.

"Yet this is hardly understood, and even less appreciated. Of course we can still play D&D without those things. Of course the players can still move from place to place, they can still fight, they can yet role-play and even accumulate status and influence upon the game world. But these things — and this is almost impossible to explain to the average player — ARE NOT THE GAME. They certainly seem to be; and most would argue with me on this point ... vehemently. But they'd be wrong."

We don't need to count runs to play baseball.  We don't need teams.  We can still pitch, bat and run the bases without these things, if that's what we want.  We don't need a king to play chess.  We can move the pieces around on the field, attacking one another, deciding the game ends when there are no pieces left to kill, or the opposing player's move assures that a kill can't happen.  We can choose not to race sprinters against one another, having them run without a clock while five judges hold up cards to decide how the sprinter did, like figure skating.  We can play scrabble letters without numbers, ignoring any "score," on a blank lined board, until the board is filled.  We can throw out the property cards of monopoly and just roll dice to move our pieces around the board.

With children, we teach chess in a manner that a modern gamer recognises as save scumming.  Make the wrong move, see the consequences, take it back.  Thinking back 28 years, my daughter moves her rook, I take it with the queen ... then I put the rook and queen back to let her try again.  I let her put her finger on the bishop, deciding if she's going to move it, but I don't make her move it, because she's seven and I don't care if she wants to move the knight instead.  We learn games like this.  We see the consequences of our actions.

Then, as we grow more serious about the game (my daughter didn't, but I did), we don't want those breaks.  We want to win for real ... because we grow to see that it's a measure of the standards against which we hold ourselves.  We put ourselves in situations that aren't comfortable, specifically because the rewards are greater.

There's nothing in my life right now that says I have to walk onto a stage and risk public embarrassment ... but if I had the chance to do it again, to play Uncle Vanya or Dr. Stockmann, I would.  There's no money in it for me.  I have no urge to take up acting as a career (though, admittedly, because no opportunity to do so has presented itself).  But I would do it because I've done it before, because I've challenged myself in that way, I've put my soul and my commitment on the line in a theatre before paying customers ... and received good reviews.  There are no take backs; there's no way to save scum a few seconds before delivering a seven-minute monologue.

I know that the way the vast majority of people play D&D is "entertaining."  Enjoyable.  It must feel good for many to save scum, with getting rewards without risk, to talk their way out of difficulty, to get experience for showing up ... to shirk combat or, to always win, without that much trouble.  Always knowing that the character I have at the start of tonight's session will still be mine at the end.  Never feeling that raw, brutal panic of a die that has to go the right way ... or the plunge of heart that strikes when it doesn't.

But —

I don't want to take my knight back.  And I definitely do not want to play with those who insist on having it that way.  I'm not playing with children.  No, let me put that another way, because it could be misunderstood.  I have no interest in having adults who want to be children play with me.  If you want your knight back, when you lose your knight due to your inability to play, this says more about you than you realise.

Yes, I said inability to play.  D&D is a game with random elements, that a good player knows are there, accounting for them ... expecting them ... so there's no reason to whine or have a fit when they don't go our way.  That is the game's play.  When the player shirks from that, trying to reconstruct the game so as to avoid those consequences, instead of taking them on the chin like an adult ...

The collapse of my game centered on one player who did not like that her 5th level 60-lb. halfling druid wasn't a "fighter."  She chose to be a druid.  She chose to be a halfling.  She chose her spells.  She liked the sound of being a druid.  She liked to make the cute little jokes about being so light that many of the bigger characters could carry her without an encumbrance penalty.  She liked the pretty-sounding spell names, with words like faerie, shillelagh, goodberry ...

But every time a fight came up, she didn't like having to put her trust in that 20-sided die.  She knew there was plenty of power in the party to manage the monsters, to protect her little child-like body, but she didn't like knowing they were going to kick ass and she wasn't.  She didn't like depending on them.  She'd had plenty of opportunities to put out a good spell and help turn the tide of a battle, but that wasn't good enough.  She didn't want to be a team player.  She didn't want to take a bow at the end with the team.  She wanted to shine.  And she didn't have the class, the spells, the hitting power or the experience level that would let her do that ... and she was getting tired of waiting.  Every time she'd miss with that d20, the feeling of failure gnawed just a little deeper.  She didn't need to actually die as a character.  She didn't need that much to push her over the edge.  What she wanted, and what she hadn't earned, was to make the game ... not a game.  To make it into something that would serve her will.  That would obey her.  And when that didn't come out of the things her character could do, she decided it would come out of her inventiveness with the spells, reinterpreting them as she needed them to work.

When I countered that, she tried harder.  She invented more desperately.  She insisted more emotionally.  When it was her turn to throw that d20, she stalled, staring at her spells, sure that they'd be some way to weave them into an action that would get the result she wanted.

And when I put my foot down, one of the other players, a shining white knight, came to her rescue. He chose that moment to tell me how to act.  And what tone of voice to use.  In no uncertain terms.  In my game.  In my house.  And I rose to the occasion, because I don't let people talk to me that way.

The desire not to play a game, but to make the game suit the player's moods and wants, is the insidious poison at the heart of 5th edition and all that the company has done to D&D these last 20 years.  I love the game of D&D.  I do not love the shambling, mawkish doppleganger that is called D&D by nearly everyone ... and I have no idea what's going to become of the game I love.  The game I love.  I expect it to die along with the undead ghoul that it's spawned.

With four weeks gone, I remain uncertain about the future.  The majority of the crowd walked in support of the halfling and the knight, but I think that's an oversimplification.  There is a whiff that remains in my thoughts that the game itself had ceased to satisfy the needs of the party; and as I read the accounts of others lately, I'm detecting that same whiff in their games.

My head feels clearer.  There's a measure of anger.  Of betrayal.  Of the cheapening of this thing I love, which darkly bites at the memory of myself discovering this game as a boy, and thinking of it as a brutal, consequence-ridden thing, like the chess I played, being the greatest game in the world.

Which it isn't.

Anymore.

The Self-Play Tutorial

This week, I've been putting together a new project, something that I had in fact considered about this time last year.  I did some preliminary work on the wiki with it, but then lost interest.  I wasn't in the right head space.  But while travelling last week, following the encounter at Butchart Gardens, it felt right to undertake the idea again, and so I have.

On the surface, this is going to seem like an old man's response to the collapse of my campaign, which is fair.  But I think there's more here than that.  For one, some months ago JB and I both discussed the subject of teaching D&D in some depth.  For another, I've been looking for a way to obtain a youtube presence since the middle of Covid.  For another, it wouldn't be my first attempt at building a better dungeon generator.  Although yes, it probably fills up a hole that's just opened, it's not wildly out of character for me to do something like this and honestly, I think that if it can be sustained, there's considerable merit here.

One important change that's come to my aid is, and I'm sorry to bring it up again, chatGPT.  Where it comes to D&D, though, it's a pretty frustrating program to work with ... not because of its design, but because of what it dredges up from it's D&D source material online.  Ask it to invent different entrances and it will gleefully rush to give ten examples of the same result, labeled with alternate "cool"-sounding adventure D&D tropes.  It's a narrow crevice entrance ... no, it's a jumble of rocks entrance.  No, it's a crumbled archway entrance; no, it's a rockfall barrier; no, an overgrown archway; no, a hidden ravine; no, a concealed tree hollow; no, a camouflaged burrow; no, a disguised well entrance ... and so on.  These are all real answers I got when I asked, "Give me different kinds of entrance ways into a dungeon."

It's very difficult to explain, when talking D&D, that these aren't really "different."  Hole in the ground covers all of them.  Granted, most dungeon entrances are a hole in the ground ... but it never occurred to chat that the dungeon, potentially located many score miles into the wilderness, might logically have a palisade or a stone wall.  True enough, a crevice will hide a dungeon from adventurers, if they have to find that crevice in a 10-mile wide hex.  But animals can smell food through a crevice, giant social insects can enter a crevice and plant their eggs there, huge spiders will no doubt find it and make a home there ... at some point, it makes sense to put something in front of that crevice that makes it more secure.  But chat couldn't think of that (I had to), because the entirety of its D&D source material couldn't think of that.

But when I have an idea, and I want to go back and forth on it, filling out details, letting chat take a swing, then writing a new draft, letting chat edit that, whereupon I write a new draft, and chat goes at it again, I can compress a lot of brainstorming and step around troublesome writer blocks with remarkable ease.  Chat can't do the work; it's utterly useless at that.  But it can suggest other words and throw out half-ideas that can be grabbed and run with.  Over the last few days, I've progressed in this particular effort by leaps and bounds because, having thought of dungeon generation for 40+ years, I finally have a real source that I can at least collaborate with.  If the reader will go look at the comments beneath the RDG post I linked above, you'll see that, in fact, in 2014, we were all positing something like what chatGPT can do for me now.

Take this one from Eric:

It'll be a real feat to make a good random dungeon that can be meaningfully revealed one room at a time ... "OK, you beat that pack of goblins, they go down screaming! Next room is..[roll].. a pack of goblin guards ... [roll] ... listening alertly."

That's quintessentially the trouble with every generator: repeat results.  Twice in a row is fine, but it's a disaster when that twice in a row happens repeatedly and gives the message that the goblins are endless; that killing the next group of them produces no real result.

The key, I think, is to control the generation so that it's not just generating from a large random sample.  It's what I'm attempting to do by separating different kinds of dungeon and acknowledging that the path through the "tunnels" dungeon has to be progressive, from space to space ... not treating every space with the same table and the same results.  A tunnel-dungeon is defined by it's rooms, not by its inhabitants; the randomly generated layout has to take that into account, creating just so many of each kind, and in a particular order, with the contents of each room having characteristics that apply to that room.  It's a brutal expectation from a generator-design standpoint, but it's the only real way to get around repetitive results.

My intent is to update my progress every 4,000 words or so.  The page itself, of course, is always going to be in the same place, so if anyone wants to see how it's going, they can.  Meanwhile, with my "collaborator," I'm going to see how far I can take this.

I think it's possible to take it out of the dungeon, though not easily.  I think it's possible to take it into urban areas as well.  I've done some preliminary work for that with my hammers/coins/food pagemaking.  I think it's possible to open up the process to suggestions from outside ... even to adapt what I'm doing to reader interaction regarding what the "player characters" choose to do next.  I have plans for this and youtube, which should reach fruition in a week or two, if I continue not to work on the Streetvendor's Guide, where my head ought to be ... but damn it, this is a new project, and new projects are fun!

Anyway, it's just a start.  We can look at this again when I double it's size so far.

I really like how, at the very end there, I got to write a couple of sentences that actually sounded like playing D&D ...

Howard and Conan

So, at the present, I am reading Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus, through audio book, 35 hours, 850 pages, with 22 short tales, novellas and novels, and one short fiction historiography of The Hyborian Age.  In addition to earlier works that were Conan-like by Howard, I've completed two Conan novellas: The Phoenix on the Sword and The Scarlet Citadel.  I'm about a fifth of the way through.

I'll talk more about Conan at a later time, but for the present I'd like to discuss the introduction by Finn J.D. John, who edited and annotated the omnibus.  I think it's relevant that R.E. Howard original "sword and sorcery" writings predate those of Tolkein by some years, with nearly all the originals published in Weird Tales being published by 1935.  The Hobbit, we may note, was published in 1937.  Conan is utterly unlike any other character in human prose to that time.  My own take on Howard's work is that he was able to mesh the supernatural genre of pre-1925 with the pacing and tempo of pirate and adventuring stories from the 19th century to his day.

H.P. Lovecraft's first appearance in Weird Tales came in 1923, and no doubt was an influence on Howard; they were personal friends, though pen-pals, communicating with each other that endured until Howard's death.  But Lovecraft's style is scientific and intellectual, a sort of combination between the adventure of Jules Verne and the supernatural of H.G. Wells.  Point in fact, most "supernatural" tales over the hundred years between Shelley's Frankenstein and the 1920s featured the appearance of some strange entity within the ordinary framework of the normal world.  Stoker's Dracula is uncovered by ordinary persons passing letters between them, until confronted by the evil; similarly Stevenson's Mr. Hyde is again encountered by anything but adventurers.  This can be said as well for the Invisible Man and Dorian Gray.

This is all turned on its head by Howard, who depicts his main character as a violent, sword-swinging, primitive killer, who does not ponder the meaning of evil when he confronts it, but instead either kills it or finds himself unable to do so.  In my opinion, because Conan is far more the "murder-hobo" type, who rises to be a king, it is far more Howard's work that sets the tempo and the inner life of D&D than Tolkein, who is filled with rather passive beings who stumble around getting out of trouble in a very fairy tale manner — that is, with author intervention in the form of magic objects and plain stupid luck.  Bilbo finding the ring, for example.  Conan rushes at the enemy, far more reminiscent of the characters in Treasure Island or Ivanhoe, who choose to fight before they think.

Here, I'm not going to discuss the writing.  Truth be told, I consider Tolkein a better sentence-maker; I do not consider either Tolkein or Howard to be "good" writers.  My scale for what makes a good writer includes a lot of people that the typical English-lit major chooses to set aside, because by gawd, none of us will ever write like Shakespeare, yes?  That would be impossible!  So we must only include writers in our "good" lexicon that we may conceivably someday match, such as the dreck of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.  "Lower the bar!" cries Academia, "Let it include Sylvia Plath!"  And so it does, achieving the goal of not scaring the be-jeebus out of first-year students.

But I digress.

As John writes,

"Conan's fame, and Howard's legacy, would steadily grow in the postwar years in spite of reviews ... but the supercilious disapproval of the literary establishment would cast a long shadow nonetheless.  In fact, some of Howard's biggest fans — among whom must be counted L. Sprague de Camp, though many modern Conan fans would rather not — felt a sort of compulsion to temper their complimentary remarks about his work for fear of being themselves judged for appreciating such low-brow trafe."

Love John's choosing of "trafe" over "tripe," simply because it's such an obscure English word, demonstrating the writer's own need to put a flag on the hill and say, "See, I'm talking about Conan, but I have a vocabulary."

I don't disparage Conan, nor seek to separate myself intellectually from it, because it has as much to do with "good writing" as does a hack saw.  His work is a tool designed to convey an idea; it's not mucking around with words to make pretty things.  It's scope and influence on writers these past hundred years dwarfs so-called better writers, who have done precisely nothing to create their own genre of literature, and even less to make themselves readable.  Therefore, do understand that I'm saying the reader does far more good to read Conan than to read of the Grey Mouser, and far more good for their communication of ideas to deconstruct the adverbs and adjectives of Howard than those of Tolkein.  Howard's phrases are raw power, picking the story up and hurlng it into the future, while Tolkein's phrases are pet dogs chasing their own rumps.  Damn the "quality" of it.

It is shocking to remember that Howard committed suicide in 1936 following the death of his mother from tuberculosis.  From Wikipedia,

"On the morning of June 11, 1936, Howard asked one of his mother's nurses, a Mrs. Green, if his mother would ever regain consciousness. When she told him no, he walked out to his car in the driveway, took the pistol from the glove box, and shot himself in the head. He died eight hours later, and his mother died the following day."

Thus the entirety of Howard's time to publish Conan stories consists of the narrow window between 1932 and 1935.  Given that though I've only read a small portion of the original stories, with DeCamp's and Lin Carter's fingerprints, it's plain already that he was improving considerably as a writer over his earlier works.  I look forward to seeing if that continues as I read the omnibus; I suspect it will. What a loss, therefore.  What a loss.

 

Jon

During my travels out west, Tamara and I determined that part of our trip would include a drive through Washington State, including our passing through Seattle.  In fact, this was deliberately arranged so that JB of B/X Blackrazor and I could meet face-to-face, which we did Friday evening.  Finding a hotel within 20 minutes of his residence, Jon came and met me there, and we went out to find a simple bar so that I could, at last, "buy him a beer," as I had promised to do many times ... though he bought the first round himself.

Oddly, no doubt because of our age, we didn't think to take a selfie together; in fact, the subject wasn't brought up.  We played a couple of games of pool, stripes and solids, but our focus wasn't on the game and while he won the first, he blew the cue ball off the eight and lost the second.  The conversation engrossed us throughout, as we talked for four hours, apart from breaks for the bathroom and our spouses.

My impression of Jon is that he is, first, a family man.  I'd first considered the possibility of meeting his family, but is soon became clear to us both that this meeting had to include only ourselves.  Anyone else, my Tamara, his wife and children, would have been inconvenienced by our discussion.

Now, what did we talk about?  Well, much that we would talk about on our blogs, of course.  Jon and I have a long, long history of going around on various topics, some of which we no longer disagree about (player-vs.-player, alignment) and some of which we continue to spar over (rules as written, the use of modules).  We did not debate; there would be no point, since in a single meeting we're not likely to change each other's minds.  Rather, we presented our views, such as we would in writing, and I think came out a little clearer on the other's point of view.

Take rules as written.  Jon isn't fanatical about that, but he is very conscious that many participants of the game change the pre-existing rules of forty years ago without knowing the reason for which those rules exist.  I agree with this.  Much of the time, I believe, people have little understanding of what purpose in the game a rule serves, or how that purpose is compromised, leading to a less robust system, when that rule is casually tossed aside.  For me personally, whatever a DM may feel about the presence of experience or encumbrance, and the "inconveniences" they bring, casting those things aside does not improve the game.  The game is worse without them.

Yet this is hardly understood, and even less appreciated.  Of course we can still play D&D without those things.  Of course the players can still move from place to place, they can still fight, they can yet role-play and even accumulate status and influence upon the game world.  But these things — and this is almost impossible to explain to the average player — ARE NOT THE GAME.  They certainly seem to be; and most would argue with me on this point ... vehemently.  But they'd be wrong.

This is not something that Jon and I talked about, merely the extension of our discussion about rules as written.  It's a post for another time, but not now.

We talked about writing and publishing, about the process of getting work out to our readers that's paid for.  We talked about Lulu, we talked about other platforms, we talked about Patreon and we gave each other advice on those things.  We debated our relative importance with respect to the D&D community (not much) and we discussed this very thing that I'm doing now: writing about each other on our pespective blogs.  [checking as I write this, he hasn't done this yet].

But to be honest, mostly, we simply enjoyed each other's company.  Jon is funny.  He's quickwitted, he's appropriately droll and sarcastic, he has a dry sense of humour ... and occasionally, there's a little blackness there.  He's not only nostalgic in his game ideals, he possesses this characteristic about a number of things.  We drank our beers, for example, in a near-empty dive in a dead mall, with carpets that hadn't been replaced since, um, the 1980s?  We played pool.  We discussed media and the internet and he expressed many thoughts that would be in keeping with the sort of straight-up white male who identifies as a pre-internet Democrat but not a supporter of Bill Clinton.  He respects those institutions the internet is killing and, guessing here, has the usual sentiments of someone who worries how the world is going to get on without those things.

So, yeah, if the reader has been a follower of JB these last ten years, then the man is exactly what his blog conveys him to be.  There were no surprises.

I think it's harder on those who meet me.  Like the statement I made above about what D&D is not, I'm difficult to predict.  I take a rigid line on things that make no sense.  Soon after meeting each other, Jon commented, in response to the radio program being turned off, on the demise of both local and national news as a meaningful source for people's understanding of the world.  I said, "good."  I have zero respect for newspapers.  I don't care if they all die.  And Jon, confronted with this, wisely dropped the subject.  I respect that.

See, four hours isn't enough for us to be friends.  I found this when I met Sterling and Ozymandias last year.  These are all people I got along with at once, whose company I immediately appreciated, whose discourse was vibrant and intelligent.  But it isn't enough time for those other things that make us friends.  Friendship is built of hardship, of labouring together, of bearing each other's sins, of having the time to break free of the need to impress and be polite, getting down to the brass tacks of meaning and disagreement and honest, tough-minded evaluation of one another.

This cannot be done when one is merely in Seattle overnight.

But, since I know Jon will be reading this, thank you.  Thank you Jon, for your smiles, for your generosity, for your understanding and your patience.  Thank you for the right place for us to talk, and thank you for your advice.  I'll try to follow as much of it as I can.

Loving this Game

I have returned, having seen much of southern British Columbia and some of Washington State.  I've had time to think and consider recent matters, and have come to a fully positive conclusion.

Silly that it should be so glaringly obvious, but let me explain how I bumped straight into what should have been staring me in the face.

We visited Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island on Wednesday, obtaining the right sort of cloudy-sunny day for it.  Tamara can walk for a distance of a few thousand steps, but she struggles beyond that; as such, we'd made certain that I could obtain a wheelchair from the Gardens to use for our support, for as long as we were there.  This required that I fill out a form, acknowledging my responsibility for the chair, for the damage that might be done, for any accidents that might occur while using the chair and so on, given that the Gardens are full of steep slopes and it would be easy for such accidents to occur.

I never mind about such things, but I like to play with such regulations in what I consider a fully fair manner.  Therefore, when I returned the wheelchair, I demanded a receipt for the chair, explaining that since I'd been made responsible for the thing, I wanted to make it absolutely clear that I was no longer responsible now that it was returned.

This obtained a rather excellent response, as they were put on their heels, wondering whether or not they should comply.  "No one's ever asked us to do this before," said the 20-something girl to me, somewhat befuddled.

"That's because you've never met a lawyer before," I answered smoothly, letting her believe, absolutely, that I was a lawyer.

And so, she signed her name to the same form that I had filled out, and the date, and handed it to me ... asking, "How long have you been a lawyer."

"Oh I'm not a lawyer," I answered.  "I'm a writer."

This broke the ice, and soon she was explaining, to me, how this obviously proved that I knew how to research things.  I explained that there was no point in telling people, most of the time, that "I'm a writer," because most people automatically believe this means "I write, but I don't make any money at it."  She didn't believe that.  I assured her it was true.  "I've been a writer for 45 years," I said, "and for half of that time, I didn't make any money, and for the other half, I have.  But the reaction from people is the same."

This roused her into a praising speech about the importance of writers and why I shouldn't worry about what people think of me, etcetera ... which ended in her asking, "What do you write?"

I gave the standard, simplified answer, highlighting the part of my writing that I like.  "I teach people how to play Dungeons and Dragons."

"NO WAY!" was her excited answer.  She had me write down this blog and my email, and for all I know she's reading this today ... but I wish the reader here could have seen the look on her face at the moment she learned that the total stranger she was speaking to actually played and liked D&D.  It was ... enlightening.

The tag line on this blog reads, "I Love the Game of D&D."  And so I do.  And it's stupid to worry about why a campaign might disintegrate or go it's own way, however frustrating that is, or whatever it might portend about my finding other players.  I love this game.  And I'm going to go on playing this game, whatever that takes, whatever that makes me look like, whatever inconveniences that arise.  Or however people might believe that my choice to play this game, my way, online, offline, is right, wrong, odd, goofy or pointless.  Because I love this game.

It is something that, for whatever reason, is easy to forget in the midst of those who see, instead, an opportunity for drama, rather than an opportunity to play.

I shall be investigating new avenues of loving this game in the weeks ahead.

Dams

When last I did any work on the hammers page of my wiki (which I abandoned to work on the Streetvendor's Guide), my next intended page would have been for "dam."  It's comforting to know that, after leaving off something for about 16 months, the work is still sitting right there, waiting to be done.  I don't have to think of what I ought to do, or want to do ... just what's next.

For a change, and because I need a post, let me produce the page here instead of on the wiki - so that it can be transcribed later.  We want to consider only dams that would be realistically created between the 15th and 17th centuries.  Dams were also made for canals, and canal work was prevalent at certain times in Chinese history, but not so much with the decline and collapse of the Ming dynasty, and certainly the practice wasn't widespread in Europe or anywhere else in the time period specified.  My game, I'll remind the reader, takes place in 1650; for this, I'm just going to pretend I have a game, just in case one pops up.

Dams are primarily constructed to provide a reliable source of water for irrigation, ensuring that crops can be watered during dry periods. Dams also supply a steady flow of water to power watermills. They ensure a consistent water supply for livestock and limited domestic uses, supplementing wells and natural water sources. Community cooperation is needed in maintaining these structures, with locals working together to manage water flow, remove sentiment and repair damage. Understanding of water contamination is minimal, given the time period, so the primary concern is maintaining the water level and the dam's integrity.

Construction involves simple techniques, using local materials such as earth, clay, stone and timber. Rare dams might be constructed with mortared stone. Typically, they're about 3 to 10 yards in height, with a generally modest length, most likely less than a hundred yards.  The reservoir would be quite small as well, most likely not larger than 20 or 30 acres.  A few acres is far more likely.  One benefit is that as water settles in a reservoir, sediment and particulates drift to the bottom, producing a clearer, cleaner water at the surface.  This isn't pure of course, as various contaminants and microorganisms would persist ... but to the late Renaissance mind, the water would taste better.  Modern concerns just aren't present, as the source of disease and other maladies is largely misunderstood.

In my infrastructure system, dams occur with type-5 hexes that have at least 2 hammers (H).  For these conditions to be met, the hex must have a significant river, not a little stream ... so there's plenty of water available with which to make a reservoir.  Such a dam facilitates the growth of population in the hex and supports the water needed to irrigate more land, so that type-5 hexes also have a notation of 3 food (3F) as well (type-6 only have 2F).  Type-5 hexes without a sufficient stream also produce 3F, without the 2 hammers, so we may assume that more irrigation is not the only reason for this.

It needs to be stated, though, that the extra food on the map stipulates not production, but surplus.  Meaning that a type-5 hex with 3F and 2H would probably support food than the same type hex with 3F and 1H.  Not that this is very important, and these numbers probably are confusing, but this can be pieced together by following links on the hammer's page, linked above.

Dam failures did occur, due to inadequate design, substandard materials, poor maintenance ... all the reasons they still fail now.  Of course, a thirty acre reservoir, when it breaks, isn't going to cause all that much damage.  Flooding might threaten a few, but the larger consequence would be crops lost, lands flooded, and the difficult task of rebuilding the dam.  There might be considerable fallout as persons left the area or as a few engineers were given the axe ... not in a nice way.

The Dutch began building dams to create "polders," low-lying tracts of land that could be farmed, in the 12th century, building on work done by earlier cultures, including the Egyptians and Romans, and in fact the Danes during the time of the Vikings, starting four centuries earlier.  Polders are a major infrastructure practice; as such, I'm adding it to type-3 hexes, needing 3 hammers.  Holland and Zeeland are extremely dense in population/infrastructure, so there would be a lot of such hexes.

 At the time of my game, before 1650, nothing like the impressive size we know today were attempted; large polders could encompass several hundred acres, but this is still less than a square mile (which have 640 acres each).  Small polders covered just a few acres, much like the size of reservoirs we discussed above.  So, keeping these things small in one's mind is a good practice.

Many reservoirs contain fish, having been drained from rivers, so there's little need to stock them, but fish were captured from nearby streams and then transported to reservoirs to be released.  This carrying was done in baskets, barrels and buckets, as available.  Often, there were designated places along the shoreline of larger reservoirs (and natural ponds as well) for the intended purpose of stocking, where the water was deep and the fish had ample space to disperse and acclimate.  Stocked fish are typically carp, trout, perch and whatever else might be native to the region.

I just had a vision of players rescuing some travellers with two wagons full of what looks like beer, but are in fact barrels full of water and baby perch.

Well, that's all I can think of.