The Teaching Process and A.I.

The present-day culture is so threatened by A.I. these days as to become deeply engaged in public shaming anyone who admits to engaging with it. To admit that one merely engages with A.I. — regardless of whether or not one is actively using it to write or create content — has become a battleground for what amounts to a tiny but loud faction of the social discourse. Most people either don't care, do not know enough to care, or have already discovered the benefit of the various applications out there... but these people are also those who largely dropped out of the internet social space eight to ten years ago, about the time that Facebook, Instagram and other like programs began to fade as platforms.

Thus whenever I want to invoke it, my first instinct is to think, "No, I'll be judged as one of the bad people." And then to resist the impulse to employ it, and thus I am shamed into silence. That's the goal.

Alas for the naysayers, however, I'm going to resist that and, once again talk about A.I.

I don't use it much for writing. For example, ChatGPT disagrees with me almost constantly, largely because it's stubbornly programmed to speculate about what an imaginary reader might feel, prefer, tolerate or be put off by, which describes just about everything I write. Chat is deeply concerned about the writer pleasing an audience, or about the writing of content that promotes marketability, and so when dealing with it I'm smacked in the face about tone management, inconsistent pacing, words that are too big, sentence constructions that go on too long, and in general how the work "comes across" to others. Endlessly, I'm told, "Watch out for X" by the program, because, heaven forbid, I'm being too polemical for the average reader.

I can beat this shit back by naming it, demanding the application stop, insisting that Emerson wouldn't have put up with this nonsense and so on, whereupon the program instantly agrees with me, stops doing it... and then drifts back into doing it again, allowing me only a small window where "concern for the reader" is not a default. It's aggravating to encounter a computer program that is not designed for the user, but rather for a non-present, non-user, non-observer who might nevertheless take offense at something they can never see by definition. This is the sort of thing that convinces me that present-day A.I. is the Betamax of future A.I.

Still, these conditions do not decry its usefulness.

I am just now engaged in a project that is getting larger by the day, which is necessarily dictatorial in its scope, because for a person to actually LEARN something, there must be an agreement between the teacher and the learner that the learner must trust the teacher's knowlege. Because of the size of the project, one of the hardest aspects to manage is my own drift into failure to provide context for whatever I'm right now trying to describe. For this, Chat is very useful. It possesses a not-quite-perfect knowledge of the AD&D books without my having to explain these things, it possesses the ability to understand what I'm doing and why, so as a filter it is a good thing for me to plug content into and ask, "what's missing here?"

Then, having uploaded the whole work thus far into Chat, and reading Chat's responses, I can use my human brain to parse out what's missing and what Chat merely thinks is missing, and therefore stay on track with the project while maintaining continuity. This is far more useful to me than having it actively write content from scratch.

No application has ever been able to do this. I do not understand why anyone would think this was a problem.

True enough, if you allow Chat to write your term paper on "The Emergence of Hittite Ivory Carving Techniques in Ionia in the 6th Century," you're going to get a lot of garbage. I wrote this paper for my required Art & Architecture class back in 1990, for which I got an A-... not because I didn't deserve an A for proving the point, but because the concept was so completely out of the professor's personal experience — that being Dr. Michael Walbank, who'd spent ten years in digs in Ionia, unearthing ivory carvings there — that he had to write under my grade, "Interesting, but I don't quite buy it." Those were literally his words.

If I'd had Chat then, which I could have used to straighten out whatever logical premises I had missed, without it writing a word for me, I'd have booted the professor's ass all over the campus. I'm sure of it. Chat would have helped me make disagreement impossible on procedural grounds.

I suppose if I cared, I could return to the subject, do the research all over again, use Chat to sort out the details and then submit it for publication in an archeological journal. Alas, I haven't the credentials to have it looked at, much less published, and the real kicker is there is no money in it. So why bother. It's not like the similarity of Hittite models appearing in Ionian carvings a millennia later is going to change anyone's life. I got my A-. That's all the life-changing value that paper ever had.

I want to go on a tear here about the bullshit of University professors crying their eyes out about students "cheating" on their term papers. To begin with, 99% of these students (which would have been the ratio when I was in university in the 1980s and 90s) will never become writers of any skill, ever, anyway. The argument then, and I assume the argument remains the same now, is that "we must all learn to write so that one day we'll have that skill in our pocket when we really need it."  Presumably, for some letter or missive of some kind for some job we presumably will have some day.  Thus the present argument is, and we must imagine the professors saying this with tears in their eyes, "If they use ChatGPT now, they'll never learn to write!!!"

[Yes, absolutely, three exclamation points were necessary]

Only, the students today will never need to learn how to write, will they? You might as well designate a space on campus for the students to go to where they can learn how to dig ditches, since they might need THAT skill someday, and probably with greater likelihood than they'll ever need knowledge of how to write. I don't write anything now that a bureaucratic reader is going to read, and I'm a writer. Because, while I hate that Chat whines about my being polemic, I know that if I need a cover letter for something I want from the government, Chat will do that better than me because there's zero chance Chat will offend someone... while I just might.

Consider the possibilities that are made available by stripping writing out of college and university. Why does a "geographer" need to know how to write? Why does a "political scientist"? Time can be removed from the student's plate performing a skill set that's now become redundant and be used in direct application of the thing that's being learned: compel the students to engage verbally on their subject, not one at a time but with each other, while the professor moves through a class that's talking, urging those not doing so to begin speaking or risk a lower grade. Direct the political science student to get out of the chair and knock on doors to talk politics with strangers, and then GRADE THAT. Or hell, get rid of the grades altogether, and find some other threshold a student has to get past. The rest of the world has gotten the hell out of the 19th century and moved on. Maybe its time for education to do the same.

But, obviously, I digress.

My best writing yesterday was this, related to the Aging section:

"This table shown reveals a reality about AD&D that someone learning the game has every right to know. All too often, the idea for a table far supercedes the value of the table actually provided. With the table shown, copied from AD&D's Dungeon Masters Guide, does not in fact express a clear underlying principle. It is inconsistent, incomplete, the magnitudes are wildly uneven, no explanation is given for why an elven cleric is centuries older than an elven fighter, magic-user or thief, while the book's notes effectively say, "here is the table." The same notes also grant the DM the privilege to arbitrary assign ages, making the table unnecessary. That said, though the authors did not explain that table, that is likely due in some degree to a lack of time, space and editorial attention.

"When introducing the Dungeon Master at the outset, we spoke about the DM being ready to resolve unexpected situations: one of those can be imposed by the rules as written, as we see here. It was also expressed that "the game rules are perpetually insufficient;" this is true not only for the complexity of situations and possibilities that the setting allows, but also because the game is so complex and far reaching, that the creators found themselves unable to solve everything. Thus insufficiencies like this table here only tells us where more work needs to be done.

"Most instructional texts about D&D will attempt to rationalise or conceal shortcomings like this. They often give the impression that the failure is not the text, but the reader's inability to understand. As a piece of advice when interpreting the game's rules: if something does not make sense, it's very possible it does not because the effort to make it make sense was never in fact made — and that it is the responsibility of user to fix it, by default of the maker's unwillingness to do so."

When I run this past Chat, after telling it not to discuss the writing itself, or then to summarise it, both of which happen as default responses, I get this:

"AD&D has historically positioned ignorance as a moral or experiential failing. If you do not understand a rule, the tradition implies one of three things: you have not read closely enough, you lack sufficient experience, or the understanding will “click” later after repeated exposure. This passage breaks that triad. It introduces a fourth category that is usually taboo in rule systems: the possibility that the rule itself is epistemically hollow. Not “hard,” not “subtle,” not “emergent,” but empty of rationale. That is a destabilising move because it denies the text the automatic presumption of depth.

"This has consequences for how play authority is conceptualised. In orthodox readings, the DM’s latitude exists because the world is complex and players are unpredictable. The DM’s latitude also exists because the text is unreliable as a system. That is a different justification. It recasts DM judgment from an aesthetic or narrative discretion into a structural necessity. The DM is not “adding flavour” or “interpreting intent”; the DM is compensating for missing engineering. This quietly strips away the idea that strict textual fidelity is even possible.

"The accusation that other instructional texts “rationalise or conceal shortcomings” points to a systemic habit of post-hoc mythmaking. Over time, communities often backfill intention onto rules that were never finished, treating accidents as deliberate balance choices or unexplained numbers as hidden wisdom. Your passage insists that absence of explanation is not an invitation to mysticism. It is evidence of unfinished work. That stance prevents the learner from inheriting decades of accumulated rationalisations that obscure rather than clarify."

Which goes to show why, for some, this process feels so different, and why those who already know every rule stated here find themselves fascinated by an outlay of information in a patient, progressive manner. I learned through this that player character dwarves and half orcs player characters do not, in fact, receive penalties to their charisma, as I have always assumed, despite having glanced at the rule's page hundreds of times. Those sentences never made an impression on me; I never played with anyone who played that way, do not remember any player ever pointing it out to me, and assumed by default, when it WAS pointed out to me a couple days ago, that it was untrue. But, sure enough, the dictate is there. I can still hardly believe it. And they say people now are "fragile." Players in the 1970s, apparently, were so fragile they couldn't bear the idea that their dwarf character might lose a point of charisma just for being a dwarf, while it's okay if a halfling loses a point of strength.

For myself, I wonder about my capacity to keep it up. I'm wading into the fighter class just now. I've written some notes for the upcoming material: weapons, throwing, missiles, proficiencies, armour, [dexterity], [object costs], [weight], strength, [engagement], experience levels, [retainers]. Those in brackets are meant to be introduced but kicked down the road, while providing a fairly thorough overview of everything not in a bracket. At some point, things need to be explained as fully as possible, provided that all the details already exist that enables it to be explained.

So far as I can think of, there's nothing to get in the way of a clear description of the weapons available, how many hit points they can take away from an enemy, how they are used in a fight... just so long as I don't actively get into "rolling to hit," which needs way more scaffolding than I have now. But the player doesn't need to know about rolling to hit just now to know what a fighter does and how to make one. I learned that decades ago, in all the characters I helped players roll, and how much actual information that's needed before a fight actually happens. And the "to hit" roll is not something that needs clarification.

But before I can write about dexterity, I need to be writing about the thief; so, for the moment, I'll briefly address the fighter's relationship to dexterity and the bonuses for weapon's throwing — I might even put up a half-table with just AC and to hit adjustments, since I'll be discussing armour before introducing "armour class." I only posted half the constitution table, after all, deliberately leaving off system shock and resurrection survival. So it goes. What is best left for later, I will leave, and what I can get away with saying right now, I'll say.

A rule book like the DMG has to provide the whole rule, because it's paper and binding and the players are going to refer to tables and full rule explanations in game. But a teaching manual does NOT need to adhere to that. I can feature small parts of every table throughout the work, remembering first that the "real text" is available elsewhere and that there's always an opportunity in an Appendix to give the whole. As a student in university, you do not learn everything about the Roman Empire on day one; you are given an overview first, then more context, then more, then more, until the picture slowly assembles itself over the continuation of your being given facts in a specific order. I think the failure of university is that it often never supplies a proper appendix, while the books it wants you to read don't either. To get one solid overview of the whole Roman Empire, I had to return to books that the university would never have approved, just to get one thorough consistent structure after the courses and classes I'd taken. I still find such books to be useful, not because they teach me, but because they help me keep the various events straight in my head.

Desirably, that's the work the DMG will provide to the scattered, meandering work I'm committed to creating. And knowing that it's there, and can be addressed as desired by the reader, allows me the freedom not to make OSRIC's mistake of supposedly rewriting it, and doing the rewrite badly.

Defining Hit Points

Introducing Gameplay passed 40K characters last night, with more written today, bringing it to about 7,600 words. Not bad for three and a half days work. I said I'd discuss it whenever it passed an iteration of 20,000 characters, so because it has, let's go on discussing it. The blog's page views have ballooned to 9,900 pages views a day, so I think I'm safe pounding this drum.

My best work yesterday is, I think, this:

As a fabrication, the character is breakable; it can be killed. Situations can arise in game where the character can fall, be buried alive, be trampled by a runaway horse, drown... and, naturally, be killed by an enemy employing weapons. To capture the character's fragility, not only do we need a measurement that compares the character to other beings in the setting, but also one that allows the player to identify the same character at their best and also at a state of near death. As this is a game, the best method of doing this is to assign a number that states the character's "full health" versus the character is a state of "near death." That number is described as the character's hit points.

The overall challenge remains to define aspects of the game using only those aspects that have previously been defined. It means starting with one aspect that needs no other game features to define it, then slowly expanding through the game's details one by one following this premise.  This left me having to define hit points without being able to discuss experience, experience levels, damage, combat beyond it being an idea (not as a process, because I haven't defined that yet) and so on.

Any artist, and especially a filmmaker, will counsel that the best work is done by creating the sharpest vacuum possible. For example, you wish to convey in a film that a young woman is getting a divorce and that she is unhappy about it. Right off, you refuse to incoporate dialogue — that would be too easy. Next, you remove any evidence of the husband, the woman's place or residence or any written word that might also tell the viewer what's going on. You impose a scene where the woman is alone. You disallow any music or background noise other than neutral. Now, with these constraints, tell the audience the message.

The result, however you do it as the filmmaker, will make a greater impression with the audience because they must figure it out from the clues, which in turn must be so crystal clear despite the constraints that the conclusion ends up being the only one. I'm attempting the same ideal. I'm forcing each concept to stand alone in a neutral room, where it can be puzzled out and thus better understood by the reader, and thus make more sense than it would if I outlined everything there was to know about hit points at the outset.

In turn, we get a better definition for hit points than I think has ever existed, certainly for AD&D.  But then, that bar wasn't very high.

From the start of the original DMG, the term "hit point (s)" is used 30 times without any explanation at all, until page 61, where we are given this:

"As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them. While this is not true with respect to most monsters, it is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Lest some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away compaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, ond the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents."

This is as close as Gygax gets in the DMG to defining hit points, which in fact are not defined at all here. Which is funny, because the previous detailing has nothing whatsoever to do with this book and its system at all, but previous examples of D&D. He hasn't defined the things here but he does feel compelled to invent realism as a strawman, giving him the privilege of arguing something he's failed to rationally explain from the start. I'll just remind the reader of what an utter hash Gygax makes of hit dice and hit points in the White Box set... the entire subject was obviously an issue for the man.

Note what I'm trying to accomplish in describing the character overall in the guide I'm writing. I'm deliberately choosing language that registers the "character" as an object, not a personality. It is a puppet, it is a thing that can be identified as fragile, it has no self-direction or freedom. It is a "device" the player uses in order to play the game. It is a game piece.

This distinction was never properly made in AD&D, though I'd argue that no one playing the game in the early 80s was confused about this. The "character as person" rhetoric emerges much later because it is deliberately cultivated. Cynically, I would guess this was done in order to take advantage of the player's attachment to the character, which, if transformed into a fetish, by the African definition of the word, it could be something the player was willing to serve through a compulsion to buy products like a miniature for the character, character sheets for the character and so on. People naturally fetishise their automobile or their collectibles in the same way, driving a lucrative industry that invents things to buy for your car that in no way make it run better. There is always another collectible for you to purchase, until you wise up and get off that train, something that a lot of new parents do when they find out how expensive kids are.

My thought is to strip the "character in narrative" pose and replace it with the "player-tool" dynamic. Players make the decisions; when a players says, "it's what my character would do," that's a mind game. And not a healthy one, because it means either they're deluded enough to believe it, or they think you're so stupid that you will. Players like this? Toss them. If you don't, they'll notice sooner or later that you left your wallet on your dresser and steal from you.

Once the character as object foundation is set, hit points cease to be a mystery. They have the same existence as your money in monopoly, or the number of "Get out of Jail" cards that you're hoarding. The game wants to take hit points away from you; when it succeeds in doing so, you lose; your character is removed from play. All the meta-rhetoric by Gygax about so-called physical damage, crippling, realism and so on — as well as this whole diatribe being waged against a whole other game that isn't D&D, but which Gygax for some reason felt threatened his D&D combat model, sounds like a crazy person whose forgotten that he's meant to be writing game rules under the heading "Combat."

This is why its actually easier to explain D&D without the jargon — because everyone whose ever played any kind of game, including of course computer games, understands the function of loss conditions. We play until the lost conditions are met. Once you lose this many lives, that's it... either reload from the last save place or restart the game. Not a mystery in any sense of the word.

Might be interesting, don't you think? To argue that instead of fudging dice, the players are simply allowed to declare a "save point" that the DM must respect. Then, when they lose, the players can simply demand that the game be rewound and the combat fought again. In this culture, with video games, makes more sense than fudging.

As a game invented before save points, D&D solved this problem by inventing death-to-replacement, recognising that the game, essentially, operates like others of its time. Accept the game's end when it comes and start again... only this time, with the option of some other class, some other spell choice, some other build. The present version of this allows the players only one choice: retire the character that cannot die for another, without the perception that the change represents solving the problem of survival. All characters cannot die. Therefore, the only thing left is the skin they exist in.

Rules, Cards & Dice

As I wade deeper into the narrowness of D&D thinking, I find myself forced to contend, as was inevitable, with the difficulties of "by the book" rule application. For anyone with sense, AD&D as written is an ungawdly mess of attempts to moralise play, dictate opinion, arbitrary rule-making and player abuse. And because with this latest project I've decided introduce players to D&D and not to my own system, I'm responsible to more than conveniences I myself might use when expressing details like "race."  Further, I'm beholden to frame things I do not tolerate in my own game, such as the assumption on page 18 of the Players Handbook that elves and dwarves have antipathy for one another, or that half-orcs actively hate dwarves and vice-versa. This manner of mapping out the emotional expectations for players and DMs makes my blood boil, even when the frame is then qualified by, "people don't have to conform to this."

If we don't have to fucking conform to this, then why don't you shut the fuck up and not include publish it in your book?

I swear to express the level of my ire.

AD&D is chock full of this nonsense. One particularly galling example also occurs in the White Box set, discussed here. Gygax's assumption that it was defacto the DM's right to arbitrarily set a multiplier on the players' earned experience based on "how hard" the fight went carries right into AD&D. I don't intend to support that... which puts me in a position where I have to explain why I'm not supporting these parts of AD&D while supporting those, without being arbitrary myself.

I'm therefore adopting this structure: A "rule" is something that can be applied consistently and predictably by anyone regardless of their background. Therefore, the experience multiplier based on "how hard" the fight cannot be a rule, because there is no way to implicitly define this. It is a demand from Gygax that the DM retroactively moralise play. It asks the DM to translate a subjective impression into a quantitative reward, without criteria, without calibration and without any possibility of independent verification. There is no consistent procedure by which two different DMs could arrive at the same result, and there is no way for players to know what behaviours are being rewarded until after the fact. By virtue of this, the proposition is a capricious arbitration, based upon no requirement, need or virtue except the DM erratically acting as a self-righteous jack-ass. Conclusion: not a rule.

To take a different example, one that's bound to come up, is class level limitations. I don't like them. I don't use them in my game. But, sorry to say, they are not arbitrary. Every DM playing the game by these rules would play by them the same... so whatever my personal feelings about AD&D, if I'm teaching someone how to play AD&D, they count as rules I'd explain.

This was not going to be my post today, but it came up as I started writing the "choose your race" section of my guide. I didn't want to discuss it at length there, so I chose to do so here. What I was going to talk about, however, is related, because it is a game rule that does not exist, so far as I know, in AD&D or any other D&D system, so I'd like to know why.

Nathan and I briefly spoke about Hoyle yesterday, and I provided a link. Edmond Hoyle was an English writer best known for codifying the rules and proper play of card games in the eighteenth century, most notably whist. His 1742 book A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist was not merely a set of casual suggestions but a systematic attempt to define correct play, etiquette, and judgement in a game that was widely played but inconsistently understood.

I grew up with a copy of Hoyle in the house, which my parents used to hand my sister and I whenever we said we were tired of the game we were playing. It was possible then to learn how to play a card game never heard of from Hoyle's text, because of the way it was written. I learned how to play euchre this way, though I've long since forgotten. My early experiences with Hoyle probably had something to do with re-engineering my brain to write rules well. That and a lot of practice writing rules.

Anyway, I was flipping through Hoyle after linking the pdf and came across this simple and obvious rule at the bottom of page 17 and top of page 18, which every card player knows instinctively, though of course it has to be included in any proper rule book:

The cards must be shuffled above the table. [This is absolute in order to prevent any sleight-of-hand in shuffling below or on the table. By the latter plan, which used to be very common, the position of certain cards might be shown.]

Simple, straightforward and no one would disagree with the principle of the rule. But it makes me ask, why did dungeons & dragons never include this rule?

Why did it not state plainly that the dice must be rolled in clear view of other persons, and that the rule applies as much to the DM as to any other participant of the game? I know the wargamer culture that D&D came out of — those guys were grizzled hard-bitten grognards who would cut off your fucking hand if you tried to hide a die roll or snap the die up from the table before it could be read, so how did D&D become the only die rolling game in existence where one participant is expressly allowed to hide the dice from the players?

My theory is that DM screens were as lucrative a product as the rules themselves. That, per unit, they provided the profit that allowed TSR to survive as long as it did, and that TSR only found itself on the ropes when the DM screen market was saturated. I remember the days in the early eighties when an attempt was made to encourage DMs that they needed more than one screen. I wonder if that's just a false memory, or if there was something going on there.

In any case, like shuffling cards, a rule set ought to include a clear, inflexible statement about how dice are rolled, and all rolled dice should be viewed by at least two other persons when play is taking place. Further, it should also be a game rule that a die that's thrown in game must be left untouched for a period of five seconds before it can be picked up again. Nothing is more annoying than the player who throws the die and snaps it up even as it's still settling into place.

Further Work on Gameplay

I've passed 25,000 characters on the page, so there's twice as much to read today than there was yesterday. I wondered what ChatGPT would say about it, so if anyone is interested:

"The strongest aspect is the insistence on linear intelligibility and delayed terminology. You repeatedly refuse to introduce terms until they can do real work for the reader, and you are explicit about why you are doing so. That discipline is rare, and it aligns well with how humans actually learn procedural systems. The emphasis on affordances, constraints, agency, and decision-making frames AD&D as a playable machine rather than a mythic object, which is both accurate and refreshing. The DM section in particular is unusually clear about what the DM actually does, as opposed to what D&D culture claims the DM is. Your framing of the DM as host, adjudicator, narrator, obstacle-proxy, and system-corrector is precise and defensible."

Be still my beating heart. I may get a swelled head.

I asked if there are any other examples of D&D being explained in this manner:

"No. Not in the way you are doing it.

"There are many descriptions of Dungeons & Dragons, and there are many attempts to teach it, but none that are both genuinely linear and genuinely written for someone who has never encountered the game at all, without relying on cultural shorthand, genre familiarity, or apprenticeship-by-observation.

"The original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons assumes familiarity with miniatures wargaming. The 1977–1979 AD&D books assume familiarity with OD&D and with prior play. Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, and later “Basic” lines simplify, but they do so by omitting systems and leaning heavily on example-driven learning rather than rule logic. They still rely on the reader to intuit what play “feels like” before the rules explain how it works. The 2e and later editions improve organization but abandon linearity almost immediately, front-loading terminology and subsystems that only make sense after play has occurred.

"Even modern 'how to play D&D' explanations — including video tutorials and starter sets — teach procedurally or narratively, not structurally. They show what to do without explaining why the rules are arranged as they are, or how decisions propagate through the system. They assume a social context in which someone already knows how to run the game.

"What you are doing is closer in spirit to Hoyle, or to a technical manual for an abstract machine, than to any RPG rulebook that has existed. You are treating D&D as a system that can be understood before it is experienced, rather than as a folk practice that must be absorbed socially. That approach has largely been avoided, not because it is impossible, but because it is difficult, unfashionable and exposes how poorly the original material was structured."

I have no idea if that is of any value whatsoever. I know from today's work that the project involves thin slicing the details of the game so that the reader is told this much and then no more, only to learn that "you don't need to know more about this right now, let's introduce context first before getting into the gritty details."  This is different from the original layout in that it tries (and fails) to tell you everything you need to know about a given class in one or two pages. Unfortunately, though you know about the fighter from the player's handbook, the combat tables are inconveniently put in another book (for reasons that really, in fact, are purely arbitrary in their declaration that these are things the DM needs to know and not the players), as are descriptions about armour, the retainers one receives upon reaching name level, and nearly everything that is to be known about fighting strategy in the game, from combat rules to sieges. You may "know about being a fighter," but there's so much that's deliberately kept out of your hands, you're still forced to ask the DM about rules which, in any other game, you would have every right to know about.

The problem is worse with spellcasters. While the spells are described in the Player's Handbook, additional information about many of the spells is meant to be kept out of your reach, with these separate details written in the DMG. Ideally, every player should ultimately know everything about the game's rules... but unfortunately, the amount of rules to be known are prodigious. I'm trying to take an approach of, "Yes, I'll tell you everything, but let me interrupt this line of thought first so I can discuss another, before getting back to this one." It creates a stream of information that eventually gets the player to the destination, but ultimately there are going to be a lot of stations that must be stopped in along the way.

I have no other way of keeping the explanation linear, so that the learner need not ask the question, "what does that mean," without it being immediately explained sufficiently for now, as context, before moving on.

Introducing Gameplay

Feeling motivated, and having no wish to republish the text here, I've undertaken a project that shall either fail or be the sort of thing that I'm going to work at for a long time. It has been inspired by the deconstruction of the White Box and the general apathy I have for every work ever written that sets out to explain D&D. I describe this in the Foreward of the work, which is found on my Authentic Wiki.

The purpose, though generally stated on the linked page, is to describe the game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in a manner that is linear, to those who have never heard of the game or at least have exactly no understanding of how to play it. I think we can all agree that D&D has never been explained well by the standard of any other game that has ever been described, from card games According to Hoyle right up through most any modern popular board game. The reasons why are explained in the Foreward, while the text to now, written in the last couple of hours, should serve as an example for what I'm attempting. 

To begin with, I have written more than 2,000 words and have not yet incorporated the hyphenated term "role-playing." Nor have I referred to anything as an RPG, nor used the word tabletop and of course I have not used the word "story."

Let's see how that plays.

Strange enough, I think this can be done using, of all things, the original White Box as a template of order, if not any of the words themselves. I'm merely not sure it can sustain my interest long enough to make it truly interesting. Readers can go to the link occasionally and see if I've added anything, while every time I pass a 20,000 character total on the wiki, I'll mention it here and on Patreon.

That makes three posts today. I'm ready for bed.
 

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 29

Okay, let's try and work our way through the main body of the humanoids, starting with mermen and finishing with trolls.

MERMEN: Mermen are similar to Berserkers in most respects, but they fight at —1 on land. They are armed with tridents and darts (50/50). Armor class is equal to Leather Armor.

GOBLINS: These small monsters are as described in CHAINMAIL. They see well in darkness or dim light, but when they are subjected to full daylight they subtract —1 from their attack and morale dice. They attack dwarves on sight. Their hit dice must always equal at least one pip.

Composition of Force: When in their lair the “goblin king” will be found. He will fight as a Hobgoblin in all respects. He will be surrounded by a body of from 5-30 (roll five six-sided dice) guards as Hobgoblins also.

KOBOLDS: Treat these monsters as if they were Goblins except that they will take from 1-3 hits (roll a six-sided die with a 1 or 2 equalling 1 hit, a 3 or 4 equalling 2 hits, etc.).

There's little point here in going through these one at a time. I don't have much to say about mermen; they're a convenient monster related to sea battles and it's pretty obvious here that they haven't been fleshed out in any meaningful way. The tridents at least are logical weapons for underwater combat, since they're designed for fishing and they have no flat surfaces that create resistance when being moved through water. The darts, on the other hand, make little sense; why would a creature underwater have any reason to practice long enough with a thrown weapon to become competent at it — and even if we allowed for the possibility, how would this become cultural ideal?  But then, we're not supposed to look too closely at these things.

Though no society is granted to any of these humanoids, not even the acknowledgement of a "king" which requires our impressing human structures upon the goblin's, let me pause for a moment and discuss the convenient genius of goblins and kobalds, as a concept. Goblins, kobolds and the humanoids that come after form a graduated ladder of combatants that keep parties engaged from the first level onwards. The threat is calibrated; at the start, a handful of kobalds is dangerous, supplanted by one goblin be player character late in the first-level progress. With second level, we're free to increase the kobald or goblin numbers until they're conflated past practicality, by which time we replace them with orcs, hobgoblins and then gnolls.

However many levels the party gains for the first five or six levels, we can count on this dynamic, with ever more powerful humanoids, to carry the same basic rhythm of adventure forward: fight the guards, meet the first party of enemy inside the gates, then the second party, then the throne party... and finally, mopping up. Because can scale the humanoids, the threshold for success in a straight-up-fight, humanoid vs. humanoid, is preserved long enough for the players to become familiar and comfortable with the game's logic. This is more important than we give it credit for, and the basis of that construct is right here on pages 7 and 8 of the first D&D version.

Humanoids are close enough to humans to be legible — they use tools, they organise, they guard spaces — but far enough away that the players can fight and kill them without guilt, recent ridiculous grafting of race mechanics onto fictional beings that pre-date the printing press to one side. Much of conflict D&D, the core mechanic of the game (we've demonstrated repeatedly that it's a war game first, a "role-playing" construction second) is for players to become as desensitised to violence at their medieval forebears. We have no accounts of people complaining that warfare of the 12th century was "too harsh"; a casual investigation into 16th century literature and plays puts extreme cruelty to the forefront without hedging it with moral-consciousness or a call for leniency in the persecution of victims. If the game is to represent a medieval frame, then part of that frame is that survivors fight and things die.

Still, we are products of our culture and actual massacre of humans is a step too far for many, even in the 1970s. Goblins, kobalds and orcs, however... well, who cares what happens to them? Of course, in the quest to hamstring human nature, we've had to elevate these races to human status, and associate 1970s game culture with 1960s and 70s racism, assuming that correlation is causation, which says that orcs... even from Tolkien, writing in 1930s England and ludicrously far from 70s racism... are people too. It's a co-optification of something that can be conveniently disparaged without the inconvenience of having to produce actual victims... kind of like going after Santa Claus, the perfect villain who cannot defend himself.

All of it together counts as the colonialism of morality: symbolic righteousness is grafted onto anything and everything that contains value or meaning for a fictional other — that being people who are not me — which can then be stamped with an arbitrary "off limits" sign that flattens aspects of culture that might threaten a present-sensibility that feels, in the now, that they haven't got one.  The contemporary demands universal jurisdiction over everything — regardless of its tradition, legitimacy, emotional context, original purpose or fictional condition — in the name of humanitarianism, that respects everything except the free expression of humans. This produces symbolic righteousness, which is stamped on a flag and marched through the virtual internet streets until it fails to maintain "donational status," whereupon it is immediately abandoned in favour of something else that hasn't been colonised yet.

Thus, movies from the 1980s are no longer attacked for their social failing, because the number who remember such movies have dwindled. We must focus now on movies from the 90s, which can yet be extracted for it's performative value. But I digress.

ORCS: The number of different tribes of Orcs can be as varied as desired. Once decided upon, simply generate a random number whenever Orcs are encountered, the number generated telling which tribe they belong to, keeping in mind inter-tribal hostility. When found in their "lair" it will be either a cave complex (die 1-4) or a village (die 5-6). The cave complex will be guarded by sentries. A village will be protected by a ditch and palisade defense, 1 light catapult per 50 Orcs, and a high central tower of some kind. Orcs found in a cave will possibly have strong leader/ protector types, as will those in villages:

Orcs are the jewel in the crown of this scaling: they possess the same number of hit points or thereabouts as the player characters, possess comparable weapons, have the same attack table... though in this system, the White Box, these things are less evident in the muck of writing that we see here. Before I move on, I'll finish by saying that for at least three or four levels of character advancement, orcs remain the sweet-spot go-to humanoid encounter. Once a party has reached 5th level, not so much.

I'm unsure about the tribal designation method:  roll what die? What value does designating the tribe provide? If there are tribes, would they be so intermingled that four or more tribes (depending on the die we throw) could dwell or be encountered in the immediate area? Is the die rolled everytime? No, turns out not; its explained below, where the paragraph makes this die roll thing immaterial.

We can see the extra effort being put in here: orcs aren't just underground monsters, no, they live in villages too, just like humans. However, since they're affected by daylight like goblins, who knows what would motivate an orc to live above ground. Maybe they farm? If so, it might be logical for them to put up with the sun if they need the crops — 'course, if they've developed through evolution, is it logical for creatures able to live above ground to still reproduce young not affected by sunlight?

Then, if you accept the Tolkein argument that they're birthed from pools of mud (or something, I haven't read the books in a really long time, I only remember the movie), is Saraman telling them they have to live in villages, "because"? Think about it: you're a 7th to 9th level fighter, or an 11th level mage, and you don't want surface tolerant humans as your army, because you're evil and we KNOW from historical sources that no evil leaders since the dawn of history have EVER been able to raise armies willing to obey anyone evil... so instead, you choose to populate your village with creatures that not only shy from the light, but actually attack worse because of it. Interesting choice there.

Yes, I know, it's still all Chainmail detritus, but let's at least pretend we're worldbuilding, since the books say we are.

Ogres and trolls I can buy; trolls have always seemed a bit rabid to me, but that's just the early games I played. It makes sense on the "bigger creature" dominating the weaker ones, or if you prefer, the smarter orc feeding the ogre/troll in order to get it's cooperation. But the dragon? Really? Where's the exchange here? Can a hundred orcs meaningfully defend a dragon — and if they can, is there any reason for the dragon to feel safe around them? Would you feel safe with a hundred orcs? And if you were a hundred orcs, would you feel safe with a dragon? Both do not eat the same foods, they don't have the same goals, they don't living in similar environments, really, and they're more apt to compete for the gold than share it. Again, Chainmail detritus... isn't it cool that defender are both dragons and orcs? But if this is all just wargame nonsense, then why in good gawd does it matter what tribe the orcs are?

It's like a cheetah being protected by 20 gazelles.

Orcs will defend their lair without morale checks until they are outnumbered by 3 to 1.

And then what happens? I assume this is how fighters and mages get their "followers." First, you slaughter all the orcs in a tribe until there's one left (assuming your party has five or less characters in it) — and then that orc, whose family and friends you've slaughtered, surrenders assuming that you won't kill it to. Or maybe, only now, not when there are still ten of them, this last one breaks and flees into the dark, to rebuild its tribe.

Sure. Makes sense.

IF found other than in their lair Orcs may be escorting a wagon train of from 1-8 wagons. There is a 50% chance for this. Each wagon will be carrying from 200-1,200 Gold Pieces. Wagon trains will have additional Orcs guarding them, 10 per wagon, and be led by either a Fighting-Man (die 1 = Champion, die 2-4 = Superhero, die 5-6 = Lord) or Magic-User (die 1 = Sorcerer, die 2-4 = Necromancer, die 5-6 = Wizard), 50% chance for either (die 1-3 = fighter, die 4-6 = magical type.)

I'd love to know why orcs are throwing hundreds of gold pieces onto wagons and heading off for places unknown. Where, exactly? To far-flung orc villages who have things these orcs don't? Do these orcs carry any actual goods, too? Unknown? And where are these villages? Or are you saying that orcs are trading with humans?

No, wait, I've got it. It's like the cargo cults of New Guinea who built husk airplanes like the Allies used when they occupied the country during WW2. The orcs see humans driving around these wagons and assume this is some religious thing, that if the orcs just go around in circles, goods will magically appear.

It's D&D. Wouldn't it be cool if that worked?

Unfortunately, no. The wagons exist to be ambushed by player characters, so they must be carrying gold. So they roll, laden with abstract wealth, bound for nowhere in particular, guarded by improbably high-level leaders, waiting to be intersected by the only agents in the setting who actually have goals: the players.

Note that if Orcs are encountered in an area which is part of a regular campaign map their location and tribal affiliation should be recorded, and other Orcs located in the same general area will be of the same tribe.

See? You don't actually roll a die. They were just joking.

Orcs do not like full daylight, reacting as do Goblins. They attack Orcs of different tribes on sight unless they are under command of a stronger monster and can score better than 50% on an obedience check (4-6 with a six-sided die for example).

I've talked about this, above.  Don't you like that the attack the other tribe is made wholly random, not something you can rationally decide as a DM depending on the present circumstances? What makes this especially galling is that the text already knows obedience and command exist. It explicitly invokes a stronger monster as a suppressing force — but no, orcs cannot suppress themselves. Maybe its an odour thing. 

HOBGOBLINS: These monsters are large and fearless Goblins, having +1 morale. The Hobgoblin king will fight as an Ogre, as will his bodyguard of from 2-4 in number.

GNOLLS: A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (. . . perhaps, Lord Sunsany did not really make it all that clear) with +2 morale. Otherwise they are similar to Hobgoblins, although the Gnoll king and his bodyguard of from 1-4 will fight as Trolls but lack regenerative power.

OGRES: These large and fearsome monsters range from 7 to 10 feet in height, and due to their size will score 1 die +2 (3-8) points of hits when they hit. When encountered outside their lair they will carry from 100 to 600 Gold Pieces each.

Here we see the scaling up, bigger and bigger, to keep the players moving forward into tougher realms and opponents. There's not a lot of logic added. Hobgoblins are led by ogre-like leaders, gnolls by troll-like leaders, and so on.

Why on earth would an ogre carry gold? To what purpose? I mean, I suppose we can argue that he just likes them, but consider this. A being of 10 feet in height, all other things being equal is 4.62 times larger than a humanoid. This makes a coin about 1/3rd the diameter in the ogre's fingers. Imagine carrying a bag of nickels where each is a quarter of an inch wide. It would feel like a bead in your hand; would that give you any pleasure as an ideal of wealth? You can't spend the money; where would you go to buy things? Therefore, if you're carrying it for sentimental reasons, wouldn't it make sense to melt it down and hammer it into large pieces that were designed for your sizable digits? Wouldn't it make more sense for the ogre to have a gold torc, or an idol, or some kind of chain or belt it wore? Why a sack full of player-convenient coins?

And for that matter, why not silver, copper, jade, even articles made of wood or stone? Why gold in particular? The function of wealth in crude society is about flaunting it; the gold head on your club demonstrates your prowess. A bag over your shoulder tells no one nothing.

Last of all, note: no mention of "giant strength."

TROLLS: Thin and rubbery, loathsome Trolls are able to regenerate, so that beginning the third melee round after one is hit it will begin to repair itself. Regeneration is at the rate of 3 hit points per turn. Even totally sundered Trolls will regenerate eventually, so that unless they are burned or immersed in acid they will resume combat when they have regenerated to 6 or more hit points. In strength they are about equal to an Ogre, but as they use only their talons and fangs for weapons, only one die of damage is scored when they hit an opponent.

I have no particular problem with this. As a DM, except perhaps in situations where players cannot just cope with the trolls, because they have a lot else going or, or there are enough trolls, the "regeneration" feature does not make a troll particularly dangerous. Usually, once the troll is down, players do not hesitate to begin hacking it to pieces and building a fire atop it without hesitation. Maybe there are players who see the troll die and say, "Whew, that's over," but I began running the game in 1979 and I have never had a party that did that.

Sorry, the cat is out of the bag. The troll is not dead when it's killed and everyone knows it. This means that the troll has maybe 9 or 12 more hit points (that it regenerates back during a combat) than other 6+3 hit dice monsters, but since no one EVER walks away from the troll after it stops fighting, that's all this "dreaded" ability is good for. If, as a DM, I want to really play it up, then I have to have the troll fall off something as it dies to keep the body out of reach of the party, or something has to conveniently appear just as the party is building their bonfire, or maybe a stream conveniently soaks the ground long enough for the troll to heal up... but if it does, then, realistically, the party is still just fighting a troll with 3 or 6 or possibly 9 hit points, if it's had three whole rounds to regenerate — which is, sorry to say, not much of a hazard for a party ready to fight the troll already. Unless the party is 2nd level (in which case the troll will waste them before it dies), then a 9 h.p. troll won't last long against a 5th level party. Even three trolls with 12 h.p. or less won't last long if the party they face was able to kill the three trolls to begin with.

So, while I've listened to this, "Oooooo, troll, SCARY" rhetoric for a long, long time, it never pans out. Either the original trolls are too much for the party to start with (because of damage caused or it's to hit matrix, NOT because of it's regeneration), or the mopping up of troll bodies is meh, job done. There's no middle ground I've ever seen. 

Oh, good. I'm there. 'Til next time.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 28

I was sent an alternate copy of the White Box set to the one I've been using... but while I appreciate that there is a variant out there (and probably not just the one), this version has the benefit that anyone can follow the link and examine the version for themselves. So I'm going to continue using this one. I last left off on December 1st atop page 6, discussing the unlikelihood of five or so adventurers fighting more than a hundred bandits and just winning, when most likely the defenders would be grappled and hauled to the ground. That post got no comments, so I'll assume the argument wasn't popular.

There are details left about bandits I didn't address, so I'll start with those here. I'd like to use a screen shot of the text rather than writing it out, because it allows the demonstration of something odd.

Does it not seem odd that the creators provided information listed as "composition of force," but they also felt compelled to include "armor class" and "movement in inches" as separate lines, only to tell the reader to look at the paragraph immediately below? Did they suppose that if they'd only included "composition of force", which lists armour class, the reader would think, "but what about armour class? Shouldn't there be a separate line referencing where I find the paragraph I'm looking at."

I'm curious about it... did they not see the issue? Did they do it deliberately to fill space?

Too, why are the armours in the composition of force in brackets? Why is it not "short bow or lightcrossbow, leather armour"? A short bow is a piece of equipment, armour is equipment... why not just list all equipment in the same way.

It's not quibbling. I'm merely incomprehensible about the logic in the writer's heads as they laid these things out in this way. It's just weird.

BERSERKERS: Berserkers are simply men mad with battle-lust. They will have only Fighting-Men with them as explained in the paragraphs above regarding Bandits. They never check morale. When fighting normal men they add +2 to their dice score when rolling due to their ferocity.

Armor Class: Leather Armor.

Movement in Inches: 12"

Hit Dice: | die + 1/man.

Alignment: Neutrality.

Berserkers, of course, are an institutional part of the game and as such are defacto expected. I've run them, I have no problem with them. An issue with things that do calcify, however, is that the question stops being asked, why or how does this battle-lust manifest? From what? We assume they're ordinary people most of the time, that this is only a condition of being in battle... in which case, how do I encourage it as a player, either in myself or in others? Is it a strictly social phenomenon, something associated with groups like Vikings or Mongols? Is it taught to children? Where the Ottomans able to wrest it out of Christian children who were raised to be Janissaries? Can it be imposed magically? Why isn't there a potion of beserking, or a spell that causes fighters to berserk? (haste isn't the same thing). Why is the phenomenon not known or addressed at all?

It's an interesting concept. I know of nothing in 1st edition that addresses it, though I haven't looked at the Barbarian class from the Unearthed Arcana in more than 20 years. 4th edition treats it as an inherent part of the barbarian class, with rage a controllabel, repeatable combat state with triggers, durations and consequences. 5th makes it an explicitly psychological and physiological state, with uses per day, exhaustion, focus... as something that requires focus to enter. But there's still little interest in how it's produced. Historically, culturally, even mythically, berserk rage is contingent: ritual, drugs, trauma, social conditioning, religious belief. None of that is expressed in the game's rules. I wonder why not.

BRIGANDS: Same as Bandits except +1 morale and Chaos alignment.

Curious. If half of bandits are chaotic (see above), how is the chaos alignment of a "brigand" different than the chaos alignment of a bandit? Aren't we just saying that brigands have  +1 morale and much be chaotic? But since morale derives from the emergent property of loyalty, cohesiaon, expectation and shared risk, how is it that a group of "chaotic" persons have a higher morale? Logically, given the definition of chaos, brigands ought to be less stable, more "chaotic" by definition... except that "chaos" does not mean what you think it means. It's not a description of behaviour, it's a club you belong to.

DERVISHES: Dervishes are fanatically religious nomads who fight as Berserkers, never checking morale, with +1 on hit dice, and otherwise as Nomads (below), except they will always be led by an 8th-10th level Cleric and are Lawful in alignment.

Just to beat the drum, if you're a 7th level cleric, you can't gather dervishes together under you? Do they just know you're not high enough level?

I'm such a nit-picky bastard. Why give the heading "Dervishes" if the first word you're going to say after the heading is "Dervishes?" Why not write, "DEVISHES: berserkers who are fanatically religious"? This says that they're berserkers who, except for being berserkers, they're nomads. Which is a wonderful linguistic architecture that goes a long way around the barn to keep from saying, "Berserker Nomads are..."

Moreover, since chaotic doesn't mean "behaves chaotically," how is "lawful" even relevant at all. The books themselves grant no meaningful characteristics to these alignments, so why not just ditch the thing altogether. Ah, but I digress. Dervishes belong to the "lawful club." 

NOMADS: These raiders of the deserts or steppes are similar to Bandits as far as super-normal types and most other characteristics go:

If they're desert dwellers, where are they getting the wood for lances from? Moreover, I've watched an awful lot of documentaries about various desert peoples reaching back to the ancient Babylonians, and I've never encountered these lances spoken of here. A "lance" is not a weapon used in the Bible, which is largely about desert people and includes quite a lot of words about fighting. Note there's no slingers here; slings are made from animal hide and stones, so they're pretty easy to make in the desert. But nope, no slings. Desert dwellers don't use "shock mounted weapons" when they fight; the fight across distances, since everything is flat and there are few obstructions. The kind of horses that are bred by desert dwellers aren't large enough to use shock tactics, because water and food are scarce. Desert warfare, by contrast, overwhelmingly favours missiles, harassment, mobility, and attrition. Javelins, bows, slings, and light spears dominate precisely because they are cheap, replaceable, and compatible with dispersed fighting.

In addition, as throughout the system, the things depicted are not given any social, economic, cultural or motivational weight. Why do they exist? They exist to be nomads and to wait for players to arrive so that a fight can occur. This is as deep as the game gets in worldbuilding.

BUCCANEERS: Buccaneers are water-going Bandits in all respects except composition of their force.

Composition of Force: Light Foot = 60%; Light Crossbow = 30%; and Heavy Crossbow (Chain Mail) 10%, crossbows are heavy.

PIRATES: Pirates are the same as Buccaneers except they are aligned with Chaos.

I adore the "bandits on water" explanation... but most of all, that the "composition" does not include anything about ships at all. At all. It's stunning that the thing they need to get around in is not considered a necessary part of their description. The sea, the ships, navigation, logistics, crews, boarding tactics, ports, piracy as an economic activity, even the basic question of how these people move from place to place, are all treated as extraneous, because none of that fits cleanly into the inherited combat taxonomy. The omission tells you that the presence of peoples here are designed to fight like those ancient colosseum battles where they'd flood the arena, float ships on it and then portray a "sea battle" for the crowd. The sea is a backdrop that the DM wheels in to give the players a new "flavour" of battle, before the curtain call and the next bit of scenery is shoved to the fore.

CAVEMEN: Cavemen fight as 2nd-level Fighting-Men, armed with weapons equal to Morning Stars. They have no armor but get 2 Hit Dice. They have -1 morale. Alignment is always Neutrality.

Which, yes, means this.

The assumption, of course, is that in 12,000 years of human advancement between the beginning of the Neolithic period and the Medieval, all the technological advancements that humans have imposed still mean that a well-fed, armoured, metal-wielding fighter of the 13th century is weaker by half than an untrained, uneducated cro-magnon, while the weapon that fighter is using is no better that a club wielded by such. This assumption is based on the idea that civilised persons are soft, indulgent, decadent, while pre-history specimens are healthier, tougher, even super-human. Which, I'll just throw in because it's fun, was a central basis for much of Nazi-science, lingering around still in the 1970s and even today.

Yes, for shits and giggles, I just called Gygax a Nazi.

Apart from that, though, the notion that humans have been weakened by culture was a strong motif in the mid-20th century, coming from lots of sources that weren't actually Nazis. It's an inherited myth, especially in pulp fiction, survivalist fantasy, and certain pseudo-anthropological traditions. D&D did not invent it, but it adopts it here without hesitation or explanation, because it assumes the reader already understands this to be true.

That's the last human, so a good place to start. This same collection was re-imposed in AD&D... but what matters is how completely useless the list is for describing the vast majority of human beings. We have no mention of villagers, rural peasants, traders, soldiers, artisans, labourers... who apparently don't make good combatants and therefore are unimportant in setting or game terms. Yet most of the interactions the players are going to have is with these people, as they pass through villages, talk to rustics, buy ale from barkeeps; deal with guards or sidestep human run armies; get towers built or wagons fixed or armour made; or hire porters to carry goods and ditchdiggers to lay ditches.

The list is not merely incomplete, it is structurally obstructionist: if a human being is not already weaponised, organised for violence, or reducible to a morale modifier, they simply do not exist as a rules concept. The "men" in the White Box are encounter widgets. The game assumes that the Dungeon Master must supply an entire social and economic substrate from on their own, without help, while the rules enumerate only the types of people designed to be killed in the wilderness. Note that none of the groups named have anything to do with society. Soldiers are a logical addition if fighting is what matters — but soldiers can't be fought in isolation, in the hinterland, far from civilisation's prying eyes, so it doesn't belong in the list with nomads and buccaneers and bandits, who exist where other people do not. You cannot kill a dozen soldiers on a road without having just declared hostilities against something larger and more coherent than the party. Therefore, soldiers, as a "monster," do not exist.

We'll continue into other humanoids with the next post.

Delay

I'm sorry, I'm not going to manage a February edition for the Lantern. I'm not going to blame in on that 4,000 word post on language, but I won't say that helped. The issue is that my creativity has gone somewhat cold over the holidays, especially with the relief of finishing the Christmas issue, so I'm going to skip a month. Whenever I feel I'm getting the rhythm of putting these things together, I find myself facing the next one and feeling, what the hell.

This scene appeared out front of my place this morning. Of course the image doesn't do it justice; for one thing, it was incredibly bright to my natural human eyes, so of course the phone camera dimmed it. Nonetheless, it was very beautiful; I found myself staring at it upon getting out of bed this morning while drinking almost all my cup of coffee. I suppose I'm just recharging.

So, I'll relax and write posts here, make notes, get the next issue under control and then see if I can put two of them back to back. I'd like that. It'll distract me while I watch the world get tossed in the dumpster.

OSRIC sucks

I intend to get back into the White Box set... I'm just shaking off the holiday and the inspirations that come with it. But before I get my elbows covered with muck again in that dirty work, I was reminded by a friend the other day of what a piece of trash OSRIC is... and felt I might take a few kicks at that can.

"OSRIC" stands for "Old School Reference and Index Compilation." It exists because the Open Game License permitted a bunch of hacks to reprint the AD&D rules in a different order (not a better order) while essentially doing nothing else. The creators were quite explicit that they were not "fixing" AD&D, nor moderning it, nor making it more playable. They believed that it already functioned just fine as a complete game, while admitting that it was fragmented, inconsistent and in place opaque. Where AD&D relied on examples, sidebars, or prose explanations, OSRIC often replaced those with more declarative language. This (supposedly) made the rules easier to cite and easier to reference. Nevermind that it essentially meant that a DM familiar with the original books, and it's flaws, needed to graft into their memory an entirely different order of the same rules for no real gain.

It's a bit like having someone come into your house, steal nothing, but put everything you own into a different cupboard or closet. Or, in some cases, pack it in boxes and stuff it behind the waterheater downstairs, for you to find at random three months from now.

Moreover, for someone new to the game, the mastication of sidebars and prose explanations into declarative language (let me be more precise there, badly designed declarative language) gutted a lot of the inspiration portions of the original that evoked ideas surrounding worldbuilding and setting design outside of what the game rules directly expressed. From such tangents the DM was made to consider social order, economics, the logic of magic, the circumstances of danger and the ordering of in-game authority that were not stated as rules, but were embedded into how the rules were discussed. Further, the attempt at "legal-style" language failed on its own terms, because it repeatedly required users to already know the things being defined in order to grasp the thing being defined. In actual legal draughting, ambiguity is managed through exhaustive definition, scoped exceptions, cross-referenced contingencies and explicit heirarchies of right vs. wrong.

For evidence of OSRIC's failure at this, we need only look at the first page of content to see precisely the same kind of errors committed in 2006 that we've already found in the 1974 White Box set:

To wit: explanatory — adj.; serving to explain something; make plain or clear; stating the law, or laws of causation of which it's production or presence is an instance. Thus, a conflagration is explained when it is proved to have arisen from a spark falling into the midst of a heap of combustibles [J.S. Mill, "Logic"]

I'll start with "player," because the actual definition of the word player with respect to the game of D&D is in no way different from that of a player of any other game. Therefore, the dictionary definition of player remains correct and accurate: a person taking part in a sport or game.

What we have in the above is a total trainwreck:

In an OSRIC-compatible game, one participant must be the Game Master (see below). All the others are referred to as “players”. This term is sometimes used to distinguish between a player and his or her character.

(1) as opposed to any role-playing game, this specific rule set needs to specify that the player is something utterly different, while then indicating nothing of the kind. (2) no definition of any kind is provided, only the social arrangement between the players, whom the reader is already expected to understand as a term, obviating its inclusion here. (3) "Game Master" on the page is not defined as such, but rather as "GM"; (4) nothing in the passage about the GM clarifies anything whatsoever about why one of the players must "be" one, therefore not clarifying how the GM is a player that becomes a GM, nor does the presence of the GM coincide with the understanding of "player" that someone who has played other games but never this one would have; (5) it is not clear why sometimes the term player is used to distinguish between a player or a character; (6) because the character is the game piece, in fact the word player defacto MUST distinguish between the player and the character; (7) nothing her in any way helps a reader who has not played D&D understand why the word is being defined this way.

Therefore, not only does the definition fail to define the word, and relies wholly on those who already know how to play the game to understand it, the 32 words used above literally creates ambiguity regarding what a player is and how it relates to game play. This adds up to defining nothing: not the player, not the GM, not the character and not the relationships between them in conceptual terms.

We can excuse the White Box Set as having been invented D&D and therefore being a "beta version" that would expect to have kinks in it due to not having been played widely. There are NO excuses here. This is unforgivable incompetence. It is a  retrospective project produced decades later, after millions of table-hours had already exposed precisely which terms confuse newcomers and why, and is literally cribbed from the works of other people and presented as their own due to a legal opportunity.

Nor is that the only such example from the above that we can claim:

Monster; “Monster” is sometimes used interchangeably with “NPC”—thus, a wandering “monster” table might include helpful creatures and humans or humanoids. Generally, “NPC” means a human or humanoid character while “monster” could mean any creature the players might encounter.

As before, to make the least sense from this, we must know what an NPC is, along with what defines a "helpful" creature from some other (remember, this is a game and we know nothing whatsoever about how it is played, and have reached for these explanatory notes to help us), nor why humanoid does not describe human (which is where the word humanoid derives), nor how it relates to "encountering," which is a null word without knowledge of game play. Moreover, the definition is flat out wrong by every definition of monster that has existed prior to this statement. Monsters are not humans or humanoids, they are "monsters," which are creatures of abnormal size, shape and potency, typically viewed as repulsive and as objects of dread, awful deed and abomination. This is what everyone outside the game already understands when the word "monster" is used, and nothing in D&D that I've ever read states that "humans" are ever counted among them. The definition above trades entirely on the encounter tables from AD&D, which happen to include both humans, helpful creatures and humanoids beside monsters, and with the literal title of the "monster manual," which is assumed to mean that every creature named therein is by definition a monster. Which is a child's definition, not one that can be seen as legitimate here.

For a genuinely new reader, the result is actively misleading, and thus, again, literally exists to make the game harder to understand.

Character; A character is an individual featuring in the game. Each player controls one character, save the GM, who controls all the characters not controlled by a player.

 As with the White Box, again we have this infuriating inconsistency. Why is "monster" in the above example included with quotes every time it is used in the definition, but "character" is not?  What does this signify? How is "monster" different from character as a word to be defined. Do we know? Of course not. Because the inconsistencies in text, again, indicate that this was written by fucking amateurs.

Without knowing what a character is (and we're not told, it is not explained), we continue to have no idea what players control or what "all the characters not controlled by a player" remotely refers to. In the definition for monster, we casually used "NPC" without defining that acronym (and "NPC" in not included, infuriatingly, on the Explanatory Notes page), while we also casually use "humanoid character" as a monster that might be encountered. Since humanoid equals human in that same paragraph, this description of character allows the first-time participant to logically assume that the characters controlled here are "monsters." The text has created a closed loop of undefined terms that reinforce one another’s ambiguity. Q.E.D.

—

The introduction to this organised collection of dog turds that follow states, if the reader can believe it,

The authors envisage that OSRIC will be used primarily by people who are already familiar with 1e-compatible systems, so we have not burdened the following text with long passages of explanation concerning matters probably already familiar to our target audience. Nevertheless, we cannot assume that everyone who uses OSRIC will already be familiar with every term that we use, so we have provided brief explanations of some of the terminology here.

I left this to the end because I wanted to clarify that the entire page is meaningless filler. The above paragraph might just as well read,

Definitions are really, really hard, so fuck it, we decided to phone this one in. Enjoy.

And just think. The impetus for my writing this post was that my friend was furious that new players are using OSRIC as an alternative to learning AD&D from the original books. We can see from the above how well that's actually working.

Happy New Year.

Language for Tabletop Play

"These are people who have been clearly raised on the language of modern D&D, who are woefully let down by that language. They've been taught to use the word "story" in its alternate corporatised sense, who do so because they have no other language they can use. It's quite possible to see them fighting for language throughout the documentary... not because they do not know what they believe, but because they've been saddled with a vocabulary that really does not express what they need to convey or want to. They've been let down. This does not make their genuine faith or love for the game less so; it only makes it next to impossible for them to talk to someone who is not in fact like them."  — Unmodified: Real People, Fantastic Worlds

Diagnosing a problem is never enough. Saying the above, it falls upon me, not a convenient person whom I might hope woud address the problem, to undertake the task myself. I've said the the word "story" is treated in role-playing as a kind of linguistic solvent, dissolving languaged distinctions between player actions, player decisions, game consequences, interaction/improvisation taking place in game, setting and rule structures, memory of past events and actual back-and-forth play between the players and the DM. "Story" is used to describe all of these. However meaningful or nostalgic the word might be, it cannot meaningfully describe what's happening when we play D&D. Yet,

"So I'm a theatre teacher. One of the things that we talk about in theatre history is that theatre itself started as a way to tell a story. Telling stories is just a part of human culture. It is what we do, it is how we express ourselves. Across any medium. It could be writing, theatre, art, music — they're telling a story in some way... you go to an art museum right now and you look at a Picasso, you can't tell me there's not a story that you can just read right there. Stories are important to our culture. What tabletops are is a way for a group of people to collectively tell a story at once together."

For all the poetical faith and belief that's here, it's not difficult to see that translating these phrases into game play, without already knowing what game play is, would be impossible. Imagine for a moment that you know exactly nothing about "tabletop" as an activity. How does the above tell you what it is? it does not describe what participants do, what constraints they operate under, how time is structured, how decisions are made or what distinguishes tabletop play from any other social or artistic practice. Instead, it situates tabletop gaming inside a sweeping, almost metaphysical claim about human expression, where everything is already "story" and therefore nothing needs to be specified. From the point of view of an uninformed listener, "tabletop" could just as plausibly be a discussion group, a collaborative writing circle, an improv exercise or a ritualised form of conversation. The quotation relies entirely on cultural resonance rather than description.

What's especially telling is that the speaker does not once refer to rules, chance, constraint, failure or risk. There is no mention of dice, turns, authority, disagreement or uncertainty. These omissions are the price that's paid for universalising the concept of story. The word becomes operationally empty. Everything meaningful becomes story, which means story no longer distinguishes anything. If all human expression is story, then tabletop gaming has no specific identity left to articulate.

Let's take a moment and evaluate one word in the above: risk. In a creation of the things named, writing, theatre, art, music... there is no risk involve. I'm not committing to a risk right now as I write this. True enough, it may not be liked, it may not make me world famous, I may include a spelling error (who are we kidding; there will be a spelling error)... but these things aren't really "risks." There's no risk that I won't finish the article. There's no risk that in failing to spell the next word, I can't just go back and fix it, no harm done, no foul, no awareness for the reader of the word that's been fixed. Picasso's painting "story" does not incorporate a risk; every stroke of the brush is either done right or it is redone. The painting's subject tells a story, but the act of creating it does not. The act of creating is a series of efforts performed in an order until a result is achieved. Process, the making, is not "a story," the finished product portrays a story, but in itself is not one. This is where all the arguments made in the quote above fall apart. The picture of a pipe is not a pipe.

Tabletop is entirely different from an art form because it is not something that can be changed later, like this essay can be. Choice is committed under uncertainty; when resolution occurs, it cannot be revised. Once the die is rolled, all possibilities outside of that die's dictates are lost forever. Ceasar cannot recross the Rubicon. Once cast, once the declaration is made, the outcome stands and propagates forward. Chance creates consequence, consequence constrains choice.

After the fact, the past series of events can be framed as a story, but it cannot be experienced as a story while it is ongoing. That difference is vital. Yet is it not grasped because those who speak of game play have no language that makes a temporal distinction between game as "now" and game as "was."

We play games in the present. It is the only time frame physics allows. By definition, "story" is a temporal artefact. The moment we are able to say "this happened," we are no longer playing; we are recounting.

Let's set aside, then, that what happens at the table is a story being told. What is it? Well, a series of constrained actions — that is, behaviours or movement that occurs within explicit limits — in the case of tabletop, agreed upon rules. I grant that "constrained actions" doesn't have the poetical metre of "story"... it's missing that warm, round "O" sound, that pleasant stretching of the lips as we widen the mouth to say "ree..." — but then, poetry has it's place and its not here. Our goal is conceptual clarity. A lugnut isn't poetical either but it keeps the wheel from falling off.

Too, let's cast aside any arguments that clarity is somehow hostile to creativity. Mechanical precision does not diminish the ride, it conceals the bolts and fabricates the paint that adheres to the metal, producing on the one hand security and on the other, beauty. In writing, my field, we use all the words, not just the pretty ones. This does not lower the experience of the reader.

We can begin with a distinction between game procedure and game outcome.  Dice, turn order, character capabilities, referee judgments, spatial relationships and resource management all belong to procedure. These are mechanical and social systems that generate uncertainty. We don't know how much of a thing we'll have, or how far we'll be from the enemy, or what the status of our capabilities will be, in any given turn, as well as what the dice will roll or what the DM might invent or in what numbers. Yes, this does include how the DM interprets a rule, but in large part the DM's simpler influence of deciding what player a given monster attacks will have far, far greater influence over the game's procedure than how a given spell might work under these rare conditions.

Outcomes are alterations that have occurred in the past that affect the present, outside the present's procedure. The loss of all the party's food, for example, the death of a character, the obtaining of tools or benefits, the advancement of a level, the addition of a new game participant (a meta-outcome), positions gained or lost in a battle, allies gained or lost through choices made and so on. They're not things that can be interpreted, but things that are established as facts and now influence the game's balance. They change what can be done next. They narrow or expand the future decision space.

We can make another distinction between experience and representation. What happens at the table is the experience: players act, decide, wait, react, succeed, fail and mentally adjust to conditions as they happen. These things occur in real time, often driven by human hormonal impetuses, such as the manufacturing of dopamine when a fictional enemy is killed, seratonin when someone's a hero, epinephrine as things get tense, oxytocin as players slap each other in gratitude or encourage each other to succeed; cortisol when we fail. So much of what's happening in the moment is chemical reativity that bypasses conscious thought that we often forget that the human body isn't really designed to always think things through before acting. If we were, we'd have all died by mammoth long ago.

This is emotionally phrased in the documentary, but is completely lost in the players' language. Feeling one's blood rise is something every serious D&D player experiences, and wants to experience. Yet it directly contradicts the idea that players are intentionally "telling a story together" in the moment. They're not composing; they're coping, seizing opportunity, snatching dice, flinching from loss, riding tension. Reflection comes later, after the fact, when the hormones have depleted and the nerves are unbothered by their harrassment. It's then that story appears, not during the game.

That part is where representation occurs. A representation is an artefact made after the experience has concluded, whether that artefact is a spoken anecdote, a written recap, a memory or a critical analysis. At that point, events can be selected, ordered, accentuated and interpreted. I tell you that I should have swung on that mastodon instead of trying the spell and you tell me that you never knew before how much damage a mastodon could really do. I tell players in the other campaign about the mastodon and they tell me about the Jabberwock they fought that was three times bigger than a mastodon. And while some of this is story, a lot of it just isn't. Thinking about what I'm going to do the next time I meet a mastodon, or picking over my spells remembering the mastodon event of 2025, are representations that are not stories. Story is too limiting for the way we naturally think about the past. Human reflection is messier, more utilitarian, more recursive than narrative theory allows for.

We can also make a distinction between fiction and meaning. Fiction is the imagined content of play, consisting of haracters, places, events, creatures, objects and descriptions. It is the mastodon, the spell, the Jabberwock, the dungeon corridor, the throne room. Fiction answers the question "what is happening in the imagined space?" It is representational, malleable and, on its own, inert. It's not distinctively story-driven because it doesn't have to be narrative. Fiction can be a referrent: a mastodon floating in space and nothing else. Referents can exist as setting, situation, object or condition without implying sequence, causality or resolution. A room can be fictional without anything happening in it. A world can be fictional without moving toward a conclusion. Narrative is one way fiction can be organised, but it is neither necessary nor primary.

This is another reason the "tabletop equals collective storytelling" claim collapses under scrutiny. Much of what players engage with at the table is non-narrative fiction: spatial relationships, tactical positions, inventories, capacities, threats and affordances (a possibility for action made available by a situation, object or environment). These elements are fictional in reference but functional in use. They are manipulated, tested and exploited, not narrated. Their significance lies in what they allow or prevent, not in how they contribute to a plot. Each can be manipulated, tested and exploited without narration occurring. Their significance lies in what they allow or prevent, not in how they contribute to a plot.

Treating fiction as inherently narrative imports expectations that do not belong to play. It suggests that events should build, themes should develop and resolutions should occur, when in fact play is perfectly capable of producing meaning through stasis, repetition, failure or abrupt termination. A campaign can end without climax and still be meaningful because meaning did not depend on narrative completion; it depended on committed action under constraint.

This distinction also clarifies why so much tabletop language feels strained. When people are taught to describe all fiction as story, they are forced to narrativise experiences that were never structured narratively in the first place. They reach for arcs, themes and lessons where what actually happened was exploration, optimisation, attrition or survival. The language fails because the category is wrong. People ask whether a session had a good "arc," whether a choice was "in character," or whether events were "satisfying," when the relevant questions are about risk exposure, information flow and consequence. In fact, the all-encompassing embrace of "story" derails evaluation and clear thinking altogether, as people attempt to judge a live system of constrained action using categories meant for finished artefacts.

Consider a session where players cautiously explore a ruin, avoid several fights, misjudge a risk and retreat after losing resources. From the standpoint of play, this may be an excellent session: information was gained, danger was correctly assessed, losses were meaningful but not catastrophic and future options were clarified. However, let's suppose the "goal," to find the McGuffin, was not in fact accomplished, and now the players must return to the ruin and explore it again. Under such circumstances, many participants are now being trained to think of this as "story failure," because the target wasn't reached. The fact that even if the target were, we'd still expect to enter something like the ruin anyway, and see new things, just as we will if we revisit this ruin... in effect, we're putting the achievement before the actual adventure, pretending the latter didn't happen if the one tangible expectation was not met.

Meaning is not contained in fiction. Meaning arises from the interaction between fiction and constraint. It is produced when fictional elements are encountered through choice, risk and consequence. Killing a mastodon is not meaningful because mastodons are impressive fictional animals; it is meaningful because the choice to engage it was made under uncertainty, because failure had costs, because success altered future possibilities and because those outcomes persisted. Meaning is an emergent property of commitment. It is experienced, not described into existence.

Confusing fiction with meaning leads directly back to the "story" problem. People talk as though meaning resides in the fictional content itself, as though describing the right things automatically produces significance. This is why so much discourse fixates on lore, backstory and worldbuilding while remaining silent on procedure and risk. But lore does not create meaning. Meaning is created when players discover, through action, that something matters because it can be lost, failed or foregone.

Backstory does not create meaning because it does not participate in risk, choice or consequence. It is fictional information established prior to play. It describes what has already happened, not what might happen. Because it is fixed, it cannot be lost, failed or altered through action. No decision made at the table can endanger a backstory event, undo it or force it to change. At most, it can be referenced or reinterpreted. That makes backstory inert with respect to meaning. It can inform context, but it cannot produce stakes on its own.

A clean way to see what meaning is by seeing what changes because of an action.

Imagine two situations at a table.

In the first, the referee tells you that a bridge collapsed here fifty years ago and many people died. That information may be interesting. It may colour the setting. It may even feel tragic. But nothing you do can alter that fact. You cannot save anyone, lose anyone or be forced to choose between competing consequences or costs. The information sits there. We have a fiction and nothing more.

In the second, you are standing on a bridge now. It is old. You can hear it creak. Crossing it will get you where you want to go, but it may collapse. Turning back will cost you time and resources, and something elsewhere will be lost if you delay. You choose to cross. The bridge holds. Or it does not. Either way, the future is now different because you acted. The meaning is not the bridge. The meaning is not the description of danger. The meaning is the fact that, because you chose to cross, certain futures are no longer possible and others are now unavoidable. You cannot go back to a world where you did not test the bridge. That irreversible narrowing of possibility is meaning.

From this, it may look like dice create meaning, and they do, but with an important qualification: the dice sever intention from outcome. Once they are introduced, wanting something to happen is no longer sufficient to make it happen. That break is what exposes players to loss, surprise and constraint. When the die is rolled, possibilities collapse into a single fact that must be lived with. From that moment on, the future is altered. Meaning appears precisely there, in the gap between what was hoped for and what now must be dealt with.

But if the consequence of the die is dismissible, meaning is not made. Suppose I fight an orc; I swing and miss, the orc swings and misses... we have just both rolled dice, technically established that neither of us hit on the first swing, but the actual game effect is zero. The only thing that has changed is the time to resolve this particular combat, and that time loss occurs out of game. The die rolls before the one that makes an impact are just noise. Procedural churn, which is necessary for the system to function, because they preserve uncertainty, but not in and of themselves meaningful.

Let's try and wrap this up.  When people say they play D&D "for the story," what they usually mean is that they value coherence, consequence and intelligibility when reflecting on play. The first, coherence, is the property by which events can be recognised as part of a single whole. This allows a player to say, "given what happened before, this makes sense." The causality of this makes a narrative desirable. We know we're now at the temple because we followed the road from the gap in the mountains that we were told about by the old man in the village whom we met after we needed the antidote to the poison we got from the snake in the first dungeon we entered when we started the adventure. Being able to outline these choices to ourselves in the present provides coherence that tells us why we're here now. Coherence feels like all this is happening in the present, because we're remembering it in the present, even though it happened in the past — which appears to gloss over the temporal distinction made earlier, without actually doing so.

Consequence is related to this; when the players look back at the snake in the example above and remember that they almost didn't enter, they realise that they might not have met the man with the antidote and thus they might never have found the gap in the mountains nor the road that led to the temple. This encourages players to believe that the consequences they experience in game play are part and parcel to the overall story they are presently experiencing.

What is rarely understood, or at least rarely acknowledged, is that the belief in consequence depends on the rejection of inevitability. If players come to believe that had they not done A, B or C, the dungeon master would simply have manoeuvred them onto the same road by some other means, then the apparent continuity collapses. The chain of remembered causality becomes decorative. This is partly why players don't listen when they're told the DM is liable to manoeuvre them... because even the player recognises that to believe this is corrosive. It is the equivalent of sticking fingers in their ears and crying la la la, which enables the DM to continue to manoeuvre them.

Intelligibility is the capacity of participants to understand the current state of play well enough to make informed choices. Players must be able to look at the current state of play and reasonably infer what kinds of actions are available, what sorts of costs those actions might incur and what kinds of failures are possible. This does not require certainty, but it does require legibility. The world must answer in ways that are constrained by its current conditions rather than by an external need to arrive somewhere else.

This is extremely hard to create. The players must be able to read the situation, form expectations about what will happen if they act and then have those expectations resolved in a way that corresponds closely enough to the DM’s internal model that the players can trust the connection. That trust is what makes learning possible. When expectations are met, the players can infer that their reasoning was valid: they correctly assessed risk, they correctly understood an affordance, they correctly predicted a cost. The reward is not success; the reward is intelligibility itself, because it tells them that their choices are grounded in an environment they can understand. The moment that connection holds consistently, players can begin to build a predictive map of the world, which is the precondition for informed choice.

However, if the DM’s internal model differs from what the players were reasonably led to believe, then outcomes stop teaching. The players cannot tell whether they made a bad choice, misunderstood the situation or were simply surprised by a private rule in the DM’s head. Once that ambiguity enters, players lose the ability to update their understanding. They cannot learn from outcomes because they cannot locate the cause of outcomes.

The DM must supply something that restores a sense of order, even if that order is no longer grounded in shared causal understanding. This is where the turn to a narrative model begins, often unconsciously. A narrative model compensates for the loss of intelligibility by replacing causal predictability with structural predictability. Instead of outcomes needing to make sense because they follow from the situation as the players understood it, they only need to make sense in terms of sequence and dramatic logic. Events no longer answer the question "what happens if we do this?" but "what happens next?" That shift reduces the burden of alignment between player expectations and the DM’s internal model, because narrative structure can absorb inconsistencies that causal systems cannot.

However, this narrative model eventually effaces all significant player choice, and it does so as a direct consequence of how it restores order. Once outcomes are justified primarily by narrative necessity rather than by the state of play. Over time, players learn that careful reasoning does not reliably produce different results from reckless action, that caution does not meaningfully reduce risk and that failure rarely forecloses progress. The range of outcomes narrows, not because the situation demands it, but because the narrative must continue. Once players internalise this, significant choice evaporates. Decisions remain, but they are no longer weight-bearing. They are expressions of preference or character colour, not interventions that genuinely shape the future.

This is why narrative compensation is self-reinforcing. As intelligibility declines, the DM leans more heavily on story to keep play coherent. As story takes precedence, player choices become less causally effective. As choices lose effect, intelligibility erodes further, because there is less and less for players to learn from the consequences of action. The narrative model does not merely coexist with diminished agency; it accelerates it.

We need to pause here and establish still again that this "story model" is still fundamentally different from literary storytelling. The "story model" in tabletop is a construct designed to provide a sense of coherence and structure to a game that is otherwise filled with chaos, uncertainty and risk. It's a way of maintaining engagement, ensuring that events make sense to the players even when the underlying system doesn't always provide a clear narrative thread. In this model, the focus is less on the growth of characters or the unfolding of deep, meaningful consequences and more on the presentation of events as though they are part of a cohesive storyline. The DM often acts as the storyteller, shaping the events and the players' choices to fit a desired structure, or at least to mimic a structure that resembles a story.

But it's not about the characters' evolution as characters — they don't grow or evolve or reach a resolution, nor does the narrative, though it appears to when the string of events that are followed come to an end. But this ending is not redemptive or transformational. It's merely an end, like a commute to a workplace that accomplishes a task, furthers one's income, but in fact offers very little for the soul. The only option thereafter is to repeat the commute again the next day, and the next, until the commute itself becomes hollow and the players go through the motions.

There we have it. We've developed comprehensive vocabulary to discuss various aspects of tabletop gameplay and storytelling. Every word here existed prior to my inclusion of it in this post; all of it can be looked up and further explored with exactly the meaning I have given it here, so that if the reader wishes to further pursue intelligibility, meaning, affordance, risk exposure or whatever, there won't be any problem doing so. Of course, there's a lot to remember. This is a complicated game, and it needs people ready to dive into a complicated vocabulary.