Love of Character

Let's take a moment and talk about 3d6 in order.  This was the procedure that began with writing down the character's six stats, usually in the order of Str, Int, Wis, Dex, Con and Chr.  (I don't play this order, because early in my gaming it became clear that by separating the two stats that began with 'C,' new players were able to distinguish them more easily).

Then, the player roll 3d6 and wrote the number down next to strength.  The next roll was written next to intelligence, and so on down the list.  Thus the player was subject to a very rigid system in determining realistically what class could be played ... and commonly, with classes that had high stat requirements, like the paladin, a player had to be very, very lucky to get a set of results that enabled that class to be taken.

I have never used this method.  I have never had a player ask me to play this method, or express any disappointment at this method not being used.  But let me explain my position, nonetheless, because I know that 3d6 was a thing, and may still be a thing, with some people.

Three six-sided dice will produce 216 possible combinations.  If we imagine the dice lined up next to each other, then it needs to be understood that 3-6-4, 6-3-4 and 4-6-3 are all different combinations, even if they all add up to 13.  There are, in total, 21 combinations that add up to 13.  There are 25 that will produce a 12, 27 that will produce either an 11 or a 10, 25 that will produce a 9 and 21 that will produce an 8.  Altogether, there are 146 combinations out of 216 that produce a number between 8 and 13.  That's 68%.

In traditional, Old D&D, the numbers 8 to 13 next to a stat mean next to nothing.  There were no ability checks in the game rules, the range won't give you a bonus to your "to hit" or your damage, it won't give you a wisdom bonus against charm spells, it won't add to your hit points.  If you're a mage in AD&D, the range makes some difference in your spells list, but not an especially significant one.  In any case, if a number less than 12 showed up next to your intelligence, you'd have been a bad player to decide being a mage was a good idea anyway.

In truth, you need a 15 or better in AD&D to have any stat make a significant difference to your character.  The total number of combinations in 3d6 that will produce a 15 or better is 20 of 216.  9.3%.  Not even 1 in 10.

Thus, your chance that any stat you roll in six 3d6 rolls being above 15 is only 56%.  Slightly better than 1 in 2.  Stick a pin in this.

Because 3d6 are being rolled, the chances of you getting a number less than 7 is precisely the same as you getting one above 14.  This means that for every meaningful character stat, one that could make an actual positive difference to game play, there's an equal possibility of a stat that provides a negative penalty against game play.  It's true that this sounds like balance ... but it's not a balance when there is a 56% chance of your character having one stat less than 7, AND a very good possibility of having one negative stat, and NO positive stats at all.  The reverse of this situation is eagerly anticipated, while the converse is, well ... shit.

It's often said that players who roll bad characters will suicide by monster, which is sometimes presented as a "fix" for the 3d6 system and sometimes shamed as "bad play."  I consider the argument immaterial.  The bad characters are not the real problem.  The real problem can be found in the good characters.

Using the 3d6 system, there is a 1 in 216 chance (0.46%) of rolling an 18 ... three sixes.  When this is done, the character having succeeded is awarded by vastly overpowered benefits in the case of strength, and moderately improved benefits in dexterity and constitution.  NO significant powered benefit in Old D&D is given to an 18 that occurs with intelligence, wisdom or charisma.  This means, even IF you roll an 18, you have a 50% chance of that 18 being wasted on a stat it doesn't help.  But if you roll that 18 on strength, then you have the benefit of being three times more powered as a fighter and combatant than a character with a 17.

A player with a charisma of 17 is very nearly as charismatic as one with 18.  As far as needing to be a paladin, either a 17 or an 18 will get you the ticket that lets you BE a paladin ... but the 18 is really wasted.  It might as well be a 17, for all the good it does.

The problem is that whomever rolls an 18 in a set of players, who happens to roll it next to strength, wins a bullshit lottery that puts to shame every other character round the table.  Since most of the stats that everyone rolls are essentially useless, and everything between a 7 and a 14 provides NO meaningful survival benefits (81% of stats), the 3d6 method demonstrates only that the original ability statistics design was a shitty, shitty rule set.  They only work now because we've found ways in the last 40 years to lend additional meaning to stats of every amount ... but that meaning did not originate with the arrival of AD&D in 1979.

Now, 4d6.

By rolling 4d6 and discarding the lowest die, we produce 1296 possible combinations.  The chance of rolling a 3, which can only occur by rolling four 1s, is 1 in 1296.  But the chances of producing an 18 by this method, where the lowest die might be a 3, a 5 or a 2, is 21 in 1296.  That's a 1.62% chance that any given throw will be an 18.  That's almost four times the chance of rolling an 18 over the 3d6 method, with 9.72% of all characters rolled at the table having at least one 18.

Using the same Old D&D rules regarding adjustments produced by ability stats, this increases the chance of a character having at least one stat of 15 or better.  There is a 300 in 1296 chance of doing so ... or 23.1% of any stat doing so.  This makes 15 or better stats far more common throughout the collection of player characters ... importantly reducing the excessive value bestowed upon a very unlikely but inevitably occurring 18 in the 3d6 method.  Because more characters have more 15s, 16s and 17s, the 18 is devalued.  That makes it LESS a game breaker when it occurs ... especially when there's a fair chance that two players at the table will have one.

Now, getting rid of the roll-in-order expectation.

IF the players can choose where to put their 15s, 16s, 17s and 18s, this diminishes the special importance of the character who happens to roll an 18 with their first roll.  He or she feels no special responsibility to be a fighter and make use of that 18 where FATE dictates, and can instead be the character class he or she wishes to be.  This means that any fighter with an 18 can be looked at by another player with the thought, "I could have put my 18 there if I'd wanted, but I'd rather be a mage."  Or a paladin, or whatever.  Less resentment, therefore; a greater personal sense of connection with the character; happier players all around.  AND the essentially broken ability stats system as it existed originally is smoothed out considerably at a time when other fixes were not yet conceived.

I have made the point repeatedly with my character background generator that a player ought not to be able to choose a character's birthplace, parentage, social status and class, or skill-sets that the player learns as a child.  My only exception in this is that I allow the player to choose the character's sex.  That is because, realistically, it would be stupidly obtuse in this day and age not to recognise that many people will never be comfortable or encouraged to play a sex that they do not feel able to play.  I'm not stupidly obtuse, so I don't insist on this.

That said, a character's class IS something that the character LOGICALLY should be able to choose.  Before the character can become that class, he or she must raise the money for the necessary training, and then as a fully-functioning teenager and afterwards an adult (as some classes require more than a decade of training), that person must WANT to work and train and pass tests and overcome shortcomings in order to be that class.  If the character didn't want it, then the character would never have excelled in the trainer's expectations ... and thus, would never have been that character class.

Thus, it's reasonable to ask the player to suffer not having parents, or having been raised as a poor street urchin in a whorehouse, or accept that when they were 5, they accidentally got a limb caught in a mill-wheel and had it torn off ... because the character's intelligence isn't that high and hell, the character was only five.  But it is stupidly obtuse to tell the player that his or her character became a fighter because there was no chance of spending years studying books to raise his or her wisdom, or years in the wilderness learning about plants and animals, or years cheating and killing people on the street while increasing his or her reaction time.

See, here's the thing.  That baby there might someday have an 18 strength, but when it's a baby, it's strength is 1.  And the argument exists, does the adult have the 18 strength because the baby was destined to have one, or is it because the baby slowly gained a point of strength every other year until it was 11, and then it began training as a fighter.  Because I think it's the training the baby, later the child, got ... and not the bones or the blood or the speed the baby had as a baby.  Maybe those things helped.  But without the training, there's zero chance that whatever the baby starts with is going to become an 18.  18s are not born.  Like with Olympic athletes, 18s are made.  Just as my intelligence was made with conversations I had with my father, who continually challenged my logic until I went out and found smarter people than my father.  Just as my wisdom was built with books and experience and not my mother's womb.  Just as my charisma was born from my empathy and not my wavy black thick hair (which is now salt-and-pepper).  We are not designed by our attributes!  Our attributes start off as little stubs, that have ever possibility of remaining stubs if they're not fed practice, direction and effort.

Thus, I let players be the characters they want.  Thus I let players organise their ability scores.  And thus I further insist that if the player does not roll at least one 15 AND one 16, or otherwise at least one 17, then all the rolls are scrapped and the player starts again.  As many times as it takes.  Because a player deserves more than a character who "happens" to be what it is.

A player deserves a character that can be fallen in love with.

Specialness

Thinking about past campaigns, I have no doubt that the individualism of players is something that is barely considered in character generation.  In the days when I ran Andrej and Lukas, I can assure the reader that Robert's approach to the game was very different than David's, with both being very different from that of Maximillian or Butch.  In the Juvenis campaign, Shelby was quite a different player from Pandred, or Drain, or Danielle.  Whatever characters any of these might have been playing, their differences as people and as individuals seeking things from D&D could not be mistaken.

I believe this difference is crucially underrated.  The company markets their game by arguing that you can use feats,

"... to customise your character with extra, unique abilities.  They grant unique powers and abilities aside from your race and class traits, and features."

 

The statement is plainly a lie.  There's nothing "unique" about a feature that I can choose for every character I run, or that the player across the table can also choose for every character he or she runs.  There's nothing unique about assembling the same build over and over, because it works.  There's nothing unique about having the same list to choose from that hundreds of thousands of other game players can also pick over.  It's an old marketing ploy.  It makes a pretense that because you can pick a shirt that advertises Billie Eilish, it's not the same t-shirt that thousands of other people haven't also bought.  It's not personal ... unless you're stupid enough to believe that because you're the only person in this bar to be wearing the shirt, it makes you an "individual."

The lie plays up to something that psychologists call "specialness" — a belief that what makes YOU valuable is found in the way you differentiate yourself from other people through what you accomplish, or what you earn, or your background, or what you choose to believe ... or even what you perceive is your usefulness to your job, your family or your iconography.  It's a philosophy that discards human value based on shared human traits: that we all bleed, or that we all feel pain, or that we all fall in love.  It's a philosophy that promotes "self-reliance" over compassion; and works as a "higher ground" from which individuals can justify their right to attack people who are "beneath" them.

But here is the crux of the philosophy:  it depends upon your ability to acquire your specialness as proof, somehow.  You must find some kind of specialness which you can lord over others, to PROVE that you're "uniquely" deserving of respect, greater sympathy when things go bad for you, or that your voice is somehow louder and more right because you're YOU.  YOU make more money; YOU know more about the Lord of the Rings than other people; YOU buy the right kind of t-shirts; YOU know the best way to build a character in D&D.

But it's all bullshit.  The company has chosen to hitch its wagon to your belief that your value as a player hinges on your ability to build characters ... and this works because a very large part of the D&D-player demographic consists of pathetic, disgruntled white male deplorable incels who are desperate for something that proves their "specialness."  These players aren't interested in "party."  They're not interested in any part of the game that isn't a platform to prove how special they are.  And the company caters to that.  Because there's money in it.

My position is wildly different.  I don't believe at all that anything a player can "choose" can be remotely special, however large the list of character classes or races might be ... for the simple fact that the choice can be made again and again, by anyone.  The only reason why someone else might not make that choice is because they are, defacto, a different person ... which means they're a different person regardless of whether or not there's a choice.  In other words, it's not the choice that makes us special.  It's that we already are.

Which means six different people running the exact same character build around my game table would still and always be six individuals.  The player's illusion of choice is metaphorical pasteboard.

In my generator, I have a result on the table hair condition & health that reads, "Perfect hair; both superabundant in volume and highly lustrous."  As it stands in the company's game, you can choose to have that hair by writing the words down on your character sheet.  And so can I.  So can every character I run.  Because choice is meaningless where it comes to defining your "specialness" or mine.

But to get that hair result in my game system, you must have an 18 charisma, and then you MUST roll a "1" when determining your hair's condition or health.  You can't choose it.  No one can.  If it comes up, you can wear your hair with the reassurance that it's extremely unlikely that anyone else will also have your personal hair, and even more unlikely that it will have the same colour or texture.  Because all of these things are rolled, NOT chosen.

The depth of this consequence is overlooked ... which is criminally irresponsible for the game system we have now.  Too many candidates for "specialness" who entered into the game during the mid-to-late 1980s chafed against and bitched that they couldn't have an 18 strength any damn time they pleased.  They hated rolling because rolling didn't give them a choice to be special ... they had to actually BE special, through rolling, or else not get what they wanted.  It never mattered to these people that if everyone could choose, then the meaning of being "special" would become a joke ... which it is now, regardless of how many times the company puts the word "unique" into a sentence.  No, what mattered for these people was the brand of being special, not actual specialness.

We see it constantly, all around us.  50 different ethnic groups living in the same country all drive the same cars, eat the same McDonald's hamburgers, drink the same Tim Horton's coffee or use the same phone apps on the same phones ... they wake up on industrialised mattresses, listen to the same programmed news and music on their way to the same jobs that observe the same rules that dictate how the same money they'll earn will be taxed and counted in the same way.  Then they use the same money machines to get their money to cross the same streets to go to the same Burger Kings and to buy the same liquor, to go home and pour their drinks in the same glasses that give them the same drunkedness they feel while watching the same sports and reality shows.

And then SOME of them scream and bitch that their "special" culture isn't recognised, or that their "special" entitlement to run the country isn't catered to, or how it's a crime that everyone doesn't 100 per cent kowtow to their "special" privilege to write about, depict, act as or speak for that "special" group of people who also happen to have their same skin tone and ethnic origin.  We live our lives together as human beings, eating and shitting and bleeding and fucking just like the same human beings, but that's NOT ENOUGH.  That doesn't make us special.  And if we're not special, how can we ever, possibly, carve out some tiny pretense that lets us be better than the next person?

The joke is, we don't have to.  We are special.  We don't have to prove it.  We don't need others to believe it.  What we prove and what others believe has no impact on reality.  All my players around my table are different people.  That's a statement of fact, one that's blatantly evident in the way they play.  What we want isn't a set of rules designed to drive people apart by catering to their specialness, but a set of rules that enables everyone to cheer when one of them rolls something so wildly unlikely that it gives us all reason to feel pleased.  One of us got cool hair.  Awesome.

Designing Character Backgrounds in the Shadow of Mordor

In case you haven't heard, the new One D&D has decided to institute a "big change" in character generation.  This post isn't going to discuss the change, or even judge it.  Essentially, however, "ability scores are going to be tied to backgrounds instead of race."  Feel free to chew that one over.

It feels a little funny to be working on a background generation book at just this time, when the company has decided to tether its entire future to making backgrounds the most important part of D&D.  Is it an opportunity for me, since I can see already that my approach is vastly more intricate than the company's?  I think it might be.  I don't see a down side, as yet, though I might make some buyers unhappy when they learn that my system isn't built to be compatible with company, which we can start calling Lord of the "ching".  Or Sauron for short.

I want to add a note into my book about the entrance of characters entering the campaign that seems to me hasn't been directly addressed ... though to some extent we took it for granted.  Here's the passage:

Notes about the end of childhood

Regardless of whether or not a character was raised by a family, a single mentor or an institution, the emphasis in every case should be that the character has achieved the transition from being a child to becoming an adult. This is the important stepping stone that entry into the campaign describes. The moment which becoming a member of the game’s party represents is that of the character obtaining complete prerogative to act as he or she desires. At last, the character has no more lessons to learn, no more teachers that are there to demand answers, no more parents or persons of importance to impugn the character for daring to act on his or her own behalf. The character is free.

Truth be told, this state of being hasn’t been in place very long. The character has just completed his or her studies. The character’s 1st level status has just been attained. And so, while the player is certainly champing at the bit, he or she might also realise that this character hasn’t the player’s experiences, yet.

Of late, as the game's been pushing this background thing, we've gotten into the habit of thinking of "new" characters in a campaign as ready-made, hard-bitten campaigners who are now ready to enter into the DM's new adventure.  There's no sense that new characters are really "new," and the backgrounds that are being invented reflect that.  Perhaps it's because so few characters in a lot of games begin at 1st level, because it's so much more "fun" to start them as 7th to 9th.  Perhaps it comes from a pervasive societal sense of entitlement that we're supposed to be respected as experts by our bosses the instant we emerge onto the job market.  Perhaps the internet has simply made the work of actually obtaining experience at something a dull-as-ditchwater expectation, that we don't think ought to act as a burden on our time.  I don't know.  I do know that new soldiers fresh out of boot start out in a war zone with a low life-expectancy, a truth that ought to apply to new 1st level characters ... not because 1st levels are "weak," but because players with 1st level characters tragically over-estimate their capabilities.  I experienced that in online campaigns with more than one 1st level swaggering around as though one level was something of a great achievement.

Anyway ...

Not sure I'm going to leave the passage above in the book.  I'm looking for another argument as to why I should than I can think up on my own.

... And the Frog Drowned

I'm always hesitant to rush into making announcements, and I always do so far too quickly.  As a result, many of the things I plan ... books, posters, etcetera ... never come to pass, so that the reader is disappointed or left wondering, "Is the bastard ever going to produce that thing?"

Unfortunately, I like show-and-tell.  And my relationship with this blog is far less a marketing site to push products, and far more a designer's blog to talk about what I'm working on.  Thus, last February, I posted a bunch of newly-created maps that underwent a series of changes before reaching a standardised format ... which, I feel, helps other designers to witness the design process and recognise how my experience fits into their own.

Likewise this year, I've written a series of posts on how one might write a book giving counsel to a new dungeon master ... and I've called that series "The New Dungeon Master," which might suggest I'm writing a book of that title.  This isn't a bad idea, and certainly something I ought to do ... which is odd, because a year ago, I'd have said, "No fucking way."  Still, I'm not ready to take that leap.  Not yet.

Thirdly this year, starting in late February, while writing about maps here, I began translating my character background generator from an excel file into a wiki post.  It is a very long wiki post, 265,313 bytes, and it's not done.  I maintained a fairly steady pace for about three months, then lost my taste for it in late June.  I have every intention of continuing the process ... and, as it happens, a strong incentive for doing so.

Through August, I've produced somewhat less map than in previous months.  I'll still have a significant amount to show tomorrow, just not as much as I normally would (and in a different dimension).  This is because I've let myself lapse into another project.  Yes I know.  But as the reader knows, sometimes my projects do reach fruition ... and with my life being a great deal less stressful, I feel pretty good about coming to the end of these various productive roads.

Here's a hint of this one ... which, as I say, is definitely being previewed way too soon.  I can't help myself.  It's just my way of stinging the frog.

This is, effectively, the same process as making the maps ... and like the maps, it translates awfully to the blog's graphic ability.  The above is a two-page spread of what the character background generator would look like as an 8x11 book ... the size of the original DM's Guide.  I did most of the writing for this back in February-March, this year.  The above reflects the preliminary lay-out.

For those who haven't done it, laying out material is an enormous headache.  It's struggling with white space, struggling to squeeze too much information into too small a space, and sometimes trying to decide how to best provide that information.  The individualised tables for each human/non-human cultural type is challenging ... and done better here than I did with the wiki, which will have to be changed eventually to reflect the above.  Column width in particular is brutally unfriendly.  Unquestionably, there will be those who will shake their heads at the above and pity my miserable design skills.

But I've printed some of these pages out to show various D&D players and the returns I get are generally favourable.  I hope to improve on these designs.  The shading needs darkening, certainly.  I haven't added page numbers and the columns are inconsistent ... but these pages ALSO haven't been fully edited for grammar and spelling, so there's no point in getting finicky with columns and so on.  This is a broad brush at best.  I have plenty of time to review and improve what's here, for which I'm thankful.

Those who have seen Tasha's Cauldron of Everything know that the book is full of large blank page areas, enormous fonts, page wasting so-so artwork, with other filler.  The book is the usual collection of new character classes, new monsters, new magic items and so on.

Producing my own splat-book of a kind, my sole marketing strength is the providing of solid material: lots of words, and entirely different sort of rhetoric, densely packaged and lacking in the usual listmaking, let's-reinvent-the-wheel content we've seen roll by for three decades.  Tasha's book runs 191 pages; I figure I need at least that many pages to mine off the ground.  I'm not worried that it may have little art, if the pages have 11 pt. font from edge to edge.

Incidentally, about tables.  After trying out a lot of different styles, I've settled on what is precisely the table format from the original books: no lines or border, with shading two or three lines wide (not single spaced, as later company splatbooks would adopt).I'm surprised how consistent and good this looks, as opposed to the cluttery alternatives.  Mixed with much black and white text, it is definitely preferable.

I can't say how long this will take.  I have serious plans to run a table at a game con in Vancouver in February 2023; I've made the downpayment for the table but I haven't heard back yet for confirmation.  I'll need to make sure to get that in the next few weeks.  I sent an email yesterday, but naturally it's only be a day.  I'd like to have this as a product on the table at that time, next to the menu and of course my old book.  Between selling this for $80 and the menu for $50 (or perhaps slightly higher prices), I think we'd make a killing.  That is a motivator to getting this done before Christmas.

Background Recklessness

Believing that a character's background should consider the decisions the character has made in the past, a number is generated by rolling a d20 and subtracting the character's intelligence.  The result, from +17 to -17, is compared on the "Choices" table of the background generator.

On the whole, the more intelligent the character, the smarter he or she has been and the better the result.  However, I consider it possible that anyone, regardless of intelligence, has experienced a moment of recklessness, which has a 1 in 20 chance of occurring according to the table.  The result gained is a "zero" after rolling and subtracting intelligence.  Here's a copy of the table on the wiki.

As can be seen, most of the results are only slightly debilitating ... with a very low chance that the character will be seriously impeded physically.  For those who may be interested, here are some rules regarding the running of blind characters in my game world.

Is this fair?  No.  There's a chance that a perfectly good character may come around to this table and achieve a 1 in 2000 chance, ending up blind.  There's a 1 in 500 chance that some really serious crippling condition will be gotten.  And if so, that player has a detriment to overcome, until such time as they can increase their status and capital to where they can have some cleric cast a spell and fix their problem.

Of course, if the character joining an ongoing campaign begins with a high-level party, this problem can be solved with a finger-snap.  I find this somewhat disappointing, but I'm satisfied with the game world and I'm not going to change long-established rules for this one background idea.  Perhaps a player will decide to allow their character to give it a try, for the challenge it offers.  I doubt it, but we'll see.

As far as it being fair, yes, this is certainly a kick in the breadbasket.  But to remind the reader: D&D is not a competitive game.  It is a group of characters with varying talents and abilities overcoming a problem together.  Which is to say that the blindness of one character also becomes a concern for every player, if the campaign is run respectfully for every participant.  Jokes will be made, of course; but I would also expect empathy and support from fellow players, as the one without a hand or a leg — together with others — sorted out the best strategies for casting magic, combat, defense and so on.

The conversation about character faults has been going on a long time, so I'm not covering any new ground here ... but as I recently completed the layout for the table, it felt right to give it a look.

Nobles

Okay, so there's this:

Although on the surface I'm categorically against "balancing" a campaign, as I've discussed before, the above does give me pause.  Is it fair to grant one player a lot of money, potential power, the pleasure of being called "your grace" without having done anything to earn it — except being born to the right parents, with land, and even additional knowledge contributed towards sage abilities?  Is it not, in fact, a bit much?

On the surface, it appears to be.  The chance of becoming a noble is far higher for player characters than the percentage of population would seem to indicate; though of course we're all going to rush to the argument that PCs are "special."  My reasons are more that it's interesting to have backgrounds that are both unique and reasonably legitimate in their chance of occurring.  It is a mere 1 in 200 chance that any character will be a noble, a member of a royal family or in line for ruling a whole kingdom.  That's fairly rare; we don't have to make it 1 in 2000, or 1 in 20,000 just to meet the criteria of demographics.

What interests me is the sort of adventures this builds.  Yes, of course there's the long campaign to get the character whose been kept from the title by a usurper, but in the long run that's just one adventure.  The harder task is to create adventures for the character after he or she has become the Count of Such-and-Such or the King of So-On-and-So-Forth.  Does the character retire, thereafter to adjust laws in the land to suit the player characters?  Or can the players invent plausible reasons why the Queen of Country-X needs to slip off and kill a dragon or two?  Is it all wars going forward, mixed with the horrors of "accounting" and bitterly adding columns of numbers ... or worse, the palace intrigue of Throne of Games?

[sorry.  I know what the title is.  Just saying it could have gone either way]

There are sure to be campaigners who hate the idea.  "Why can't we all just be ordinary adventurers?", they're sure to argue, wanting nothing more than to play the same old game in the same old way.  Thankfully, I'm not bound by this kind of player.  I like the opportunities that a different way of seeing the world offers.

And really, the benefits aren't that much.  The character starts with some nice money — which won't be all that much once the players participate in a few adventures — which can be shared around if the party has a positive, team-structured attitude.  The title is nice, but obviously the party isn't going to use it; if they were asked to do so, that would be quite a joke; and meanwhile, the title's going to get used to help everyone, so it's fine.  The hirelings like the character a bit more, so there's less trouble with hirelings; the character will use his or her knowledge to help the party in general; and the +2 bonus for charisma checks will make this character the front guy when dealing with NPCs.  That's mostly it ... except for the player actually getting power and being able to use it to have the rest of the party executed.

BUT ... that's only an element of a player-vs.-player campaign.  Since I don't allow it, and I'm not going to run your noble character alone, without the party around, I guess you're going to have to see yourself as just another party member.  Poor you.

Since the very beginning of my running D&D starting in 1980, that's always been the baseline.  We're all friends.  We respect each other.  We share.  I must have been busy running D&D when the toxicity of fuck-you-I-got-mine took over the community.  I have experienced it in small packets: game worlds I played in once, and never again — and even, in some cases, for less than an hour before getting up and leaving.  The occasional player I've had online who clearly entered the game with Goggles of Selfishness +4.  No doubt, one has to be wary.  But it is possible to play this game without worrying that making one player a noble will break the party's unity.  At least, between me and my friends.

So ... sometimes I don't know what it serves to create rules like the Background Generator in the present climate.  I like 'em.  The page is 195,446 bytes so far, which would rank 4,744 on the list of longest pages that occurs on Wikipedia.  And I still have lots to go.

Knighting Knights

For a long time, I equated "knight" with the seventh level paladin character because Gygax chose to use the word "chevalier" to as a level title.  That made sense to me; knights are powerful.  Any one who's a knight ought to have a lot of experience.  From that, I embraced the supposition that once a paladin reached 7th level, it seemed appropriate that they should be called a knight.

Then I got older and less stupid.  Yes, we do think of knights as strong and capable fighters.  We have Arthur's legends and Percival to inform us.  But ... we should remember that it's not strength or prowess that makes a person a knight.  Becoming a knight is a decision made by someone who is not a knight ... specifically, the person who knights knights.  Now, that person can decide that he (or she) isn't going to knight a person who unless they've shown prowess ... but as far as I know, they're under no strict obligation to do so, especially if we're speaking of a time of divine right.  And lest we forget, not every knight is knighted in England or France.  Little tiny countries run by very lowly monarchs can also knight knights ... and while that might make the knight less of a threat, it doesn't mean the knighted person isn't a knight.

I also took it as dogma that a knight was obviously a paladin.  And if not a paladin, certainly a fighter.  But again ... what you are doesn't make you a knight.  What makes you a knight is someone else's decision.  And if they want to knight a bard or an illusionist ... well, they're the fucking monarch, aren't they?  You just say, "Yes sire, whatever you say sire."

YOU may have some huge resistance against a mage being a knight, but that's a baseless prejudice you've gained from writers of stories, books, the last half century's television and a bunch of movies.  Some of which are made by actors and directors who are, by English standards, "knights."  Knights who became knights for acting well.  Because a monarch said so.

And so ... can a first player character be a knight?  Oh yeah.  Absolutely.  That may rankle, but we know of CEOs of billion dollar corporations who are barely in their 20s ... who became CEOs because Mommy and Daddy said so.  It's not fair, but it's the way things are.

Now, I've mentioned a few times that I'm working on adding my complete Character Background Generator to the wiki.  The number of bytes have reached 162,511 ... which means that if the page were on wikipedia, it would rank 9,108th in length.  At the moment I'm working on the system of randomly rolling the character's education as a child prior to becoming a character class, based on whatever the character's "progenitor" (father, mother, mentor, uncle, aunt, older sibling, whatever) did as a profession or way of life.  One of the results I've added is "landed knight":

That's right.  There's a 7 in 600 chance (give or take, depending) that your fairly charismatic character could have a knight as a progenitor ... who, in turn, prior to your entering my game campaign as a 1st level character — regardless of class — pulled some strings and made you a knight also.  He or she also bequeathed you a large piece of land, with renters, the right to collect taxes, be called a "Sir" and so on ... without having to reach any so-called "name level" at all.  Here it is, handed to you on a silver platter.  Enjoy.

No, not everyone gets this.  It's much more likely that you're a farmer or a herder of animals, a blacksmith or a porter ... in which case, no, you don't get to be called "Sir" or "Dame."  I do not care that it is not fair.  My game is not based on everyone starting equal in the pits and competing to see who wins against each other.  My game is about the other players being wildly happy that you're a landed knight, because it means they get to lounge about your land and spend your tax money, because that's the way YOU want it also.  The party is a unified whole, working together ... and it does not matter a damn who gets to be called sir.  If it does matter to you, because for you a chance die roll says you're special ... then fuck you there's the door.

The larger point is that the so-called "end game" can start any time.  If this round of characters isn't blessed, well, soon enough everyone's going to roll a henchfolk, meaning you and the others can try again.  And again and again, without anyone having to kill themselves to get another swing.

Oh, and for those who might be interested, because I haven't written out the notes for the landed knight yet, it is possible that your knighted mage character will receive a free weapon proficiency that will, yes, be a long sword, which yes, your character can use.  Because that's how my hereditary system works.

In fact, scattered throughout the character background generator there are all kinds of cross-training opportunities.  Your druid might have had an assassin as a father, making you able to assassinate.  Yep.  Your non-bard might be able to play an instrument and perform in public.  Your fighter might know how to function as an alchemist.  Because I don't consider "skills" to be definitively the province of any class ... just the norm for most classes.  There's no reason why a particular player character shouldn't deviate from that norm.  The heavens won't fall, dogs and cats won't live together, there won't be mass hysteria.

And because it's random, it's not subject to the evils of a point-buy system.  Worse, it's not subject to game balance, either, because — as I've said — fuck selfish people.

Learn to be excellent to one another, appreciate a fellow player's gains and spread your good luck around.  Everyone gets some.  If not on this particular table, then somewhere else.

Exploring as a Player Character

The above combines the table entry for the "explorer" character background plus an additional description of how having an explorer as a progenitor has affected the player character's life before entering the game's campaign.  Thus the party meets Titus the 1st level fighter at a bar, it's assumed they hit it off and Titus asks to tag along with the general group.  I usually don't role-play this process because it happens so often in the game's progress that it's a little silly to keep playing meet-and-greet scenarios one after another.  This only wastes game time and the result's always the same.  I know situations arise when players decide to act "in character" and transform the first meeting into a game conflict, but that's a subject for another post.

The party knows already by this time that before Titus became a 16 y.o. fighter, he actually climbed aboard a ship and spent 28 months on a journey to [rolling randomly] the Spice Islands of the East Indies beyond Asia, an archipelago now called the Moluccas.  How randomly?  Suppose the players are in Europe; "exploring" assumes a far-off place that isn't well-known to Europe, so start with the oceans: north & south Atlantic, east & west Indian, Arctic, Antarctic ... and then count the Pacific in four quarters.  That's 10.  We roll the NW part of the Pacific, which we divide into five 15 degree latitudes, starting at the equator.  Getting a "1", we divide the nearest band above the equater into six 15 degree longitudes eastward from the tip of the Malay Peninsula, which divides the Pacific from the Indian Oceans.  We roll a "2," which gives us either the Spice Islands or the big island of Sulawesi.  Easy peasy.

Titus was there between the ages of 9 and 12.  He's been there, he made friends, he came back.  He has memories of that place, two thirds of the way around the globe.  With some charts, some money, a ship and a crew, and some friends, he'd know what to expect when arriving.  Not only has he been, but he spent years talking about it, he's read his progenitor's diaries, he's discussed the possibility of returning and he's studied navigation.  Titus is ready to go.  Someday.

Maybe he won't.  It's out of the die's hands, it's something for the player to decide.  He can adventure locally, raise the cash and increase that by thousands more.  Maybe the party's interested, maybe they're not.  Let's ask, what value does the effort have?  What does the party get out of it?  Numerous people know the islands, so "discovering" them is out.  What else is there.

Foremost, there's adventuring.  Side quests along the way, time spent, battles fought, treasure found ... the journey gives opportunities to meet new and interesting monsters.  This is obvious and, in truth, can be managed just about anywhere.  Why go to the Spice Islands when the Black Forest in Germany is nearby?

The islands are distant and although they're known, they're not well known.  There are many places nobody's been, and many products no one has discovered.  So there's mapmaking and there's trade.  Mapmaking can lead to accurate charts that are drawn, reproduced and sold to military, whaling and other trade captains all over Europe, for dear prices.  It's like inventing the first cellphone.  Moreover, going and seeing leads to writing it down in a book, or telling audiences in person, which is more money, notariety, status, the opportunity to meet the most important people in Europe and impress them with things they don't know and stories about the player character's immense bravery.  This leads to knighthoods, gifts of land, tens of thousands of gold for another journey (since the character has shown his or her mettle) and doors of all kinds being opened.

Regarding trade, any number of islands producing valuable spices, woods, dyestuffs and extracts for perfume do so as a market that's never been tapped.  The players can collect a cheap boatload of valuable something, and make a deal to ensure that the party, and only the party, is allowed to collect the goods from that place.  This means an arrangement to come back two years hence and pick up ten times as much cheap valuable somethings, which the natives are happy to collect over time, waiting for when the party will come back and re-acquaint themselves as friends.  I give you the real stories of Marco Polo's father returning to China and bringing little Marco along, or William Bligh visiting Tahiti with Captain Cook and then returning again himself some years later.  This means that when it comes time to collect all this lovely wealth from the Spice Islands, the PCs don't need to go themselves.  They need only send some associated member of the earlier, original crew as captain of the return expedition.  Only, we'd hope, this captain would do better than Bligh.

Further, upon returning to Europe, the party could offer the trading rights to a specific political entity.  In my game, in 1650, the Dutch have already beaten back the Portuguese and the English from the Banda Islands ... but the wider collection of islands in that part of the world would remain in dispute for the next 150 years.  So suppose the players return with charts of the Spice Islands, complete with the location of Dutch bases, and offer this to the English?  Suppose the players convince the English to send warships, and go along, and fight the Dutch?  It's possible.

'Course, the DM has to be able to run a thing like that.  The DM needs a good sense of geography, world geopolitics, how national entities react, how to make it possible for the players to succeed on a world stage and how to do all this without pre-determining what must happen, as a story narrative.  If we do it without a narrative, we just allow the players to fuck around in the East Indies, and see how it goes when they lead a war squadron against Dutch shipping, then we have no idea what's going to happen.  Depends on the choices the players make.  Depends on their skillset as players.  Depends on how strong we make the Dutch strongholds, or how flexible we are as a DM with the campaign going either way, because it doesn't matter to us which way it goes.  That takes skill as a DM.  It takes a positive philosophy as a game-runner.  It takes a vision that the game can offer people the possibility of doing anything — even allowing the players to take the East Indies from the Dutch and keeping it for themselves.  Because their battle plan made sense.

But I digress.

Having a background as an "explorer" is very unlikely.  It's a 1 in 50 chance, if the player even rolls on the right table.  There are six possible tables, so in reality it's a 1 in 300 chance.  It's worse if the character has a slightly above average constitution and it's no chance at all if the character's constitution is below average.  So what's the deal?  We're going to roll maybe 25 characters over five years of playing a campaign ... what good is it if no one ever rolls an explorer?

Part of the progenitor concept is that it defines many of the persons in the game world outside the players, without requiring that each activity be represented as a character class.  An explorer can be a mage, a thief, a bard, a monk, whatever ... because the action of "exploring" isn't the same as a collection of skills associated with a given class.  We can easily assign three skills in addition to a character's class, even if those skills are not normally a part of that class.  It's a way for an illusionist to be a navigator, even though none of the illusionist's normal track-skills include navigation.

This means the world is full of non-player characters who are explorers.  The players don't need to be an explorer themselves.  If they want this sort of experience, or to persue an exploring campaign, they need only find some fellow whose been to Patagonia or Zanzibar or the Marquesas Islands ... but who doesn't happen to have enough money for a ship or anything else.  Yet Isaac or Freida or Beverly has been to those places; and she or he has the needed skills, the past history of studying books and charts, the friends waiting for them in Patagonia or wherever, so that all this can be set up by making Beverly an associate follower-slash-associate of the party.  And once Frieda or Isaac has gotten the party in the door, then the NPC can go home, as a friend and future contact, and the party can play the part of Marco Polo on their own.

This logic applies to all the professions listed on the progenitor's lists, and many professions not listed there because they're too small a part to play to serve as a player character background.  This means that how a party plays the NPCs is a BIG PART of how my game world is organised.  These are valuable persons, and virtually inexhaustible, since I have many millions of established people living everywhere.  So if the player doesn't happen to have a skillset, that skillset is definitely waiting around to be hired and perhaps made into a friend.  It's a matter of approaching the NPC politely and reasonably, while making an offer that's as tempting to the NPC as it is to the player.

Exploring that possibility — the art of assembling people to perform great deeds — is the Holy Grail of D&D.   

The Biggest Page

I apologise.  I owe the reader two villages and I'm acutely aware of it.  However, in my free time I'm also working on my D&D wiki ... the recent work upon which this post discusses.

One thing I adore about working on a wiki is that slowly, steadily, the hundreds of pages of random notes and ideas I have pours steadily into this one source.  The process is normally slow and requires much deliberation and reworking of the idea, to make it comprehensible and of value.  Yet I don't tire of the process, so I don't worry about it's chronological aspects.

A practice that I follow for existing content is to use the "random page" feature to bring forth posts that need editing and rework.  This dredges up pages from the nether regions and puts them to the fore of my attention.  Part of this process is to commit to the page when it appears — and not merely click the random button again for a page that's more "fun."  Nope, gotta fix the page as it appears, no matter how unpleasant that prospect is.

Some months ago I promised myself that when the Character Background Generator rolled into view, I'd make a written version of the excel file, complete with tables.  Well, the day came on Friday afternoon ... and for three days, I've been working on it.

No, the wiki-version of the Generator isn't done.  It isn't even close to done.  It's 80,000 characters, which averages to better than 1,000 characters an hour for the last 72 hours (the number of hours it's been between starting and writing this paragraph).  It's now the longest page on the wiki.  I am just at the point where the next section will be generating the character's secondary skills and social heritage ... and this, my dear readers, is a deep, deep well of a process.  Deeper than most realise, since the version most have seen is the 2012 version of the generator ... whereas I'm working from the unfinished, never revealed 2019 version.  And later on in this process, I'll be writing completely new content for the source material from 2012, which is woefully out of date for my campaign.

So, I'll be adding to the page for awhile.  I ask the reader to view it, to come back here and discuss anything that seems odd to read or any spelling/grammar errors that aggravate.  I don't mind being edited or encouraged to do a better layout with this sort of thing.  There are some changes to the bigger hair/eye colour tables that I'm undertaking.  I want things to be better.  It's only that I've been working at breakneck speed on the material and in some cases I made a few bad early choices.

Well, that's all.  I'll get back to the villages.  I'm just focused elsewhere for a little while.

The Problem

Occasionally I read StackExchange to see what questions D&D players are asking ... and commonly I find queries like this:

"How can I avoid problems that arise from rolling ability scores?

"Rolling ability scores is a time-honored tradition across many editions of D&D. However, it can sometimes cause problems for players and/or the DM. For example, one player character may end up much weaker or much stronger than the rest of the party, which can result in a poor experience for some of the players. In other cases, a player may have their characters repeatedly commit suicide-by-monster so they can try to reroll for higher stats, which can be quite frustrating for the GM and other players.

"What approaches are available to mitigate these problems?

"Note: Answers should ideally be able to prevent both the "Joe rolled all 7s, and his character is useless" problem and the "Karen rolled all 18s and her character makes everyone else's character useless" problem. That is, an answer that only avoids very low average/total scores is not as good as one that avoids both very low and very high average/total scores."

I don't answer these questions on the site, any more than I normally answer questions on Reddit or any bulletin board ~ because these discussions invariably devolve into baiting questions or whataboutisms.  There is an answer to the above question; and it begins with first understanding what's being described.

The "problem" is that the DM, the game as it is played, the usual expectations created by company modules and contest events, perceive that a character with very high ability stats is a "superior" character, as compared to those with average stats ~ and that one with very low stats is, predictably, "inferior."  And this is true, (A) if the DM runs a game that includes a high number of success/fail rolls based on the character's ability stats; (B) if the game itself focuses excessively (more than ordinary) upon bonus/penalty modifiers to those stats to determine success; (C) if the modules being played prepare the DM to focus exclusively on both (a) and (b); and (D) if the mass event includes a feature that rewards "play" based upon the party's success in completing the official module being presented.

If you build the game specifically that way, where every decision being made by the player is followed by the DM saying, "roll to see if you succeed," then obviously we should expect that players able to consistently roll against 17s and 18s will perform fantastically better than those who must consistently roll against 12s and 13s.  If I ask you to play craps, where the rules at the table apply to everyone the same except you ~ because, for you, a 3, 6 and 9 are automatic losers ~ then, yeah, you're going to resent how the game is tipped in favour of those who can roll a 6 without losing all their chips.

I should think most of my readers already know that 5th Edition has been nerfed so hard that this problem was managed by getting rid of players rolling for their character stats.  Essentially, the game writers found the imbalance so insurmountable ~ as told by the game's general audience, who were asked for their input ~ that their only "for sure" correction had to be that every character's stats had to be perfectly balanced with every other player.  After all, equality is the highest virtue.  We need equality to settle, once and for all, the right of every player to feel effective and useful when the game is played.

Those of you playing 5th Edition:  experiencing a lot of equality at the game table?

All that's happened, of course, is that ability stats have become less of a go-to excuse to complain about the lack of fairness that persons feel when something (like the die) goes against them.  But as humans, we don't need ability stats.  We can always find something.

That is because, as humans, we are not equals.  Most of us expect this, accept it and, by the time we cease to be children, move past it.  I'll prove it.  I think it's safe to say that if Ken Griffey Jr. showed up at our company softball game, we'd be glad to meet him, to shake his hand and to let him play.  Obviously, we'd want him on our team ... but we'd also realize that if he were playing, the score on either side wouldn't mean much, as it would depend mostly on how seriously Griffey played.  But here's the thing: in D&D, there is no other team.  There is ONLY our team.  The DM isn't a "team."  If we sat down to play with the "Ken Griffey of D&D," it ought to be pretty obvious from the start that it wouldn't matter what character class he played or what his stats were ... and it wouldn't matter if our stats were higher than his.  He's going to out-think us, out-innovate us, be six jumps ahead of the DM ~ and he'll be funny, clever, charismatic, encouraging, supportive and an all-around helluva guy; because he'll get, like the best players in the game, that while there might be some rivalry between party members, we're not competing against each other to see who "wins."  No one wins.  We all win.  Winning is not what the game is about.  And those who carp and moan about, or lord their lucky rolls over the ability stats of their fellow party members are having bigger problems with their personality than that they need to win at a game without a winning line.

I want to emphasize that many DMs and the public social culture behind D&D push this winning narrative ~ by pressuring us to laugh at players who experience bad luck, or to stand up and scream at the DM upon rolling a 20, "In your FACE!"  And like behaviour that suggests that other players are a personal threat to our comfort and that the DM is the embodiment of the game's persecution of players.  The player who feels they've "got it made" because they've rolled high ability stats demonstrates that we're emphasizing the wrong things in game play.  D&D isn't craps.  It isn't strictly about rolling dice.  It is about setting oneself and one's party up so that when the dice are rolled, we've prepared for bad luck.  We've thought this through and made contingency plans ... and none of us need high stats to make those plans.  None of us should think that high stats will guarantee that a plan works.  And all of us should know that, inevitably, with experience and more levels, those stats are going to mean less and less compared to the battle ready creativity we can bring to any situation.  We're all going to gather more power as we go, according to our real life efforts, smarts, bravery, good sense and willingness to take bad luck into account.

And yet despite that, despite the personal experience hundreds of thousands of players have had trying to solve puzzles or survive against enemies without the wisdom to run when a TPK threatened ... we still think that ability stats are a "problem" because some people will get more and others will get less.  These same people who should have realized that Karen with all her 18s can't be everywhere, and that obviously she is not a one-person army, and that she is bound to draw the greatest amount of direct attacks once she begins to kick ass in a general melee, so that the rest of us are plainly not "useless."  Not everyone on Ken Griffey's team is Ken Griffey ... he's going to need someone at 1st base to throw to.  Granted, at 50 years of age it's possible he can pitch well enough to stop us from ever getting a hit (he's an outfielder), and we'd probably never get him out, but that's beside the point.  If I do catch hold of a pitch, that ball is going way over his head.  My point is that he can't be everywhere; no one can.  Karen isn't going to solve every puzzle, she needs to be healed occasionally (speaking of editions where healing isn't a stupidly easy nerfed thing), she can't fly, she can't breathe under water, she's only one person.  The rest of us are only "useless" if we choose to view the game as a competitive pissing contest ... which it isn't, because if Karen kills half the enemy, we all move ahead.  Not just Karen.  If Ken Griffey Jr. hits a home run and wins the game, the whole team wins.  Not just him.

If Joe throws all 7s ...

[never seen that, but yeah, could happen; never seen all 18s, either, but using 4d6 to roll stats makes rolling an 18 almost as easy as rolling a 7 ... but I digress]

If Joe throws all 7s, then suicides by monster over and over, the "frustration" should absolutely be addressed.  That is, Joe's frustration, not that of the DM and the other players.  Clearly, if Joe is suiciding by monster, Joe has reason to think that if he doesn't have a character with higher stats, he isn't going to be useful, it is because the game is making Joe with his all 7s feel useless.  I am more apt to believe that this opinion of Joe's is not coming from Joe ~ and I am just as inclined to believe that everyone else INSISTS that it comes from Joe.  In other words, that Joe's dissatisfaction is more likely to be ignored and belittled, and that he is bound to be further humiliated for having the poor taste to roll poor numbers, than that Joe is spoilsport.  Given the emphasis that DMs and players DO put on high numbers, and the game balance described above that forces every player decision to become a success/fail roll, Joe has every right to protest and throw the game in the face of his peers.

Either Joe should have the right to re-roll his character, to obtain an accepted minimum (which I do, partly because I have had Joes in my campaign who have been hurt and cannot reconcile themselves with poor rolls, no matter what my campaign awards), or else Joe needs to feel that his numbers aren't really that important.  This requires that everyone at the table feel the same way.  Including the DM.  But it is ridiculous to create a game where Karen's high stats are viewed as making everyone else feel useless, only to then turn around and disparage Joe for not sucking it up and playing his crappy, extra-useless character.  There is something broken here, and it isn't just the game.

Beyond the structure of roll-heavy game designs (and fracturingly competitive game designs), and beyond the win/mock sentiment of game pissing contests, I put the third blame on game campaigns that demand the one player/one character model in game play.  Why shouldn't Karen also have a second character who does not have all 18s?  And why shouldn't Joe also have a second character who does not have all 7s?  Why can't players manage multiple players all living at the same time, allowing parties the freedom to exchange, mix and match different character combinations to different adventures ... so that in this adventure, Karen's second is standing side-by-side with Joe's prime, and in the next adventure Karen is taking on the roll of protecting Joe, giving Joe a chance to prepare, harass the enemy verbally and most of all survive until those ability stats matter less and less in the face of Joe's other gained abilities?  Must we forever look at this game like children in a bus with square wheels?  Can we never look at what's really going on, and reconcile predictable human behaviour with the way we deliberately design games to be confrontational and abusive?

It is really not that hard to change our positions on these things.

Grumpy Grognard Guy

"Use of the NPC personality traits and characteristics [found on pages ] for player characters is NOT recommended.  The purpose of AD&D is to allow participants to create and develop interesting player characters who will adventure and interact with their surroundings.  If personality traits are forced upon PCs, then participants will be doing little more than moving automatons around while you, the DM, tell them how their characters react to situations.  It is therefore absolutely necessary for you to allow each player the right to develop his or her character as he or she chooses!"

~ p.11, Original Dungeon Master's Guide

I stumbled across this while considering an upgrade to my own character creation page on my wiki, and could not help noticing how well it contrasts with the content I wrote earlier today.  At the risk of sounding like Grumpy Grognard Guy, even though I don't use the AD&D DM's Guide for much any more ~ I've either replaced it, remembered it or redacted it from my game ~ I cannot help noticing the comparison of language from one edition to another.  5th Edition really wants you to like it; hell, it desperately panders so hard the player is forced to consider a restraining order.  1st clearly does not give a shit if you like it or not.  "The Game is This.  Fuck you."

I'm not sure my wiki needs an upgrade.  I don't strongly feel there needs a reason for my choosing to roll 4d6 [given as method I in the DMG] rather than some other form.  Games as a whole don't give explanations or justifications for their rules.  They usually give one opening paragraph with a little drama in them and then they get down to business.  For example, here's the first paragraph for the 1975 game, Wooden Ships & Iron Men:

"Wooden Ships and Iron Men is a tactical simulation of naval warefare during the great age of sail.  The game covers the period from 1776 to 1814 when the great square sail ships-of-the-line dominated the oceans and the speedy and durable American frigates gave world recognition to their young parent navy.  The game is played by two or more players each commanding a ship, squadron or whole fleet!  Scenarios depict the famous naval engagements of the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleanic Wars.  The game is also a kit from which other scenarios or any fictitious engagement may be designed."

Direct, to the point, here's what the game offers and how.  The immediate next paragraph sets the language for the rest of the manual (I won't quote it all):

"Each counter represents a single ship and covers two hexes of the mapboard.  Orders for movement are written for each ship on a 'log.'  Ships are then moved simultaneously over the mapboard.  Any which foul or grapple may attempt to form boarding parties to take possession of the enemy's craft ..."

We don't need a lot of flowery bullshit language.  "Grapple?  Boarding parties?  Take over the enemy's craft?  I'm in!"

No one thinks to explain why we've adopted a simultaneous movement scheme or why a ship is specifically two hexes long.  Because it works, that's why.  Because it's a game, we tested it, you didn't, so shut up and play.  And that's how people would have talked to you in 1978 if you sat down at a tournament to play the game.  There were such tournaments.  War games go back a long way.

Early along the way, however, where D&D was concerned, spines grew  rubbery and flexible among the designers.  Look at that page in the old DMG.  There are four methods offered for how to roll dice for the character and there is a namby-pamby effort to explain that characters rolling a straight 3d6 for stats tended to have short lifespans.  Even then, in 1979, the originators were already beginning to doubt their message.  That list of dice-rolling methods (it used to be famous, like Appendix N, but I suppose it has fallen into obscurity) obviously came about because the designers themselves couldn't agree on how much better a character's stats ought to be.

I am fine with saying this is the method and drawing the line here.  I have heard every kind of complaint a player can make about low ability stats.  And I've had my share of player suiciders ... that's why long ago I determined that the player's character had to meet two possible requirements.  If every stat except one was 14 or less, and that one stat was at least 17, even a grumbly player would make the best of it.  The same, I found, was true if no stat was 17 or better, but two were at least 15 and 16.  Two 15s weren't enough.  And a single 16, with everything else being 14 or less, wasn't good enough either.

Of course, I had players who would happily run with all their stats below 15.  Some players are just like that.  That can't be relied upon across the board; my minimums, as far as I can tell, satisfy everyone ... and even those disgruntled players who don't want me to let them roll their six stats again, because they're a masochist, will grudgingly do so anyway once they understand everyone in the game is held to the same standard.

It works.  I've tested it.  Those who don't like it, who don't feel the rewards equal whatever the hell 5e offers them, can keep walking.  Once we've established what the rules ARE, one thing we cannot allow ourselves to do is cave everytime some malcontent doesn't get their way.  Malcontents will always try.  Reason, effectiveness and the very course of civilization demands that malcontents not be given any power, ever.  Look what happens.

Civilization?  Look at any part of your culture that is falling apart: infrastructure, the law, the electoral system, the way people are treated in public ... it's all degrading because some group of people really, really didn't want to behave or act or contribute as they were meant to contribute.

And some dumbfuck group with real power said, "Okay. You don't have to.  Not if you don't really want to."

Cleaning up was such a bother.  [see the source for this image from Nix & Gerber]

Sufficient, Unsatisfying

Amid the crickets, I feel we're ready to start our campaign and bring the players into an adventure.  We should have a structure in mind that describes the game's rigidity.  We should have an idea of how we want that game to function, and what sort of user experience, or player behaviour, that we want.  I have taken the time to explain some of the pratfalls that are bound to result, regardless of your game's rigidity, and I have suggested strategies to overcome those troubles.  Finally, I have thoroughly argued that what we're seeking is a degree of inefficiency in our system that will encourage gameplay, through player/user efforts to overcome obstacles and achieve success.  Going forward, we need to better understand how we want to make a game that, at that same time, blocks success and enables success.  Good games are those that find the sweet spot between these two goals.

In starting the campaign, we have two hurdles to overcome: we need a structure that will enable the players to have characters, and we need some sort of interface with which the players can interact.  This latter, we will call an "adventure."

Note, I did not say, "roll" characters.  Rolling characters is a process, not a goal.  We need characters; we don't actually need to roll them randomly.  We could as easily assign every player the same value digits for all their characters, absolutely balancing the abilities of every player with every other player.  We're not going to do that ~ but I want the opportunity to ask, why aren't we going to do that?

Rolling the character randomly produces a user experience; we need to ask ourselves, what is that user experience and what do we want it to accomplish?  The players, naturally, want to roll high, because they feel that the desired user experience is to have high numbers.  If we follow some proponents of user experience, those who have little understanding of human behaviour, they would tell us to ask the players what they want and then give them what they want.

That is 100% inconsistent with creating inefficiency.  Where it comes to rolling up characters, and any other random die roll, we must make the players understand that there is no promise of any kind that they can have what they want.  They must accept, we tell them, to take what they can get.  This may be hard.  Sometimes, we will slice the ball into the woods.  It sucks.  Everyone hates it.  Golfers break clubs.  Players swear. That's how it goes.

However, in making a random character-generation system, we want to ask ourselves, how hard do we want that system to be?  We can, of course, make it harder and harder until one player in a thousand can produce the highest possible score in our character-making "mini-game."  We can also, however, adjust the mini-game any way that we want, to produce the highest possible experience for both success and failure. That is in our power.

To take D&D as an example, we can force the players to roll 3d6 for every stat.  We can force them to roll the stats in order.  Or we can enable them to roll 4d6 and discard the lowest die.  Or we can settle on a standard that the total die rolls must be higher than a certain average, or that the six rolls must include, at minimum, a 15 and a 16, or a single 17 or 18, or else all six dice must be thrown again from scratch. Whatever method we use, we must make it clear to ourselves that our goal is to be inefficient, not efficient! We don't want everyone to do super-well.  But we don't want to be excessively inefficient.  We don't want players participating with scores so poor they may as well turn their weapons on themselves.

As well, we want that inefficiency to be more or less consistent across all the participants.  We want bell-curve results.  At the end, all the players should possess results that make them feel sufficiently successful, without necessarily completely satisfying them.  This is what most game-makers interested in creating user experience totally misunderstand.  They presume that the goal is to satisfy wishes or to force excessive hardship.  No.  The goal is to compel the player to look at the final result and then do what humans do: find things that they can put a silver-lining around, to make them thankful that at least that stat came out all right, because this will make them identify with a character that isn't perfect.

Super-bad stats will be hated.  Super-good stats will soon become tiresome.  Both will create an experience that will bear little resemblance to a human person (and yes, elves and dwarves are still psychologically human) and will therefore fail at their purpose: to create a character that will meaningfully interact with our adventure.  Meaningfully?  In a manner that makes the time spent in the campaign worth the player's interest.

We have the same problem with every other facet of the character's creation.  Appearance, special abilities, defenses and equipment must be managed in a fashion that produces enough, but not great, results. Appearance should correspond to abilities, but not in an extraordinarily fixed standard: just because someone is super-strong doesn't mean they always fit one stereotype of how we envision super-strong. Special abilities should be weak and insignificant in the beginning compared to upgrades that will come later. Defenses should be expensive to have, maintain or endure, until such time as the player acquires greater skill and actual in-game experience.  The best equipment, on the whole, should be too expensive to buy; players should always wish for something they can't have easily, as this gives them direction.  In short, we're looking to make disappointment a standard, in order to make achievement measurable and, again, meaningful.

If the character generation system we're using doesn't achieve this, get rid of it or fix it.  Poor character generation will produce a bad, bad user experience and the game will fail.  If we do have a good system, we must be very careful how we mess with that system.  Any adjustment has the potential for moving out of the groove we want ~ with the understanding that, in a complex game like an RPG, it can take weeks or even months to see solid evidence of that fail.

Most often, as a DM, I will be the first to see it; often it will take much longer for the players to understand that it's happening.  For a certain type of player who is enjoying the benefits of having too much power and not enough inefficiency, the resistance against adjusting the rule can be very high and can produce considerable resentment.  Always, however, I can see that the given player is isolated in that resistance; the rest of the party, not having the benefit of the flawed rule, will support my decision.  But it is always a difficulty to rein in the power, which I have to do by a series of clawbacks and adjustments, since full-on stops are hard on the player.  I prefer to avoid getting myself into these situations, but as someone who tries new rules all the time, now and then problems arise.

Sometimes, the whole rule has to be thrown out, much to everyone's discontent.  There's nothing for it, however.  The game's integrity is compromised and, overall, that inefficiency is lost.  Eventually, if the correction isn't made, the campaign will die.  Often, the campaign is already dead, and there's nothing I can do.  This has happened to me online several times now.

That is because, I believe, my standards for inefficiency in a r/l campaign don't work as well when applied online; and yet, I refuse to change, because I don't want to offset my groove.  It is more important to me, at this point, that I keep with my principles than I make things easier for online players just because the campaign moves more slowly.  That may be unfair and unreasonably inefficient.  I am able to recognize that.

If I am wrong, it is because I am cherishing processes and game structure, whereas I should be more concerned with the player's needs and the dynamics of DM-player interaction.  I should be flexible enough to tune my game to the difficulties of the online interface.  Were I able to do so, I would experience less online troubles, my games would move faster, the campaigns would die with less frequency and I could probably streamline the amount of prep and work that I'm doing.  For example, I could get rid of things like CLO, encumbrance, the daily temperature and wind conditions, tactical combat [indeed, all combat] and an excessively detailed world, substituting instead more interactive role-play and puzzle mechanics. That is what I see other DMs doing who play games with participation through chat or skype.

I see online games, however, as a way to increase the degree of my complexity, and online players as guinea pigs upon which to test new rules an ideas.  My goal is not to create the best possible adventures for players, but to create the best possible game design for me.  My online players understand this, and as such give me exactly as much interest as they care to, since they can't feel the visceral pleasure of truly playing in my game.

This cannot be your goal, if you want your campaign to be successful.  I can get new online players; you, most likely, cannot replace the r/l players you have.

Therefore, you must find the sweet spot in your sufficient-yet-not-satisfying structure.  Your players must be close enough to satisfaction to deal with being unsatisfied, while feeling sufficiently empowered to believe that one day they will be satisfied.  If either of these are a fail, your campaign will fail.

Once you've built the characters, you must approach your first adventure in this same manner.  What counts as the bare-minimum amount of equipment and abilities to count as "sufficient"?  The closer we are to the bottom of the scale, that still enables the players to believe they can succeed, the better.  What counts as the bare-minimum amount of achievement that will count as "satisfying"?  We can always give huge amounts of satisfaction, but we have to always be thinking of the next adventure.  If we pile on the amount of satisfying once this adventure is accomplished, then our next adventure won't meet the pre-requisite of sufficiency that we want.

We always want the players to be hungry.  When they're not hungry, we want to be sure they will be hungry again, and soon.  Not right away; they should enjoy their full bellies a little while.  But soon, we want them to be feeling that maybe it's time to be off again.

These are the boundaries in which we are making characters and chasing adventures.  The actual rules and processes we create must be slaves to this principle of individual experience and effective interaction between players and the campaign.  Rules and processes are important; but they are NOT why we play the game.

Strength & Dexterity

Strength & Dexterity

These two tables are going to come as a disappointment to some, particularly those who feel that fighters just don’t bring enough force into their campaigns. Remember, however, that my motivation for these tables did not include giving my party a lot of new powers—but to compensate for the disinterest in what I’ve been calling dump stats. Convincing players to pimp up their strength or dexterity requires no help from any table.

Strength in particular is the big disappointment. It compares very favorably with wisdom and with the father’s profession table, however. And it adds a piece of information that every player needs. This is the first time I’ve ever used a table like this without having to constantly make re-rolls. I’m quite happy with it.



I typically roll a d4 to determine which grandparents are indicated, and a d2 to determine sex of the player's siblings; I usually get asked how many older or younger siblings the player possesses, which is easily determined by rolling a die for the number of children indicated.

I haven't had much interest in rolling great-grandparents, but they could be wedged into the system if anyone wanted.

Dexterity has a bit more oomph. There may be some contentious results on it, but by and large my party has accepted them. I have a thief with a 17 Dex who rolled the “can’t fight with two weapons” result…and he gripes about it…but it’s understood that this is a peculiar circumstance that just has to occur. You may be very quick, but you don’t happen to have the balance that enables both hands to operate in tandem; one hand is far more dominant than the other.

Some might argue it belongs on the intelligence table…and I have a quick, sly answer to that. The medieval mind perceived that such abilities did not transcend from the mind, but from the body. It would not have occurred to anyone that the brain had anything with what the hand was able to do.

Perhaps that’s not fair. But Adler won’t be born for another three centuries, so I don’t worry about it.