Premise

Let's take some time and clear everything off the game table ... books, dice, rules, the DM, what specific game we're playing, everything.  There's you, sitting at the table, and there's the game.  We can think of it as everything you have power over, and everything you don't.  For the present, take that duality, and nothing else, as the entire universe.

We might begin by proposing that something is involved in presenting the game to you; that there's an intelligent force behind the game ... but we don't necessarily say there is.  The presentation might be a program; it might be a person, like the DM; or it might be a self-perpetuating universe without an intelligent designer behind it.  I don't say that it's any of these things.  I only want you to take a moment and consider that whichever it might be, it doesn't matter.  The simple fact is that however those things outside of your control are presented, they're outside your control.  Any argument you make regarding the agenda of the game is irrelevant to your circumstance in it.

What do you control?  Your thoughts, to begin with ... at least, apparently, as we can go down the whole Cartesian cycle in argument against that but let's take it as a given for the time being that, philosophy considered, you certainly seem to be in possession of your own thoughts.

If you have your thoughts, you have your will — that is, what you'd like to do as an individual.  This then is the first decision you need to consider upon your embarking upon the game: once the game starts, what's your agenda?

Your agenda, of course, is curtailed considerably by what you can't control.  But here's a peculiar facet in the game: what exactly is it that you can't control?  This isn't as cut and dried as you might imagine.  At first glance, you might conceive of something you'd like to do, but which you think you can't, because your judgment of the circumstances is, in fact, inaccurate.  You can do it, but you think you can't.

This is universally the struggle that every person has with the real world.  Our lives are also established upon the duality of what we control and what we do not.  Most of the time, however, our perception over what we have control over is based on prejudice, doubt, fear, indecision, attempts to succeed that fail and inevitably, resistance against trying again.  Many of the things we succeed at turn out to be, upon that success, something that surprises, as we find it hard to believe that we actually DID succeed, as we spent so much time believing that we wouldn't.

This discontinuity affects the games we play.  The most popular games that exist are those that we have every reason to believe that we'll eventually win, so long as we put in the time.  For example, think of any video game with a storyline, an expected number of playable hours and a final destination.  However long it takes you, however many times it takes, you have a clear, reasonable expectation that you'll achieve the end.  Which will be satisfying ... though not surprising.  Because you always knew you would.

On the other hand, there are a number of competitive first-person shooters that you may have no expectation that you'll ever win, ever, no matter how long you play.  That doesn't apply to everyone.  Some obviously DO win, because they've trained themselves, and have the gift, or the will to spend that many hours ... but with those kind of competitive games, the number of winners stands atop a very, very wide pyramid of folks who'll never, ever win.  It relies on that.

With a luddite game, like chess or poker, depending on your partner, or your luck, you always have a reasonable expectation of winning.  You may lose a lot, but once in a while ... but there are always those who suck at checkers or hangman or what have you, that rate their chance of winning very low, or their pleasure at winning as very low, that they won't play these games.

The general point is that the player's perceived ability to win, or handle the principles of the game, says a great deal about what sort of game they'll play, and how willing they are to play a game they don't expect to win.  Most traditional role-playing games, as they were originally written decades ago, presupposed that, eventually, you would absolutely die.  You know, like real life.  They only way not to die was to retire the character and start another, thus cheating the hangman, presupposing that it was okay for the new character to die because it was new and thus not nearly as valuable as the character being retired.

The consequence to role-playing games has been, to make them more popular, to continually adjust the balance between what the character controls versus what the game controls.  More character control equals more assuredness that the game could be succeeded at ... but it also takes away the surprise a player might have if success should occur.  Remember: with our real personal experience, in our real lives, the things we suspend temporarily to play the game, our most formative moments occur when we accomplish something we NEVER expected to accomplish.  Such moments drastically alters the universe with regards to our perception of it.  That alteration, that experience, makes us who we think we are, and what we think we can accomplish.

The more we think we CAN accomplish, the greater our expectation for what an experience offers.  Once an individual gets a taste for accomplishing the "impossible," having accomplished the "impossible" several times already, the less interest we have for the possible ... and in particular, our interest for the probable and the certain.  In fact, we develop a violent distaste for wasting any time on something we're already sure we can do.

Let's start at the beginning again.  What's your agenda?

Your choice in what you think you can do, or how high you want to climb, changes everything about the game you're about to play — and that's regardless of the game being played, or the game's source.  If I'm the source of that game, deciding what you, my player, controls, I can't give you an experience you won't fight for.  Or, for that matter, which you won't die for.  Before we can play, or decide what you can control, or roll your character ... we have to manage your expectation.

That defines the difficulty setting we're going to play at.

Childhood

From the wiki:

To understand this part of the character's generation, the reader must start from the heading, Progenitors.  The progenitor is the player's father or mother, and where either are lacking, then the character's older sibling, uncle, aunt, or some stranger met on the street after the character's family died while the character was young.  Before the character could become a fighter or a thief or a druid, he or she had to grow up first; and how the character "grows up" is no more a choice of the character than it was for me or for anyone reading this.  I had an engineer as a father and a housewife as a mother, I grew up in a middle-middle class neighbourhood of white, white Calgary Alberta, without any rights or freedoms except those I could attempt once I was old enough to get out of sight from my parents, the pastor (of a church I didn't choose to attend) or any other authority figure.

I don't consider a player character should have it any different.  If one's father happens to be a rat catcher, then yes, your character will be taken along and made to set traps and lay out poison and hit rats with a club, in the meantime getting bit dozens of times and coming down with all sorts of diseases, which you survived because eventually you found the means and the mental acuity to make yourself into the proud, respected cleric you are today — a choice I do think the character is entitled to make because it was made after the character reached a quasi-level of maturity.  And for the record, I consider that age to be about 12 or 13 in a 17th century or earlier world.  My great-uncle Leo was a farmer outside of Forestburg, central Alberta; he got married at the age of 13 to my great-aunt Meri, in the 1920s.  My great uncle Irving also married at 13 to my great aunt Theodora, again the same age; while my great uncle Igan married my great aunt Anna when he was 12 and she was 14.  This was in the 1920s.  They were each given a farm upon marrying, a farm they managed without tractors, which they still farmed in the 1970s when I knew them and visited.

I make this point because in a cold, raw, make-your-own way world, people begin their lives young.  The player character is 9 when he leaves with his explorer father for some distant, strange part of the world aboard ship; the character is 7 when she helps her father rob graves; the character starts working as a miner at 6.  Nineteenth century literature is chock full of such examples.

I don't provide these backgrounds so the player can build a "story" around how the character got from then to now.  No.  No, we do not think of our lives as "stories."  We have stories about ourselves, but they're snippets and bits, or they're overarching simplifications that ignore the constant everyday changes and nonsense and things that don't fit conveniently into whatever else we do.  The rat catcher isn't a "story."  The rat catcher is a collection of memories, some good, some bad, some nasty, some frightening, some best forgotten ... and yes, some wedged into a tale told at a bar some night.  But mostly, it's about what the character can DO.  "Yeah, I've caught rats.  Big ones, black ones, ones crawling with maggots, inside walls, inside carriages and sewers, inside dead bodies.  You want a rat killed, I know how.  But I hate it.  I hate rats.  I could go the rest of my life without ever seeing one.  Filthy, revolting creatures.  I didn't become a cleric so I could go on hunting rats."

Character raised in a smithy walks into a smithy and feels at home.  Sees a porter wending way along a road and thinks, "Yeah, those were long days."  Meets an unemployed labourer and says, "Buck up, fellow; I was a labourer once.  Look at me now.  If I could do it, you can too."

It's a feeling for place, for a past, for a way of thinking, for things thought of with a cringe and things thought of sentimentally.  It's an underlay to the leveled character, making a distinction between the assassin raised in a gypsy camp and the assassin whose childhood days were spent watching swords being made.  Leaves a mark.  The work we were made to do as children makes us what we are — soft, hard, privileged, ignorant, worldly, entitled, miserable, grateful.

Prohibitive

One of the more fascinating sage abilities, with an unusual and player-friendly benefit:

The overall structure is game-building because it doesn't rely upon the player to possess the sage ability, for the players to enjoy it (as the page explains).  It provides another reason to enter a city or town beyond the need to buy equipment and restore hit points ... and it makes the Bard Class more valuable to the party as a whole, with something concrete the bard can employ on a regular basis.

I need to add that the ability described above is an extremely minimal skill.  Later on, something that would be gained at 4th-6th level, is Master Instrument, which gives the benefits of the above except that it increases the number of times the skill can be employed to once a week, instead of once a month, and adds an addition +5% experience to the benefits described on the Play Instrument page.  So this is really just a stepping stone.  The larger motive is then for the players to visit even larger cities, where even better musicians can be seen giving performances.  This increases the motivation to travel, by giving real benefits to travelling.

I have other ideas up my sleeve for the bard as well.

I've touched on this before, but I'd like to return to the subject because sometimes it haunts me.  If I could, I would invent metrics for fulfillment, happiness and health and incorporate them into D&D.  These would be influenced by a combination of player behaviours and choices, random events such as weather, the after-effects of combat and the game environments visited.

Let's take health.  Now, personally I wouldn't transform this into an "ability stat" or even concoct the player's health from ability stats.  "Health" wouldn't be fundamentally based on a comparison of one character's health with another's ... but rather, as a metric describing the character's present health vs. the character's potential health.

As an example, let's say that Claire has a constitution of 3, meaning that she's generally in poor health at best.  There are already dozens of circumstances by which Claire's 3 constitution is bound to be tested.  Therefore, if Claire's health were, say, equal to 20 out of a possible 20, it means that she's at peak health for Claire.  She may not be at peak health for someone else, but she can't feel what it's like to be Jerome or Tesha, so who gives a damn what their healths are.

From this, we can argue that health is a characteristic fundamentally applicable to itself, which affects other metrics, but isn't a composite of other metrics.  It means we can use it as a self-defining thing, used to measure functions of the game world that aren't reflected by the player's hit points, ability stats, experience level, knowledge and so on.  Stuff like, say, Claire's tolerance of some perfectly healthy foods over others.  Eating the wrong foods in a state of poor health can kill you.  But we don't have saving throws for "food choices" or "food quality."  And the rules surrounding disease don't sufficiently deal with this problem.   Nor do we expect Claire to make an ability check every time she eats something.

Suppose we define peak health at 20 points, as stipulated.  When the character takes care of his or her self, peak health is maintained.  But taking more than 8 damage reduces health by 1 point.  Vomiting from bad food reduces health by 1 point.  Two days exposure to rain, even in tent, reduces health by 1; and without a tent, by 2.  Entering a big city reduces it by 1.  Climbing down into the sewers; or into a dungeon; or failing a save vs. poison; or catching a cold; or not having a bath; or living on shipboard for a day; and anything else that seems applicable ... each of these things cuts the character's health by 1 point.

Which is fine.  We can set a leeway of 10 points, so that as long as the character's health is between 11 and 20, it's no big deal.  They can wander through a dungeon, get themselves beat up, crawl around in an offal pit, visit a prostitute, whatever ... usually, they're fine.  But as that metric drops towards 10, the character begins to think, "Hm.  Better not push that.  Might be a good idea if I do something healthy for a bit.  Eat a little better.  Have a bath.  Visit a doctor.  Buy a tonic from the apothecary.  Get that number up a bit."

Then, and only then, if the character gets into some very unusual situation, the character's health never becomes a serious problem.  It's just a minor detail that needs to be monitored without stressing over.

At 10 health, however, the character's constitution drops by 1 point.  And it continues to drop by 1 point for every point of health below 10.  At 9 health, the character automatically rolls a 10% chance for disease.  And each point of health below 9 requires a similar roll.  At 8 health, the character's strength drops by 2 points.  And each point of health below eight costs another 2.  At 7 health it's charisma, and at 6 health it's dexterity ... and by then the character is a real mess and seriously needs some kind of serious R&R somewhere.

So it really matters that the character is careful about how many truly stupid unhealthy things he or she does.

With a character like Claire and her 3 constitution, going outdoors costs a point of health.  Eating food that isn't severely boiled costs a point of health.  Alcohol is a point of health.  Even sex, or a lack of sleep, or too much time travelling, are reasons to be concerned about her health.  And for her, once her health drops to 9 overall, she has exactly 1 constitution point.  It can be argued that her constitution can't drop below 1 ... but it follows that for every subtraction after 1, she has to make a save vs. bodily-derived poisons or she absolutely dies.

One could run a character with a 3 constitution ... but under this system, it would be a serious challenge, with serious issues to address.  It wouldn't just mean often missing a constitution check.

I don't implement ideas like this because I recognize the expected push-back from a community that thinks encumbrance is the equivalent of driving the Allied armies to Arnhem.  Therefore, most readers will assume this post is a thought experiment and no more.  "Hey, what about this?  Obviously, I'd never do it."

I'm not sure where this "we must never change the original structure of D&D" came from.  Human beings change the original structure of everything.  Microwave ovens came into being about the time of D&D, and the one I use today is a far sight different and better than the one my parents purchased in 1979.  The video games I play today are spectacularly better, more complicated and more prohibitive — the word being used to describe games with a very high cost and a very high learning curve.  I'm considering finally getting into Europa Universalis, and that's how it's been described to me: prohibitive.  In other words, really consider whether or not we're up to playing this particular game.  And yet, the game is insanely popular, in a way that D&D encumbrance isn't, even though I'm familiar enough with EU to know it's much more brain-crushing that figuring out encumbrance.  I don't know anyone running around saying that we don't need these complicated war games when perfectly good, simple games like Global War were invented in 1979.

It's a little bit like the goal in D&D is to hack off our foot, scream at anyone approaching with a prosthetic, then go online and scream about why everyone should hack off their foot.

Why shouldn't expansive rules for things like health and happiness be implemented into the game?  We've created about a million character classes, two million character races and three million stupid character religions and philosophies, not to mention four million unneeded weapon types and five million ways not to roll dice in a game designed for rolling dice.  Why exactly should a Waterdhavian Noble be a thing, when simple rules surrounding every character's health are a bridge too far?

Answer me that one, and I'll put down ideas of a metric for a character achieving moral, mental or cultural fulfillment.

How to Live

So here's a screen shot from a video that I just put on the blog.  The speaker is Dan Pink, who's a presenter of documentaries and writes about behavioural science.

"Let's talk about mastery ~ our urge to get better at stuff.  We like to get better at stuff.  This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend.  You've got all these people who are acting in ways that seem irrational economically.  They play musical instruments on weekends?  Why?  It's not going to get them a mate, it's not going to make them any money, why are they doing it?  'Cos it's fun.  'Cos you get better at it and that's satisfying."

I often talk about going to sources other than game makers to understand what is going on with people playing D&D and other RPGs.  This is an example.

Where I differ from most people is that I play D&D because I want to get better at it, while most claim they just want to have fun ... the two examples for motivation that Pink gives.  Part of this is because I view D&D like playing a musical instrument, while I know that many people who participate in the game view D&D like a complicated version of a boardgame, emphasis on game.  When I talk about the game, I'm not satisfied that the reader understands what a hit point is, or what a given monster does, or how a particular adventure is described.  I want the reader to "get it" ~ to have a deeper, more profound understanding that what's going on here is not players responding to rules, but human beings responding to an opportunity to explore incentives and innovation.

Let me put that another way, though I'll keep putting it another way for the rest of my life.  Many people, when they sit down to play, imagine a set of events that they have to problem solve, in order to get from a place where they are, to a place where they want to go, in a linear fashion that might have a few lateral jumps.  In effect, for most people the game is like an excursion ... whether or not they happen to be able to choose which paths they're taking.  The excursion passes through a set piece which the DM designs, which the players enjoy, and that is the basic framework for play.

I want to run a game in which a player is a person, specifically YOU, in an environment which is, intellectually, no different from the environment you are actually sitting in, in the real world.  Just as you might rise from your seat to go get a drink from the fridge, because you happen to be thirsty, I want you to feel the same general incentive to do things in my game world.  And just as YOU, the real person, could save up your money, go to India, buy a plantation, defend it against real life bandits, raise indigo, bring it back home and sell it for a profit, I want the character in my game to think, what do I want to do with my life?

And then, when you figure out what that is, just as YOU, the real person, has to figure out what that is, I want to run a game which makes that a difficult, satisfying, possible, wonderful, deeply fascinating experience for you, as you'll be doing this thing in a world of magic, weapons, monsters, treasure, the potential for world domination, etcetera, in a hundred ways you cannot manage in the real world.  I want you to LIVE in my world.  Not just game in it.

Yet when I think about game design for that system, I'm not interested in making some system that reflects or reproduces reality.  That would be impossible.  Instead, I have to use my energy to make a system that reflects and reproduces the emotional element of reality.  I don't want a system that makes sword play "realistic."  I want a system that makes the emotional fear from dying in sword play, or the emotional triumph from succeeding in sword play, or the cringe factor of bleeding out from being stabbed, or the tremulous satisfaction of smashing flesh and bone ... real.

To do that, I have to approach the game very differently from the way a simulationist might.  I can't be concerned with details that will undermine momentum.  Momentum is incredibly important where it comes to emotional impact.  I can't be overly concerned with too much bookkeeping, though I'd love to be ... so I try to build systems that make bookkeeping easy and automatic, making use of computers, excel and such, so that things can be added and calculated in the blink of an eye.  Again, because momentum matters.  My game can't be run with pen and paper.  It's too slow.  My game can't be run on a map with miniatures.  They're too slow and clumsy, and they undermine the player's identification with self.

I need the player to have access to the rules, because they need to think as fast inside the rules as I do.  I need the players to see my die rolls, so they know it's the die, and not me, that holds their lives in jeopardy.  The dice are inflexible, immutable, implacable, indifferent.  I might bend to appeal. The dice can't.  So the dice must be thrown in the open, where everyone can see them, and be subject to their results.

I need a world that can be comprehended, pictured, seen, studied, revealed and visited.  If the players are in a small town in Turkey, they should know that a Turkish town in the 17th century, with its narrow streets, lanes, houses pushed up against houses, is not like a modern town in Ohio, with isolated houses surrounded by big yards.  If they bring a horse into a village like that, I need them to understand they can't just gallop their horse around willy nilly.  This is a medieval town.  I need my players to "get that."

And I need my players to stop thinking like players.  I need them to open their eyes.  I need them to wake up and see that I'm not just giving them the excursion tour.  If they really want to enjoy the world, they have to stop visiting it and start living there.

I wouldn't need to tell them to do that, if the whole of the rest of the RPG community didn't have their head collectively up their own ass.

What Might Improve Game Play?

I'm watching a lot of D&D advice videos, making myself sit through content, parsing it so I can write further posts on how the community thinks.  It has taken me nine years to step back from going bat-shit furious at seeing this stuff ... I think that the effort lately to view it calmly, coldly, from the point of view of the giver first before deconstructing its value, has been helpful.  Anything that cools down my passion until I can be rational is great.

I have seen some stuff, however, that doesn't fit the format ~ not what we could call "advice."  We could call it a belief system about how to play characters, or it could be fallout from many years of finding more and more justification for players to "role-play" characters with little understanding of how personality works, how it is constructed, or how it logically fits into the framework of believable motivation.

Here is a sort of pressure.  We are playing a character in a campaign, without any particular skill or training that make us great character designers.  Excellent writers spend their whole lives struggling to create a meaningful, memorable, positive character, whose place in a story will produce a strong resonance with an audience.  RPG players, however, have no understanding of this.  For them, a "great character" is defacto an "original character" ~ that is, one that is different from every other character that might be conceived.

To boot, we've massively expanded the number of races a player can play, in a wild attempt to superimpose a wider range of "unique" characters based, if on nothing else, the increased number of combinations between race, class and morality.  If that isn't enough, the game makers have been on a quest the last two decades to invent monsters whose only real purpose is that it enables yet one more monster race the player can have.

As a grognard, I find it all somewhat silly.  Whatever we call the character's race, we know that a rose is a rose, and that all character races are just different elements of being human.  The "uniqueness" is just empty gloss.

However, let's look at two examples where someone has painted, or imagined to paint, a character of tremendous richness and diversity, gleaned from two different RPGer videos.  First, this guy again.  He's popular, prolific in his efforts and consistently provocative.

"I had one player, a wonderful role player.  She had a paladin, and the paladin would only engage in combat if she was wearing her fighting leathers.  Such an impression it gave me, that she had fighting leathers, and she couldn't talk to you if she had her fighting leathers on.  So if she wanted to talk, she'd take her fighting leathers off, and put her talking leathers on.  Or her drinking leathers.  Or her sexing leathers.  She had different outfits for each of the incidents that she was about to participate in, and literally combat ground to a halt because this paladin was screaming, 'Wait, I'm not wearing my fighting leathers!  Don't anybody move, I'll come back!'  And she'd run off and change out of the one bodice and into the other piece of plate mail or whatever it was that she was wearing and she'd come in, 'All right, I've got 'em on, we can carry on fighting now!'  And she'd run in and launch into combat."

As a DM, I'd assess how long it took her to get out of sight, and how long it took her to change ... and I would carry on with the combat.  Frankly, I see my game world as a threatening, uncompromising place. Those willing to carry forward a combat, to kill, do so with the hope of taking any advantage they can in order that they will survive.  There might be some who, under special chivalrous circumstances, might be willing to establish rules for when fighting starts and when it stops, but most of the murderous sort of people one will meet on a road or in a wilderness in my world just want you dead.

As a fellow participant, this is the sort of humor that is 'funny-once.'  As it happens, the presenter here does admit that this particular role-playing does happen in a one-off game, over four hours, and not in a longer campaign.  I don't see it being very practical as a "character quirk," as suggested, simply because it would be the sort of annoyance that would hold up games and douse momentum overall.  It has too much "Me me, me me me, me me me me me" in it's construction, even apart from the time sensitiveness of not always being able to get the clothes off so a conversation can be held, or the clothes on so that a sword can be parried.

Finally, as a communicative mechanism, it's a struggle.  What if, in the midst of a battle, the paladin conceives of something the rest of the party ought to know?  Or wants to express a desire to heal someone; or have someone get out of the way.  Perhaps, however, that's not as much a hard rule as partially presented.  After all, right at the end, after she's put on her fighting levels, she's depicted as talking, which we've been told she won't do when her fighting leathers are on.

Seems confusing.

Let's pick up with the other video:

"And my favorite class?  Right now I'm playing a kenku cleric.  I specifically like playing kenkus, right now, 'cause kenkus are so interesting as a player character.  They don't communicate, they only do mimicry, and so communicating with your players, it's kind of for me, it's a new way to think about how to play.  Because instead of being like, 'Hey guys, we should go over there and ambush those goblins, instead I have to find a way to communicate ambushing goblins with sounds and mimicry.  So it could literally be like, you know, 'Aha' flies up to a tree and looks at the band of goblins and starts making small [bird noises] sounds as if flying arrows are going by.  And then, on the players' side of things, that's a whole 'nother level of interpretation that kind of creates camaraderie in a fun and interesting way, because now not only do they have to deal with the challenge, but they have to deal with the communication that comes.  And the ranger who is like my 'buddy-buddy' is like we've kind of got a secret code that allows the communication to be a little more streamlined if we're running into real problems."

Some of this is easy to explain.  Ivan Van Norman is an actor and producer associated with Matthew Mercer (who describes himself as a voice actor first and a dungeon master second) and Satine Phoenix. There are clearly multiple occasions in which these individuals self-identify as artists and film-makers, rather than role-players ... and I think to some degree the above passage from Van Norman is a strong example of an actor getting excited by an acting role.

However, all these people are technically representing the "official" game, so we have to assume that they are encouraging those audience members at home to run their characters with this same level of "interpretation."

Me, I'm confused.  The kenku has been around since the old Fiend Folio (1981), where they are described as having "the head of a hawk."  The repeated use of the word 'mimicry' would suggest that at some point kenku were restyled as parrots.  However, mimicry in parrots is an instinct, not an example of conscious thought.  Conscious mimicry occurs where people deliberately imitate what someone has just said, in order to entertain or ridicule.  I'm guessing, without reading the later edition rule, that the kenku/parrot has to use examples of previously spoken speech to communicate ... but wouldn't that include all speech?

When I write these words, I'm mimicking someone from my past.  Sooooo ... I'm hopelessly confused about this rule.

A brief bit of research doesn't indicate any particular limitations on what sounds a parrot can mimic.

This sounds, then, like a terrific difficulty to impose on others, for the sake of "fun."  I wouldn't find it much fun, not as a fellow player or as a DM.  I think I would tell the player to stop it.


These are both examples of play that seems, to me, a desperate attempt to make more out of a game that can traditionally be had with straight role-playing.  It seems, from watching examples of these people run games, and the interplay going on between voice actors, producers and such, that "role-playing" is a sort of generalized, clumsy, difficult to enhance improvisational experience, receiving much praise but without much demonstration of acumen or impresario.  Having spent hundreds of hours doing this on stage, and hundreds more watching others, I don't find the level of character creation or acting on WOTC videos to be, well, professional.  Certainly not as professional as an everyday improv group performing at a comedy club or a theater in a mid-sized city, such as Calgary is (about a million people).

So I am simply at a loss as to how any of this helps.  I hope that this does not sound like a rant.  I'm really trying to figure out how this approach and philosophy is improving anyone's game play.  I can't see it.

Characters One-at-a-Time

In not very long, I'm going to be moving the campaign chatter right off this blog.  Here is the plan.

I'm going to create a second campaign blog.  The old campaign blog has been renamed "Campaign Senex."  This will include the following characters: Ahmet, Andrej, Ibrahim, Lukas, Nine-toes, Yuliya, plus henchmen Enrico, Kismet and Sophia.

The new campaign blog will be named "Campaign Juvenis."  I'm still setting this one up, waiting for details as to where it starts before finalizing the lay-out.  This will include Arduin/Rowan, Dani, Drain, Maxwell and Shelby/Lothar.

Everyone seems to have had their character's stats rolled now.  The next step is to deal with each of you individually, so that we're not tripping over each other comments.

Keep an eye on this post.  I'm going to update HERE, not in the comments, posting a link to your personal character as soon as I'm ready.  Please have a character name so that the post I create will be in your character name, and not yours.  Here are links towards dealing with various character creation issues:

Senex

Ahmet/Enrico
Andrej/Sophia
Lukas/Kismet
Nine-toes
Yuliya Romanyuk
Ibrahim bin Yusuf

Juvenis

Rowan
Aleksandra Ivanovna
Gudbrand Andersen Lillesund
Lothar Svenson
Engelhart Askjellson

That's everyone.

People can start addressing their questions to these posts as I create them.  Please be patient: I'll be running around to 11 different posts, so I may take time to get back to you if others are dealing with really difficult problems.  We'll just work out these things for as long as it takes until we're ready to go.

The Bodyguard Result

Several days ago, BaronOpal was able to impress into my thick head some of his reasons for resisting a character of his having a background generated with an addiction.  I wanted to pause, before writing this post, and assert that while I like generated results and I support things not always going the player's way, I'm not a tyrant.  Given a reasonable, convincing real-life argument, I would probably offer the Baron, or any other player, the option of an alternate character generation (though I would insist on everything being regenerated, not just that one result).

Still, on some level it is the DM's role to pester the players - so I am still looking for odd things that can be added to the background generator that will make players take notice.  After all, if I'm not provoking a response, I'm only doing half a job.

With this in mind, I've been working on the Father's table.  I don't mean that to be sexist; I'm working on a result that gives an equal chance for it being the "Mothers table" just now.  The point is that a character's secondary skills (or benefits) come as a result of whomever may have had an influence on the character at a young age.  In many cases, since characters occasionally lose both their parents at a young age, are foundlings or grow up on the streets, "Father" here is a mutable term.  Progenitor may be a better term, but it distinctly does not sound 'fantasy,' eh?  Sounds lawyerish.

One possible result is that one's progenitor is a grandmaster/grandmistress of assassins or thieves.  I've puzzled about the 'benefit' of that - apart from money.  With this result the character gets a nice bonus there.  Here's what I've landed on:

Ciela and her Protector by Benlo

We may propose that the 1st level character (all my player characters start at 1st, regardless of the level of the party) has a father or mother who is naturally concerned about their child, and has the power to compel others to be concerned.  In this case, the 1st level character starts with a 'bodyguard,' a 2nd to 5th level thief or assassin (depending on the guild) whose role it is to protect the player character - with or without the player's permission.

The bodyguard would be completely loyal to the character, except where the character was clearly attempting to put themselves in unreasonable danger.  For example, the character decides to climb a wall and infiltrate a castle.  The bodyguard might approve of this - IF there is room for the bodyguard to come along.  If not, the bodyguard might physically restrain the player's character from taking such action.  Whether the party comes to the aid of the character, that's up to them.

The bodyguard would fight with the character and the party, but would not move farther away than the distance that could be covered in one round, if the character got into trouble.  This could be very useful for the character - IF the character were prepared to play within the bodyguard's rules.  It gives the character considerable clout at the start of the campaign, particularly if everyone starts at 1st level.

For my world, which doesn't allow player-vs-player, I would not let the player direct the bodyguard to intimidate others in the party.  The bodyguard's attitude would be more like, "Listen, you need to be friends with these people - that will keep you safer.  You should apologize and make nice."  The bodyguard is not a toy.  He or she sees the long range benefit of the character having friends in the party and would work towards that.

After a time, the character would level (and the bodyguard too, as a henchman, getting half the player's experience), and might not want the bodyguard any more.  This might involve ditching the bodyguard (who could then appear later at the DMs discretion, out there and always searching for the character), killing the bodyguard or perhaps finding a way to communicate with Mom or Dad about ending this annoying presence.  On the other hand, once the character hit a certain level and got control over the bodyguard, the bodyguard could be adopted as a loyal henchman (according to my rules).  Or the character could just enjoy the extra presence of a loyal guard ready to get up and fight, so long as the character doesn't do something really stupid.  Most of my players do not run stupid characters and would not find this a problem.

Still, I like the idea of a character trying to run from his or her own bodyguard and getting tackled, getting a lecture and getting hauled by forcibly to a safe place.

Railroading?  No.  NPC foil to character's usual 2-dimensional expectation of success.

Truly Game-style Modifiers

I wanted to write a note about a result I'm incorporating into my intelligence table - a result that has a chance of being picked up by any character, even one with an intelligence of 3:

"The character possesses a remarkably good horse sense; when following a plan of this character's making, one die roll made by anyone, including the DM, can be adjusted 2 points in the character's favor, one time per day."

Essentially, there's a chance (I'm not sure what the chance is, yet, I'm still adding things) of picking up this 'ability' at the start of the character's creation.  It does require a little more description than what the above includes, in order to clarify what's being said and to narrow down the effect somewhat.

"Horse sense" is an idiom that developed to convey an "unsophisticated, country type of sense."  The link makes the connection that horses are often sort of dim, being associated with words meaning nonsense of stupidity, such as horse feathers or horseshit (a dumber form or shit than most others).  Having been around horses just a little bit, I feel the term derived from a sort of 'sense' that horses have about bad paths, bad footing or just places they don't want to go - places where the rider overrides the horse's will and finds out the horse was dead right about not going into that hidden cactus patch.

In any case, a horse is always dumber than the dumbest human, so any character of any intelligence fits into the category.

"A plan of this character's making" would be any plan that was originally proposed by the player, which is now being followed.  It can only include the player's ideas specifically - not the ideas of others who advanced the original plan by adding features and corrections.

Thus, the player with the ability says, "I think we should dive into the pool and see what happens."  If the character with horse sense or any other character actually dives into the pool, then the +2 bonus can be applied in that situation.  If, on the other hand, a character suggests easing into the pool, paddling around for a bit and then going underwater, that would not be the plan proposed and the bonus could not be applied.

It must be remembered that the bonus is not applied to the character making the plan, but to the plan itself - though the character with horse sense does get to decide where the bonus is applied (saving throw, to hit die, damage done, amount of treasure found, etc.).

If the plan is carried out and the character does not think of using the bonus (or can't use it, as no dice are thrown) until after the situation is resolved, then the character must invent a new plan to regain the unused bonus for a new situation.

"Favour" expresses a positive result that encourages survival and success.  The die roll cannot be used to bring woe or misfortune to another character (player or non-player).

Would I, as DM, accept the modifier at the player's behest?  *smile*  Absolutely!

Twins

When I last worked on my character generator, I felt I was pushing the limits on my creativity.  In reality, however, that was only the limit on my energy, as putting together idea after idea is draining.  Primarily, I was interested in getting the whole thing together so I could use it for my games . . . so when some particularly difficult idea that would need a lot of programming occurred to me, I would shelve it and keep going.

This time around, however, I can lean on my earlier work as a crutch - giving me time to rethink and add to the tables.  One such add that occurred to me was that I had never included any possibility that the character being generated by the player might be a twin.

The way my character generation works begins with the rolls for the six stats, which the player arranges as desired, to play the character's choice of class (fundamentally AD&D).  The character than chooses their race and gender, both of which are needed for entry into the background generator.  That's really all I need, however.

I had a long chat with my players about this over Christmas regarding how the presence of twins would play out.  These I dutifully included into the new character generator (which we could call version 'CG 3.0,' I suppose).

First, I needed a determination for whether or not the twins would be fraternal and identical.  Demographically, identical twins account for 3 in every 1,000 births; depending on the part of the world measured, fraternal twins account for 6 to 20 in every 1,000 births.  There are other studies that produce slightly different numbers, but these are the ones I went with.  It works out roughly that fraternal twins are 2 to 6 times more likely than identical twins.

The next question becomes, how do the twins manifest?  First, I give a chance that the twin hasn't lived as long as the player character.  The twin most likely dies at birth or at the age of one - and if not then, at some time between age 2 and 14.  My minimum character age is going to be 15 going forward so this is a good, general range.  I feel that if the player does discover they have such a twin, that they should be able to seek out the grave as a small side quest - possibly leading to who knows what where resurrection is possible.  Anything that might be done would be up to the player character - but it is likely that I would run the previously-deceased twin as an NPC.

That is not the case where a living twin is rolled.  Here I got a lot of pressure from my players on the subject.  They feel strongly that if a twin result comes up and the twin is alive, then the player should be able to run that twin also.  I have acquiesced to this.  Therefore, a player would gain both twins as a boon.

An identical twin will, of course, be the same gender as the previously rolled character; a fraternal twin may be either gender.  The question arises, what will the twin's statistics be?

For me, the identical twin must have the exact same stats the player has already chosen, in the exact same order.  This does not mean the identical twin has to be the same class; so long as the stats don't change and the minimums are met, then I'm fine with the twins choosing different classes.  I also think that identical twins ought to start with the same number of hit points (though a fighter would get a slightly better bonus out of a 17 strength than a mage would - that's an AD&D thing).  As they leveled, even in the same class, their hit points would begin to differ.  They also might choose different weapons, wear different levels of armor or distinguish themselves from one another in whatever way the player chose.  I would want to give plenty of leeway there.

Fraternal twin stats would work differently (we talked about this a lot).  We know some fraternal twins in our circle of acquaintances and very often they are quite different from one another.  The suggestion the players and I agreed upon would work thusly.

Let's say that the first generated character has the following stats:  Str 16, Int 10, Wis 11, Con 17, Dex 15, Char 11.  In order, the numbers generated are 17-16-15-11-11-10.

The player then rolls a new set of six numbers, getting (again in order) 18-17-14-13-12-9.  These numbers are then arranged in the same descending placement as the original twin's stats - that is, the 18 must go under constitution, the 17 under strength and the 14 under dexterity.  The 13 can go under either charisma or wisdom (the player's choice) because those were both 11 in the original; the 12 must then go under the other not picked.  The 9 is then place under intelligence.

This allows for a moderate differentiation - one that could result in a twin having really much better stats or much worse, depending on how the player's second group of six rolls land.  As before, the player then assigns a class for the fraternal twin and gets to run both characters in the campaign.

There is one other possibility, which my players insisted had to be there - that's where the twins are separated at birth and that the other is an evil twin, out there somewhere in the world.  As before, the evil twin could be fraternal or identical - and would have stats and characteristics in keeping with the format described above.  The evil twin would know the character's twin was alive and out in the world also - and might be watching or manipulating events in true comic book tradition.  That's rather interesting and funny, to tell the truth.

So, something different for character's to play with.  I figure that the chance of a runable twin in my game is really high - 1 in 20 if the character's strength is 12 or more, not even possible if the character's strength is less than 12.  Why strength?  I use strength as a measure of choosing the character's family and background, based on the idea that a higher strength suggests a family that survives and proliferates, whereas a lower strength would be a family that will more likely have died out or been broken up.

I'll write about other new ideas I come up with from time to time.  CG 3.0 will be a good while in the making, depending on how consistently I'm working at it.  I fooled around with the first of two intelligence tables last night, spending a couple of hours hammering out results for players having fostered a child or being pregnant at the start of the campaign (depending on the chosen gender of the character).

Physical Power Adjustments

I was shown a new trick with excel exactly a week ago and it gave me the motivation to do some work in excel programming this week - namely, going through the Character Generation program I devised some years ago.  There are some strange results that occur with it, which I've largely ignored . . . but I always knew that one day I'd get around to fixing them.

Naturally, if you're going to rework something, might as well add to it: so here is a table showing the new possible results for the physical power side of the strength table:




No doubt, some of that is going to be difficult to read.  I've done the best I could - it's huge.

To remind the reader, the "adjusted d20" roll is a d20 minus the character's strength.  Thus, a roll of 17 against an 11 strength would give a result of +6.  This would be a moderately bad roll, denying the use of a heavy warhorse, reducing weapons range, giving a penalty for using a sword, making the character slumberous after a long walk OR subtracting from the die against low intelligence creatures (out of sympathy is the idea).

The character does not get all those penalties, just one, whichever is predetermined under the five headings of toughness, energy, performance, aggression or forbearance [misspelled on the table - I'll fix that).  With the rework, those are basically random - but I plan to adjust the chance of receiving each category based on constitution (forbearance), dexterity (energy), wisdom (aggression) and so on, depending on the character's highest stats.  That means what you put under dexterity can affect what bonuses/penalties that are received under strength.

As soon as I figure out just how to do that.

Anyway, I know that players like tables full of adjustments.

Time in Mass Combat

As a second post on mass combat, I'd like to talk about time.

Over the years, I have settled on 12 seconds as the appropriate time for a combat round to last.  In the beginning of my experience, I adopted the one-minute round with everyone else, though in the early 1980s it was a favorite mocking conversation to talk about how much could be done in the time it took to remove 1 hp from a goblin.  Eventually I had trouble with movement vs. one-minute rounds and I tried adjusting my combat so that it ran in segments rather than rounds.

For those not familiar with AD&D, there were ten segments to a round.  The 'weapon speed' for individual weapons had been carefully broken down in the player's handbook: daggers had a 'speed factor' of 2 segments, halberds had an SF of 9, morning stars 7, long swords 5, short swords 3 and so on.  For a year (about '84), I tried a system where the time it took to fight with a weapon was the speed factor plus 10, so that a dagger could be used in attack every 12 segments, a footman's mace every 17 segments and a war-hammer every 14 segments, along with other weapons of varying speeds.  Quickly players moved over to faster weapons and the two-handed sword disappeared (even though I was still using special damage against large creatures in those days).  Being able to attack 8 times in the space of 100 segments with a dagger was vastly superior to attacking 5 times with a two-handed sword.

But, it really didn't work.  The actual time element hadn't actually changed and so trying to explain what was going on with all that time was becoming more and more problematic - particularly when I made the decision to slow spellcasters down (see the last post) in order to reduce their power.

So I adjusted my 'rounds' to 6-seconds, the length of the old segment, so that spells that took '4 segments' to cast in the players' handbook became 4 rounds to cast.  This was eventually adjusted too, so that now I use a system where 1st and 2nd level spells take 1 round to cast and part of 1 round to discharge; 3rd and 4th level spells take 2 rounds to cast, 5th and 6th level spells take 3 rounds to cast and so on.  Everything discharges at the same speed.  There are exceptions, such as the 24 hours for find familiar or the gunshot effect of command, where casting and discharge happen simultaneously in the time it takes to speak one word.  Command is a weak spell, however, so I have no problem with it.  As well, I have certain spells where the discharge is automatic because it affects the spellcaster personally, such as sanctuary, shield, shocking grasp, etcetera - the caster does not need to spend movement discharging the shocking grasp, but time must be spent trying to touch the opponent . . . but this is all unimportant right now.

Six seconds was too short, however, particularly as I adopted action points into my campaign from 3rd Edition (I thought them a good idea).  Twelve seconds offered a more refined speed for events, so that a single 'action point' (AP) was anything that required 2.4 seconds to perform (5 AP per round).

Using this scale, however, when we measure the 29 rounds it took to bring the melee in the previous set of posts to the point where I stopped recording the battle, we find that all of that takes only 5.8 minutes.

Ouch.

I don't think that the solution is to return to one-minute rounds.  Granted, 29 minutes seems more reasonable for a mass battle (still pretty fast, though), but it also means that when the mage blinks out of existence, that mage is gone for a full minute of time.  It means it takes the mastodon three minutes to cover a distance of 70 feet once it chooses to flee, smashing through the 15 ft. high palisade wall that surrounds the fort.  The mastodon weighs six tons.  I made the time it took to smash the wall equal an extra 12 seconds; traditional AD&D would suggest it takes the mastodon a full two minutes to smash that wall.  That is as ridiculous as 5.8 minutes of total time for the combat.

No, no, no, the solution is to force the combatants to do what they actually do in real life:  hesitate.  At several points in the combat I had the enemy hesitate (or even fail to do the logical thing and rush across the courtyard to shore up a battle), but I did not require the party to follow that principle.  That's a way of giving the party an edge.

But rule ideas I proposed earlier this year could massively slow down a combat like this.  Where both sides of the north gate battle or the west breech battle are steadily losing strength and combat effectiveness, it more or less forces Falyn - who fights virtually every round of the entire combat, when not held - to fall back to avoid passing out from heat stroke.  If the reduction in character abilities across the total force is deep and hurtful enough, eventually the entire force will withdraw out of missile range, to cool down and regroup.  Even if they're winning!  That is the thing about biology - it doesn't care how well the battle is going.

That is only the first consideration, however.  At the time of this battle, I was not playing with the recently proposed biological unit rules that I've lately adopted.  Those rules give another 4 hit points to every goblin and every glaiver all over the field, so that instead of these dying upon hitting zero, as I was doing in 2010, more than half of them would actually be alive and well.  This should result in many of the glaivers who are standing at the back and doing nothing except waiting to get into battle to change their minds in order to walk or carry their still-alive companions off the field.  This is going to produce a different sort of attrition on both sides, one that every real-life commander of a military unit accounts for and accepts as proper behavior from the combatants.  The commander who opposed such action would undoubtedly get 'accidentally' shot in short order.

So as that attrition is happening, simultaneous to the loss of statistical power, the players would have to retreat in light of the fact that while they might be inclined to stay, staying may not be an option.  Once again, by forcing the battle lines to pull back, time is spent, thus more closely reflecting the duration of a battle without changing the time it takes to move or swing a weapon.  We often fail to recognize that most battles that are fought throughout a day are not fought continuously as they are in role-playing.  People take breaks.  Both sides, in fact, acknowledge the need for these breaks and are willing to let a side retreat - simply because they are too exhausted to follow.

Finally, in the mass combat above, I was not applying any meaningful morale system to the events.  Occasionally, for something profound, I would require a morale check (for the druid's animals, for instance, after a fireball) - but I did not employ them unilaterally.

In the fall, however, I began trying to employ a morale check for NPCs, in order to affect the way that followers of the party reacted to combat differently from their own henchmen.  Mostly, it has been an attempt to force parties not to rely upon hirelings to show 100% loyalty in combat.  It has worked, more or less.  Parties still have hirelings, but they are much more conscious of trying to boost the hireling's overall morale while at the same time protecting them, since they know that the hirelings will fold in actual combat if left to themselves.

So far, the morale system is still in its learning stages; there are a number of details that haven't been memorized by the players or even by myself, so that looking up the linked page above has been a chore.  Eventually, however, the rules will stick; they've already proven themselves in terms of increasing the tension and tactical considerations in battle.

If this morale system above is applied to a mass combat, this too will cause whole units to collapse and fall back from battle.  If the reader takes the time, the consideration of sympathetic morale could mean that an entire unit could rout on account of one participant in that unit.  A routed unit would then retreat, again to a point outside of missile range, to reform, cool down, then march back into combat.

Overall, between heat exhaustion, injuries and morale, a battle such as the one detailed in the many posts this week could easily take five times as long to play - particularly if the party wanted to have all three or four fronts hammering away at the fort at the same time.  It is easy to see the Queen drow and other smarter defenders being able to move from melee to melee as this one or that collapses, leaving only one group still actually assaulting the fort.

Would this drive the players crazy?  Yes.  Would it make them question the validity of this sort of assault?  Yes.  Would it feel like actual mass combat feels, a frustrating, disappointing, disheartening and maddening procedure encouraging both sides to make some sort of treaty rather than going on with the apparently unending attack?  Abso-fucking-lutely.

I love that people have written to say that this combat from 2010 was fantastic and awesome.  But I still think I can do better.

Three-Dimensional Characters

We've all seen it.  The player that decides, "My character is an asshole," then sets out to justify every bad thing they do from the perspective of a character that is bad.  "Why does every character have to be a goody-goody," they argue.  "My character was the product of a broken home, a dead father, an evil uncle that beat him every day, etcetera, etcetera."

I thought I might write a post today about characterization and developing character, on a subject not covered in my How to Play a Character book.  Specifically, what makes a good character?  What makes a character that is three-dimensional and therefore alive, rather than two dimensional and wooden.

Part of the misconception in creating characters comes from the Second-Rate-Writer's Character Development Handbook, which says that to create a more developed, interesting character, what that character needs is a back story.  The back story, the argument goes, provides motivation for the character's present behaviour, thus offering reasons why the character acts in a certain way.  For example, if Jim's uncle hits him every day, then we can expect Jim to grow up distrustful and mean. Therefore, when the character Jim does something aggressive or self-interestedly, it's only a reaction to his upbringing - Q.E.D.

The player who proposes this sort of logic deserves a good slap up the back side of the head. Alternatively, you could keep a stack of hard cover psychology books on hand so, when the player makes an argument along these lines, you could pick the book of the appropriate size and weight for the given moment and hurl it at the player.

We are NOT the product of our back story.  The idea that we might be was an attempt by various criminal lawyers in the 1950s and 60s to take the new psychology of the time and develop it into a legal defense:  "Your Honor, my client Jim could not help killing those three people, cutting up their bodies and disposing of them in the East River because Jim is the product of a broken home.  He was beaten every day by his uncle, so that today Jim is a victim, not a criminal.  He deserves our pity, not our condemnation."

Guess what?  It fucking did not work.  While Hollywood writers thought the idea was brilliant and ran with it, producing a mess-load of mastubatory, self-congratulating movies in the 60s and 70s about woebegone criminals smashing up cars at high speed (a trend that goes on and on), the courts decided that - upon hearing evidence, something movies don't have to provide - that people are responsible for their actions.

That is because we are NOT robots.  Jim, it turns out, eventually grows up and becomes aware of why he is being beaten.  He sees plenty of examples of other people who are not being beaten and knows perfectly well that once he is free of his uncle, there are endless different lives that Jim can lead.  Even as a child, Jim learns all the places he can go to escape these beatings.  He has memories of thinking that it's wrong and why it shouldn't happen - he can reason, he can see the right path and he can take it if he chooses to do so.

Jim is not an automaton.  Humans do not work by the rule, plug coin with beating uncle into machine, machine becomes a raging bastard.

When your player says, "The back story gives my character dimension!", your player has chosen to conveniently forget the tens of thousands of other events, experiences, moments of time, people and lessons the character has learned.  In other words, your player has deliberately chosen the most wooden and two dimensional justification possible for their crappy, 2-D character.

3-D characters are created not with justifications or motivations, but with uncertainty.  Note that I don't mean indecision, where the pathetic Peter Parker cannot make up his mind between two alternatives, neither of which add up to a whole personality.  I mean uncertainty, the condition in which real people live every day, not being certain of what its all leading to or where this existence is going.  Except for the very old, who are bedridden and left without alternatives, we all live our lives in the future, not the past.  Even those who claim to live in the past are really just bitching about their fear that the future is never going to get better than what's going on right now.  Such people always have one other fear, the fear we all share:  that life is going to get worse.

Jim's third dimension comes from Jim's uncertainty that he's made the right choices about his reactions to his uncle.  It results from his hesitation is behaving this way or that, the uncertainty that this really is a good moment to behave as an asshole . . . followed, as all uncertainty is, by guilt feelings and regret that we did not make the right decision.  It is regret, doubt, denial and so on that causes us to behave erratically, all the time, even when we are trying so damn hard to retain a sense of proportion or reason.

The key here is that there is no precise way that any 3-D character will respond to any given stimulus.  If we already know before it happens how the character will respond, then what we have is a WOODEN, lifeless character.  The reason why film directors are always getting on the wrong side of fanboys is that the fanboys LOVE the wooden character and want the character to stay as wooden as possible, forever . . . whereas the director is trying to make the character human, which means there's no such thing as an action the character cannot, under certain circumstances, perform.  Thus Superman can kill.  The Empire can resort to using Black Stormtroopers.  James Bond can cry.

Your player's desperate, sad attempt to create a character via back story only serves to create a character that supposedly has a blank cheque to perform the same miserable, shit-justified action over and over - without doubt, without reason, without hesitation and without humanity.  Don't rubber stamp that shit.  Call that shit out.  Point out that if the character really had been beaten by the uncle, the character should feel deep, unimaginable remorse, on a level that would threaten the character's will to go on.

In other words, institute a suicide saving throw . . . and every time the player has the character act like a total fucking prick, roll a d4 - and that number of days later, the player has to roll 9 or over on a d20 or wander off and kill themselves.

A Higher Class

I was asked why yesterday that I had been dead set against 'sage abilities' for fighters, but that my plans now included them.  I felt I should expand on that idea, and explain that my plans now include sage abilities for every class.  The word 'sage,' then, has ceased to mean an old man with plenty of time for reading books; it has become a convenient word for 'knowledge skills inherent in classes.'

Since beginning to work on the proposed system, with interruptions, I've come to realize just how many disconnects there are in the existence of things in the world vs. the magic that the game includes.  How did gelatinous cubes come into existence?  How are wands made?  Does a D&D world even have geology in the sense of fossils, tectonic plates and traditional volcanism?  If you have made a world with volcanoes, how do they work?  Has your world existed for billions of years, or did the gods make your world with volcanoes just so they could spout off once in awhile?  Do they spout when the gods say so?

For many, the answers are a matter of simple hand-waving.  But for some, who have an intense and abiding interest in such things, hand-waving is not enough.  I have been fascinated with tectonics since I was a young boy, having been well aware of the controversy in 1972 when subduction and continental drift were all the rage.  I was only 8, but I gobbled up books on geography like candy because I thought of the subject as the most wonderful thing!  Thus was the basis laid for my infatuation with mapmaking.

Fuck gaming.  Continental drift, volcanism, earthquakes and the like are incredible wonders - and where the reader talks of 'magic,' I point to such real manifestations of nature, complete with the rational formation underlying them, as every bit the value of any magic any gamer can pop from their skulls.  I shall never understand why laziness in waving something aside is allowed to take the place of the profound delight gained from knowing things and fitting those known things into the game universe.

I don't want my world to have volcanoes that don't act like volcanoes.  If there will be volcanoes, they will damn well function like volcanoes do, and the gods themselves shall tremble when half the mountain falls away and drifts ash upon a quarter of the world.

Which means that if druids know about the world, not all of that information will come from the gods.

Thus is the game a science, not the silly stories given to children to shut them up.  Thus all the various elements of the game must be hammered into that science - even though that is hard.  I don't care how hard it is. Great things are hard.  Passion is hard.  People who claim that things ought to be easy, for the sake of 'fun' or some other infantile pleasure, fail to see the intensity gained in accomplishment.  They have never screamed in delight and felt empowered like the gods, because they have done something amazing.

These poor, sad little furtive people and their fun.  We must pity them.

So yes, there are reasons to give sage abilities to other classes, to cover things that cannot be covered by spellcasters.  I'll confess, for fighters I am thinking of things like 'leadership,' the governing of men, the power to draw men towards oneself through prowess and ability, rather than charisma.  Find, if you can, a reference to Ulysses S. Grant's charisma - and then compare that to the number of references to his ability, his perseverance, his will or his energy.  There is more to leadership than being 'liked.'

I am thinking about logistics, though right now I have no idea how to apply that.  That will take more thought. What of naval combat?   What of the management of civilians?  What of keeping peace?  Or training men, particularly youth and civilians who have never participated in war before?  Are these things not also part of the fighter, and are they not ignored by the game as it stands?

We think so small.  We think extra shots with a bow or extra damage or more proficiencies or better binding of wounds.  Some of those things are important, and I will probably address them, but there are immense things as well, particularly in the management of fighting, that have for so long been ignored.

People are liking the druid studies, and that's great.  But having reconciled myself to changing the face of the fighter and other classes, I admit that I can't wait to finish the druid and start the next class!

The Origin of Points

Well.  Time to step up, dump AD&D and change the rules.

Some of you know I haven't played the straight AD&D combat system in a lot of years - 28, in fact.  Some of you also know that my HD/hp rules vary for the size of monster encountered, so that while a middle-sized orc nominally has a d8 for hit points, a goblin at half the weight only has a d6, while a kobald, at 40 lbs. only has a d4.  This vastly complicates the issue that I originally proposed on Monday, as I no longer use the simplified system that was originally invented (it was convenient for the post, for discussion this week, but it's time to move up).

The change in hit points per die gets rid of hit die quandaries such as 1 minus 1 or 1/2 or 1/4 hit points.  The 1 HD giant centipede weighs 5 oz. (the weight an ordinary centipede would have if it were a foot long) and therefore only has 1 hit point.  It hasn't enough mass to ever justify 2 hit points.  I have seen enough now to guess at those who will chatter on about how fast it is or the hard exoskeleton or whatever, only those are questions for armor class, not hit points.  But I digress.

The incorporation of these rules helped me solve something else that always bothered me about leveled creatures.  It is clear from the DMG that many non-character races were allowed to have levels, given that their magicians have spells and that the leaders attack with more hit dice and thus on a better table.  I never did like the fact that an ordinary orc with 1 hit die (traditionally 1d8 hit points) could have more combat value than a first level orc (traditionally 1d10 hit points).  I'm sure some of the readers (particularly those who have sworn never, ever, to read this blog again, despite their knowledge of all its contents) would come up for wild justifications for why a 1st level orc fighter has 2 hit points while an ordinary grunt has 5, but it always bothered me.  To fix it, I had to produce ad hoc numbers and I hate doing that.  I like rules that everyone understands, that I am held to, so that the game continues apace without fudging.

The answer was to view the 'level' as a bonus number of hit points that were added to the base hit points gained for mass.  A 1 HD humanoid of medium size (140-219 lbs) has no training and thus has 1d8 hit points for their mass, health, constitution and whatever.  A 1st level fighter humanoid adds 1d10 to the original mass roll, so that all told the 1st level orc fighter would have 2-18 hit points.

Naturally, this meant calculating the mass of all the player characters and adding additional hit points for them, which the players adore.  I haven't heard any complaints so far.

It is still possible, however, for a 1st level orc fighter to have less than a 1 hit die ordinary orc.   I don't feel like calculating out the chance - knowing it exists is enough.

My players know that they're going to start their first level with a full hit die of their class.  This is a policy that goes back to when I was still in high school, which had been adopted by all my friends in the worlds they also ran.  No one among my group ever thought it was a bad idea; nor any of the people who would later run in my campaign over the next twenty years.  I didn't encounter people who felt otherwise until finding the internet.

Note that I say the full hit die - not the mass roll.  The mass roll, since its introduction five years ago, has been random.  Which is to say that potentially a boy with 1 hit point is trained to be a fighter, succeeds at it and then begins the game with 11 hit points, plus constitution bonus.

Given recent number crunchings, however, I see a problem in this thinking.  The mass number has always been rolled after the fact of the fighter's existence; I had not previously looked at it any other way.

Perhaps, however, going forward I should be adjust that mass number to the upper half of the die.

The same principle would be applied to the 1 HD humanoid fighter - only, the d10 roll would be random on top of Monday's numbers.  The most likely candidate for fighter training would be a humanoid with 7 or 8 hit points (with 5 or 6 hit points occurring, but more rarely), so the 1st level orc fighter should have d4+4 hit points for mass (assuming we don't want to use a d100 to determine hit points) and d10 hit points for fighting ability.  That still leaves the possibility of a 1st level having less hp than a ordinary man-at-arms, but since there's a rationale for it (the training had largely failed, since only a 1-3 on a d10 was rolled) I am more comfortable with the result.

Some of the non-readers will jump on my 'rationale' and scream that it's a story, so allow me to explain.  I never said that a 1 HD humanoid couldn't have 1 hit point and enter combat.  The response screamed that such would exist, and people rushed about this week proving it, giving examples of what these would be like and so on, but they merely misread what I'd written.  Yes, there would be a 1 hit point orc that might enter combat.  Only, you'd probably have to comb through more than 11,000 orcs to find one.  That was my point.  However, as the reader knows . . . numbers; confusing; not looking at them.

I said the 'balance' would have 7 or 8 hit points.  Not ALL.  The balance.  I cannot help it if people cannot read.  But that is what I said on Wednesday.

My rationale is only that I have an origin for where those fighter level numbers come from - those are training hit points, not constitution hit points.  Constitution bonuses per level are thus improved fitness resulting from additional training.  Thus, a 2nd level orc fighter with a 15 constitution would have 5-8 hit points from mass, 2-20 hit points from habits developed through training and an additional 2 hit points gained from improved fitness.  I don't have to make a story about where the points come from.  They originate in the same way for every orc, in a quantifiable manner.

Since the mass roll for new characters is going to go up in my world, to reflect this new perspective, I don't expect players will complain.  Players never contain about more of anything.  Thus the balance is maintained. The orcs have more hit points and so do the players.

Well, I was going to get into my stunning rules, but this is enough for today.  Have at it, boys.

Age

There are going to be a few of my long-time readers who won't like that last post at all, who shake their heads wondering why I write these screeds when they serve so little purpose.  Not that the disagree with me. It's only that, why bother stirring that kettle?  The beer on top was perfectly good until I spoiled it with precipitate.

Very well, letting the beer settle again . . .

I was asked yesterday how I handled the age limit on elves and other non-humans in comparison to humans, where it came to learning skills, and I answered rather flatly - perhaps too flatly - that I didn't use them.  And that I haven't had a player that missed them.

There are several problems, I note, with running characters of old age - particularly extreme old age, say of 1,500 years or more.  At present, I am coming to grips with the fact that the 30-year-old 'me' seems to have been pretty stupid, even as that 'me' was so clear about how stupid was the 18-year-old 'me.'  No doubt, at 70, I'm going to look back and just know that I was such a moron when I was 50.

This is how it goes.  Can you imagine what it must be like to be 350 and look back on those first hundred years?  No, in fact, none of us can.

Most of the time, when someone older than 150 is depicted in a film, they are shown to be terribly emo. Not that long ago I saw Byzantium, which is about a 200-year-old girl who is so hopelessly bored with life she can't think of anything to do with all that time.  I suppose this must be conceived from the minds of writers who are themselves terribly bored at 46 (the age of Moira Buffini when she wrote Byzantium, presuming she wrote it a year before the film came out).  For some of my generation, I know, the years spread out in front like a great, long badly-lit hall, ending in darkness, with a carpet that should have been replaced a generation ago.  Part of this feeling comes from recognizing that the body has passed 'starting' to break down - it actually is corrupted, now, and that corruption is getting worse.  This makes one feel there's little point in taking up anything new, since a) it's going to be made difficult by the present cruddy body, and b) there isn't time to get good at it before total crud sets in.

I admit, I recognize those sentiments.  There are other aspects of the film, too, that undermine the hopefulness of the characters, but then I said most of the time that this is the depiction.  The future is boredom.

Tolkein's elves are horrifying.  They sit and sit and wait and occupy themselves with unaccountable tasks - singing, I suppose, or other art forms that are only obliquely addressed.  Over 1,000 years, it doesn't seem like much of a life.  Why they don't develop the technology and skills mankind invented within 800 years after the re-education of Western Europe is never explained.  If we are going to talk about skills, it doesn't take 800 years to learn to use a sword better - it doesn't even take 800 years to replace the sword entirely with gunpowder, cannon and rifles - but the elves seem uncommonly maudlin, unambitious creatures.  We're better off without them, really.

I would like to think that Heinlein had the idea better handled with his Lazarus Long, who doesn't truly become tired of living life until he's past 2,000.  But then, he was 66 when Time Enough for Love was published, and he'd written the character the first time in 1941, so he'd had time to consider the relative issues.  Lazarus never takes over the universe, despite all his skills, but then part of Heinlein's theme behind Lazarus reflects upon Yeats, that the centre does not hold and that all that we build ultimately becomes flaky. Heinlein, born in 1907, seeing the WWI, WWII and the Cold War had ever reason to believe that America was going the way of the toilet, a theme he stuck to all his life.  He would not approve of me - my manners are far too poor to suit him.

I don't accept his argument that things don't get better, because I am ultimately a progressive.  Every very bad part of the 20th century was in fact better than the 19th, when mass murder was so common that millions who died in Russia, Africa, India, China and so on don't even have the benefit of labels to describe their tombs like 'the Holocaust.'  We'll never know for sure how many coolies the British Empire worked to death, or how many Africans died on plantations the world wide, or how many native warriors with spears and animal skin shields were mown down by rifles and machine guns.  As awful as it is now, it is better.  And as awful as it gets in the future - and I'm convinced it will - whatever the total destructions wrought by climate, nuclear winter or the zombie plague, unless every last one of us die, then things will be better when society is rebuilt on the ruins of that mighty history lesson.  One has to take the long view.

The elves could, the reader must understand.  The elves would have time to take the very long view, which would mean they'd be all the more evil for not making the effort to settle the hash of the present in the way that only they could.  But they don't.  They are Emerson's worst nightmare.  They sit and do nothing.

To retain the history I wanted for an Earth-like world, I had to impose the same age on all player character races that humans had.  Having one player character who, in the 17th century, could remember the vikings or the end of the Roman Empire sounds all very fun and fanciful, but the players weren't going to be up to that role-play.  They just weren't.  There are those reading me now who will think, "I could," but no you couldn't. You have trouble conceiving that you're a 75-year-old man, or 90, and if you don't believe me pack yourself up and spend a couple of weeks working in an urban titty bar, where the clientele and the staff are mostly all 25.  See how long you last before you just hate these people.

Of course, the reader may be 25.  In which case, I have no advice for you.  I promise that you cannot have any idea what it is like to be 75, at all.  You just haven't lived long enough.  Sorry.  Them's the breaks.  I hope you get the chance, though.  We should all have the chance.

My point is that anyone who was more than several hundred years old would look back on our lives, our problems, our approach to solving those problems and so on with nothing but disdain.  God, how could you not?  Time offers perspective, and perspective makes all this shit we worry about day-by-day look absolutely ridiculous.

Suppose I could live another 400 years, and suppose that I were living in a culture where that was practically a guarantee - like this one.  Would I worry about how well my book was doing today?  Would I worry that any of you understood my perspective?  God no.  I have plenty of time.  I'll figure out the book that will convince you eventually.  And in the meantime, I'm not going to sit about doing nothing.  I think I could work my way up through medical school if I had, say, three or four decades to get used to it.  And then work as a doctor somewhere awful for fifty, sixty years, until I got bored of that and decided to try my hand at politics.  Or engineering.  Or farming for a century or so.  Raise five or six families from five or six wives, etcetera, etcetera.  And meanwhile, work on this endless silly problem of people being what they are.  I'm sure, given four centuries, I could figure it out.  The solution might have to be drastic.  That's an understood possibility.

No player running a 653-year-old elf is going to approach the world with the disdain or contempt that the world probably deserves . . . and who would want to?  What would be the point of that?  We wouldn't do it in the right way, anyhow, since none of us are going to live to that age.  Who knows, maybe we would become the pathetic, do-nothing elves that Tolkein proposed.  Maybe Buddhism in the extreme is inevitable. In which case, why would a nirvana-seeking elf ever adventure?

No, better to keep the players running ages they can at least meet in ordinary life.  They still can't do 61 very well, but at least they can pretend being 61 is like it is in the movies.