Building Something

The newest work involves the design of a very mundane game setting, a frontier set of farmhouses, with no villages, thorpes or hamlets of any kind. Just 65 persons living in 14 farmhouses, spaced 3/4 of a mile apart. With this, I've been carefully designing really basic non-adventuring set ups for a 1st level party. Possible set-ups include: a disease takes hold of some residents; a group of residents plan an expedition into the true wilderness to hunt; one farmer loses some livestock and it must be searched for; a new settler in the area has more work to do than the family can manage, and the players can help; the players are asked to help improve the area by digging a water well. This mixed in with the possibility of getting into a fight with a small group of outlaws, with vermin, with a predator or possibly a roving monster.

This gives me some leeway as to what sort of tone a campaign might possess. For example, it could focuse on the difficulties and struggles of the farmers, the isolation of the environment and the general fight everyone has for food. We can imagine a party ready to take it upon themselves to help these people, but understanding that "gold" is more or less useless; there's no where to buy things and one can't eat gold. The obvious solution that most party's would do would be to travel some distance, find food, pay for it, and haul it back ... but realistically, these isolated self-driven folk would look down on this sort of "solution," calling it charity, doubting the veracity of the party, probably refusing to eat this food that they didn't work for. Going elsewhere to buy food for these people is not the answer.

Instead, consider the overall sense of community and cooperation. Imagine that these people are not resistant or hateful of outsiders; we're not trying to create a fabricated conflict here. Suppose them to be rational, that the hands and effort of the party, working side by side with these independent peasants, could make the party one of them. They could embrace these strangers, call them friends, respect them for getting their hands dirty or breaking their backs to clear stones, pick weeds, help bring in the slain deer from a hunt or help protect the farmhouses from predators and vermin.

This sort of tone is anathema for players much of the time, who value independence and rugged individualism ... but I want to think about the game on a different level, where the thing the players work to achieve isn't stopping some evil from doing a bad thing in this moment, but helping good folk achieve good work on a day to day basis. And in doing so, becoming respected, becoming members of that community, even rising to being leaders, where the community trusts them and has reason to do so. This positions the party for those deeper adventures at a higher level, where they must enter this dungeon or clear that other lair, or root out some village of dangerous humanoids, not for the plunder, not for the glamour, but because it makes "our village" safer and better able to sustain itself.

It's not unheard of; it's the premise of a great many westerns, where the bad people act like player characters normally act, and the "heroes" are the ones who vouch for law and order and risking life and limb for cause, not for coin. I understand how in this post-colonial world how alien this sounds, how utterly unlike the premise the game appears to have been founded upon; a premise I've run many times and would have soundly defended in my youth. But even then, in playing a game, I always liked to build things. On this blog, I've written about starting a trading town, I've written about building a base camp from which to launch raids on a dungeon. I've written about starting a mustard farm.

I think building gets very little credit in this game. Far less than it deserves. Nor are we just talking about houses and economic ventures. There's the building of a reputation, the building of trust between oneself and the residents, the empowerment of one's character in gaining the respect of people in the game world with power and their own agency. We only think of power in terms of how many spells we have or how much damage we can do; there's no room in a typical DM's lexicon for building a world that accentuates planning, collaboration or the development of the setting ... yet I believe that the players enjoying the evident fruit of their labours could be the richest and most fulfilling experience possible.

Much of the drawback is the need to create artificial conflict between NPCs and players. We see so much of this on television. People can't just work together. They can't achieve things together. They must be depicted as disagreeing over policy, of maneouvering behind each other's backs for leverage, of being absolute moral vacuums in their willingness to perform any loathsome act if it wins them one fleeting moment of besting the other character. DMs are raised on this story content, as we all are, and for them, "story" means drama, not out of some rational motive, but for the pure, unrelenting need for conflict ... because conflict is "interesting."

It's not, really. We know that Tom isn't going to succeed, or that Jane's efforts will end in her humiliation, or that the marriage between Brent and Rebecca is destined to break up, no matter how close they are in the first season, because every facet of every story is a glass pillar waiting for the hammer to fall in the second season or the third season or whenever the writers run out of conflict.

Instead of contrived conflicts, instead of the DM always inventing another obstacle to fuck over the party, instead of the party hacking every ally in the back before the ally can hack them, the enviroment and the task at hand, making this settlement thrive, or making the surrounding hills safe, has plenty of obstacles and trials without needing to invent interpersonal drama. And as hurdles are overcome, players can feel a genuine sense of accomplishment, creating a game experience that rises above all the others as "that one time we built something, because the DM let us."

It is perhaps because I have been at this 40+ years, and that I am tired of the endless cycle of conflict-driven adventure cliches. It's my game, and I'm a player in my game, and I want to make things. If there had ever been a DM in my life whose game I would have been a player in, that DM would have let me do this.

The Threat of Poverty

Tonight would have been a game night, but it isn't.  Instead, I'll take a swing at writing a post.

I was thinking today about the preview I posted for my Streetvendor's Guide, available on patreon for those who donate $10 on my patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466) ... have to do a little plugging, that's how it goes.  I'll copy a tiny piece of the relevant text here, the full preview's about 1650 words:

Performance ... (price not yet determined)

The price to engage the services of a travelling minstrel or musician for a minimum of two hours and surely not more than four. Matters such as the scope of the performance, the repertoire of music to be played and the specified time and location always require negotiation that rarely pleases either side of the bargain. While the fee is almost never paid up front, it’s assumed that food and beverages at the event are to be provided gratis on an all-the-musicians can eat and drink basis.

Wouldn't be much, I'd expect, somewhere between 5 and 10 silvers I'd guess, but as I'm working on musical instruments yet, I want prices for the whole collection before calculating from the mean some sort of base price.  Easy enough for players to afford, and not likely to be enough for a player bard to pursue, except for the game experience of actually playing in front of live audience of strangers.

The passage exists in the guide because instruments exist, and because for the most part I'm including fees and hiring prices for people who use the equipment included in the book.  Whether or not players take advantage of the prices is no nevermind to me; part of the book's agenda is also to include information that might provide inspiration for a storyteller or a writer, who could easily use the guide as a random search engine, jumping through pages just to see what sparks.

But that aside, as I considered the passage today, I found myself wondering, "What if the price of working as a musician was worthwhile for players," which is not to say that I'd consider raising the price.  Oh, obviously, a much better musician would rate a higher fee, while maestros and geniuses could rate 30 to 60 times as much ... but that isn't where I'm going.

One of the larger gamebreaking issues of the game is the value of gold, jewels, insundry items and magic that pours into the player's pockets as they hie themselves off to a dungeon.  This has been part and parcel of the game's culture from the very beginning, as Gygax et al considered themselves to be portraying the vast riches that fantasy characters were always depicted as obtaining.  Jason and his Argonauts obtained the Golden Fleece, Siegfried gets his hands on the Rhinegold, Odysseus loads his ship with treasure from Troy, Wiglaf brings a sample of the dragon's treature to Beowulf before he dies, there were endless stories of El Dorado, Hansel & Gretel discover chests filled with jewels and gold when the witch is burned in her own oven, the Fisherman obtains more and more wealth through wishes granted by the fish, the Golden Goose, Rumplestiltskin and so on.

Yet I can just as easily point out that in any of the original modules released by TSR, setting the standard for treasure hordes, what one gets for killing 30 or 40 fairly ordinary orcs provides a rather comparable pile compared to these literary treasures.  A single ogre can yield up a few thousand gold pieces in value for battle given.  Granted, Siegfried's treasure is much, much more, but I don't remember any passages in the tale about his "hording up" 20 or 30 thousand coins as he fights battles on the way to getting there.  The same goes for a lot of adventure stories, notably King Arthur and his knights, where treasure figures rather negligibly compared to the adventure itself, the mystic elements of the stories and the morality of the quests pursued.  True enough, Troy yields up a lot of treasure ... but aside from armour, the acquisition of horses and a few slaves, these soldiers fight ten years before they see their cut of what Troy has.

Now, now, I'm not dissing treasure.  The players like it, it's a good motivator to action and yes, it helps the players buy stuff.  My general approach to that problem is to make sure there is lots and lots of stuff to buy, but that only goes so far.  How many large ships, herds of warhorses, merchant houses and castles can one character really want?

All the long-term player characters in my erstwhile and now dead campaign had accumulated hundreds of thousands of gold, some buried in property and some just buried.  Having enough to buy everything they wanted and then some didn't stop them from adventuring.  In the long run, it was never the treasure they wanted; this not being 5e, it was experience, and thus levels, and thus more options when adventuring.  Treasure was, and is, a means of getting there.  Which is why, for a lot of players who aren't indoctrinated in the old ways, being granted a pile of experience or an automatic new level does just as well as a big pile of gold coins.

Rest assured, I'm not preaching that either.  Just waving at it as we go by.

Consider what the game might be if players could not count on girding themselves up for a little dungeon delving, whenever their cash flow looked a bit thin.  Suppose that there still were the orcs, the ogres, the giant snakes and all the other big baddies ... but like we might expect of creatures who have no personal use for money, they don't actually have any.  Suppose that in toto, our clan of 50 orcs has some 50 copper pieces "between the seats of the couch," as it were, randomly discarded into a vessel here and there, punched and made part of a bone necklace, used as eyes for some kid's doll, as a button for clothing or kicked off into some corner of a rough cavern?  After all, there's no reason to keep these coins in a special chest made for the purpose; chests can be useful for storing things, and for most orc clans, coins aren't.  What are these orcs going to do with them?  Visit the local village market and buy a few peaches?

Suppose the orcs do pile up a few hundred gold, and that they know somewhere they can take them ... the lair of some group of human outlaws, who have the choice to take a bath and visit a town.  Wouldn't it make sense for the orcs, upon accumulating any coins, run off to the outlaws and make a trade for better iron, pottery jars, medicines, or whatever they can get?  Why hold onto this useless hunks of metal, when they can be traded for something useful?

Oh, sure, we can argue these orcs might want to keep some gems, as these are pretty.  But would these gems be anything more than somewhat ordinary shiny stones?  The early settlers in the Americas came across large "gems" in the hands of the natives, but these weren't cut and polished as if from Antwerp.  Compared to European-gems, these were stones found in rivers, worn smooth, but far, far from being worth hundreds of gold pieces.  And there were always more rivers, and more stones, and the natives knew where to go to get them.  This is not a question of something in short supply, but rather, how many do we really want to carry home?

In my childhood, our cabin was near a lake that had beaches made of quartz and agate.  Any day I could walk along the water's edge and find pounds and pounds of beautiful, mottled pieces of agate and glistening white quartz as big as my thumb, or bigger.  But none of these had any real value, unless time was taken to tumble the pieces, and clean them with acids, and polish them with rock blankets, until they'd shine enough to sell for $2 a piece at a rock shop.  It's not the stone being paid for; it's the work that goes into the stone.  There are rivers in Burma and Ceylon that produce rubies and sapphires in the quantities that my lake in Alberta produces agate; but they don't look like rubies and sapphires in a Burma stream.  They just look like rocks.  Smooth, pretty rocks, but if you weren't a geologist, or a local that's been taught, you'd never know which was a ruby and which wasn't.

So sure, the orcs have "gems" ... or rather, pretty rocks.  Maybe fifty or sixty of them, scattered around.  Some worth a few coppers apiece, and some worth nothing.  Because the orcs aren't jewellers.  They're not learning which stones the market is craving.  They're just picking up rocks that please them, that they see in a stream.

Oh, someone can argue around this.  The Incas and the Aztecs had some very nice stones, which the Europeans recognised as having terrific value, and these were brought to Europe and cut a little better and polished a little better, and some of them found their way into crown jewels around the continent.  But these were also stones that accumulated over a very large area, that of Mexico and Peru; and not in one generation, but over scores of generations, whose very best rocks were slowly plundered and gathered into the hands of monarchies.  We're not talking about the players knocking off some orc king, whose ancestors have ruled for a hundred years, in a land that's built on three other previous empires going back 2,000 years.  We're talking 40 orcs in a hole in the ground.  What are they doing with such a rock?

Just suppose, is all I'm saying.  Suppose the players can go out and kill the orcs, and get the experience from that, and rid the neighbourhood of orcs, and have a fine adventure, and feel good about their service.  And suppose, when they get back, all that effort isn't enough to pay for three nights at an inn and more than a half dozen meals.  And suppose there's no expectation that the next adventure is going to bring in any more.  What about then?

What does the game become?  That's all I'm asking.  Does it stop being D&D, because the money tap is turned off?  Is there something inherently game-breaking about the players agreeing to help a small family plough their land this spring, in return for a hundred pounds of food?  Does it ruin everyone's good time if the bard has to get a gig, today, to pay for the party's lodging tonight?  Or are we just talking about a set of completely subjective assumptions about what the players are entitled to?  

Along the Way

At the beginning of a running, my players usually arrive ebullient, arms full of food, folders, backpack, dice bags and so on — much more than they need, I think, because it seems like they're preparing to camp out for several days and not just a Friday evening.  They arrive in groups, as couples or as one heading out to fetch the lone player who has no car.  They unpack their gear, help me move the 120 lb. table from against the wall into the center of the room, sort out the location of their chair, dirty my dishes as they make up their food plates while, all the while, chatting constantly.  They hug me, they ask after me, they haven't heard from me in two weeks (they don't read this blog).  Now there's a 2-year-old running in circles underfoot, whom my partner Tamara will manage as she's decided D&D has become too stressful of late.  In all honestly, I think she better prefers being a grandmother.

Grazing on food takes up much of an hour, as does the plugging of cords, the outlay of dice trays to roll in, connecting to the internet (as access to the wiki is de rigueur), plus discussion of recent movies, global events, the best recent uploads to youtube and so on.  I talk, I rest, I gorge coffee and sugar, I work to get myself "in the mood."  If I don't call the game to start, this warming up period can spin into an hour and a half, two hours, three hours, possibly all night.

The best way to grab their attention is to stand up and say in a DM's voice, "Okay."

That brings silence and complete readiness.  No one has to do a last minute shuffle, push food out of the way, rush to the kitchen for a drink, or anything.  When I say okay, no matter when I say it, they're ready to go.  Just like that.  For all their casualness, they've been ready to start for quite some time.

And where do I start?

I ask the question of the players, "What do you want to do?"

This fits into all we've said thus far.  The game begins with the party's answer to this question.  We may have stopped the last session in the middle of a fight, but the continuation of that fight starts with the players stating their next round's action.  It may be that I don't get an immediate answer, because they party needs to collaborate on the question for a bit.  There are times when I rise, start the game, ask the question ... then go to the kitchen and refill my coffee, because I'm not needed.

For this post, let's suppose that the party has just awoken at the usual inn, this is their first session, and they answer the question, "We'd like to go to a dungeon."

"Excellent," I say.  "I just happen to have a dungeon ready.  Are you ready to leave, or do you still have equipment left to buy?"

This always seems to bring them up short, as they think, "Oh, yeah ... we had better get ready, hadn't we?"  So I provide them an equipment list, then go to the kitchen and get another cup of coffee.

They have questions, I answer.  They buy, they set about calculating their encumbrance, they loan each other money ... then they drift into casual discussions about things and when I see no one's eyes fixed on a screen, I ask, "Are you ready to go?"

A few last things and yes, they're ready to go.  I explain how they know about the dungeon (they grew up in this town where they're starting, so they already know all the rumours any NPC might know), they know what road to take to get sort of in the area, after which I explain they'll have to search.  This all follows some background exposition that several groups have already entered the forested mountain-hills next to the swampy-sandy lakeside, at the end of the trail-cart-track road, and never come back, so if they head out to said road, they ought to be on the right track.  That sounds right to the party, so they head out.

The reader shouldn't think that my description goes, "You leave town ... and you've just found the dungeon entrance."

As a DM, you may think that it's important to get the party to "the good part," but doing that would miss opportunities to deepen and enrich the players' connection with the setting.  My game's generator isn't a one trick pony.

The space between the town and the dungeon creates rhythm, a flow at which controlled time passes, according to how much experience I wish to insert between the players and their goal.  Rhythm in this case has a strong positive/negative polarity that increases as the party gets further and further from the town in pursuit of the dungeon.  While the dungeon is closer, the town's being farther away preys upon the players' sense of safety.  Should it matter that getting back to town in a hurry might decide a character's fate, if something happens, distance is key.

As is difficulty of terrain.  Both vertical upness and flooded downness create immense difficulties to travel, especially should an escape occur in which the party is being pursued by something unknown.  They know that every step forward is also one they'll have to take back; impressing the difficulty of the forward upon them, it builds tension.

Additionally, the harder it is to reach the dungeon, the more concerning and dangerous the dungeon becomes.  Something easy to get to can't possibly have anything really bad in it, or so parties tend to think.  Something really hard to reach is, maybe, and perhaps should be, out of reach.  Make the journey hard enough, and parties will stop and debate, arguing whether or not they want to go on.  This makes terrific gaming.  Not only is there an irrational fear at play, there's also pride and bravery that players ought to have, which is being challenged.  Forcing a balance between the two produces a feeling of adventure that can't be produced by an hour of meaningless flavour text.

During the rhythm of travel, too, there's the possibility of showcasing a part of the world.  Look at what the other people are doing; look at the world's layout in this small part; look at the people on the road and where they're going.  The players can meet persons travelling to some important city that they might want to travel to themselves.  They can see people working fields that someday might be a part of the player's own lands.  Envisioning the world, the players begin to shape a larger picture for their agenda, because it's all here, laid out in front of them.  It's not just a jump to the dungeon.  The world is a real place that the players are moving through.

Plus, there are hooks to cast.  Hey, there's a father walking along with two little girls, all three of them singing together, as they head off to town.  The party doesn't know it, but not long after they get back from the dungeon, they're going to see that same father standing on a scaffold, inches from death, as a town clerk asks if anyone's willing to pay for the father's bond to spare his life.  Oh, and here's a rather elaborate camp along the side of the road, where the tents are marked with a heraldic symbol of a three diamonds and a dagger; upon inquiry, the party is told its a travelling noble, and to "Move along, move along."  The party doesn't know it, but the ring they're going to find in the dungeon was owned by this noble's father, who died in the same dungeon 14 years ago.  And here's a peddler heading to the party's town, asking if the party wants to buy something from his rather sad little cart, where the pastries he has are stale, and the fruit on the overripe side.  The party doesn't know it, but this peddler survived the dungeon the party is about to enter, four years ago ... and after the party gets back to town, he's going to overhear them talking and ask if they encountered the "lizard door."  "What, no!" the party will answer, because there was no lizard door, whereupon the peddler will chuckle and walk away.  Though likely, the party won't let him.

So there we are ... three adventures in the queue, and the party hasn't even reached the dungeon yet.  Throw a couple of red herrings into the mix — a son helping his father fix a cart wheel, a tired woman beating out sheets in a stream bed, across from a dilapidated road house a mile out of town — and we're all set to see the wheels churn in the player's head as they struggle onwards to find that elusive entrance.  

Build this kind of pattern session after session, and you need never worry about the players "finding something to do."  There'll always be some connection they need to make, some person they do a favour for, some choice that seems imminent, just as soon as we get done what we're doing right now.  The realm of characters encircling the party, aiding them in their quests, choosing to stand against them, demanding something from them, sets out dozens of little goal posts that are ready to matter when the party has the time.

At first, you'll struggle thinking of examples like the one's I've just given.  But they'll come to you in time.  None of these are, in fact, time sensitive ... nor even by necessity game critical.  If the girls' father is hung, he's hung; oh well, it's a Medieval world.  If the players never do sell the ring, and thus never know it's a legacy, c'est la vie.  If they don't care about the lizard door, okay.  It isn't going anywhere.  The trick as a DM is to make these things fit into the player's ordinary behaviour, without ever forcing the encounter.  Make each part of the narrative "happen" in its own time, with its own rhythm.  With practice, and patience, a DM can understand why we don't have to throw out the hook until the time is right.  When the players happen to be in the centre of town.  When the player wearing the ring happens into the company of someone who recognises it.  When the players happen to be talking about the dungeon, when they're supposed to be at the bar, or shopping, or hanging outside their inn getting their horses saddled to ride out of town.  And what do you know?  The peddler happens to be right there.

Adventure Fiction

Looking around for something that might raise an eyebrow.  This article is from the self-same Sep 1981 issue of Heavy Metal.

It's fascinating that a footprint for these people can be easily found on Wikipedia.  Charles Platt seems to have produced a wide variety and considerable amount of content, but not one single thing listed drifts remotely into my radar.  Judging from the article, he seems to be something of a flake, seems to resist the moving forward of technology and in general doesn't seem to be much liked.  Of course, Wikipedia can be very, very misleading.  The cryonics thing, though ... just hm.  He's still alive.

I post this for its obvious D&D connection, especially that it's a voice in 1981 not connected to the Dragon Magazine.

Safe Words

"The Miracle of the Andes", that's what they called it. Many people come up to me and say, that had they been there they surely would have died. But that makes no sense. Because until you're in a situation like that, you ... you have no idea how you'd behave. To be affronted by solitude without decadence, or a single material thing to prostitute, it elevates you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now, there's the God they taught me about at school, and there is the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilisation. That's the God that I met on the mountain."

— opening narration to the film, Alive (1993)

For those who don't know, in 1972 a plane bearing a Uruguayan Rugby team and their friends and family suffered an airplane crash into the remote Andes Mountains; 29 out of 45 died.  They were stranded for 72 days against the worst odds imaginable, in a sea of ice and rock, deprived of oxygen due to altitude in below freezing weather.  I won't say more, in case the reader would like to find the book or see the film.

Listening to the opening monologue a few minutes ago, having decided to watch the film again, I was struck by the dualism of the two gods spoken above.  Unquestionably, the first god is also the D&D model.  People tend to imagine gods — including the Christian god — much along the Greek model: as persons with agendas, sometimes good or bad, but always ambitious in some manner, whether it's to obtain sex with a herder girl or convince the locals that, "Yes, no kidding, I'm real and I'm you're god."  It's no great observation, since it's been written about constantly for thousands of years, but we see gods in our own image, with our own foibles and our own needs.  Even the Christian god needs a motivation we can understand: "he loves us" — though he has a helluva way of showing it, not to mention he's pretty damn picky about who constitutes "us."

Much better, however, than the narrator's other "God": the unbelievable force of concentrated, indescriminate death and indifference that lies outside those parts of the world we've managed to tame.  The God that lives in literal space, surrounding the earth itself in every direction, who waits patiently for silly fools to prance forth in thin metal and fabric suits mere millimeters from the worst environment imaginable ... no environment at all.  We don't represent that god in D&D, except possibly with the dice; and it's at precisely that point that the game gets "too real" for comfort and we have to back away and impose nerfing traditions to mitigate the raw, cold, brutal seriousness of the "god on the mountain."

What a bunch of pansies we are.

I had choices to pick from for this image.  Ones where, unlike the one above, the climber wasn't tethered.  This stuff is porn for climbers.  The more dangerous, the more absurd to commonsense, the better.  Pitons slip.  Rope breaks.  People die every year.  Actual death, mind you ... no fudging.

We gamers can't even comfortably imagine death, much less face it.  We have no desire at all to be elevated to a spiritual plane, even metaphorically.  There are no gods of nature in D&D.  Even the very bad ones, the gods of chaos, have an agenda ... and though its unknown, an arrival time as well, like a train that's perpetually late.  But nature is right here, right now.  It's ready to kill you today.  And it doesn't care.  Not a tiny bit.  We matter as much to nature as the particle of dust landing on the tip of your nose, just now.  The particle that could kill you — if it's the right particle.

Doesn't sound much like a game.  Doesn't sound "fun."  Sounds dismal.

Yet what is that girl doing up there, courting death?  What the fuck is that all about?

Well, now, you see ... our bodies are built in this weird, designed format, tailored by a constant interaction we had with this horrific natural god for literally millions of years.  That includes a lot of years before we were "surrounded" in this civilisation.  There was no civilisation.  There was only this solitary indifferent god — in a very non-metaphorical way you understand, because we hadn't invented metaphors yet.  All we had was our biology ... and to keep us alive, to permit the birthing of children that would keep the species alive, our biology developed a strategy that enabled us to cope with constant, terrifying spiritualism on the order of that plane crash turned up to eleven.  All. the. time.

Part of that strategy included flooding our body with intensely pleasurable drugs during moments of extreme danger.  Just think about how fucked up that is.  Your body chemistry is actually designed to reward you for courting life-threatening situations.  And judging from those who push the envelope in this regard constantly, the effect of this "drug" makes you feel god-like.

Take a moment and think about that combination of words.

Why in particular do we associate feelings of fear mixed with invulnerability with the word "god"?  Hm?  Any guesses?

I'll give you a hint.  The feeling occurred millions of years before the word did.

That's right.  We invented a word that captured the feeling, and now we use that word when we have that feeling; and we ascribe that word to other imaginary entities that we associate with being invulnerable and laughing in the face of danger.  True adventurers, if you will.

But you don't have to climb upside down to tap into those feelings, or drugs if you wish; like nature, which you're a part of, those drugs are right here, right now, locked into tiny vessels inside you just aching to be flushed into your arteries and veins.  Want to learn how?  Want to learn when and why D&D enables your imagination to jack you full of god-like chemicals?

Get rid of your safe words.  Ditch the screen, roll the die in the open.  Ditch the fortune points and any namby-pamby harnesses.  Let yourself feel scared.  Get a hitch in your throat.  Experience some trembling in your fingers as you reach for a die.  If you fall, you fall.

At least you'll live like a god.

Getting There's a Bitch

"However that might be, the mere fresh gale that endured for four days after the first storm then worked up again into a tempest, blowing eternally from the westward with almost hurricane force; grey dreary days of lowering cloud, and wild black nights, with the wind howling unceasingly in the rigging until the ear was sated with the noise, until no price seemed too great to pay for five minutes of peace — and yet no price however great could buy even a second of peace.

 "The creaking and the groaning of Hotspur's fabric blended with the noise of the wind, and the actual woodwork of the ship vibrated with the vibration of the rigging until it seemed as if body and mind, exhausted with the din and with the fatigues of mere movement, could not endure for another minute, and yet went on to endure for days. The tempest died down to a fresh gale, to a point when the top-sails needed only a single reef, and then, unbelievably, worked up into a tempest again, the third in a month, during which all on board renewed the bruises that covered them as a result of being flung about by the motion of the ship. And it was during that tempest that Hornblower went through a spiritual crisis."

C.S. Forrester, Hornblower & the Hotspur

The quote is here to provide evidence that the highest levels of adventure fiction have always acknowledged elements of nature that would set the character's teeth on edge.  Of all the cruelties that plague the heroes of novels, there is none so vile as those which keep the characters from carrying forward as they might wish ... and none with as long a history in story.  Storms and floods, earthquakes and blasts from the earth have always done the writer's work, maintaining the tension at the cost of some momentum — which is never really lost, since we know our heroes will get ultimately get there, just the same.

In D&D, we exempt this choice by the DM, given how obvious it would be that the DM was playing head games and nothing better.  Yet a set of circumstances has arisen, unforeseen, out of game rules that I've been running for quite some time, and yet have never produced the sort of frustration I'm seeing now.

One rule is the manner in which I calculate the weather — which, I'm sorry to say, I don't wish to repeat because saying it once on this blog is enough.  I'm quite happy that it's buried deep in the back catalogue — though I'm sure my players have a good idea how I'm calculating the weather.  Let's be clear ... it is out of my hands.  I don't decide when it rains and I don't decide which direction the wind blows.

The other is a quaint little rule I use when someone breaks their weapon in combat.  I've never written it down, but players who have participated with me can attest to my use of it going back decades.  In simple terms: when rolling a natural 1 on a d20, a weapon is dropped.  When the weapon is dropped on a hard surface, a 1 in 6 is rolled (some tougher weapons give a 1 in 8, some flimsier weapons, a 1 in 4); if that 1 comes up, the weapon breaks.  When a weapon breaks, I contend this is a very serious fumble, and the character must roll a "break check" on a d20.  Under perfectly normal circumstances, flat even surface, no teetering upon any slope and acting in traditional combat, this check can only be failed on a natural 1.  Otherwise, if the character is on a bad slope, or otherwise physically compromised, the break check is a "dex check" — roll equal to or less than the dexterity score.  If that fails, a bone breaks, using a location chart, which means an injury of 1-4 pts.  If that happens, roll another d20.  Roll a natural 1 on that, with no attention paid to circumstances and you ... die.  You fell and broke your neck.

In all the decades I've run, that has happened three times to monsters against the players and once to the player party; but it was a follower that died, not a player character.

Okay.  Here's the war story.

The players discover a dungeon east of Treborg in Norway, on June 25th.  They did well against nearly two dozen monsters in four encounters, took a surface level of treasure off the dungeon's first level and returned to Treborg to rest and equip themselves.  Getting to the dungeon a second time has been something of a problem.

They leave for the dungeon their second time on the 29th of June.  First, it was rain rain rain all the time, which isn't unusual for Norway but it is summer and clearly this was an unusual run of heavy storms.  When the party got up to the dungeon again, July 1st, there were two skeleton dire wolves to get past, which the party dispatched quite easily ... but then Lexent the cleric dropped his weapon in the last round, effectively after the last wolf was destroyed, standing at the crest of a gulley that had already been established as treacherous, blew his dex check and cracked his hip.  4 pts. of injury.

The party chose to wait nearby in the wild for the hip to heal, which it did in a few days thanks to a healing staff and a healing bottle; I ruled Lexent was in too much pain to cast spells.  They got the cleric on his feet (July 4th) and decided to scout a little around the mountain before returning up slope to the dungeon.  On the south side, they got pinned down by a giant eagle; the illusionist cast wall of fog to conceal them, which revealed there was also a goat among the rocks where they were hiding.  The party realized they could wrestle the goat into the open and let the eagle take it, a plan that worked.

Only, while wrestling the goat among the rocks, in a dense magically-generated fog, Pandred the fighter rolled a fumble; there being no weapon, and the circumstance being unusually dangerous, I had her roll a dex check, which she blew, so that she twisted an ankle.  3 pts. of injury.

Another round of healing in the wild, this time helped by the cleric, to get Pandred on her feet.  It's July 7th.  The party finally gets back up to the dungeon, meets with a creature that cannot be seen with infravision, with scary red eyes, "Grond" ... the master of the dungeon.  The party decides enough is enough, it's not the right day, so they retreat, all the way back to Treborg, which they reach on the 8th.  There they discover their new house is built, deal with some details and decide they've got to get off to the big city, Stavanger, for better supplies and to hire people to help with the dungeon.  They leave on July 9th in the morning.

The journey is 16 hours of hell, as steady rain comes in and threaten to swamp their boat, while a bare wind in the wide fjord leaves them a minimum of headway, with the wind in the wrong direction.  They get into Stavanger at 1 a.m. on the 10th, soaking wet.  They stay with friends.

It takes them that day and three more to buy their things and hire five sappers and a cook for their basecamp.  On the 14th, at last, they're ready to get out to the dungeon; and there is a hard wind blowing the wrong way.  The pilot tells them it will take probably 24 hours to make their way home to Trebord with the wind at the head, as they have only a lighter to get back and forth across the fjord.  They agree to wait.  Now it is the morning of July 15th when we're due to start again tomorrow.

It's been 20 days since they discovered the dungeon; they probably won't be ready to reach the dungeon itself until mid-day on the 17th (if the weather holds).  It has been a long, frustrating run of bad luck ... and there are quite a lot of players, I know, who would be demanding that we just "get on with it" and stop all this "wasting time."

When players act like that, DMs think it's a bad thing.

It isn't.  It means the players ARE frustrated, which is good.  It means the players are aggravated and pissed and motivated to kill something, which is good.  It means that when the players finally get there, they won't be so anxious to leave the moment they stub a toe.  And that is good.

I'm sorry too many DMs don't see that.

The Rolling Carpet

If I were to start a new world today, from scratch, knowing what I know now, and for some reason deciding I didn't want to run the Earth any more (though I can't imagine that), then I wouldn't start with a map.  Oh, I'd get to a map by-and-by, but I wouldn't start there.

I would start with a climate.  Of all the things that define a setting, I think the elements are the most powerful emotional consideration.  I would pick a climate and a specific season in that climate, knowing that I was going to run that season for at least two months of game time.  Thinking that, my mind goes to the setting scenes in films, with snow blasting across the landscape; the branches of trees as soaking rain drips under a dark, leaden sky; the raw, blazing sun cutting through a jungle canopy, so hot that steam rises from the surrounding waters.  I'd decide for myself, what sort of introduction do I want to give the players ... and then I'd build a settlement, or some obscure place, that matched the season.  A place on the edge of an enormous ocean, with the party waking up to find their ship's boat is floating in a lagoon; that the storm has subsided and the ship they had taken passage on is gone ~ sunk or lost over the horizon.  They don't know what this is; a beach covered with dead trunks and fronds, a forest of sago palms, the crystal blue water of the lagoon and nothing in their possession but a few trinkets hanging about their necks.

Is this an atoll?  A continent?  Should they wait to be rescued?  The sun is short of zenith; it's morning, and yet the air is so thickly humid that it suffocates.

I don't need more than this.  I don't need more story.  The tale of shipwrecked peoples, forced to explore their surroundings, survive, make their own technology and wrest themselves from their struggles is as old as time.  There are still beasts to fight, still peoples that can be met; there are still tales of Conan to be played from this beginning, or Tarzan or the Swiss Family Robinson.  The scenes and strangeness of the land beyond the palms could rival Mars, with the party playing the part of John Carter, adapting themselves to the rules of culture and mystery they discover.  As they cut their way further and further into the wilderness, looking for emancipation and a return to civilization, they meet more and different peoples, some friendly, some not.  The party collects weapons, riches, allies, greater skills and mastery of their character classes ... while I design the world like a rolling carpet in front of them.

I have been asking folks, what is the purpose of the setting?  What function does it serve?  And the answer I receive is a mixed understanding that the setting feeds itself, it develops a life of its own ... and it serves as a place where adventures happen.

I don't believe the setting provides a place for adventures.  I believe the setting is the adventure.  And that it has to be designed that way in order to achieve its full functionality as a game structure.

A Different Start

[You can read Sunday's post on The Higher Path here]
[You can read today's post on Authentic Adventures Inc. here]


Recently I've been considering ways to break the usual script of the first game session: namely, the players gather themselves together at a tavern, strike a bargain with a stranger and head off for an adventure.  Suppose I asked a group of players to approach the opening game differently.

There are three or four of you, brothers or first cousins, your education paid by a great uncle.  This uncle has done this out of his concern for your fathers and mothers ... and he has sent you back home with a few coppers in your pocket, two days provisions and the shirts on your backs.  You haven't a decent pair of boots, you haven't weapons or armor; the mage in the party is proud he has a spellbook.  And so, with no where else to go, you've come home to the little group of farms that make up your childhood.  There isn't even a village nearby; the nearest one is ten miles away.

And so, for food, for lodging, for the love of your parents, for a month you've accepted this lot in life and you've been working hard to help plant the spring crops.  There's much more to do ... and you recognize that your fathers seem a lot less able and healthy than they were ten years ago when you left.  In fact, there's a good chance that one of them isn't going to make it through the next winter.

Now, I know that most players won't accept that kind of responsibility from a game, but I ask the reader to consider how a game like this might be run.  Suppose you were to accept responsibility for your family: not just your parents, but your sisters and cousins too.  And suppose you found yourself with a little more to handle than a farmer usually would: the unexpected arrival of some large creature, for instance, chasing your little sister along the road as she fled back to the house.  You have nothing but a rake to fight it off.  You shout at your sister to hurry and get cousin Abram, while you back away from the creature and play for time.  Abram has a great spell for this.  Then again, Victor comes out of the woods where he's been picking mushrooms and sees you ... only there's a whole field between you and Victor ... and he hasn't even got a rake.

There are a nest of these creatures, as it turns out.  So you make clubs and prepare as best you can, warning your mother to keep the little ones inside for a few days.  Your father hands you a gourd of mead he made last fall and tells you he's proud of you.  "Come back safe, son," he says, then turns away so you won't see him break down.

If only there could be some sort of treasure, you think.  Then you could hire some men, so your father could stop working and live years longer; and Abram's mother could get the medicine she needs; and maybe cousin Grace could be introduced to a husband, since you could provide her with a dowry.  It's a pity these creatures seem somewhat dense.  But perhaps there is some bigger thing in the wood to be fought off.

You and your friends tighten their belts, pick up their make-shift shields and start off. 

D&D can start anywhere. 

Stumbling Around a Place Called Wargla

[You can read today's post on Authentic Adventure's Inc. here]


If you're interested in finding the best details from history, take the following advice.  When you search the web, specifically search "books."  Set the tools so that you're only searching for those with a preview, and then under "any time," select "19th Century."

I chanced to be looking for information about a place in Algeria called Ouargla, or Wargla, and stumbled across this little gem:

This is from the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record ... Vol. 4 ... a real page turner.  It was a pleasant surprise to discover there were convenient ruins inserted right into the description of the town.  I could not find an image, but no doubt the ruins aren't much.  The best images I could find were stock photos from Alamy ... but they're not overly spoiled by the company.

I find that more than romantic enough to let my imagination wander.  The guns that are carried in the foreground promise this is 19th century; no doubt drawn by a French visitor.  The region was virtually untravelled by Europeans before 1800.  Wargla is in the true desert, 200 miles south of the Atlas Mountain foothills, and through most of the year it was unbearably hot to all but natives: above 120 F on many days.  That water would no doubt be welcome.

Finding information about an obscure place such as this is not an easy task; travellers do not write more than a dozen sentences, and rarely give an in depth account.  Imagination must be used to fill the gaps.  The town is a jumping off point for the desert, so there must be caravans coming and going.  The day is hot, so action must be found in the evening or before dawn.  I read that in the winter, some mornings are so cold that there is frost on the ground ~ which must be at least 50 or 60 degrees below the day temperature ... so when night settles in, it is as unpleasant to move about as it would be on a very hot day.

I conjecture baths, to keep some filth out of the drinking water.  Animals no doubt must drink at assigned places.  Strangers must have to bargain for water to refill their casks; and yet there are opportunities to obtain many strange and unusual luxuries, not to be found elsewhere: ostrich feathers, gold, coffee, sugar, spices, cloth, beads ... and ivory.  These things can be bought cheap and transported north.  Making arrangements with a merchant could also be the making of a lifelong friendship, if the deal is right and the player returns.  There are many opportunities to learn about near and distant places, as the denizens have little to do except lay in the shade and talk.  There is a long storytelling tradition here; and the desert is ever a land of magic.  But as I say, we will not find this in books.  We must insert our imagination.

I find this easy to do; and it is the reason why I fell in love with geography as a boy.  There is so much in the world, and so many ideas to be added to it.  When I chanced across D&D, I realized immediately that it had been made for me.

Upheavals

The ambitious DM may want to add an over-arching narrative based around historical upheavals.  Here it is best to think in terms of the Four Horsemen: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.  But before we get into specifics, allow me to caution you: don't introduce a gigantic narrative of this type unless you understand how events like this trend and function.  If you know little to nothing about war, and the influence it has on society; or if you cannot fully grasp something like the Covid pestilence that is gripping the world right now; then you are out of your depth and your world will be better without your lack of knowledge minimizing the potential impact these events can have.  Nothing hurts a campaign than to have a narrative fizzle from lack of imagination or competence.

Additionally, when introducing these concepts, do not have them surprise the party.  A huge event produces an underlying, ongoing tension ~ as many readers are learning right now in real time.  This works enormously in your campaign's favor.  Knowing that there is a war going on two or three hundred miles away is enough to capture a party's imagination.  Having that war break out in different districts, perhaps one where the party intended to go, will send a chill.  Add to this the various incidents that accompany such events: assembling soldiers, seizing war materials, increased taxes, encounters with battlefields long after the battles have taken place, the unusual appearance of hundreds of crippled ex-soldiers, etc.

We may apply the same logic to famine.  A famine builds slowly; a poor harvest raises prices, week by week.  Certain foods are no longer available.  Incidents occur where people steal food.  There are hangings of such thieves.  Starving people begin to appear everywhere.  There is no food available in this town, at any price.  Resentment builds towards anyone who looks well-fed.  Crowds of people appear on the roads, moving towards places where they hope food is available.

There are many forms of death that are not included under war, famine or plague.  Natural disasters; horrific weather; political repression; predation by monsters or wild animals; and accidents.  An unusual number of these events can portent some unnatural power at work.  The death of a king or someone important can spark resentment, rebellion, the appearance of competitive factions.  The momentum from such events can build over months; and the aftermath can require months to overcome.

Each of these large narrative arcs can be ongoing while the players are wrapped up in simple mundane things, such as proposed in the last post.  It is one thing for the players to be immersed in following up clues in a book that will lead to the location of some large magic ruby; it is another when that adventure is set against a completely disconnected background of a pestilence ravaging multiple villages in the neighborhood, giving the players reason to pause before simply heading off to the next dungeon or ruin.

What to Do When You Do

Let's say for the sake of discussion that as a group of characters, you've decided to settle down near the town of Odda, the example from the last post.  Let's say the party isn't concerned about its distance from Bergen because they have a light schooner and can make the journey in near a day.  Let's say the party has just had a recent adventure in the town and has just gathered a few henchmen, and now they'd like to have a general meeting point for the main party and the secondary party, for further adventures in the area.  Let's say the mountains and tundra to the east provide lots of opportunities for just that.

And let's say the party has already explored the area, so we can freely give them the map shown on the left, indicating type-6 and type-7 hexes surrounding Odda.  Most of them are forest-based but one is in high country with less trees.  We count a hammer in every hex and 30 food (as opposed to "30F" which should now be understood to mean something completely different), amounting to a total of 1350pd (45pd per food), with a rural population of some 210.  Odda has a population of 862, so the small region is food-abundant, able to export food outside as the production is more than Odda's needs.

There are four coins in the area and we can postulate 15 active support persons per coin, supporting families that number three times that on average, or 60 persons per coin.  These are probably all based out of Odda ... so we can postulate that Odda's population of 862 includes 240 bourgoise and 49 of the aforementioned food-producers.  Most of the labor operating in other hexes would be based in Odda as well ~ earlier we described these as 5 persons per hammer, and each of them has three times as many dependents, so this accounts for another 20x8, or 160 persons, a quarter of which are not at home a lot of the time.  All told, 449 persons.

I said during the mapping coins post that the coins accounted for everyone related to making money and controlling money, so what about the other 413 persons in Stavanger?  We can't call them government or officials or guards ... these are accounted for already.  They're not farmers or foragers (all the food is accounted for), they're not scouring the countryside for valuables.  Who are they?

A small number, perhaps 2-3%, about 16 to 24, fall into two categories: they live on charity or they have enough money that they do not need employment.  This includes beggars, of which there would be only two or three that would be tolerated, the local cleric, his second and their one servant, and those who are living on investments, sinecures or are simply rich.  If the player characters settled in the area and simply hung around, they would fit into this third category.

The remainder are dependents whose principle wage earners are elsewhere ~ perhaps working aboard ship in the North Sea, or working aboard a trawler outside of Stavanger, or working some small mine or trap line further afield than those near Odda.  A few might be in the Norwegian army; one of the houses may have ten servants and seven members and be owned by a noted minister in Copenhagen.  Each of these would send money home to support their dependent family, who use the money to buy food in Odda.  That accounts for all the extra people.

There, now we have a good, solid concept of the town, how it makes its money, where the food comes from and who is doing what.  These are things the PCs can know without harm ... and we can even give them numbers as this only contributes to their "feel" for the place.

We were talking about settling down.  I'd like to run through some of the ways the players might do that.  Let's do it in point form.


Continued on the blog, the Higher Path, available through my Patreon. Please support me with a $3 donation and gain the complete series of estate posts related to the post above, as these have all been written.

15th Class: Experiential

After the previous two classes covering game consensus and situated learning, we come now to the existential development of the role-playing character.  This is the process by which the character consciously or unconsciously shifts it’s original purpose and conception through hundreds of hours of game play.  Essentially, dealing with the world, managing the struggles and difficulties associated with adventuring, the precepts upon which the character was founded grow less and less important, while the existential needs and wants of the character take precedence.  The player will, without awareness, reshape his or her perspective, so that past expectations will be achieved or discarded in favor of a new perspective.  Just as we do with our daily lives.

This. too, is connected with meaning making.  The meanings we created once no longer apply; we have new knowledge now … and with it, new meanings.

From the perspective of playing and managing a role-playing game, we need to ask ourselves, how can we advance this change in knowledge, and thereby advance the habit of characters constantly making new meanings for themselves? How can we encourage player and character growth, together?  Because obviously it is not really the character that grows, but the player’s conception of the character.

Before we can answer that question, we must first understand the principles underlying rupture and reconstruction.  This is a universal phenomenon which we all know from personal experience.

The normal pattern of an individual's life follows a pattern of stability interrupted by rupture, followed by restructuring and then new stability.  Ruptures can be radical, causing PTSD, defying restructuring and lasting in years of oscillation between temporary comfort and difficulty.  Ruptures can also be highly transitory, so that something upsetting that happened a particular morning can be acknowledged, managed and ultimately restructured within hours.  Psychology tends to look at the larger moments of rupture because these are much more difficult to manage and often require outside assistance.

Ruptures are highly variable in type.  Ruptures can result from cultural changes and conflicts, such as war or the appearance of some new ideology or social-changing technology.  Ruptures can result as a change in a person's environment, such as moving to a new city or country, a change in management at work or a recession.  Relationship changes, such as divorce, a death in the family, a child leaving home, new love or a change of interests can be a rupture.  Merely growing older, an increase in health issues or changes in one's belief system should also be included.  Ruptures may happen in an instant, or they may accumulate over a period of years.  We need to recognize here, however, that the origin of the rupture is much less important than the effect the rupture has upon the way the person views their immediate world.

We each move from home to office, from office to entertainment venue, from venue to home, from home to parents home ... and each of these spheres possesses a recognizeable identity for us.  We go where we are comfortable; and the less we recognize the sphere, the more hesitant we are to go there, or let ourselves interact with it.  Going on vacation is stress-inducing because we don't know that sphere and we have reason to question that choice.  A bad vacation can very much be a rupture, one that we will have to deal with while losing that opportunity to relax from our day jobs.  This is one reason why some people never go on vacation.

Ruptures, when they occur, cause uncertainty.  Uncertainty is generally seen to be full of tension and anxiety, but it can also be felt as excitement (again, the thrill of going on vacation, to see something we've never seen, is both exciting and stressful).  Uncertainty can be paralyzing.  It can bring on the oscillation between our coming to terms with what's happened, while feeling despair or depression as we fail to overcome the rupture.  We feel a compulsion to explore, to experience newness, but we are also well aware from our own experience that newness can often have a high price.

Our takeaway here should be that we often deliberately court rupture.  We change jobs for the sake of opportunity, we seek out relationships or to end relationships, we adventure into dangerous places for the sake of newness, we play dangerous sports and other games ... and we do these things because, following the oscillation of the reconstruction process, we grow as people.  We see, we experience, we learn, we advance, we develop new ideas and we come away with new tools and methods of managing ruptures that might occur in our future.  If a rupture occurs, we feel certain that we will handle it and that ultimately that management, that reconstruction, will make us stronger.

Most meaningful activities, the ones we most remember, the ones that bring us the greatest amount of satisfaction, deliberately risk some form of rupture.  The very concept of game-playing is rupture on a micro-level.  Let's take a moment and view a typical role-playing campaign in terms of micro-ruptures.

The players create their characters in an atmosphere of certainty, with free time to conjure up backgrounds, purchase equipment, chat with each other about plans and build up their confidence.  Soon, however, after venturing out, they encounter a difficulty.  They have to reassess; change some of their expectations.  But then they advance, restore their characters, head out again ... and get into some really serious trouble.

Soon, it looks like it could end in a total-party-kill.  Several members of the party begin to identify their situation with inevitable doom.  Another disaster befalls the party and yet they fight it out.  Things swing wildly back and forth.  For a moment, the party is safe; then all hell breaks loose.  Someone's character dies.  Another falls unconscious.  Then something is found - treasure, or equipment - and the dead character is restored and the party advances in ability ... one more difficulty and the party retreats back to town and catches their breath.  There is a moment of comfort again.

But because of their actions, a new rupture is forming.  The enemy has followed the party back to town and now there is a momentous battle.  Magic items are used, some are destroyed; the enemy seems impossible to kill; there's no telling who will win; the party's tension rises, the moment is very exciting ...

We deliberately pursue this format of game play because it reflects our characteristics as biological, thinking entities.  We equate rupture with growth; we equate the threat of rupture with purpose.  And then, following the rupture, we narrate the process of stability-rupture-reconstruction and new stability as a story ... because that is how we are constructed to think.

For those who may be familiar with the term, "the Hero's Journey" described by Joseph Campbell is nothing more than the fundamental structure of human being's adapting and reconstructing themselves psychologically following any rupture that might have occurred in their lives.  Campbell's "universality of theme" exists because every person writing a story is a biological human being.

Our goal is to see clearly how creating rupture is the heart of the campaign structure - much more so than story or heroism.  Story is only the recording of the process; heroism is only the self-perception of how we rose to the challenge.  Both are second-hand descriptors of what is really happening.  We need to lay aside non-specific language and address the functional process directly.  We will continue with this subject, applying the cyclical process of experiential rupture and growth after the Mid-Term exam.

I'll take this moment and say a few words about the Mid-Term, which will be the next class.  There will be four essay questions on the exam - the student should choose only two of the essay questions, then write a 500-word essay on each of those two questions.  For those students who cannot follow instructions, you will be graded on the first two exam questions that I see pass my desk.  Each exam question will be worth 50% of the total mark on the mid-term, which as I said before will be worth 40% of your final grade.

You will be given one week from the time when the exam is posted to submit your answers.  Your answers should be submitted to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  You will not receive a grade if you do not submit your answers to my email.  You may, if you wish, submit your answers directly to the blog (splitting your answers up as needed to make it fit), but answers submitted to the blog will not be published until after the exam deadline has passed.  Answers submitted to the blog but NOT to my email address will not be graded and will not be published.

I will be grading each essay according to the following method:

• F Grade.  Essays which show no evidence of grasping or understanding the course content will receive an F Grade.  Take note that answers that introduce outside, unsupported content not included in the course material run a considerable risk of receiving an F Grade as well (I will consider new material that is sourced on a case-by-case basis, subject to the academic value of the source).
• D Grade.  Essays that accurately repeat the barest material included in the course content, providing no personal insight, will receive a D Grade.
• C Grade.  Essays that show an excellent grasp of the course content, yet show little or no personal insight, will receive a C Grade.
• B Grade.  Essays that demonstrate a strong recognition of how elements of the course content influence one another, offering personal insight, will receive a B Grade.
• A Grade.  Essays that provide remarkable intuition from the course content and the source material, which surprises the examiner with its acumen, will receive an A Grade.

You will not be graded on your spelling or your grammar.  Remember that a D is a Pass.  I wish the best of luck to all concerned.

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.

Bring Enough for Everyone, Did We?

Of course, the first thing that most role-players think when finding rules for practicing medicine without the use of magic is, "why bother?"  After all, magical spells are much faster and less problematic, yes?  What party doesn't have a regeneration scroll just kicking around?

Well, my parties, for one. Regeneration is a 7th level spell and requires a 16th level cleric to cast.  16th level clerics are ridiculously rare and invariably very busy.  Think of it this way: the pope can easily lay his hand on your shoulder and bless you . . . but given that there are a billion other people who want the same thing, the simple act of receiving a personal blessing is probably not going to happen for you.

In short, even if the party in an everyday munchkinish game has enough of every kind of healing spell available to ensure never having to worry about getting their hands dirty with ~ shudder ~ surgery, most of the other people filling all the towns and rural countryside of the world probably have little choice about it.

But why should that matter?  Why concern ourselves with what the simple people do ~ we're busy adventuring here!  We can't worry about what limbs or diseases the common folk care to die from ~ right?

This thinking expresses a kind of bubble that most campaigns simply ignore, one where the setting is built wholly upon the party's specific needs.  If a member of the party catches a disease, no problem: we have a spell for that.  If a member loses a limb, boom, here's another.  If a member slips and falls among a patch of razor cactus, we have a handy rod of resurrection right here.  The important thing is that we survive, we keep going, we get the adventure done.  Other people don't matter.

Suppose the party, having just come from killing off an otyugh in some slime filled trough five miles into the forest, returns to the nearest village, all safe and sound.  Quite by surprise, by the middle of the first night, half the inn's residents are mysteriously down with some sort of malady.  The party is awoken by the tramping of twenty pairs of feet going up and down the stairs and with doors opening and shutting, because all of these poor souls have the trots.

The next day, finishing their breakfast, the party notices the bartender and the barmaid are clearly pale and in poor shape.  As they collect their horses from the stables, they see signs of a spreading ailment everywhere: there are slop buckets full of vomit and rumours that half the village has been infected.  As the party is saddling their horses, the chief magistrate approaches them, saying, "Within a single night, there are more than a hundred people who have some sort of disease!  You must have brought it with you, you're the only outsiders here!  What are you going to do about it?"

Well?  What are they going to do?  There isn't enough disease-curing and resurrection to go around for everyone, is there?  And since the party are clearly carriers, as they are unaffected themselves, are they really going to go to another place and spread whatever they've got there, too?  If they leave this horror behind, someone is going to have to deal with it.  Sooner or later, someone is going to have to deal with the party, too, before their selfishness kills half the kingdom - just how hard do they think it will be to identify them and follow the trail of disease and death they leave behind them.

But this sort of thing never happens in most campaigns, because DMs don't think of it.  Evil is something that happens to the party, not to the innocents . . . and the party is never at fault, never put in a position where their clumsy indifference to the world where they live eventually turns up some consequence they can't wave away with a single cleric.

I'm steadily coming to the conclusion that "simple rules" work for most campaigns because the adventures ~ and the problems ~ are kept as two-dimensional as possible.  Simplistic adventures don't demand many rules.  On the other hand, complicated situations and catastrophes can't help but challenge the magic parachute most parties depend upon, because usually they involve more than a population of just three to five persons.

Yes, I do know about the ridiculous healing rules that have been included in the Pathfinder system.  They have been explained to me.  Even those, however, falter when dealing with thousands of people suffering from large scale disasters and holocausts.  No party, ever, has enough resources for everyone.

It's a question of how hard do we want to bring this home for them.  It's hard to feel like a hero when we're lambing it out of town to avoid admitting that we'd rather just let people die rather than risk contracting the disease ourselves ~ even as we make excuses for our behaviour.  Excuses, however, are a lot easier than performing ordinary, mundane, non-magical surgery for 42 hours at a stretch because we are able . . . long after the spells have run out.

Just for a little perspective:

Missed Opportunities

Yesterday, LTW wrote in reply to my description of my recent campaign,

"I do love reading the adventures you create. I like to see how you apply your methods to your own campaign. I've also read that you don't care for sharing war stories. I hope this does not cause you to shy away from sharing yours because you think they are boring to us."

Fair enough, but I also think it is interesting to consider what might not have happened in the game as well.  To remind the reader, in the post linked above, I mentioned that the party had remembered an association with a djinn that gave them the information they wanted.  But what if the party hadn't thought of the djinn?  What if the party had called someone in to answer the question, "Where are the crown jewels?", only to find themselves with someone who didn't know?  Then what?

It is always assumed that as a DM I have another plan up my sleeve that will be sure to get the party to the adventure, right?  I mean, isn't that more or less the standard practice?  I've done all this "work" with the adventure that would be wasted if the party didn't go, so naturally no matter what the party does, they're going to get to the site of the treasure anyway, so what's the big deal.

My players know better.  I do not DM that way.  Every time I put the players in a situation like this, they know they're up to bat and they know they can lose.  I am under precisely ZERO obligation to put them in the same place as the crown jewels.  I frankly don't care if the party finds them or not.  As of right now, I have done no physical design work of any kind.  Why would I?  The players haven't found the adventure's site yet, they haven't done their full due diligence ~ they don't even know exactly where the site is right now.  The djinn wouldn't tell them; he gave them a general location, south of Gran Canaria, told them that the site was under an illusion so that it couldn't be seen by just sailing past and wished them luck.

Until they actually know where the adventure site is, I won't draw a line.  I don't want to waste time prepping a game the players won't start and that they might get bored of and quit to find something less obscure.  They're loss.  In the meantime, everything that could happen is in my head. Best place for it, given the stage of the adventure.

So the players know I won't give in and tell them.  That treasure (I am conservatively estimating it at somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 g.p., enough to put 20 characters from 7th to 11th up a full level) can sit at the bottom of the ocean south of Gran Canaria until it rots, until some other party fifteen years from now, when I'm running at 67, decides to find it.

Why am I going at this adventure this way?  Or why do I do all my adventures this way?  Because I learned long ago that I fucking hated genre-savvy players who scoffed at dilemmas, saying, "What difference does it make?  He's going to tell us where it is anyway!  Why don't we just skip all this shit and get started?"

It is that "anyway" that's the killer.  The nonchalant apathetic cry of the smarmy toad who thinks he's got it all figured out, he's the dude, he's the shit, he's four steps ahead of the DM and fuck if he isn't ready to slam the "I told you so" button at every opportunity.

I could try to circumvent this guy (it is always a guy - this is why I'm dropping my usual gender-neutral language) by making things super weird or totally unexpected, inventing twists on twists on twists . . . but I think those who have tried that will agree with me that it just makes the campaign indecipherable and ultimately contrived.  As such, instead I guarantee nothing.  I won't even guarantee that the treasure is where I say it is, because nope, sorry, once again I am under zero obligation to tell the truth.  People in the world lie.  Djinns lie.  I won't play the game how everyone else does because my game is not based on player service. I am not a cruise director. I am a player enabler. Success only comes from taking a risk; there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Now, let me be clear.  The Portuguese crown jewels in the game were lost.  That's confirmed by a lot of sources, reliable ones, so it is fact.  The two Spanish ships definitely disappeared in the vicinity of Gran Canaria.  The djinn is a good friend of the party and has no reason to lie - moreover, the paladin in the party did not detect malevolence, which is what a lie of this magnitude would be.  It is very probable that the ships contained the jewels and that they're right there, somewhere, lying on the ocean floor.

Fundamentally, it doesn't matter if the party succeeded in finding the right entity to call for information.  Some being in my world has seen those jewels since they were lost.  There must be a way, somehow, to find that being.  The key point, however, is that I'm not responsible for helping the players find that being.  I'm responsible for knowing where the potential being (or beings) would be, what they would probably say when asked and how helpful they would be.  That's it. The rest is the party's problem.

I have no idea why other DMs don't see it this way.