The Fourth Question

It began with the realization that Giles Coren is Victoria Coren's brother.  I had never put that together.  For those who don't know (I didn't, 45 days ago), Giles Coren is an English columnist and restaurant critic for The Times in London.  He has a remarkably dry sense of humor (like his sister) and is possessed with that peculiar British talent that retains its superiority while indulging in self-abuse.

Investigation into this strange new person uncovered his association with Gordon Ramsay, which is okay because Coren bitch-slaps Ramsay unhesitatingly.  Yay.  This then led to the series that Coren did with Sue Perkins (that some may recognize from Q.I.) in which the two of them go back in time to sample the food and living habits of various historical periods (The Supersizers Eat... 2007-08).

Well, that was interesting and I considered posting it here on the blog and talking about food before realizing that probably no one would care to read my opinions on the subject.  So I dropped the idea and moved on.

My partner, however, having cut her teeth on this historical reality show jazz, continued on while I sat in my room playing Patrician III, writing my book and occasionally bothering to work on D&D.

This has not been time wasted.

So following Coren she found Back in Time for Dinner (2015) and then Electric Dreams (2009).  These are not my thing, but at least - since both are BBC productions - the various characters more or less speak and act towards one another like human beings.  Unfortunately, they ran out rather quickly.  Still hungry, however, my partner was bound to find across Frontier House (2002), which was positively wretched but not nearly as bad as Texas Ranch House (2006), which I can only describe as execrable.  My partner, bless her, has far more tolerance for this sort of shit than I do.  I had to fight back with BBC's Tudor Monastery Farm (2013), in which at living in the past is at least done by educated historians and not slack-jawed, infantile, passive-aggressive dicks.

Tudor Monastery, best of the lot.  A shot from the center of a
Hall House, in which the fire was built in the house center
without a chimney.

Now, I realize most of this is old and I don't expect anyone to get excited that I've linked the above - but it is all there on youtube.  I haven't had "television service" since 2004 because it became practical to simply watch everything on the internet, even before youtube was launched.  So I don't see advertisements for TV shows (along with commercials, political ads, news stories, flood warnings or threats to launch a nuclear strike) unless I go looking for these things.  This makes for an extraordinarily pleasant existence.  Therefore, until recently I hadn't become aware of these shows and would not have watched them except that I love HER, very, very much.

It is impossible not to notice, however, that these shows tap the same buttons that D&D and other role-playing games tap . . . in some ways, much better than RPGs because the cows, the fences, the building of fires with flint and so on are obviously much more 'hands on' than talking about these things around a table.  On the other hand, these things also suck at RPGs in that they are bound to universally fail because no one's allowed to truly feel more than, well, ashamed or humilated by having a camera in their face while forced to deal with others prancing and dancing their fucking self-righteousness because they have a camera in their face.

Yesterday, I asked a question.  I'll reword it 'slightly' to fit the context of the above:

Is it possible to create a visual, audio and moderately sensory habitat or setting in which players of an RPG world could dispense with a DM and pursue a different sort of social contract through the use of an electronic medium that would be so much better than D&D that DMing (but not playing) would become obsolete?

 I don't think I'm going to answer that, at least not right now.  I'm thoroughly enjoying reading and taking inspiration from others who are parsing this question.

Bad for Business

Anyone reading this blog should know that I am not optimistic. I feel now and then that I ought to write something encouraging, something that extolls the great strides the game has taken these last four decades, or that I should somehow celebrate all the work and effort of thousands of self-motivated gamers as they strive to produce their campaigns, gathering together in the warm glow of the dining room ceiling lamp to challenge their imaginations, their hopes and dreams.

But I'm reminded of this drunken exchange from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington:

Clarissa: Maybe we could clear out of this town, get to feel like people. Live like we just got out of a tunnel.

Diz: Tunnel?

Clarissa: A tunnel. You've never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you Diz?

Diz: Does the wind get tired out there?

Clarissa: Or angry little mountain streams, or ... or the sun moving against the cattle. You've never seen
anything like that, have you Diz?

Diz: Have you?

Clarissa: No.

Diz: (hesitating) Do we have to?

Clarissa: (disgusted) No, I can't think of anything more sappy.

I guess people need to hear that kind of crap said out loud now and then. Truth be told, I'm as moved by angry mountain streams and the wind on prairie grass as much as the next guy. And I love this game I talk about; that should be bleeding obvious too, I spend so much gawddamn time working on it and writing about it. But somehow, whenever I hear someone preaching the glories of the game and the glories of its participants, I get to looking for exits. I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop, the dirty, filthy shoe sitting in the pot that someone's about to serve me for dinner. This isn't cynicism. This is experience.

I've been a sourpuss of late, no question. But if we're going to look at the state of the hobby, it's an ignorant argument of convenience to look at the future, and claim that its going to be something wonderful. We don't know what the future is going to be. The present, on the other hand, is a sewer. It is a fecal drainpipe of repetition and recursiveness, fetishism, bickering and dissension. We're not even arguing over the actual game any more. We've reduced ourselves to the point where we're arguing over how to describe the arguments over the game. We've been factionalized, deadlocked, nitpicked and lethargic for at least a decade. What has the Internet wrought for the game?

Not a fucking thing.

If there's been a glint of hope in all this torpidity, it has come from individuals who have made the effort to change their minds. I've had to change my mind about my style of play to make my online game more accessible for players who can't see me. I've had to change my mind about presentation, and just HOW MUCH work I need to do in order to communicate ideas. I work far harder on clarity than I used to ... where once I would write a few words to cover rules, I find myself now writing pages and pages in order to make clear what I mean.

But there's a bigger change I want to make; and it has much to do with 17th century Holland.

It is difficult to convey the degree of dissention in Europe during the 16th century. Religion had been the property of one entity for so many centuries, when the rise of Protestantism occurred, emotions ran high. The word 'protest' is often missed in the word protestant; and protest was not limited to the mild hammering of paper on church doors. Protest was violent, it was constant, it happened in a moment's notice and - most often - it was perpetrated thoughtlessly.

If the gentle reader can, imagine a world way outside the very conception of tolerance. A world where being within five miles of another religious belief is justification for mounting up and slaughtering husband, wife, children, dogs ... and so on. Imagine that you believe this is mandated ... it's not a whim, it's not a fun time on a Friday night, this is serious business and has a great deal to do with your duty, honor, your soul and the souls of your dead father and mother. If the reader can, gather all the emotional feeling you have about your mother right now, and then imagine your mother being stabbed with pitchforks and burned with oil, and her eyes gutted out and her hair set on fire ... and then imagine yourself being capable of thinking the reason for this happening is because of the non-believers that have lately settled in the house down the road.

It's difficult, I know. We view 'intolerance' as a few nasty words spoken thoughtlessly during a political speech about unemployment. There is so little of it in our day-to-day lives that we have to go to the media to find us examples so we can get upset about it. We have nothing in our conciousness that would enable us to comprehend the bloody-minded hatred possessed by an Augsburgian Catholic for a Wittenberger Lutheran.

And still, it took many decades of Protestantism to coalesce into something that could really challenge Catholic authority ... and until it did really challenge Catholic authority, the Catholics were comparably light-handed about the execution of Protestants.

This is the point where someone ought to point out the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. This was a notorious event in 1572, when an overflowing of religious zeal produced a Catholic mob that proceeded to slaughter Protestant Huguenots in the streets of Paris, largely due to the intolerance I've been talking about. The number of Huguenots had been steadily rising, reaching a critical mass ... but that blind violence I've been speaking of hadn't quite manifested. Yet when a group of targeted assassinations by the King initiated a general emotional feeling of hatred, the thing got out of control and something like 5,000 to 30,000 people died.

So this would be the argument someone might make against my statement that the Catholics had been light-handed. I'd like to point out, however, that Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to the door in 1517. To get a sense of the scale of time here, try to imagine that the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre happened yesterday ... that would mean the theses that started the anti-Catholic protest had been hammered to a door in 1958. Before Kennedy, before Nixon, before most of you were BORN, and in many cases, before your parents were born. That's not a rapid ascendance in violence. Just think of all the mass genocides that have taken place in our culture since 1958 ... Cambodia, Timor and Bosnia all leap immediately to mind, along with Zaire, Darfour and Christ knows how many people died in China during the post-Maoist regieme.

In any case, the Huguenot execution was a small beginning to what was to follow later, when there really were enough Protestants to produce armies of considerable size. Once again, to put it in perspective, if the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre was 9/11, the Thirty Years War was a series of Hiroshimas.

By 1618, following the latter Defenestration of Prague, it was a free-for-all. There were a lot of reasons for war - power politics in Europe being the most significant among the upper classes - but like St. Bartholomew's Day, once the royal agenda was made known, the average individual on the ground went nuts. Off and on for thirty years, whole towns were razed, mass executions seized the victors, Catholics were slaughtered, Protestants were slaughtered ... it was just a long murderous drunken hatred-fueled nightmare that went on unceasing for more than a whole generation of Europeans. If the War were ending today, it would have started just about the time that the movie Return of the Jedi hit the theatres. The first time.

This is from Wikipedia; it's close enough to other accounts I've read in legitimate books:

"So great was the devastation brought about by the war that estimates put the reduction of population in the German states at about 25% to 40%. Some regions were affected much more than others. For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war. In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two-thirds of the population died. The male population of the German states was reduced by almost half. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third due to war, disease, famine and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs. Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers. Villages were especially easy prey to the marauding armies. Those that survived, like the small village of Drais near Mainz, would take almost a hundred years to recover. The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns."

But what does this long and winding post have to do with Holland and the present state of D&D?

In reality, Holland is just one small province amid a number of regions that were jointly described as the 'Netherlands.' Nether is a word we usually associate with 'out there' or 'at the far end,' but in fact the word derives from the Old Saxon nitheraz, which means down, below ... or bottom. And the Netherlands were indeed down below ... comprising both the modern Netherlands and most of Belguim, these were lands at the bottom of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, meaning that a large part of the commerce of central Europe flowed directly into them. To get a sense of this, imagine that you own the only bridge between the entire Northeast Corner of America and everywhere else in the world, and there are no ships. And everyone has to pay YOU a toll if they want to do business.

This particular toll had been in the hands of a few lucky families in Europe, notably Nassau and Hapsburg, and had fallen into the hands of Spain around the time that Martin Luther was doing his thing. Spain was somewhat keen to go on collecting tolls ... but the Netherlands were becoming less and less passive. Protestantism was flourishing, Spain had grown weak in its military dealings with France, and like all really strong countries that don't want to lose what they consider their own, Spain ultimately marched in to teach those rebellious bastards a lesson.

The result of that was an 80-year fist-fight that would eventually fall into the groove of the 30-years-war like the War in China would eventually groove with WWII. For a sense of the war, imagine the Vietnam war began in 1933 and ended yesterday.

80 years has a way of encouraging a sense of both continuity and cohesion among defenders - and in the Bottom Lands' case, this was heightened by the fact that the residents had a whole other enemy that could not be reasoned with, would never make peace, and had a far greater potential for destroying the landscape than the Spanish. This would be the sea. It is still the Low Countries' enemy.

Where one has a country where much of the land is below sea-level, where it has been wrested from the sea like one would seize enemy territory and make it one's own, there is a recognition that when the sea threatens, EVERYTHING else is immediately dropped. Screw the Spanish, screw Protestantism, screw the argument you had with your neighbor, screw scruples where it comes to whose help you'll accept and who you're too proud to ask help from. Get up, get out, get working, save the country.

Holland is a work project that changed the way human beings began to think of one another.

When the Thirty Years War ended, and the Eighty Years War with it, most of Europe was DONE with religious wars. There were flare-ups, but the war had produced a greater identification with one's nation than with one's religion, and Nationalism as an ideology began to replace the driven, irrational behaviour that had marked the century before the Peace of Westphalia with a driven, irrational behavior that would hit its peak three centuries later. In no place was this more evident than in the Netherlands - which had lost its southern half to Spain, while the northern half organized themselves as a set of 'United Provinces.' If this seems coincidental with the idea of a group of united states, don't you believe it. There is no coincidence. Between the U.P.N. and the U.S., the English invited a Dutchman of Orange-Nassau to come be their king, the English fell in love with all things Dutch, and the Dutch had established themselves as the money-masters of the American Colonies. John Adams would say, "The origins of the two Republics are so much alike that the history of one seems but a transcript from that of the other." This, obviously, is not often quoted when talking about the 'greatest document ever produced in human history,' though a Dutch Constitution had been written a century earlier, and had 120 years of precedent challenges against it that Jefferson would have well known about.

The practice of tolerance possessed the Netherlands, long before it freed itself from Spanish authority. It mattered less to a Hollander that you despised his religion or his heritage than whether or not you intended to buy his fish. The people of the United Provinces developed a live-and-let-live policy to life that they imparted to other peoples, most notably the British for the reasons described above. Moreover, throughout the second half of the 17th century and well into the 18th, Dutch businessmen drove the world's economy. It was clear to the British that there was something to this attitude of tolerance. They themselves had been through a rather bloody religious civil war, from 1640 to 1660, that demonstrated that a Protestant minister could be every bit as much a dick (with a tumbledown son to boot) as a Catholic King. There had been an endless series of civil wars that had possessed England for two centuries - and prior to that endless warring with the French - and this idea of getting rich and having peace at the same time appealed.

But to have it ... and to get rich ... it was necessary to look at another person you hated, and listen to words that made you sick in the throat, and swallow down all that bile. It was necessary to nod and smile and say out loud, "That's very nice. Would you like to buy some fish?" It was necessary to recognize that having an opinion, and killing another person for having an opinion, were two very different things. It meant that it was okay to express yourself, to say what you believed, but taking ACTION intended to suppress opinion was BAD FOR BUSINESS. Best that you just open and close your fists in frustration, before holding out an open hand and accepting their money.

By all means, hate me. By all means, dispise what I have to say. But in the meantime, perhaps there's something in the way of D&D I could tell you about?

The State of Dungeons & Dragons

On Friday I wrote a post that sounded like a justification for quitting D&D.  Earlier today I wrote a post explaining at least one reason why I might stop, but in the bigger sense I ended the post with the proposition that the game could be replaced with something else.

And a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post that included this:

"That, I think, is because in the beginning, WAY back in the 70s, everyone who ran D&D was shit at it ... Everyone. Was. Shit. The game had been around for just a few years, there had been no quality control at all, no one had had much practice, and it wasn't even conceived that there could be such a thing as a railroad/non-railroad philosophy. People ran completely grab-ass because they hadn't gotten the hang of it, and for those people who were really important, for whom smoke was blown up their ass everyday from the beginning because they were the founders of the game, that grab-ass style became acceptable, even dogmatically acceptable."

I just can't get this out of my head.  I think I had a true moment there ... I hadn't planned to write the paragraph, it just poured out of me, like the application of a cognitive Ouija Board, where my mind was in one place and my fingers in another.  Writing is often like that.

People defend D&D.  They don't play the same edition, they don't play the same way, they can't agree on alignment or method of play or sixteen hundred other contentious issues, but the amorphous ill-defined concept, that they defend.  I think what I've been getting at is to question what it is, exactly, that is being defended?

I've said it commonly to my players of late that if D&D had been invented today - the basic idea, I mean - that there's a very good chance that it wouldn't have dice.  It certainly wouldn't be based upon pen and paper, and I doubt greatly that there would be 'miniatures' associated with play.  The young, who would take up this new game in 2013, are far too indoctrinated into software to bother with such physical nonsense.  Generate a random number between 1 and 20?  Sure, that's no problem, my phone will do that.

With the picture of a die rolling across the screen?  What the fuck for?

This perspective will matter greatly in the next ten years ... those same years when you, the gentle reader, are SURE you'll still be playing the game.  But what game, exactly?

Take a look at the state of Dungeons and Dragons, right now.  A clear, clean look, without the emotional context that seeing the image of a die rolling across your cellphone generates.  Examine closely the content of the game, as it appears in blogs, as it appears in the company that presumes to direct the game, or in the companies that challenge D&D with other fantasy-dependent content.  Where are we, what have we become?  What do we talk about?

The Past.  This used to make up at least 90% of everything I saw on blogs.  Books people liked, games people liked, war stories that took place in games people liked, art people liked, the Dragon Magazine ... and of course, modules and more modules.  Hell, that's all Grognardia would talk about.  It's no wonder he screwed people on the Kickstarter he proposed, that depended on something happening in the future, and Grognardia did not live in the future.  His peculiar talent was pouring sweet, preserving honey in a thick layer over everything that had ever been written about the game.

Yes, people prize things.  Sentiment is a powerful human emotion and must be acknowledged.  In this era, however, when materialism is so much better protected by the houses and lifestyles we live, we've come to recognize culturally that there comes a point when too much sentimentality leads to ... well, to fetishism.

All this stuff that's been gathered.  The folders bulging with art on your computer, the shelves full of miniatures and modules, the fantasy literature filling up the boxes in your storeroom, the little bits and pieces of how many years you've been participating in Cons and cherished moments in gaming stores ... pause and look around you, and try to lift yourself out of your deep, visceral dopamine-fueled tearfulness, if only you can ask for once in your life, what does any of this have to do with the game you play NOW?

Are you really keeping all those modules because you can't wait to pull them down again and play them, or is it that you can't imagine throwing any of them away?  Do you really think, after two decades, that there's still content you're going to magically pull out of those oh-so-familiar 32 pages?  Will there be in another decade?  Even if there isn't, admit it - to yourself, at least, if to no one else - there are so many bits of stuff there that have ceased to be of value to the game.  Totally.

Oh, keep them if you must; but can't you see that in some way, returning to them again and again has begun to cripple your ability to think anew?  You have piled someone else's creative design upon your brain in an immense heap, magazine by magazine, and now all you have is thought that isn't yours - that has never been yours - cluttering up the halls and rooms of your imagination.  How long as it been that you've been truly forced to think?  How much easier is it to just pull down old module #81 down from the third shelf, the one you remember perfectly, it had the fire giant and the magic glove and ... where is your contribution?  You're proud that you can re-adapt it, again?  That's all your contribution is, after all.  Screwing in the module-preform light bulb.  Now really fast, now really slow.  What a marvelous imagination you have.

I have a few Dragons on a shelf somewhere.  Last time I found them, I couldn't see a single idea inside that I could imagine using.  I'd moved past what those magazines could offer.  I did not even think the way those magazines wanted me to think as a DM.

So I contrived an idea for a video I could put on you tube.  I wanted to hold one of those Dragon Magazines on cam (Issue #198, I think it is), talk about it a bit, talk about how meaningless it all was to me.  How the content was derivative and passé and how anything that had been there once had long been incorporated into my thought process.  Finally, I would talk about how I couldn't understand why I even kept the thing.  Then I'd cross the room on camera, open the mesh in front of my fireplace, where there'd be a fire burning, and toss the magazine in.

There's a couple reasons I never did it.  There's the whole anti-book burning thing.  People get worked up about that, they don't even care what's being burnt.  But mostly it was that I didn't feel most viewers would be mature enough to get the point.  And if you're not making your point, what's it all for?  So I abandoned the idea.

I'd feel more angst having to go through the process of finding one of those damn magazines than I'd feel actually burning one.  I don't know where the hell the things are now.

The past, for all the good feelings it offers, is a mess of smothering blankets.  They pile one upon another until there's nothing to be seen except blankets, blotting out the present and the future.  Yes, they're soft.  They smell lovely.  You sink and sink in contentment ... until you asphyxiate.

There's less of it on the web, however; many of the blogs and writers who were the greatest fetishists have ceased to blog at all, now.  They've been replaced by a new breed, who ...

Reinvent the Wheel.  This is all the WOTC does.  This is their entire business plan, and well we know it.  Their most recent incarnation of the game, Next, is a brilliant demonstration of rethinking at its highest level.  Having hundreds (thousands?) of game testers is a great way to encourage fickle, uncommitted customers to buy your game, but it is demonstrably a really crappy way to innovate anything.  But that's fine, because the last thing WOTC wants is to create a definitive wheel.  D&D Next can be soon followed by D&D After and D&D Later On, breaking new ground for D&D Once Again, D&D Yet Again and eventually D&D Last ... to be offered by CEO Gabriel five minutes before blowing the Last Trump.

Has any of it had very much to do with actually improving the game?  No, not really.  It has been about 'balance,' encouraged by market research telling the designers that people weren't buying the game because they didn't feel they were the strongest player at the table, and about 'realism,' as though in some way rolling one kind of die makes a game more realistic than rolling a bunch of different dice.  I remember downloading a host of 3.0 and 3.5 'rulebooks,' reboots of handbooks and more, each one of them filled with a mess of weapons, a mess of spells, a mess of skills ... and a few scene descriptions and a few pages of exposition to justify this book having a different title than that book.  This went on, and on, and on, until sales dropped off, when it was necessary to produce 4e, a version where the Wheel was so freaking BIG it blotted out the entire landscape of the game.  It was hoped that players wouldn't notice.

Most young players did not.

And this last decade, of course, has drummed up a cacophony of cheap, low-budget remakes and designs that purport - somehow, on a budget of a few hundred dollars - to produce a gaming experience that millions of dollars cannot.  A claim that is admittedly ambitious, impressive and mocking, all at once.  After all, if James Raggi can choke out a game as 'brilliant' as anything TSR or WOTC produced, why is the D&D division at WOTC not just four overworked Finns with an office temp who's job it is to write a blog about what's on sale today?  Or as of five minutes ago?

Sorry, it's only that having read a wide variety of reviews on the game, and comparing those with my own experience, it seems like an reasonable competent do-over of shit I've seen a thousand times already.  The reviews seem to be filled with the word 'good' used over and over again in reference to various nouns, but quite lacking in any real content.  This has also been my experience with White Wolf, Swords & Wizardry, Pathfinder and so on.  People who like Pathfinder really, really like Pathfinder ... I just can't seem to find out why it's so different or special.  Like people who, back in far off days, played Rolemaster, Tunnels & Trolls or Chivalry & Sorcery.  They had different mechanics, but where the rubber met the road, the game was the same.

The thing about a wheel, by itself it's fairly useless.  It's a round, flat thing.  The trick is to make a groove in it so it can be used with rope to make a pulley, or fitted with an axle and another wheel, so a cart can be built atop it.  Making another wheel of a different wood, just so it can sit on the same bit of grass doing nothing, isn't very impressive.  The game isn't great because of the mechanics.  The game has NEVER been great because of the mechanics.  Fit another set of mechanics, and it's still the same game.  Call it another name, it is still the same game.  Walk, amble, shuffle, prance, strut, stagger ... what matters is that we're going somewhere.

But the wheel is a lot easier to make than the cart that fits on top of it.  The animal-powered cart is nothing compared to the steam engine, that turns the wheel without a horse.  Steam is nothing compared to electricity.  The people redesigning the game on their blogs, however, have no interest in domesticating an animal, or inventing steam or electricity.  They have a new wheel.  They'd like to tell you about it.

WOTC is no different.  That is why I said earlier today that real change is going to come from people who don't play D&D.  They have nothing invested in re-inventing the thing that's been re-invented before in a whole new re-invented way.  They're actually interested in a new idea.

The Community is not.  This is plainly evident from the third vast landscape of written content:

The Pin.  Specifically, the number of angels on it.

There are those I've seen who have argued that all this argument about what this word means or what that word means is an eventual process to finding a final answer to the mysteries that surround the game.  If we could finally define, once and for all, just exactly what is meant by 'simulation,' we could move forward, having a clear and cognizant comprehension of what other people mean when they describe themselves as simulationists, thereby saving us HUGE amounts of time when they explain what sort of game they play, and how best to play it.

This is an interesting supposition.

All that I have written in this post ... indeed, all that I have written on this blog, is subject to interpretation.  All that has been accomplished by all human beings, everywhere, equally so.  The fact that something is subject to interpretation, however, does not in itself compel as much.  It is a peculiar mindset that demands that every position be viewed from every angle before a judgement can be made about anything - and so goes the Internet.

Forget if I am right or wrong.  We can presume I'm wrong, it makes no matter.  The bigger issue is not in whether anything I've written is true, but in whether or not the GAME you wish to play is dependent upon the 'validity' of anything I happen to say.  Not your general emotion, mind, or the resentment you may have for me, or the visceral love you have for your D&D stuff or your D&D version.  I ask about the game.  Does it need any of this?  Has the endless, endless, endless dialogue about this or that actually improved your play, or has it merely been something that fills your time as a placeholder because you cannot actually play D&D right now?

In the larger sense, is not all this blogging and boarding a sort of cheap, fetishistic porn, to carry you through the day and the week, or even longer, until you can at last sit down at a table again.  And if that is so - and I know that it is, even if the gentle reader does not - then what has long exposure wrought upon you as a player.  Or as a DM?  Has it improved you.  Has it tempered you, informed you, compelled you to greater achievement ... or has it merely given you the opportunity to wallow corpulently in the fetid waters of self-congratulation and easy, cheap stimulation, allowing your eyes to mist over happily in the company of others just like you, who approve of your gaming habits and make you feel warm and happy, knowing how these others approve of you?

Are you able at all to judge the difference?

Have you any perspective left?  Or are you so bent upon chasing after the approval of your peers, now that you have found them, and now that you can read them and give them feedback, and get feedback in return, that you're just an addict getting your fix between your morning pee and your last minute pillow fluffing.  How much do you play compared to the time you spend talking about playing?  How much design do you produce compared to how much you talk about your design, or your desires to design?

Again, have you even thought about that?

It must seem worth it to add one more comment on a bulletin board, rushing out another 800, 900 words, to make your point even clearer than you've already made it, to say the same thing again in the hopes that this time, they'll get it.  It must be, else why would you go on doing it, day after day, except for the thrill of it all.

Is the game your game, or is THIS your game?  Are you sure you even care about D&D?  Perhaps all you care about is interaction, approval, the sense of your own importance in the eyes of other people.  Perhaps you could give up the game, if only no one asked you to give up talking about the game.

In case it has been missed, this is the state of D&D.  This is where it has arrived.  Hens clucking over eggs laid, their color and their uniqueness, as loud and as long as they dare to cackle before another hen pecks at them.  The Company, the Net and the Participants have succeeded in building a social network, a very extensive one, but have they created a greater and better game?

I await evidence.

See!

Without question, people did not take me seriously.

I would expect to hear voices shout, "Not me, I'll play this game forever!" Those who would say so, who would not give the matter the introspection it deserves, are either young, unimaginative or still living in their mother's basement. Gentle reader, be you 15 or 45, you CANNOT know what you will be doing ten years from now.

I do love this game. And I can say with some assuredness that I will be running it six months from now. But should something happen - should my circumstances change, should it come about that I obtain a different position or find success some other place than here, I recognize that I may have to give up playing this game, because it would be impractical to continue.

The example I gave my partner Tamara, over the weekend, was this: Suppose that someone who knows me encourages me to submit my resume for a position that they feel I would be suitable for. And suppose this position involved giving seminars, where information was imparted about the business I work for, to various people, including travelling ... the sort of thing that would be 10 days on and 4 days off.

Offered this sort of position, which is entirely possible, I can tell you that something I would not 'feel' like doing during those four days off was further presentation, ANY presentation, including D&D. Sorry, but that would be the facts of it. I might work on maps, I might write a post, I would probably write something fiction and out of fields, but I probably would mostly veg and get quiet time.

Why would I take such a job, if it involved the likelihood of killing D&D for me? Because I'm 49. I'm well aware, more than any other time of my life, that the time is coming when I will be overlooked where it comes to hiring. That is a reality. At 25 I could quit jobs on a whim and never worry about finding work in a day or two, for I was skilled and smart and able to make myself liked whenever it mattered. At 49, those things matter less, because I work for, and apply to, people who are younger than me. People who visibly flinch when I mention the 80s.

The gentle reader had better prepare for it. The brilliant self-employed people in technology and research I knew 20 years ago are struggling to keep their households together, for what was brilliant in 1993 doesn't meet the expectation quite so easily for them today. The business I spent fifteen years breaking into, journalism, crashed and burned five years ago just around the time I was making a good living at it.

The world changes. And its a gawddamn good thing the world changes. I am thrilled to be alive in this world, and not the world of 1981 - to begin with, there were no blogs in 1981. There was no possible way to get a consensus against whatever company-fostered D&D there was, no way to posit an alternative, no way to show thousands of people my maps, or chat about philosophy of gaming, etc. The laptop did not exist as a tool, nor did Excel (shit, in 81, even LOTUS didn't exist, which I learned on incidentally). Nor did every convenient tool for generation that we have now. Yay for change.

Change is relentless, however, and all those decrying the possibility that they would EVER quit playing D&D do so in the safe and secure belief that no one will EVER come up with a better, more astounding version of the game, as though DDO is automatically and without question the highest state of gaming that a computer can offer. That's the sort of dull bovine perception of change that I do expect of the unimaginative. The reader claims to be involved in a hobby requiring imagination and yet, somehow, THIS escapes you? Gad, what fools read this blog.

While the fan boys and gamers argue the moronic divisions between narration and simulation, people having nothing to do with this game are building the applications that will DESTROY this game, as you or as anyone knows it. Believe it. Prepare for it. Open your gawddamn eyes.

There are others coming along who will smack you right in your blind face if you don't.

When Will You Make An End?

When is it, do you think, that you stop playing? It might be when you get that job that really requires you dedicate yourself to company, success, competance, what have you. It might be the birth of your child, who - following that first initial impact, seems to take more and more of your time as the months, then the years go on ... until at last you have to admit that you're not quite getting in all the things you ought to be. It might be after that first few years of running the little tykes, that window between six and eleven years, before they don't want to be a home on Friday and Saturday evenings, when they'd rather play with their friends, and you look around to discover you have no one else to play with. Or perhaps it's after that attempt to get back into it, ten years later, and find that everything about the game has changed, the people have changed - and they are a LOT younger than they used to be ...

Perhaps you'll just burn out. After all, one can only spend so much time drawing hallways, putting in little doors and little secret doors and putting the umpty umpth stairway into the umpty umpth corner. Too, there must come a time when there are not just too many orcs, there are too many of everything, and the experience sours a bit of players rule lawyering the same rule that's been lawyered and lawyered to death. Would that the consensus could just be reached on such things, but there you are, the rule has to be discussed once again, well ... because it has to.

It could be that the gentle reader will just cease to care. One more alignment debate, one more agonizing desconstruction of gaming versus simulation versus narration, could be the death of you. It just takes one, you know, to force an acknowledgement where one is forced to admit that one just doesn't give a hoot anymore. The camel's back is not merely broken, the funeral has been held, the cremation accomplished, the trip to the camel's homeland has been made and crops have been planted, tilled and harvested from the camel's ash. The thing is done.

What are the measures for how much of it you can take? Do the serious minded burn out more quickly than the frivolous gamers. Are the 4th editioners defeated by one more 18 hour combat, or are the basicers more quickly exhausted by little four minute blips of dice-rolling between long, fluffy setting descriptions? Has Paizo redeemed you, or are there hidden toxicities in the game design that will one day bereft you of your will to fight on, design on, game on (or simulate or narrate)? Have you gone the right way that will let you game until your retirement, or has the dim comprehension that the day when you'll stop begun to play about your psyche?

Then again, religion carries some through all their lives, the same hymns every year, the same words every holy day, repeated and repeated, a catharsis you drag yourself through for the good of your soul ... long after you've been able to take any pleasure from it. As the endeth does approacheth, so does the anxiety with which one mumbles the words, as the promises of the gods come that much closer to fruition or disappointment.

Will you make an end of it? Or will you drag on until it has ceased to offer the sweet taste it did three decades, four decades ... even five decades ago. Are you ready to call it 60 years, or 70? And what will all this sound and debate mean then? What will railroads and sandboxes mean then? What will any of it mean?

Flooded But Not Underwater

17 hours ago.

Let me start by saying that I'm fine.  There are those of you who may have heard, the city of Calgary, where I live, has large parts underwater.  There are many who have been severely hit.  Calgary consists of two escarpments looking down at a large river valley, and those in the southeast of the city - the last corner of the city to be developed, for good reason - have been most affected.  I live on the edge of one of the escarpments, hundreds of feet above the river, and where I am there's no sign of anything being different.  There are places where there is no power; many industries and places are closed more for lack of power than for flooding.  My place of employment is fine, but turned off at the moment.  Don't know how this next week is going to play out.

I heard there was a rush on stores, but as I said on my facebook, there's plenty of food.  I was there Saturday morning, right after the crest, and there were no line-ups, no panicked people, plenty of food on the shelves, and hardly any sign that something had happened.  Some of the junk food was scant, but that was all.

It's funny; Canadians have a sort of idea that whatever the problem, the government will ultimately step in and fix it.  I'm sure even if we were actually in trouble, the food stores would still be accessible.  If food ran out, the government would supply it (that's the thought process, any way).  No question.  Whether this is true or not is debatable, but all the conversations I've had, near and far from the actual site of the flood, has been calm, mild concern.  Even the press has trouble making it seem horrible, and you'll notice a lack of crying, freaked out people.

Whatever happens, I'll be at home tomorrow, trying to make arrangements perhaps to take off some time or have access to the restricted in-house system I usually work with.  I do expect to still restart my online campaign - I may even have more time than I expected.

See?  Everyone's smiling.

Scale on the Ground

I thought I would talk about scale for a bit, since I have always been annoyed at pre-made maps like those you find in every module where, in a circle a hundred miles across, there is one town.  Even Minaria, of which I've repeatedly shown the Kingdom of Hothiar on this blog, shows a land of 40+ hexes and yet there are only four towns.  Obviously, that's for a game, but too often D&D representations fit that motif.

The above shot is from a valley in India, Madhya Pradesh province, a region called Shivpuri.  This is a part of a valley about 20 miles wide and 70 miles long ... but the actual image itself is about three miles wide and five miles deep.  That's all.  You're looking at an area that's 15 square miles ... less than half the area of one of the small hexes I only just finished generating on the previous generation post.

Look at the population centers.  I'll highlight them for you:

There are TEN.

I did not cherry pick an area with lots of villages ... in fact, what I tried to do was find an area without any large cities, as well ... there's one just off the right of the map, about four miles.  Everywhere in the Shivpuri valley looks like this.  It the 17th century, it was famous for its dense forests ... which it still has, in the high country surrounding the forementioned valley.

The point I want to make is for the reader to look at the space.  Naturally, it's filled with fields, there are ten villages on the map (the nearest probably has a population of about 400).  But suppose that there were only ONE village shown.  How much of the remaining shot would need to be cultivated?

Answer:  not much.  Rice in particular doesn't cover a lot of ground for the number of people it feeds, but there are grain fields shown, too.  If you had one village for a hex six miles across, that would be a mighty empty hex.  There'd be plenty of room for a party to move through it and never encounter a single human being, even if there was a village just three miles away.

We have a tendency to view the world from motor vehicles, and thus to envision three miles as a negligible distance.  In actual fact, from the perspective of a wilderness explorer, its a considerable amount of ground to walk over.  Remove any roads that might happen to be in the hex and you make travel more difficult, and thus it takes even more time to poke around every heap of rocks and along every river bank.

In a hex 20 miles across, even if there were a sizeable city in it, a large party of people hunting all day could fail to find a herd of elephants, much less something small like a raiding party of half a dozen trolls.  We just fail to recognize how big the world is, even on a tiny scale.

Suppose I gave you a task, as a party member, to find the rakshasa hiding in the image shown above.  He's in one of the villages; we don't know if he's posing as a holy person or if he's a recluse, or he's got the village by the throat and they're terrified to give him away.  Go ahead, find him.

Just don't expect to do it by noon.

DM Like a Human Being

I don't know what to think of people who play this game, this D&D game, with no interest in portraying any sort of 'realism.'  I don't know why they keep using that word.  I don't think it means what they think it means.

It's a good thing that as we get older, we find ourselves in less and less situations where we have to put up with bullshit.  I don't think most of us are really aware of how much complete crap we had to eat in school, or from coaches for teams we played on, or tutors of piano or violin.  It is as though when we were children, at the age of five someone came and gave us a spoon, pointed to a large heap of steaming shit with a sign on top saying 'CHILDHOOD' and said, "All right, come on, get eating."

And now we say these things to ourselves, and we say these things to our children.

One of my favorites has to be, "Never Assume.  When you assume, you make an Ass of U and Me!"  Oh, to be 12 again, and have some fart tell me this, just so I can stand up and say, "Um, sir?  Does that mean I shouldn't assume that I'll be alive in five minutes?  Um, sir?  Since I can't assume that my house will still be there for me to go home to, I think I'd better get leaving now, just to be sure.  Um, sir?  I seem to be healthy, but I don't want to assume anything.  I'm just going to run to the hospital now."

Philosophy is not something we teach our children.  If it was, that would only make it harder for us to fill them up with shit.

Along the same lines, there are people in fantasy roleplaying who will tell you they don't play 'realism' ... which they think is the opposite of 'fantasy.'  Naturally, these people are full of shit, and they are extending the spoon to you, expecting you to dig in.  That's because Realism is NOT the opposite of Fantasy.  It is the opposite of Idealism.  From Wikipedia:

"Idealism is a term with several related meanings. It comes via idea from the Greek idein (ἰδεῖν), meaning "to see". The term entered the English language by 1796. In ordinary use, as when speaking of Woodrow Wilson's political idealism, it generally suggests the priority of ideals, principles, values, and goals over concrete realities. Idealists are understood to represent the world as it might or should be, unlike pragmatists, who focus on the world as it presently is. In the arts, similarly, idealism affirms imagination and attempts to realize a mental conception of beauty, a standard of perfection, in opposition to aesthetic naturalism and realism."

Now tell me ... what does that have to do with 'fantasy?'  Precisely nothing, obviously.  It has even less to do with a game that has concrete rules that define possible actions, determined by a concrete die that results in a physical universe, outside pure thought.

In a moment of desperation, people will seize upon any word that sounds like something that's the opposite of what they want, and slapdash the use of that word into their arguments.  "Realism" sounds like the real world, which of course is terrible and unpleasant and full of limitations.  Thus, Real = "BAD."  Fantasy = "GOOD."

This is just the worst sort of math.  Well, it isn't math at all.  But people think it is.

I'm not quite clear on what's wrong with all this 'real' life.  Real life gives me opportunities to think, to take pleasure in the company of others, to create magnificent artworks and designs with my mind, to communicate those designs, to argue passionately, to believe passionately, to be astounded, to be thrilled and so on.  All the 'fantasy' I will ever have or experience is fantasy that is accomplished with my REAL mind in the REAL world ... so what the fuck is bad about it?  I mean, you can get all caught up with the fact that you don't have a perfect body and you have trouble getting laid, or that people are slaughtering each other with guns, or that your government doesn't give a shit about you - which it doesn't, by the way - but all that doesn't make 'fantasy' something that takes place outside of your present reality.  You just don't have the kind of power it takes to make reality stop happening.

Yes, of course you can seek an escapist ideology for your gaming ... but the problem with believing that escapism alone is enough to make it interesting is all the inconvenient biology that is still going on while you're pretending its not.  The real you is still getting hungry and thirty.  Your sexual parts are still dead to the world or alive according to their own hormonal priorities.  YOUR PLAYERS ARE STILL SUBJECT TO BOREDOM.  If you want your world to be at all interesting, you have to apply it to the biological necessities of your player's real bodies.  You're not somehow exempt from that.

And sadly for you, if your world is SO different from the real world - that is, if your world just tosses out ideas like logic, morality, familiar social structure or economics as unpleasant or unnecessary, you're creating a huge obstacle for your world's success.  Your PLAYERS, whatever their intellectual interests might be, are nevertheless habitually designed to cope with a real world.  They can't help themselves.  They respond to real things every day.  They react to given intellectual stimuli and social expectations in a way that is quite beyond their choice.  They've been raised on a particular variety of shit, which they've been eating with spoons since grade school, and as shitty as it might be, they're used to the goddamned taste.  Just cause you want to now feed them a different sort of shit doesn't mean they're going to gobble it up.

I suppose if you're seriously bent on making your world stick to the wall - as shit does - then you can work night and day to overcome this obstacle ... but for the love of little green puppies, why the fuck make yourself work that hard?  Why not take advantage of the present packaged shit bars your players are already programmed to respond to and use those to create tension and drama?  Why insist on your particular brand?  Why beat yourself up changing the product, when there's still so many ways left to cook the one we're born and raised with?

Fantasy, yes, but not fantasy in a way that denies reality.  The two aren't opposites!  They're twins, and they work together just fine.  Don't throw out one for the other!  Mix them, you stupid, bloody idiots!

Get this ridiculous notion out of your head that you're such a magic creationist that you can build ALL the concepts of human interaction from scratch.  You're not playing with Kaswellians from the planet Kaswell.  You're playing with humans from the Planet Earth.

You are a human from Planet Earth.  Try liking it for a change.

Talking About It

Continuing to play the extreme sport of mentioning that I play D&D while at work, I discovered that one of the women gave up the game in high school because, as she put it, "the DM was awkwardly in love with me."

Would that this were rare.

Sadly, I can remember when I inviegled a group of girls to come play in my world (cleverly fielding an invite while in the school cafeteria) ... and the disastrous wag-fest that followed when eight very nerdish social lepers blocked and passed pathetically at three young waifs.  Worse still when the waifs made up their minds and all hell broke loose.  Ah, 1985, what a year that was.

I have it on good authority that you still can't mention D&D on the job.  People really don't allow it on the level of say, Nascar or craft shows ... which I suppose has something to do with the extreme nerdiness of the participants out there.  There's one girl at a tea shop that serves me occasionally, who is so deep in e4 that the air turns noxious once she gets going.  She's blissfully unaware that there is another edition coming, because she is non-Internet based.

The gentle reader cannot imagine how many non-internet based D&D players are out there.  I know of one group here in town representing 400 players (so they told me) without any internet presence--no email, no website.  That has to be the kookiest thing I've heard this last year.

Anyway.  Everyone I work with knows I play D&D.  They occasionally ask if that's what I'm doing for the weekend.  I don't talk about the games; I don't describe what happens.  I don't even try to explain what the game is.  Why bother?  All I say is that I play it and it takes up my time.

Which is as much as most people can handle.  Shame more talkative players don't get that.