The Uncertainty Principle

I have been thinking about setting up a window on Discord and then publicly working on my D&D world for several hours at a time, as a sort of inspiration for others to work on their D&D worlds, under the auspices that it is easier to find motivation to work if you don't feel you're the only one doing it. I remember that now and then my friends and I used to do that in the early 80s, and that it was sort of a good time. Not that we ever got much work done, since it's easier to talk and work... but still, it felt motivating and it was easier to work by ourselves in between those occasions.

Like many creative writers, I often start from a proposition that suggests some sort of wanted clarification... the kind that invites a muse to insert itself. Thus when I think of something like the Discord concept, I start to pull it apart in my head. The subject really isn't, "do other people want this?" I'm like to think I'm writing things because they have to be said, not because they please others. If they do please, that's well and good, but that's a byproduct, not the goal. The following question though, is, "do I want this?"

That's harder to answer. On some level it feels beneficial. I assume people have some interest in my work process: how do the maps get made, what does rewriting or designing a wiki page happen, what things do I consider important enough to work on. D&D is a constructive product. It is a thing we make. We can buy it, yes, but someone still has to make it, and they have some process by which they do that... so arguably, if we want to transcend from "user" to "maker," some form of learning that process is necessary. That stands to reason.

Not everyone understands that transformation. I didn't when I started; like most, I assumed random tables were necessary to create ongoing gameplay; I assumed that more of something already good would always be a good thing. It took time for me to understand that more spells, more monsters and more magic items really didn't improve game play... while more kinds of things to buy did. It took time to understand that rebuilding rules did not just mean rewriting the language, or providing more details: most of the time, it meant a complete reworking of the premises for what the rule was trying to solve. I spent an enormous amount of time rewriting experience tables based on Gygax's original structure before understanding that original structure couldn't be effectively redesigned. It was based on the wrong premises. That could apply to dozens and dozens of approaches to the game's original rules, which weren't "broken," they were fundamentally flawed. They didn't need "fixing." Then needed to be thrown away and replaced with things that actually addressed the problems at hand.

Take, for example, mapmaking. The internet continues to be full of artists telling us how to "draw a map for our fantasy campaign," as though the example on the right in anyway actually helps a DM run a game session in any substantial way. This example, ends with a map that has exactly one centre of population, one label that says "Thieves Bridge" and one that says "The Werwoods." This accomplished through untold number of hours learning how to draw even this well, to produce information that takes me exactly one sentence to say to my players: "You're in a village called Riversmeet, downstream from the Thieves Bridge and near the Werwoods. What do you want to do?" Now, how does this map help me with the other FOUR HOURS of game time I have to create?

The ability to draw has absolutely nothing to do with dungeon mastering. If I take a piece of paper, scrawl two blue lines on it, add  "swamp" on blank area of white, "forest" on another blank area, "mountains" below the forest and then make a circle where the rivers meet, then add the names of this map above, I've accomplished EVERYTHING this artist did. I still have to run the game. The relationship between map and game is not clearly understood and it is not clarified by having a mediocre artist on the internet prove that you, Dear Reader, can't draw as well. The problem is a lot more difficult that the snake oil being sold here. The artist has merely reframed "running D&D" as an "artistic problem"... one the artist can solve. And having substituted the problem, the artist solves the "problem" you, Dear Reader, didn't need solved... but heck, it looks cool.

Others thought so too in 1982 when I learned I could draw a map this well; I sold them maps for their D&D worlds for as much as a hundred dollars a map. Guess how many worlds those people got off the ground.

Yes, that's right. I used to scam D&D players too. Maybe that's why I hate the company so much... it's because of the dark part of myself that I hate so much.

This post is not to talk about the relationship between maps and D&D, but to point out that there are hundreds of like conditions that modify and affect the game, none of which are in themselves a solution to the way the game is adjudicated. It isn't just making the world, it is making it alive, giving it dimension, giving the players motivation, offering meaningful rewards or when to say "yes" and when to say "no." Even watching a good DM run does not actually offer much clarification here, because the DM must needs hold back during the running in terms of what's been actively thought in his or her head, so that the player never quite sees how the sausage is made, even when that sausage is being made right in front of them. It is a strange but fundamentally misunderstood element of the game's structure as an instructive tool. The teacher has to withhold information from you about, say, the plight of the Anasazi natives, while still expecting you to pass the test anyway.

A proper solution would require that the learner sit with the DM while the game goes on, so that the DM can whisper details into the learner's ear, but not in a way that reveals to the players what's being whispered, or even what specifically needs communication, because humans can sense the importance of things merely by what's paid attention to. A parent need only follow a child's line of sight to guess at what the child might be thinking... so that as children begin to reach the age of six, they begin to understand that the best way to get something is not to look at it. Once the DM says something, then whispers to the learner, the jig with the players is, as they say, "up." Thereafter, the running is sullied and anything that has been whispered to the learner is no longer of value in learning game play. It is, more or less, D&D's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This is not to say that DMing can't be "taught." It's just that it can't be taught the way that a surgeon might teach a medical student how to resection a bowel. In the latter case, the surgeon can freely be exact and complete with the information given: the student must watch the surgeon's hands and attempt to reproduce the physical effort being demonstrated in an manner exact enough to allow the procedure to be accomplished gracefully. But it is the reverse in dungeon mastering... which, I want to stress, is not as important as learning to be a surgeon. As an example, this one is merely convenient. With dungeon mastering, the physical process of creating the substance of the game world can be duplicated... but the student has to "watch the DM's mind" to comprehend how the campaign can be run gracefully.

And in almost every sense, initially, that seems an impossibility.

None of this is made easier with bromides. Sorry, this is an Ayn Randian reference to the white salt-like crystalline powder that was added to a glass of water in an era before the invention of peptol bismol and all the other neat little chemicals that followed, designed to remove stress caused by ulcers that, in turn, were believed to be caused by worry. Thus, "bromides" are phrases that are designed to relieve your emotional stress in the way that the powder once relieved your physical stress. "Time heals all wounds," for example, and "everything happens for a reason." D&D is stocked full of them: “"The DM's job is to make sure everyone has fun," or "Never say no... always say 'yes, and...'" or "D&D is collaborative storytelling."  These stock phrases are there to make the DM feel like they have a nice little role to perform that doesn't, in fact, require the least little bit of talent or doubt. After all, who doesn't want the players to have fun?

These bromides exist because the various persons attached to every form of role-playing game, regardless of their position or stance on some edition or some alternate rules structure they're promoting, find themselves helplessly in the same position: we can provide the rules, we can provide the premise for the rules, we can offer arguments that say our game is worth playing... but, unfortunately, and we're no different from anyone else, we cannot help you run this game. At best, we can offer this bromide: it is easier to run that someone else's game.

Thus, you can find yourself buying, say, Cairn... which is an outlandishly simplistic sort of, um, if we stretch the definition to include "bullshitting about stuff with your friends," RPG. Cairn is so simple to run that a child can run it — though, admittedly, that is also true of D&D. I'll therefore be a little clearer. Cairn is so easy to run that a child who has never read a book longer than Dick and Jane could probably run it. I'm not sure myself that that's, um, compelling for me. It seems to be compelling for others. I'm simply not in the market for an RPG that requires less intellectual effort than checkers.

The simple system, however, still requires the DM (in this case, the "Warden") to engage in "fiction first" and "neutral arbitration," which requires an invented causal connection between the situation at hand, the players' attempted actions and the consequence, all of which has to be essentially "made up," since the sparse rules do not address this problem. A capable Warden can make the game appear to be a "game"... but an incapable one does not, and there's no structure that's suggested that teaches someone incapable to be capable. So even with the easiest rule system imaginable, in some way the DM still has to "DM" (as a verb)... regardless.

Oh well, it was a nice try.

So where does this leave us? Going over in my mind the environment that existed when I learned how to DM, something I did not know how to do in the womb, I must assume that had something to do with my obtaining the skill. To some degree, surely, my interest in writing and reading mattered, as did my experience with maps, geography, statistics, drama, religion (I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church four months before encountering D&D)... but those are just incidental facts having to do with a certain degree of academic prowess. On the whole, I'd ascribe my transformation from user to maker to these things:

First, parents who did not play board games by the rules. A long history of board games was certainly of a help also, but in my case, the peculiar habit by mother and father had of adjusting rules to "make games better" was ingrained into me at a young age. Specific examples included paying dividends in Stock Ticker below par, which makes a very different game; being able to play in more than one direction in Scrabble; adding more children than the game allowed in the Game of Life; playing two full years in Payday as opposed to one; discarding protection cards from Mille Bornes. There were others, but that was a long time ago.

This history is supported in that my players liked to play cards, and together knew many scores of card games, including as many, many ways to play gin, poker and whist/bridge. In fact, it was quite common for us not only to sit down to play canasta, but to decide, beforehand (which meant, our parents deciding) which kind of canasta we were going to play this time. That meant that from the age of 6, I had no reason whatsoever to believe (a) that games could not be altered or restructured; (b) that changing dividends, directions of play or duration of a game wasn't something that simply were parts of whatever game was being played; and (c) that "official" rules meant anything to the way a game was played.

This is directly continuous with my later understanding of D&D's flawed premises. Long before consciously setting to adjust D&D, I had already tried my hand at adjusting numerous games with my family and friends, just because we wanted to. The maker, in our minds, had nothing to do with that.

Second, I began playing D&D when the "culture" had not yet come into being. Some culture existed: there were other versions of role-playing game and other genres like Gammaworld, Traveller, Top Secret, Paranoia. There was the Dragon magazine that tried its best to sell products. But these were like any other game culture at the time. There was no strict "official" group of people saying, defacto, "gaming is this" or "gaming requires this thought process." We thought nothing of playing a couple games of Ogre or Awful Green Things from Outer Space before settling down to actually playing D&D, since we were in school, we'd often get together at six pm and play until midnight. None of our parents knew what was going on, because there were no news stories yet; they were grateful that when we got together we wanted the kitchen table and not the television room. Thus, more or less, we were left to ourselves, to decide for ourselves what the game meant to ourselves, without voices other than other campaigns we knew of to tell us what was supposed to mean.

The parental thing matters. When I was 15 (not nine or ten as many early players around nowadays were when they started gaming), it was 1979. The parents biggest worries were threefold: drinking, drugs and sex. If we had been like other teens of that time, we'd have been out of the house on a Friday or Saturday night... and even if that meant, as it did for many teens, just hanging around talking by the river or in a park or walking along some road somewhere, it meant being out of our parents' sight, and their not knowing if we were engaging in drinking, drugs or sex. Being at home, around the kitchen table, where plainly no drink was, where plainly none of us were on drugs, and plainly we weren't having sex, was seen as a win-win-win for many, many parents. Moreover, because I grew up in a part of the world not run by a maniacal christian-nutjob cabal, where christian politics did not decide civic votes on things, there was no Satanic Panic where I lived in Canada. NONE. Why would there be? Our parents were all educated, as I grew up middle class; they weren't the sort who really, in actuality, believed in the devil. So that part of it just wasn't part of my past. At all.

Third, I started my gaming experience in the company of a lot of DMs. Besides myself, in my immediate high school peer group, were three other DMs: Scott, Joel and Asif. We rotated every weekend, but if Joel wasn't up to it then someone else would run that night, so that a straight rotation tended to be flexible. I also played in a separate D&D game with the Shane, who was my first DM, and a game of Empire of the Petal Throne, and a separate game using Rolemaster, and then later a game of Chivalry and Sorcery run by a friend from Hong Kong, Calvin. By 1982, in just 24 months of gaming, I'd played as a player with probably eleven or twelve other DMs in at least seven or eight different role-playing games, including all those named above plus Tunnels and Trolls. Thus I saw a lot of DMs play a lot of different styles of DMing, so I could take what seemed to work in one campaign and apply it to myself, while having the capacity to compare table management of any one person with many others.

Mind you, this was not the modern game store experience, where ten DMs all run the same four or five people each, without anyone changing tables. In those days, if you did not like the way a DM was running a game, you got up, crossed all of twelve feet to the next table and said, "Hey, can I get in here?" Nearly always, the answer was "Yes." Why wouldn't it be. Everyone wanted new players. So if you weren't flexible as a DM, there were lots of options around, because DMs were not treated as sacrosanct. DMs gained players from other games all the time and it wasn't seen as "stealing." It was seen as "sorting" or "trying" different groups to find where you belonged. That behaviour drastically lowers the capacity of any DM to simply act abusively entitled... and it trains someone wanting to DM not to be that.

Fourth, no one pretended to know what they were doing. We were all muddling through, reading everything we could about medieval worlds and culture, watching whatever movies we could find like The Last Unicorn, Conan the Barbarian, Krull, Deathstalker, Conquest... some of this was very bad stuff. We shared, talked, sat in libraries reading every book on a shelf or at least leafing through them... and where it came to the game itself, we retconned, asked others "were you fine with that decision?" and "do you think the rule means this or that?" We seriously did not know, and we knew we did not know... and like I said, there were no real entities around to tell us we should know.

So we... made it up. If it worked, we kept doing it. If it didn't work, we'd sit around after a session sometimes for hours and talk about why it didn't work. We'd walk home from one guy's house and talk the whole time about D&D, and what could change, and why the rules were written in a particular way, and how they could have been written in some other way. There was no sense that someone of "authority" was going to come along and fix the rules for us. No one talked about "Gygax" as a person that mattered. The game was a set of books. We didn't care about who wrote them any more than we cared about who wrote the rules of Monopoly, RISK or Careers. Game rules were just game rules. We didn't care whose feet we stepped on... because it wasn't like any of us had any reason to think the game makers would care.

Okay. So what?

Let me say, I'm not nostalgic for all that because I'm still doing all that. Nothing about my approach to my game has changed. I've stopped looking for other DMs for advice because for 30 years now they've been giving me precisely the same non-advice bromides that they acquired from the books: more monsters, more spells, more magic items, more feats, more character classes... those are all good things, because they offer more choice. I have yet to hear anyone tell me that more choice does anything but paralyse a player who is new to the game, but heck, I'm bored with all of that anyway. More things make D&D more "collectable." For a lot of people, I think, being able to say that once they had a tiefling is much the same as an old girlfriend I had whose room was full of little mushroom knickknacks, because she liked them: mushroom lamps, mushroom pictures, mushroom statues, little gnomes on mushrooms, sheep hiding under mushrooms... that's what choice is. Something that can be collected over time.

I pay attention to "official" D&D and rail at it at times not because I'm obsessed, but because I believe that a great many DMs would do much, much better with their design and their games if they would just turn their back on all present D&D culture. Including this blog, I suppose, if need be, but certainly upon anything that defacto does not help run the actual week-to-week game. Repeating bromides like mantras will not make anyone a better DM. Allowing voices on youtube to dictate mapmaking skills or how to choose adventures for a party only promotes dependency, not experimentation. Don't assign monsters to a party according to the experience of someone not at your game table. TRY picking monsters at random and learn from your own experience what has worked and what might. Try everything, at least once. If you've never used that monster, do. If you've never handed out that magic item, do. What can it hurt. Experimentation brings knowledge.

And if there's something in your game that you don't like, throw it away. Don't ask permission, don't wait for the company to abandon the game element, do it yourself. There's no one who can stop you but your players... and if you're only permitting something you hate because they like it, you're just making yourself a slave to their whims.

Stop doing that. Respect yourself, for heaven's sake. Better that you have no players and you're free to work on your D&D campaign in peace, than that you let others boss you into doing things you hate.

No, there's no "right way" to run D&D. There are certainly plenty of wrong ways. Oh yes, are there ever. Stop running D&D the wrong way. Start there.

If you've played with less than ten other DMs in your lifetime? That's not enough. Play whatever game they're playing. Watch them. Listen. Learn. And when you find you're not learning from them at all, or not any more, then stop running in their campaigns. They've taught you all they have. You can move on now.

Play other games. Play board games. Play war games. Play sports. Hell, LARP, though personally I can't imagine. Collect experience. It's what your player characters do. It's your turn.

And last but not least: talk about what you're doing, or want to do, with anyone willing to listen: including your kids, your wife, that co-worker or people on the bus. Walk along a deserted road and talk to yourself. You have got to learn how to express what you're thinking out loud so you can do that with players, without thinking about what you're doing. Talking because you care about what you want to say will overcome nervousness about possibly not saying the right thing every time. Talk and talk until your mouth is dry and your throat is sore and you have a headache. DMing is the art of talking. Talk more. And get used to talking more.

My thoughts about sitting on Discord and working on my world was not to enable talking... but to help enable others to sit and actually work on their D&D world, as a habit they need or want to acquire. It was that. I did not hope that it would spark a conversation. Rather, I thought it would be just fine if there were a group of people who knew that between certain hours on a certain day, they'd get out the books and the stuff and the thought process and work on that world.

But... I don't really believe that people do need other people, like the sociologists tell us. In the end, I think people are way too, uh, self-conscious to actually want to seem vulnerable around others. And the problem with "working on the D&D world" is that in this culture of so many voices, and so many authorities, and so few opportunities for experience, admitting to working on a D&D world just feels too... uncomfortable. I think that's what this culture has wrought for a lot of people.

So I didn't try the experiment last night, between 5 and 9 my time, MST, like I was going to. But I am still thinking about it.

Session 13: Treasure Aplenty

Reprinting the combat set-up to begin the session, the battle took 11 rounds to settle, with two or three additional rounds of mopping up the last two participants. Six party members attacked or took 66 actions, while on average, due to getting stunned a lot, the trogs managed an average of about four attacks per round. The combat took two hours and 10 minutes to play out, which no doubt sounds slow... but the average time per action/attack works out to about 71 seconds, which includes time taken for characters to fetch salves and cast spells on themselves and others, movement, jokes, uncertainty, tactical discussion, rule explanations, movement, spell effects, stun tracking, saving throws, damage, and players recalculating encumbrance as their Strength scores fell. In fact, the pace was fairly brisk — with all the players utterly engaged, especially as moments occurred that led them to doubt their success in the end. The number of attacks does not include actions performed by Fenwick and Edvard, who acted in a support capacity sufficiently enough to get a share of the bonus experience, but did not take or do damage.

The experience for just combat at the end looked like this:

It can be seen that Zoltan alone took 38 damage, whereas at one point Pandred was criticaled for 20 damage in one hit. Both Ti and Pandred are heavily armoured, so that I needed a 16 on the die to hit Pandred and 17 to hit Ti... this is why Ti manages to get through the battle unscathed, but his suffering from the trog's nausea explains why his damage done was quite low.

Coincidentally, both sides did the same damage; for an AD&D hit point system, 290 damage in 13 rounds is considerable (counting the mopping up rounds): that's a total of 22 damage done every round, which is a lot considering the party rates between 3rd and 5th level. As a result, experience was considerable. The additional 11% bonus the party got from visiting Buda-Pest had it's last hey-day and is gone now, though the party took good advantage of it.

Total treasure was 2,367 c.p. (at 1 xp/4 cp), 4,264 s.p. (at 1 xp/3 sp) and 10,135 g.p. Fourteen gems included a cherry-sized alexandrite, an almond-sized aquamarine, four peach-sized carnelians, a marble-sized emerald, a walnut-sized fire opal, a walnut-sized garnet, two almond-sized jets and three almond-sized topazes. Total value of the gems in x.p. equalled 1,113.

Six pieces of valuables/jewellery included:

• A fine-work silver-alloy balance scale, 10 inches high when assembled, with a folding beam, two shallow pans, suspension chains and a nested set of brass weights; weight 4 lb. 12 oz.
• An 18K gold-alloy covered cup with two handles and a fitted lid; weight 1 lb. 8 oz.
• A 14K gold-alloy covered cup with a hinged lid and thumbpiece; weight 4¼ oz.
• A silver-alloy handbell with a turned hardwood handle; weight 1 lb. 4 oz.
• A 14K gold-alloy candlestick, 5 inches high with a broad weighted base; weight 3 oz.
• An 18K gold-alloy necklace set with twelve matched garnets and a large central beryl pendant; weight 11 oz.

The total x.p. value of these was 1,750.

The party came in with a +1 spear, which they lost during one of their earlier expeditions. That was regained, along with another +1 spear, which I rolled on my random table here, along with a +1 dagger, +2 vs. smaller than man-sized. Total experience for the magic items, 1100. Since the character got 500 a second time for recovering the same spear lost.

Total experience, for combat, coins, gems, valuables and magic: 24,766.

Four full sessions were necessary to accumulate the above; Zoltan, Ti, Mikael, Lexent and Arduin has all previously gone up a level during the other two assaults on the dungeon... on this last, only Arduin advanced of this group, along with Pandred, who progressed from 5th to 6th. Because Arduin started the dungeon at level 2, he was the one most likely to advance. Everyone, including Pandred, got a big push toward their next level, even if they did not advance with this session.

I'll remind the reader that Lexent, Pandred, Mikael and Arduin are all from the pre-Covid Juvenis campaign, played in text. But in 13 sessions, both Zoltan and Ti have managed fourth and are now more than halfway to 5th. Zoltan, who only needs 13,000 as a cleric, is actually quite close.

I think it says something about the quality of a lengthy campaign; most do not even last long enough for the players to engage in four sessions... this spent that many sessions just running this one dungeon. That over a period of six weeks, starting with the first Friday and playing two weeks apart. Thus the dungeon started on the 12th of June and finished on the 24 of July.

I didn't have much to do after pouring out the treasure. The party were engaged in dividing it and then ascertaining the effects of it, how to move the weight of it out of the dungeon and attending to themselves, rather than showing any interest in what would come next. Some might call the treasure excessive, but honestly, I don't consider it anywhere near to being enough to break the party's game experience.

What's more, it's about what I would have given ad hoc... which supports the quality of the system I spent the prior two weeks building. I'm quite pleased with that work, especially as it made me feel guilty free over the amount given, while not feeling that the system did not provide enough abundance to justify the party's efforts or risk.

I must add as an aside: these players survived largely because they played highly intelligently. They had lots of opportunities to break their line in the trog combat, trying to push into the cave, and they did. Several times they made their minds up not to advance, letting the less intelligent trogs come on. Magic use was well-considered and effective, though the party's main artillery had been used in the third session at the start of the party's third dungeon assault. This continued that assault, with the party pressing their advantage. I'll say honestly that, having earlier established that these trogs had a second exit available, if the players had made a plan for a fourth assault, they'd have found all the trogs gone, and their treasure too.

It meant this last fight was battled with second-tier spells and cantrips... but these were used well. The balance between the combat and spellcasting players was tight, well-considered and reliable. It's a pleasure to play with players who know how to manage their characters and support the party they're with.

I would have undoubtedly killed a less careful party.

Nirvana

I should be writing the account of last Friday's session, but instead I'm going to write this. Some might find this a different sort of post, in which case, good. I see no reason I need to write the same posts over and over.

One of the sage studies of my D&D game is the "Outer Planes." The premise follows that the various planes of existence are real and can be travelled to, but more to the point, they can be understood in essence by people dwelling on Earth, the "prime material" plane, despite never having gone there. In D&D terms, this is something like having read books and articles by people who went to the Dark of Africa in the 19th century, while most would never have perceived actually doing it themselves.

As players gain knowledge points in my game, which come naturally through the accumulation of levels, they assign the points they gain in the Outer Planes study to the plane they wish to know about. I think this is only reasonable: if you are interested in tales about Africa, why would you be forced to discover details about Mongolia or Patagonia? If a player, then, decides to know more about Nirvana, one of the outer planes. Gygax perceived it as "pure law," which either confuses what he knew about Buddhism — though, to be fair, it was the 70s, there was much confusion being spewed by all sorts of writers at the time — or his peculiar notion about law. Discounting this as neither here nor there, I have had a player ask about Nirvana and what it's like, asking me to write a wiki page for it.

I think for most it would be fairly Old Hat to write the planes of existence as a set of D&D adventures: a sort of "McVenture" that scratches out the word Nirvana and writes in the words "Twin Paradises" instead sort of adventure, where in fact the concept itself is utterly sacrificed for the sake of the game. A second approach would be to embrace totality of "nirvana" as a metaphysical concept, i.e., the extinguishing of passion, detachment lack of suffering... even "nothingness" in the truest possible sense. After all, in Buddhism, nirvana is the abandonment of the "10 fetters" all of which pretty much describe a D&D player's process when playing the game: protect self, doubt everything, count on my lucky die, love that crit, kill monsters, get that treasure, expect they'll never die, stomp proudly, ache for the next adventure and mostly, don't care what it all means. In a nutshell.

But let's face it: Nirvana as a physical outer plane of absolute stillness, marked by an endless, pale, luminous expanse without sun, sky, weather, horizon or darkness, where nothing needs to grow because hunger and thirst is unknown... is a pretty boring place. D&D is not going to thrive in a place where violence is (a) impossible and (b) fruitless. Heck, why even have the knowledge of such a place?

About the time I started playing D&D, I was competing in a high school game show format called Reach for the Top here in Canada; and after getting into the semi-finals we won as prizes various books that were donated. I obtained at that time a copy of "Shambhala," which I read all the way through despite not being able to make heads or tales out of it. Shambhala, I get now, is the conception of Nirvana — a place freed from suffering, corruption and the destructive consequences of craving, externalised as a "country." James Hilton invented the name "Shangri-La" for his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, so he could side-step any theological errors he might have had to account for, but the concept is more or less the same. Like Shambhala, it is a society entrusted with the Buddha's teaching, that embodies life, labour, governance, learning and community as what they would look like if they operated under the conditions approaching Nirvanic liberation.

So is that "Nirvana" as the plane? A hidden, perfected kingdom: fertile valleys enclosed by immense mountains, clear rivers, cultivated fields, walled cities, monasteries, palaces, libraries, gardens and roads kept in immaculate condition. It is inhabited by enlightened rulers, scholars, artisans, monks, families and long-lived beings who have achieved freedom from suffering without ceasing to possess bodies, homes, customs or society.

But, what precisely would scholars learn in a place that was "perfected"? What point is there to the palaces if no problems arise that must be solved? If there is no suffering, what is the use of food, what is the value of cultivating fields, what are customs designed to appease, or society to organise. One gets the sense that something along these lines is the right idea, but the answer is still missing from the problem. And we still don't have anything that would help a D&D player to know about.

Let us then reject "perfection." Perfection is the problem in the above, which need not exist since we are not imagining Nirvana as a philosophical exercise for people living upon the real earth, but a fictional physical place where the players can actually go. That removes any responsibility we have that Nirvana must be a "perfect" anything. It is merely called "perfect" by suffering humans with little understanding of things deeper than the most obvious immediate answer to a person's perceived need.

And here we have a very convenient Twilight Zone episode: A Nice Place to Visit. The link has the plot synopsis if it's needed, though by and large it's a well-known episode, much quoted on youtube, because it deconstructs a particular human frailty: the belief that having what we want will make us happy. That is literally the construction that Siddhartha supposedly landed upon under a tree after continuous objective reasoning some 2500 years ago, before Rome became a republic, but it's okay because America got there in 1960. Sort of. "Wanting" is the problem. Contentment, says Buddhism, begins with not wanting.

I find it interesting, because in the 47 years of my running D&D, in which I always ask my clerics to choose a religion, any religion, I never fail to get at least one that claims "Buddhist" as their choice. Jeebs, really. What a choice for a D&D player.

Nirvana or Shambhala cannot be a place where where everyone gets what they want, because they, like the character Rocky in the linked episode, would be bored as sin within a month. Getting everything you want, in excess, is hell. Oops, sorry, that was a spoiler.

So, let's change the structure thusly: we still have a vast temperate country of broad river valleys, wooded hills, clear lakes and snow-covered mountains. The air is warm, rain falls but never becomes a storm. The sun moves across the sky and night genuinely comes, because tranquility does not require the abolition of ordinary physical existence. Plants flower, fruit ripens, leaves fall and animals live normally, but disease, starvation, predation and destructive decay do not occur. There are towns, estates, monasteries, libraries, gardens, workshops and roads.

The dead would retain recognisable bodies and individual identities. They could eat, drink, sleep, converse, study, make things, walk through the countryside or live alone. Most importantly, while they would still need to eat, that actual need would not be the crisis it is for us on earth for one simple reason... which I'll of course approach by going around this barn here. The big one, painted red, on your left.

To quote Captain Kirk (well, really, D.C. Fontana, who wrote This Side of Paradise), humanity stagnates without ambition or challenge, and therefore people aren't meant for paradise but must "fight their way through" and struggle upward. The reason there is a struggle comes from Nature being a very unreasonable and nasty bitch... oh damn, are we still identifying Nature as feminine? I'm really not sure; no offense meant, really. Okay, to put it another way, nature is really, really, really not nice. You build your barn and nature knocks it down with a tornado; you plant your crops and nature sends bugs to eat the, or fails to give you any water at all; you fix your wagon's axle and a rock breaks your wheel. It's pretty much like that, all the time. So "struggle" is necessary because nature keeps getting in the way not of a "perfect" life, but of one that can reliably be counted upon.

Meaningful activity could occur quite nicely if we weren't spending all this time repainting the barn red or defending the animals we have to keep safe in the barn from weather, rote, vermin and accident. Getting rid of all those difficulties would not make scholarship less interesting... it would make it less fraught with the need to recopy a book that was spoiled when the roof leaked. If the farmer could be absolutely certain that all the seeds that were planted would reliably grow and produce food, the farmer would still have to do the labour... but that labour would not be compromised with the worry the labour might be wasted. In that event, the labour might even become enjoyable; it might be that thing that Thoreau and other naturalists insist: a good afternoon spent, a feeling of accomplishment, the sense of using one's muscles purposefully, the pleasantness of a beautiful vista to work in... all without crows or prospective hail.

D.C. Fontana's paradise in Star Trek (based on an original story by Jerry Sohl) had to be taken apart because the spores caused everyone to just lay about drinking mint juleps. Actual paradise occurs when everyone has something fruitful and meaningful to accomplish, wishes to do so, and therefore digs in, works, enjoys the work and then, at the end of the day, food being plentiful because there are no ants to eat it, no one goes hungry. Not because they can't get hungry, but because the larder is always full, because the desire to fill it is so damned satisfying.

I have said several times in the last few weeks to people that my perception of heaven would be to do exactly what I am doing right now: writing, playing D&D, investigating new things, stretching my legs and so on. Only, without having to concern myself with making money.

Don't Give Me Some of that Old School Religion

I agree with Blaine that the "what if" game really doesn't get us anywhere... but then, I must confess I am not playing fair where it comes to my own story within yesterday's post. So, I'll come clean, though I don't expect the unfamiliar reader to much like it. Those familiar with me and my game won't be surprised... so, really, this is going to be nothing more than my indulging my enormous, bloated ego. Thank gawd I never became the head of a game company, huh?

I've said before I was given the three basic books of AD&D for Christmas in 1979. Two of them I still have, though they got so wrecked through use that I was forced to buy used copies from a bookstore in the early 1990s. My original copy of the Monster Manual went missing, so the copy I have was given to me for Christmas in 1982 by my then fiancee. The replacement is, understandably, more valuable to me.

I own copies of Keep on the Borderlands, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Village of Hommlet and the first two parts of Against the Giants... with the except of KotB, I've run none of them as modules in my game. I've only run a few rooms of KotB, the last time in 2004, when I ran my daughter and her boyfriend in it on the spur of the moment, nothing prepared. I only own these modules because another DM I knew in '82 quit D&D entirely and shoved them at me with, "Want them?" I told them I'd take them, expecting I'd get around to looking through them someday. It might shock some people, but I've never actually taken the time to read a few pages of any of these at a time — when I try, I find them so boring, I just can't be bothered.

The "Harndex" came up before the game session Friday — the 1983 edition, not the later splat book version that came out later. This, again, is not something I paid for, but gained when a different DM decided to quit D&D after his first very rough year as a barely surviving engineering student. It seems all through the 80s I was the dumping site for a lot of this stuff, without my having to buy it. The only reason I never read either Holmes or Mentzer before the internet happened was that none of the DMs that I knew, who quit, had bought those books. Though I do seem to vaguely remember a blue basic version of the game kicking around at some point... but because I never used it or opened it, I have no idea if it was Mentzer's work or not.

The Harndex was more interesting... but only in the sense of looking at someone else's invented wheel still having square corners and my thinking, "Hm, I bet that would work better if the corners were rounded off." I never used the Harndex. It didn't have anything to use. An ordinary real world encyclopedia has more usable information in it.

I have had a relationship with the local principal gamestore owner here in Calgary that reaches so far back that he and I can talk jokingly about his first store front back in 1979, as he remembers my being a customer then... only, I wasn't actually a customer of D&D for him. I bought a few war games, I think I bought my copy of Axis and Allies from him (now in my daughter's possession, as I haven't played it literally since this century started), and some dice and miniatures. I would go around and look at the enormous collection of books he had... more than enough to fill a good sized public library before the internet happened... but I'd leaf through the books, see what the designers were doing and think, "Oh, that's a wrong direction," or, "Yeah, did that, did it better"... or worse, "What the fuck is that supposed to acccomplish?" And then not buy the book.

All this is to say that my experience with D&D is the inverse of what virtually every "official" source thought it ought to be. Everyone around me practically worshipped The Dragon. I thought it was shit. Here, I stumbled across this issue from April 1986 while digging around for my copy of the Harndex.

"Dear Dragon... According to the author of the article, seeing is believing, about 2' is how far the invisibility extends. If the invisibility extends in all directions, the floor below him would be invisible for two feet down and over at an upward slope. Isn't there a special ruling that he, the author, should have made about this? If not, invisibility is useless because when a moving patch of invisibility saunters into a room, it would take a really dumbass monster not to know something was amiss."

See? The internet existed before the internet existed.

This kind of appeal to authority demonstrates just how stupid the average reader of The Dragon was, which the Dragon catered to because, hey, it wasn't making any money from me. I'd say "guys like me," but there were no guys like me, not then, not now. Back about ten years ago, I got so tired hearing from other bloggers about the amazing Dragon magazine that I made a plan to burn one of my copies on youtube in spite. My daughter put her foot down and I didn't. Raised my own petard, there.

I did not need a staff member from The Dragon to tell me that bad rule design (even joke bad rule design, which was what deliberately happened here) did not need an authority to clarify, it needed a will to step up. I, more than anyone, ought to hate "rule lawyers," because those are the first and foremost to call out descriptions like the joke one here as if God Handed Them Down to Gygax on Sinai... but I don't have that knee-jerk hatred because even in 1986 I could have out-argued any of these halfwits writing on the page above. I didn't care to because I'd already rebuilt the problems in the game The Dragon magazine was bent on, with it's virtually Holy Quest, making less clear, less practical or just plain worse, for the sake of having something to assemble words together in as so-called articles.

If anyone wants to do a Communications Thesis about the destruction of a popular hobby through inept or deliberately obtuse journalism, there it is. The Dragon's approach directly contributed to the need to replace every passage in the original game with a NEW VERSION, essentially by finding it's own personal way to exploit the reader's attention by nit-picking and derailing rules to death.

A good carpenter can tell you... for every tool that's really nifty and useful invented by someone, there are hundreds that are junk. But it's okay, because once a carpenter has done that for a few years, they get to recognise the difference... in fact, it's a reflex one develops habitually, looking for any part that's made of plastic or some other material that's bound to give within a day or two of use. Roleplaying games are not different from other things in the way that opportunists rush pell-mell to make things that are essentially useless but which look good for people who just don't know anything.

The difference with D&D is simple: there are no good products, aside from the dice. Every product, from the White Set on, arrived on the shelf broken as fuck. This is a fact that is deliberately overlooked by nostalgists who insist, instead, that "Sure, there are a few problems with AD&D..."

With regards to this aspect of RPGs, the cognitive dissonance is staggering. If anyone ever wants to put together a list of seven cognitive dissonance wonders of the world, I vote for D&D... though I suppose the U.S. Constitution deserves the number 1 spot.

The problem is not merely that D&D is old now, or that the substance of the game has changed, it is the stubborn conception that any of the original works served to create a playable game in their own time, never mind in ours... and that those who claim as much simply ignore decades of published arguments, replacement systems occurring long before 2nd edition, a wash of alternate RPG versions each trying to steal customers even before 1982, not to mention the flat out evidence of both self-conceit and ad hoc declarations by the self-righteous author that spawned all this... well, it's just breathtaking. I've said this before but it bears repeating... and repeating and repeating, I suppose.

We at the age of 15, playing in a world without an internet, without cable television, without at home video games, without telephones that were not still connected by wires to walls, looked at AD&D in the 1970s and recognised that large parts of it were not only badly written, but were the worst kind of game design compared to the games we already knew. We were trained game designers. We weren't journalists. Fuck, we hadn't even completed grade 10. But we knew. And not only was it utterly obvious that the rules that attempted to outline alignment, weapon speed, encumbrance, combat movement, the design of a believable medieval culture or pretty much everything in the book that wasn't entirely self-contained, wasn't up to snuff intellectually. We didn't argue about it. We didn't write to The Dragon. We dumped the shit that didn't work and decided, you know what, the game worked fine. Just fine.

All that shit from people who just couldn't get it, they weren't like us. We were early adopters. And like early adopters, we were curious, we wanted to look at how things worked, we wanted to test things, we were experienced with other sorts of complicated games, we knew already how to work around defects, fix or ignore beta-level documentation, expect the product to have limitations, criticise a design early... in large part because we had done all this before with other complicated systems.

Early adopters do not expect a new and complicated system to arrive complete. They tolerate crude documentation, test every component against actual use, distinguish the underlying possibility from the defective implementation and assume that repair is part of adoption. A later customer expects a finished product. Early adopters don't.

Those that come after early adopters are called "early majority." These are people who wait to see if there are reliable reviews about the product before moving forward. They are people who wait to assure themselves that a visible success has occurred. They want to see someone else demonstrate success. They count on technical support to fix problems. They wait for others to create usable instructions that will help them understand. They want to be sure the product will remain available and supported before they buy in.

When the early majority started to see the groundswell around D&D growing in '82 and '83, they started to climb on board the train. They detected that D&D had been validated, that it was popular enough to be considered viable to explore... but they came at expecting the rules to be explained to them, the rulings to be made clear by those in the know, the modules to be produced "officially"... and they are those who ran to publications like The Dragon to get those clarifications and desperately looked-for support.

There are always far more early majority that early adopters. Some people rushed to Android products in 2008 and 2009, when the Blackberry still dominated the market and Apple was trying to corner MP3 access. But Android products, initially, were quite hard to manage. Those that wanted to try, though, were those who consider Linux their go-to platform. They like complexity, because they view complexity as flexible, designable and more interesting. Android smashed Apple's market because it was able to describe itself more practically and usefully to the early majority when that sort came along in 2010 and 2011.  But unlike Android, when TSR was faced with it's early majority, it had its pants down around its ankles because it had fucked up its business plan and was being turned over the money makers. So, explanation and technical support just never happened. And it hasn't happened since. It's never going to happen.

The OSR movement failed in large part because the groundswell engaged participants who were old-school chronologically, but weren't early adopters psychologically. By the 2000s, they came into a D&D product that had been validated by decades of survival, reputation, nostalgia and accumulated commentary (and then controversy, through the internet). These early and "late adopters" were not approaching an unknown system and asking what could be made from it. They were approaching a canon and asking how faithfully it could be recovered.

Except their perception of what was to be recovered matched that exact disaster which came into being as D&D failed as a business and began to excel as an exploitative product. While the earlier products by Gygax and Arneson, and the persons themselves, were revered, that reverence made it impossible for these "renaissance" folk to actually LOOK at the product directly and make up their own minds. In the actual Renaissance, architects like Filippo Brunelleschi studied and designed classical architectural ideas — or else they wouldn't have been able to achieve what they did — but then they set out to surpass the classicists. The structure of the Great Dome in Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, had never existed in human history before. The OSR went back to the origins of D&D and then did not surpass them at all. Instead, they turned D&D into a "religion," not a "renaissance." But thank gawd, the anachronym doesn't need to be changed.

To restate: with the OSR, the participants recovered the texts, terminology, visual presentation, modules and remembered procedures, but the recovered material had acquired authority through age. The defects became "authentic" features. Ambiguities became invitations to "rulings." Missing systems became proof of openness. Crude mechanics became evidence of elegant simplicity. Instead of asking what the original designers had failed to accomplish, the movement spent enormous energy explaining why those failures were virtues.

This is what a religion does. It preserves a founding revelation, develops commentary around contradictions, venerates founding personalities, treats departure from the sacred text as corruption and then, individually, the individual DM's themselves invent mantras as supportive evidence that their way is the only way that makes sense. The OSR did not produce a single product that surpassed old D&D... which is why it has proven to be thoroughly irrelevant within the progress of the game. It was a momentary period of zealotry, not enlightenment... and though it has created a sort of community in its wake, that community in turn has done nothing more than continue to churn out the same products that old D&D turned out to exploit an old player base... only now the so-called Old School Religion exploits a "new" player base.

And so, in the middle of all this, there's me.

I didn't quit like all the early adopters I once new. I didn't buy into the product train. If you'd asked me who Gary Gygax was in 1980 I'd have been unable to give you an answer. I did not care who made D&D any more than I cared who made Squad Leader or RISK or Cribbage. I loved the game as I played it... not as the books presented it, gawd no, but as my friends and I redesigned it for ourselves in the 1980s, without concern for what the company might have done or what Gygax's money woes were when he went down in flames. I didn't even know about any of that until the internet happened, because Gygax's life trajectory simply wasn't relevant to my deciding how much treasure to hand to a party. I make changes to AD&D because all the other versions of the game, to me, started deeper in the hole than AD&D had, while I'd already had ten years of fixing that system before 2nd came out and proved itself to be worse. I had 21 years of work behind me before 3rd, and 28 years behind me before 4th, and gawd help me, 35 years behind me by the time 5th made its appearance. Jeebus... what are you supposed to do when someone comes along and tells you to pull your thirty-five year old renovated house down because they've invented a new way to hammer nails?

That's right. You ignore them.

Now I write lengthy posts about how nuts all this is, not because I think I'll change anyone's mind, and not because I'm "obsessed" with being proved right, but because, well, damn, it's interesting. I said to my players on Friday that this is a slow running freight crashing into a wall, that I've more or less been around what feels, for me, like forever. I'm fascinated to reflect on this failure for this reason, on these misunderstandings or justifications, on this collective mess that grew and grew simply because there was no Cassandra around to tell Priam, "You're gonna lose, Dad." 'Course, that didn't work out for Cassandra.

D&D has lost. It's a joke. Not among the players, but... just consider. It's had fifty years to convince the world that it isn't a joke. It has acquired millions of nominal admirers while remaining something people expect to outgrow, apologise for or present with a smirk. Hell, they made a movie with the game as its title... as a comedy. Doesn't that sting... just a little? Hm?

Maybe it's just me.

What if...?

We had a discussion before the D&D session started yesterday, which though disjointed in the direction basically revolved around the question, "Was D&D destined to become what it has because that was really the only way it could have?"

Now, I have to be very careful here, because Matthew Colville wants us all to know that "some folks", a "they" who want to rally a community, manipulate the community. And how do "they" do this? You can tell that someone is doing that because "they" begin their message with, "Does anyone else..." or "I think players would prefer it if..."

Sorry, couldn't help dragging this in. You can find this piece of genius at 54:23 of the video, in which Matthew explains how some people invoke some people to make an argument that justifies they're cause. It's a delightful piece of recursive cognitive dissonance, said with the straight face of a man who has utterly no clue that he's engaging in it. The youtube video is a day old as I write this.

My reason for bringing that up is that it would be impossible to argue about anything related to human endeavours without supposing some kind of imagined collective preference: players wanted a thing, audiences rejected a thing, the community moved towards a thing.  Arguing that we can't argue on what groups do fits is a profoundly blind way to suppose we can argue about anything except whether or not we like vanilla ice cream.

I don't wish to argue about my favourite ice cream flavours, so I'm going to have to engage in some discussion about trends. That will, of course, be unlike every other writer and creator on the internet, so please forgive me.

On the whole, I tend to agree that D&D was destined to turn out as it has — but not because the game was inherently written or designed in a specific way, which a spectacularly waffling Mike Mearls more or less blathers about in this interview, from about a year ago — but because at some point the makers of D&D decided that it needed to be a "business" rather than "game designers." This makes sense, and there's an argument to be made that this was inevitable also, given the lack of foresight, intuitiveness or social intelligence of the creators, especially Gary Gygax. In 1973, "game designer" wasn't a profession or an ideal one sought to achieve; what one imagined was that having created a great product, it was a chance to become Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley... or, at the very least, Avalon Hill. That is the message behind the creation of Tactical Strategy Rules. The designers of a few wargames built more or less upon a single concept with various flavours supposed that they were suddenly going to propel themselves into the world of Corporate Scale Wealth. They had stars in their eyes and, as usual with such beings, they tripped over a straw in their blindness... that straw being that none of them knew jack shit about business.

No one can argue that D&D didn't "take off" as a phenomenon. Within just a few years it had reached a scale where mainstream media was aware of it. The problem being, of course, was that mainstream media's approach was all bad. 1982's Mazes and Monsters — funnily enough not mentioned at all in this very good two hour interview with Tom Hanks, where he spends a lot of time talking about how he got started in Hollywood (or, possibly, I missed it), was a mainstream media disaster for any company thinking it was would become huge based on the game's popularity. Further media investigations, which gave equal air time to D&D's detractors, did not promise a rosy future. But by then, the die had been cast, the cubic gate had been crossed. TSR was churning out modules instead of game structure, Gygax was bloviating egomaniacally upon the pages of the Dragon instead of accepting his responsibility as a guru and the rotunda was full of other game companies with knives waiting for TSR to come through the portico. Money merchants would seize the body, stand on it to orate their justifications in butchering the game as it had only barely become known and now, here we are, with Augustus gasping his last while we wonder what sort of Tiberius will next take over the company. In fact, the time frames almost match perfectly to the metaphor.

D&D was never going to be a financial success for numerous reasons, the first being that adults did not understand the premise of the game. That's not a judgment or an accusation, or a measure of adult imagination, it's a simple recognition that the game as structured did not fit with "game" in the minds of older, contented people who had been playing games all their lives. My parents and those of everyone I played with were not "bored" of board games or cards or backgammon or chess or, hell, horseshoes. They appreciated all those traditional, direct, sometimes gently physical games, which could be played competitively or not, restfully or not. They enjoyed those games, they could understand them, they could be explained in five minutes and a pleasant evening could be had taking tricks, pegging, jumping and getting kinged, hammering a couple stakes into the ground twenty paces apart and playing with a beer in hand. Those things were, in 1982, still universally viewed as fun and, more importantly, enough. They felt no special urge to spend hours to understand hundreds of nitpicky confusing rules to produce an experience not unlike, as my mother would say, "playing house."

Second, the "success" among it's adolescent audience was just as constraining. In the 1700 person high school I attended at the start of my game experience, about twenty students altogether played any kind of tactical or role-playing game... and even they could not agree on what was better in 1980. Some preferred Rolemaster, others Chivalry and Sorcery, others Traveller, others Top Secret... D&D was the premiere game among that set, but statistically that meant it was played by 12 out of 20 of that 1700 student body. One does not build a successful corporation on this kind of market share.

Third, the game had a time clock built into it's practical age window. Children become adults who don't have the time to spend six hours in an intellectual activity when what they really want to do it spend Fridays and Saturdays washing the intellectual out of their brains with suds, nachos and yes, obviously, far harder things. This isn't to say that we didn't, our small groups, prefer an intellectual activity of our own rather than spend Friday nights either drunk or stoned, but it is relevant that we were in a very, very small minority, that dwindled frequently as we aged. Again, while Janie and Jimmie could still get together for a rousing game of poker on a Friday night at 20, and continue doing that for the next twenty years, our experience was filled with excuses like, "Um, sorry guys, but I've got a trig final on Monday and I've got to study for it." Followed by steadily and slowly never seen Nathan again.

One realises that the hobby they love isn't really popular when it loses players because they get cars and can run off to the mountains and ski all weekend, among actual thousands and thousands of people. Our little rooms of a few score obsessionists did not compete, nor did we imagine in our wildest imagination that they ever would. When I hear people like Mearls say, "12 million" play D&D, I think, um, yeah, sure. So many that when I say I play in a room with three people in it, I still get blank stares or, at best, that look that conveys, "Oh, you're one of those people."  12 million people my ass. There's a corporate fiction.

ChatGPT tells me that,

"The much-repeated 2017 claim was actually “12 million to 15 million in North America alone,” offered while the executive declined to disclose concrete sales numbers. That substitution is significant: the measurable commercial fact was withheld and replaced by an enormous, unverifiable population claim.

"The category has only become looser since then. Wizards described D&D Beyond’s ten million users as everyone who had used the service since 2017, while Hasbro later announced more than fifty million “fans” and D&D Beyond thanked eighty-five million people worldwide. Those statements do not measure the same thing, and the steady inflation from players to users to fans allows almost anyone who has passed through the brand’s orbit to be counted."

Far be it for me to argue with that level of market research.

To get around to the point, then... given the way the game was approached in the 1970s, given the priorities that were asserted, given the media's reaction to the game, given the limited viability among participants — the inevitable poison was that what was valuable about the game was mercilessly exploited in the same manner as "junk bonds."

I'm begging the metaphor here, so I'll admit that I don't mean the phrase in the manner of promising exceptional returns for an instrument, whose underlying condition is doubtful, because at this moment it can be sacrificed for greater profit. In a sense, D&D was treated that way, because I believe the corporate engine that took over TSR did not believe, truly, that D&D as a concept was going to last. As such, they changed the focus of the game's gestation for considering what might improve the game's value to one where exploitation of the existing asset — that being the players — was best achieved by offering modules that ignored any pretense of improving play or game development. What modules did do, and any other product that could be sold on the backs of the aforementioned asset, was make money, today, for the money managers. No one, I think, was as surprised as they were when D&D proved resilient enough to keep growing as a culture.

By the late 80s, though, seven years of junk shit had been moved onto the market, complimented by additional junk shit that tried to exploit new young players by literally rewriting the game as "basic D&D," so that as an intellectual property, D&D was done. The masters at the helm were all like Mearls — dumbass fan boys bent on doing whatever felt "keen" today, which amounted to shit thrown at walls and then scraped off even after it did stick, because more wall was needed to throw more shit at. I've covered all that part after 1989 before, so I don't want to do it again now.

To write it in the shortest way possible, "developing the game" hasn't been a relevant principle underlying D&D since 1979. Everything since, beginning with the death throes of a badly run TSR under Gygax flopping around like a fish in a boat, followed by money merchants who did not care at all, has been about maintaining a product cycle. Every product produced since 1979 has been produced for that purpose, to make money because money was either needed, and desperately so, or because money could be generated from doofs who did not fucking understand the game they were playing even as more of them grew to like it. The business history of D&D is founded on the simple reality that there are plenty of people dumb enough out there to believe that D&D is played by 85 million people worldwide.

Because there are those who will quibble, let me be frank. Yes, individual designers since 1979 have sincerely attempted to improve the game. There have been rule books that have included good rules and settings, with good material, that can be advantaged by a present-day discriminating DM. But none of those things occurred because the company deliberately set out to empower those designers. They happened because the designers found a large enough gap in the surveillance that they got away with producing something viable and sometimes brilliant inside a corporate structure that simply failed to catch them at it. None of those brilliant designers were regaled or shown appreciation; all of them were eventually moved out the door, in favour of people who would just shut up and take orders. If a product did happen to advance the game, it's important to understand that product wasn't commissioned to do so. Sometimes, smart people just won't take orders.

Fair enough. This is what did happen. And arguably, the pips were going to come up that way from the start... and that being so, if I'm going to blame anyone, it has to be Gygax's parents. They're the ones obviously responsible for producing a puffed-up pompous blowhard of a son, one incapable of self-awareness or humility... the damage being done sometime in the 1950s, before two D's were put together.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can get into a time machine and show a video to Gary's parents of their egotistical magniloquent of a son, causing them to hit him more or perhaps less or maybe increase the amount of greens in his diet so that he grows up able to play nice with the other kids. What then?

A less vain, more self-aware Gygax might have recognised that D&D was not the foundation of the next Parker Brothers, but a difficult specialist game with a small, unusually committed audience. He might have accepted that the real task was not to expand the company as fast as possible, but to spend twenty years discovering what the game actually was.

This was more or less what half the players argued in the session last night. Effectively, if D&D had been freed from proving itself on the market, if it had addressed the inconsistencies, if it had not struggled to add excessive irrelevant details to play in the manner of "alignment" and deliberately urging the DM to be a morality cop, perhaps D&D wouldn't have gathered the reputation it did as a socially immoral culture exploiting children's morality to sell content. Less visibility in those early days might not have ultimately solved those problems, but perhaps it could have mitigated the narrow market, the aging-out problem, the media panic or the difficulty of sustaining long campaigns among the players. If the designers, not organised into a non-human faced "TSR," but as a bunch of ordinary dudes just playing with the concept, had better managed their presence in the Dragon magazine by actually having a plan for what they published — that magazine being read by literally every player, pretty near fanatically — then perhaps some kind of rational forward momentum could have been created that would have made 2nd and 3rd edition unnecessary. If they had simply ignored the need to be "more popular," because they were hobbyists rather than corporatists, then perhaps in the long run they'd have ended up owning their game rather than having it eventually delivered to Hasbro — a corporation so evil that they considered the children's toy market a fair game for fucking over people younger than 12... and their parents too.

The most important difference is that Gygax might have understood his position as a responsibility rather than a coronation. He might then have realised that importing moral language such as good and evil as characteristics the players were expected to functionally play, was bound to attract the wrong kind of attention from people who treat these matters way too seriously. Had Gygax been willing to step back and let other voices be heard, or have the capacity to encourage frank debate instead of viewing himself as God Almighty, D&D might have found a greater support from that intellectual community willing to view the system in terms of its opportunities for education, social support... even as therapy, which people do use it for right now.

But, of course, many of the beloved products would never have been made. And these are all a lot of "ifs," requiring faith and human patience and unimaginable levels of restraint for people engaged in what remains, after all this time, still essentially a "children's game," played by those who are still expected to quit when they get to college.

I do believe that other "beloved" material would have been produced... that would have been, really, far more popular and valuable than what the community tends to bleat habitually about today. But that is neither here nor there, since we will never know.

Distributing Magic Items

The first step it to identify some 475 magic items that appear in the DMG, which is more than enough for my campaign. I've never felt much need to create more than a basic few items of my own, simple stuff, refilling jugs, flasks that provide healing salves, that sort of thing. But those can be left off the table for now and we can just use what's there in front of us. This collection of items appears as a list from pages 121 to 125 of the DMG, with a lot of description afterwards, most of it inadequate to the purpose.

The next step is to identify all the "sub-types" for those listed. For example, from the list shown, we have "dragon control" potion, but not which dragon is controlled, just as we don't know which giant is controlled or which giant's strength is obtained from the giant strength potion. These sub-types are determined by an additional roll that is made in the description of the potion: for example, the dragon control potion type is determined by a d20 roll found on p.125.

The reason this matters is because what's wanted is a likelihood ratio for all items as if they they were listed together in one table. To determine at the start whether to roll on the "potions" table or the "scrolls" table, and so on, there's an initial table at the top of page 121 that one rolls on first. To get the result of a white dragon potion, one has to roll first on that top table to determine a "potion," then on the potions table to get a "dragon control potion" as the result, then that d20 table to get "white dragon control potion." That's three tables. The total chance of getting that specific potion is therefore 0.2 x 0.02 x 0.1, which equals 0.0004. What's wanted is that universal number for every magic item, so that they can all be compared with each other, dispensing with tables that need us to roll on tables that in turn need us to roll on another table.

The system is fine. But what's wanted to is to create a new set of tables, from scratch, and not use that are pre-existing... while at the same time not actually changing the chance of each item in and of itself occurring as something the players can find.

Why accept the DMG's numbers? Because I've play-tested them for 47 years and those averages may be close to the best organisation of any part of original D&D. The only real problem is that they offer a chance of getting an incredibly powerful item when rolling for things that are much more common. That's not desirable. Not at all. What we want can be found on this page of my wiki.

The concept for determining a randomly given magic item is essentially this. First, we build a separate but easy to make table for the monster being plundered:

This is the troglodyte treasure, as discussed on this post, discarding the "treasure type A" moniker completely by merely designating the amount of treasure per individual, the only number that actually matters. From the above, if you kill ONE troglydyte in his personal lair, where he's just been hanging around a bunch of time, his wealth will equal 65 c.p., 137 s.p., 326 g.p., less than one gem and therefore none, less than one jewellery and therefore none, less than 100 magic item experience (the bare minimum needed) and therefore none. This total treasure compares rather fairly with how much a 2nd level fighter player character tends to have from adventuring, so why should the trog be any different?

Of course this can be viewed as an average. The single trog may have more, or it may have less... and logically, if this is what the trog keeps as wealth while not adventuring with others, this wealth may be secretly buried in a forest (in a "lair" some 8 inches cubed that consists of a hole, a bag and a large rock on top) where its not likely to be found. That's not the point. What matters is that we have a rational total, perhaps balanced by a die roll, that assures to things: a trog definitely has something, and it isn't the ridiculous 3-18 c.p. that orcs in the original game are assumed to carry around, for purposes that are never explained, since there are no stores to spend copper pieces at where the orcs are, and in game you can't buy much more than a chicken with that kind of scratch.

What matters is not what "one trog" carries regardless — because as a DM, you're never going to throw one trog at the party anyway. You know that five first levels are going to waste the trog forthwith, so logically the trog knows that too... and knows that there is safety in numbers. A lone trog is only "lone" for one reason: it's lost where the rest of its kin are.

The Magic Item Distribution page on the wiki, linked above, includes the following line: "With 22.3 x.p. per troglodyte, the total is 691, the fraction ignored. As such, one roll would be made on Table I and one upon Table III." Table I is sketched out on the page, broken into "Common Magic Items" with a sub-table for items so unlikely that they don't fit easily into the d100 format. The Rod of Absorption, with 1 charge, for example, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of being rolled randomly. That is also the likelihood of three other rods, one staff and two different wands. The reduced likelihood deserves an explanation.

Table I accounts for magic items with 100 to 200 x.p. value as rated by the DMG. Rods have 50 charges in them and the DMG states that a fully charged rod of absorption is worth 7,500 x.p. That makes each charge worth 150... so, a rod with 1 charge fits into the Table I range.

However, the base chance for rolling a rod of absorption from all possible magic items is 0.5 (the rods, staves and wands table) x 0.03 (1-3 of one hundred of the table itself). This equals a chance of 0.0015;
but importantly, a 1 charge rod has only a 1 in 50 chance of being found among all the rods of that kind out there (by the logic I'm using), so that chance is reduced by another 0.02 to a final chance of 0.00006. Considerably less of a chance than finding a healing potion.

Here's my workup of Table I in excel (please just ignore the shading):

Everything that didn't produce enough chance to push the die roll another point in the main table was shoved into the rare item subtable, which is rolled on if 98-00 is rolled on the common table. The numbers all reflect how many charges at this table rank count against the total charges of that item: a wand of magic has 8 out of 100 possible charges, while the wand of metal & mineral detection has 13 out of 100 possible. Together, that's why these are more likely, along with the fact that the DMG makes them more likely overall.

At this point some wise ass raises a hand and says, "Hey, if the wand of illumination has 20 x.p. per charge, why can't the single troglodyte have an illumination wand with 1 charge? Huh? Why not?"

Because, totally arbitrarily, I'm setting a 100 x.p. minimum for magic. Point in fact, by the logic I've just explained, the 1 charge illumination wand would have a 0.000025 chance out of 1 (0.0025%) chance of existing at all. Thus out of 40,000 single troglodytes out there, one of them would have a single charge illumination wand. Yeah. I'm drawing the 100 x.p. line against this sort of nonsense, and pegging the table at 150 x.p. average for distribution purposes. You don't like it, you go ahead and do it your way.

I think this about covers it. I tried to manage the same process with determining the percentage of scrolls based on the scroll table in the DMG and, I must say, I'm not really satisfied that my judgment was sound there. I'm okay with the result... and at some point screwing around getting more accurate so that a number can be changed from 15 to either 14 or 16 just doesn't become worth the skull sweat. Like a bad accountant, I tend to think, "Well, I'm close... so fuck it."

See, it's the way Gygax conceived of scroll distribution on that table... which is really, really annoying. Go look at it.

That's about all. I still have to make table III (I have it in excel right now, but not laid out on the wiki) before Friday's game... unless, of course, the party all die or they fail to get the treasure. But I don't know they will, so I have to ready that table in case they succeed.

Are we all having fun?

Calculating the Value of Pretty Stones

I haven't touched on this for awhile, but it's relevant so I'll give some background.

Sorry I can't publish this in a larger format. It opens fine in another window, though.

The list here includes "ornamental stones," the commonest sort, the kind that Blaine recently referred to as "fish tank" rocks, which isn't far wrong. Yet while it's true that a "cherry-sized" rock that's an agate is worth a mere 30 c.p. in Budapest, I rush to point out that 30 copper coins weigh about 1.62 pounds, the same size agate weighs just less than 2/5ths of an ounce. Chat tells me it takes about 540 such rocks to fill the bottom of an 18 by 12 inch fish tank, which equals 16,376 copper pieces of value, or about 85 g.p., at a weight of about 13 pounds. 85 gold pieces weighs about 21 and a quarter ounces, so polished agates clearly aren't worth their weight in gold, but still, not bad.

I think the real issue isn't that "low price gems" don't have a meaningful value, it's rather that the encumbrance of things really isn't considered very closely, and most every "value" is compared to the player's need for the next experience level. 85 g.p. is not going to get a group of 5th level players very far down that road, so it feels pretty silly when that's all the gems are worth.

The table above is highlighted where the gemstone of that size is worth 5 g.p. or better on it's own. For the agate, that's a chunk the size of an apple, 8.65 cub.in., about the size of a Spartan. 540 of those would fill a chest that's two feet long, 18 inches high and 18 inches deep... or about five to six standard bushel baskets. Their total value would be 2,951 g.p. and their weight about 447 lb. That amount in gold pieces would weight 46 lb., for the sake of curiousity.

I promise, if I give that weight of agate to a party, they're going to figure out how to move 447 lb.

But, all this is old news. I've had these elements as part of my gems table for a long time. Why bring it up now?

Well, because the standard AD&D table produces a "10 g.p. gem," not a "10 g.p. agate," and I've never been able to reconcile the old table and my new work in a way that I could produce it quickly in game play. But, thanks to ChatGPT, I can now.

This is a basic, simple table, with every line representing a randomly generated gem. I've replaced the DMG labels of "ornamental, fancy, semi-precious..." et al because I've repurposed those labels for the gems themselves. The "bead" essentially equals the 10 g.p. category from the DMG, with the "bauble" equalling the 50 g.p. category and the "gemstone" being the 100 g.p. Here, the combination of "stone" with "gem" is meant to convey that we're not talking about shining glistening jewel that the hero reaches for in hand of the enormous statue in some treasure room... that would be a "brilliant." Gemstones are just the everyday decently valued "stones" that have beauty but a fairly ordinary presence in a lapidary's shop.

Simply explained, the "gem" (used as the general term) is rolled on the far left on a d100, adjusted from the DMG. I'm using 01-44 (bead), 45-69 (bauble), 70-85 (gemstone), 86-95 (gem), 96-99 (jewel) and 00 (brilliant). That's a sharp change from page 25 of the DMG, if you want to look it up.

The formulas get so long here that it's not practical to show them inside the table... so this part is just for the excel nerds. Normality shall ensue soon. But, here's an image for framing what's going on, showing just ten generated gems



The DMG stipulates that each stone gets a d10 rolled for it, and if a "1" is generated, then that stone goes up to the next category: that is, a bead becomes a bauble, a bauble a gemstone, a gemstone a gem and so on. I wasn't sure how to do this in excel, but ChatGPT managed it of course. This is the formula appearing in the M column:

=IF(L3=1,IF(B3="sm bead","bead",IF(B3="bead","bauble",IF(B3="bauble","gemstone",IF(B3="gemstone","gem",IF(B3="gem","jewel",IF(B3="jewel","brilliant","lg brilliant")))))),IF(L3=10,IF(B3="lg brilliant","brilliant",IF(B3="brilliant","jewel",IF(B3="jewel","gem",IF(B3="gem","gemstone",IF(B3="gemstone","bauble",IF(B3="bauble","bead","sm bead")))))),B3))

On a 10 rolled (no examples on the table), it downgrades the stone to the category lower. If a "brilliant" is pushed up, it becomes a "large brilliant;" if downgraded, a "bead" becomes a "small bead."

Thus, you can see that line 9 changed "bead" in column B to "bauble" in column M. That allows column N to reassess the value:

=IF(L3=1,IF(M3="sm bead",C3,IF(M3="bead",D3,IF(M3="bauble",E3,IF(M3="gemstone",F3,IF(M3="gem",G3,IF(M3="jewel",H3,IF(M3="brilliant",I3,J3))))))),IF(L3=2,K3*2,IF(L3=3,K3*(1+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)/10),IF(L3<9,K3,IF(L3=9,K3*(1-RANDBETWEEN(1,4)/10),IF(L3=10,IF(M3="sm bead",C3,IF(M3="bead",D3,IF(M3="bauble",E3,IF(M3="gemstone",F3,IF(M3="gem",G3,IF(M3="jewel",H3,IF(M3="brilliant",I3,J3))))))),K3))))))

This is doing a bit more. A roll of "2" doubles the original value, a roll of "3" adds 10-60% to the value; a roll of 9 reduces the value by 10-40%. All this is done automatically, so I don't have to think about it.

Column's O through R then do a second basic check, in which another 1 doubles the size of the gem. I did not use any other modifier for this column, because I really don't want to generate smaller gems. 5 g.p. is about as small as I want to bother about.

Then, the fun part. And oh, how I like this.

This shows the calculation for fitting in those gems that have been created by the pricing table correctly to the value generated by the table. Here, I'll show this without the formula, adding a few more lines and all the relevant columns:

There we are. Look at line 3: a roll of 78 produces a "gemstone" with a value of 100 g.p.; two worth checks adjust the price not at all, so that it remains what it was. BUT... and this is the absolute bliss of this thing for me:

Never again do I have to tell a player, "you find a 100 g.p. gem." Nope, it's a "tourmaline the size of an almond." The actual price of the thing is not a 100 g.p., as it happens, but that's how much x.p. I'm going to give for it. The price will matter as to where it is sold.

By the way, I don't know why there are five walnut-sized fire opals... I pressed refresh and got none. Just coincidence. Here's the lookup page for those interested, though it's not easy to read in this format.

For the first time in, what, nearly 20 years, I feel like I don't have enough varieties of gem. That's just awesome, I think.

This same structure more or less can be applied to jewelry, but I've just done a little bit of work with that so far. The look-up page can be effectively endless, but it is also has the unbelievable potential for work that will never end.

As such, when I pick up the next post on treasure, it'll be about magic.