A big fat vain-glorious dream I've had for some time now has been to pick up where Trampier left off with his Woimy cartoon and bring it to a climactic conclusion, something along the lines of Woimy having his treasure stolen by the trolls, finding himself owing big time to the storm giant, and putting together a band resembling AC/DC to win a battle of the bands competition (did I mention that I grew up in the 80's :-).
Well, the passing of AC/DC guitarist Malcom Young last week made me think about it again. That, along with Brian Johnson's problems, probably marks the end of AC/DC altogether. A sad moment in rock, although you never can tell when it comes to AC/DC.
Anyways, it's all just a dream I don't think I'll ever get around to, and even if I did I wouldn't know how to maneuver through all the legal hoopla surrounding copyright, intellectual property, trademarks and everything else. So. In honor of Malcom Young, David Trampier, AC/DC and my own dream band WO/MY here's some fan art I did as well as the lyrics to what would have been their break-out hit D-N-D.
See
me ride out of the castle On your Dungeon Master screen Out for all that I can get If you know what I mean Half-elves to the left of
me Half-orcs to the right Got a monkey grip And a mercurial
great sword Gonna role play tonight.
'Cause
I play D-N-D I'm a mystic knight. D-N-D and I'll win the fight D-N-D I kill giant trolls D-N-D.
Watch my Die Roll!!!
I'm
dirty, mean and mighty unclean Ain't no pala-dan. Gencon
registrant number one Don'tchu understand? A symphony of
slaughter A twilight knife Cast dimension door And run for
you life The elf is back in town This is my battle ground.
'Cause
I play D-N-D I slay the wights D-N-D and I'llllll win the
fight D-N-D I laugh at the gnolls D-N-D.
One of the many things that has always irked me about D&D lies at the core of the system. The d20 roll. If you have a character with a Strength of 3 arm wrestling a character with a Strength of 18, it’s pretty obvious who should win. Until you start checking their ability scores and comparing the totals.
The weaker character suffers a -4. The stronger character gains a +4 (according to 5e rules). That’s an eight point spread. To win the match all the weaker character has to do is roll 9 points better than the strong one - 20 vs 11, 15 vs 6, 10 vs 1 - all amounts to a win for the weaker character. This is where a lot of D&D’s goofiness comes from.
There is simply too much randomness in the d20 roll.
THE RISK ROLL
My answer is called risk rolling. It’s very simple but you need one six sider you can tell apart from all the others. This is the Sign Die. You always roll it in tandem with another die called the Risk Die which is the amount of risk your character is willing to take in order to succeed.
Little Risk = 1d4.
Medium Risk = 1d6.
Large Risk = 1d8.
High Risk = 1d10.
Big Risk = 1d12.
Huge Risk = 1d20.
Massive Risk = 1d30.
If the sign die rolls an even number then the risk die becomes a bonus. If odd it's a penalty.
So Bob has a Strength of 14 and is trying to kick in a door. The GM says he needs an 18 or better to do so. Bob rolls the sign die and a 1d10 for the risk die. The sign die rolls a 4 and the 1d10 a 6 giving him a +6 bonus. Checkwise, 14 + 6 = 20. He beats the 18, passes the check and kicks in the door.
(not exactly Bob but you get the point.)
For combat you use your Strength score for melee attacks or your Dexterity for ranged attacks. Plus other related bonuses except for those normally coming from Str & Dex, of course. Defeat your opponent's ascending armor class and the hit succeeds!
CRITICAL FAIL
The controlling factor in all of this is the critical fail. Any time you end up with a zero or less that is a critical fail. Bob could have rolled the 1d30 and had an easier time breaking down the door, but if he rolled a -14 or worse it would result in a critical fail. The farther below zero the score goes the more disasterous the fail. Just a few points below zero and Bob might have sprained an ankle. Ten or more points and he would probably break a leg.
WHY IT WORKS
For one thing, you are always rolling two dice which to me feels like a more substantial roll. There is something eternal about dice needing to be rolled in pairs. A single die roll just feels strange.
Risk rolling also seems more realistic. I don’t know of any formal explanation for what the d20 roll represents. I guess it is random factors that might come into play. But with risk rolling, the die roll is something specific, something a character has some control over. Risking it all in order to succeed. A certain tension arises as we watch to see what die a player picks as their risk die.
Also risk rolling frees people, players as well as the DM, from having to roll the dice for pointless checks. If you have an Intelligence of 15 there really is no point in rolling the dice to beat something with a DC of 15 or less. You simply succeed, end of story.
Last but not least! It also means there is always a chance you will succeed, however slim. It circumvents the problem of fighting a monster whose AC is too high to hit. Watch out evil Drow overlords, that d30 is coming for you.
(better make it two d30's)
WHY IT MIGHT NOT WORK
Risk rolling is different and people generally don’t do different. The d20 system has been around for years and is dug in deeper than a tick on a stirge. You don’t have to actually think about what you are doing when rolling a d20. You just roll it and deal with it. Ho-hum.
Risk Rolling also involves subtraction. IMHO people love adding but are not so keen on subtraction, especially when the total drops below zero. It’s a minor annoyance but like a pair of new shoes it may take some getting used to.
Finally, there is no rolling a 20 and auto-succeeding. However, a good substitute might be exploding dice. Whenever the Risk Die rolls the best it can roll as a bonus you may opt to risk roll again. Roll high and it keeps going like a strip of firecrackers. Roll a penalty? That demolishes your lead, and that's why the exploding roll is an option.
I wouldn’t realize this until a few decades after the fact but yeah - back in the day - my friends and I made the same mistake that everybody seems to have made with the D&D boxed sets, specifically B/X D&D. We assumed that “Basic” was code for “Baby” and “Advanced” was code for “Adult.” And by being in Junior High, we weren’t interested in playing anything that had been made for us. We wanted the real deal! The true unfiltered raw reality of tabletop fantasy! We wanted to play the adult version of our favorite game and had little tolerance for anyone interested in Baby D&D.
(we weren't too keen on muppet babies either)
Being this way we totally missed the point that B/X D&D was an improvement of AD&D, a filtration of it, a purification of it. It only seemed natural that the best version of the game should be the one bound up in hard covers. Books were special. A hard bound book was one you would be proud to display in a bookcase. Its presence in your home marked you as a fine upstanding citizen, an unpretentious intellectual, a pillar of the community.
Paperbacks are trash!
Lurid titles sold on dime store racks, destined to end up in a basket beside the toilet before finding their true destiny in some sea-gull infested landfill. Nothing good ever comes wrapped in paper.
And so, many of us came to the hobby through our B/X boxed sets, fell in love with the game and “moved up” to playing AD&D just as quickly as we could afford to. In so doing, we not only missed out on a better version of the game but we also missed something else, something a bit more sublime that no one ever seems to mention. Something which would not work with a hardcover.
The B/X books had been drilled with a 3 hole punch and designed so you could take them apart and keep them in a binder. As it says on page B3, at the front of the basic rulebook…
“Each rule booklet is drilled with holes, so that if desired, the pages may be cut apart and rearranged in a ring binder. To cut the pages apart either scissors or a razor knife and a ruler may be used. Whenever possible, the other rule booklets will be divided into the same eight parts to make them easy to combine into one larger set of rules. Every page of the D&D BASIC rules are numbered B#, and each page also lists the section it is from.”
Sure enough, each page tells you what section it belongs to, and this was carried over into the Expert manual. As well as a caveat that T$R is not responsible for you damaging your own books by following their advice. As a kid, I noticed the three hole punches. I even went on to massacre many of my other gaming books by trying to punch holes in them, sometimes rather messily.
(hey, give me a break, I was only in the 6th grade)
But somehow I missed the part about taking the books apart or why anyone would ever want to. I just popped whole books into a binder and beamed with a genuine lack of clue.
Then I moved onto AD&D.
Because it’s Advanced!
Assuming my hunches are true, the grand vision wrapped up in these punch holes which we may have missed is the idea that the game should grow with the group that plays it, that people should be home-brewing rules and tailoring what they have towards their own use, without any regard to how people may be playing it across town, out of state, or around the world.
For most people in the early 80’s, games still came in a Parker Brothers box. They were iconic, unmoving, unchanging, oblivious to the desires of the people who played them. The kids who played SORRY! in the 1950’s would play the same exact game as senior citizens many decades later.
(yes, Sorry! Teaching generations of kids that it's perfectly okay to be total dicks to each other just so long as you apologize afterwards)
D&D was different. It didn’t have a board. It could go anywhere and do anything. B/X D&D took this one step further by creating a rule book which was just as unbound as the rules themselves. If we had bothered to slice apart our rulebooks and added to them as we went, this would have created a tome, a grimoire filled with tabbed separators for magic, monsters, treasure and characters. There would be pages hanging out of it like lunchmeat in a dagwood sandwich. It would grow to become a crazy rag-tag representation of the world, a unique artifact of our imaginations at work held together by glue stick, mucilage and page reinforcement rings. And that would be a good thing.
Think of the way people approach tabletop role playing games. Someone on the B/X design team must have noticed this right off the bat. Beginning players want simple games. Give me a pre-made character, tell me what dice to roll and I will pick up the rest along the way. This is the reason why traditional characters begin at first level and work their way upwards. It’s not because 1st level is the easiest (it isn’t). It 's because first level is the least complicated of all the levels to run. Here is the rub though, as rules are acquired and come to be understood they also lose their compelling nature. People start to wonder what else can be done with the game. How about swimming, spelunking or wilderness survival? How do I raise an army? How do I manage a kingdom? What other creatures are there besides orcs, goblins and skeletons? Being a fighter is boring. What other classes can I play? Races? Multi-classes? Complexity adds interest.
Yet, it is only a percieved complexity brought about by that ever-increasing binder of stuff. Someone new to the group, shown the teetering collection of “rules” would probably run away screaming and rightfully so. But for those who had been there from the start, who slowly waded into the system, picking it up in bits and pieces, it all makes perfect sense.
(just don't try to play it like jenga)
Alhough it doesn't say it anywhere, B/X D&D is a game designed to be added to by its players. In theory, you could even reset the B/X D&D system, to let a new and different game world grow out of it, one very different from the one before. All you needed was another booklet to slice apart and a new binder to keep it all in.
Of course, none of this would have made T$R a dime. It may have even cost them money through production fees and complaints about kids destroying their own books probably didn't sit well either. From what I’ve been able to gather from the internet (and thanks to everyone who responded to my queries) The punching began just before B/X D&D with a number of what you might call support modules for AD&D notably the Rogues Gallery and the Monster & Treasure assortment. My copy of the Rogues Gallery was published in 1980 and it mentions B1.) In Search of the Unknown but doesn’t list B2.) Keep on the Borderlands on the back cover, so I think it’s safe to assume that the Gallery came first. Some copies of Star Frontiers came with three-hole punching but there is nothing in the rules which acknowledges it or recommends taking the book apart (aside from some reference material in the center of the expanded rule book). The last punched product from the golden age seems to be the Dungeon Masters Adventure Log from 1983, which on the first page states...
These sheets have been drilled for use in a three -ringed binder but have not been perforated for removal. Do not tear these pages out. It is intended that all pages remain together to proveide an ongoing history of a campaign.
Yeah, there must have been complaints. After that you have to skip ahead almost a decade to get to the Monsterous Compendium for AD&D 2nd edition. I missed this one. Many claim its pages were weak and the books were prone to falling apart. So, so much for that.
All of which makes me think of the endless sluice flow of gaming material that floods the market on a regular basis. As I write, people have started to show some fatigue with D&D 5e and many are making the leap onto that bright and shiny new thing from Paizo called Starfinder. Just a few months out of the gate and there are at least fifteen different books you can buy for it. Financially, I'm sure it is essential for the companies to produce as much as possible as quickly as possible before the buzz gives out, yet I'm just not sure if it is all that great for the games themselves. There is no wading into it, no personal involvement. Like a trip to Disney world, it's not actually something you helped create. It's just a nice looking place you had some fun at while away on staycation.
There's definitely something missing.
Lacking.
Maybe.
Maybe what we need is not another great new game system or a revamping of an old one, but just a better binding system for the one we have been playing. A better way to organize all the stuff that goes into the games we love. One that won't fall apart if you drop it in the hall.
I’ll have to think about that.
Quick Addendum! Tim tells me not to forget that the Rolemaster Standard System books were drilled for holes. Oh. Wait. Just like he's written down there in the comments section. Okay, so, nevermind.
Shaun is talking about DM-ing a party which has just encountered the vampire at the end of the mud room - the one with the giant discs hanging from chains. The encounter went well enough for the vampire, not so well for the players who were forced to rout.
After the encounter was over, one of Shaun’s players wondered if the vampire’s charm powers should have worked on his character because he was a dwarf and dwarves are short while vampires (of the - Vlad vants to suck your blaad - sort) are typically tall. The DM did mention the need to make eye contact for the power to work and the two were not exactly standing eye to eye.
Around minute 33 in the video, Shaun gets exasperated and says roughly this, “so, remember your players are a lot of the time thinking from - they’re taking in all of these realistic factors - you know I’m coming at it from the rules. They’re coming at it from you know, ‘would this really have happened’ players are always looking for an advantage for their characters, let’s just be honest, so I just kinda thought about it, and there is nothing which says different sized characters cannot look each other in the eye.”
I’m not here to hop on Shaun. I have really enjoyed his adventure coverage, and I do agree with him in that a vampire could easily stoop down to look the dwarf in the eyes. What interests me here is the disconnect between reality and the rules and how Shaun has chosen to handle it. With every intervention of reality he heads to the rule books to see how they say it should be handled. This is something which has irked me from the very beginning, as in from the first game of D&D I ever played. It’s something which has always been there and simply never seems to go away.
Here is the problem as I see it.
Players often don’t know the rules of the games they play and this is a good thing. It doesn’t take too much knowledge of “the way the game is supposed to be played” to turn an ordinary player into a rules lawyer who will suck the life out of a game quicker than any vampire. In my world, the perfect player understands what is on their character sheet and how to make it work within the context of the system. After that they do what many of us old school gamers have been doing since the latter half of the last century - we play by way of what we know of reality to handle the rest.
(The Rules Lawyer Rises from his Stack of Books)
Dungeon Masters - it is assumed - do know the rules or at least are willing to stop and look them up when needed. This is great, except that every time a DM does this it is like hitting the pause button on a movie everyone is trying to watch. It wastes times and sparks contention, especially since what the DM often finds is still something which needs to be jury-rigged to fit the situation at hand.
So why bother?
Because of his need to play by the rules, Shaun wasted valuable time and mental energy milling over everything he knew of the game, searching for something which might apply before going with the obvious: the vampire stoops down to look the dwarf in the eyes.
If this were my game, the dwarven player would probably have squeaked out, “I close my eyes and look away!” Which is where I would think - sure, why not?, if it works for a medusa why not a vampire - and say, “alright, give me a dex check to see if you can do it in time, and realize that you are now fighting blindly.”
The dwarven player, knowing a to-hit penalty is hot on his heels would then say, “um, but isn’t this corridor super narrow? If no one can get past me to help fight him, how could I miss with my attack. I mean, he’s right there in front of me.”
To which I would say, “alright, nix the blind fighting but you’re still going to have to give me a dex check.”
Reality beats rules.
Consider how much time it would take to go through the books and find justification for every little needling thing mentioned in my expansion on this encounter. It could easily turn a few seconds into an hour without returning any extra value to the game.
So, why do we play by the rules?
Consistency? Fair play? Time honored tradition? Learned reflex action? Bragging Rights? Is it because we are afraid that if we make it through White Plume Mountain without playing Rules As Written people will accuse us of cheating?
If you are playing - reality beats rules - you are still playing by way of some very serious rules, aka all that we know of reality. If anything, playing this way more than validates your claim to conquest than does someone who finagles their way to victory through loopholes and oversites haphazardly printed in the rule books.
Yes Gerry, I am talking about the Dust of Sneezing and Choking.
I have not forgotten.
We play by the rules in the books because many of us, especially the old school guys, are instinctively tuned to treat this kind of play as a sport. Yes, it has been written over and over that there are no winners or losers in role playing games. Which, of course, does nothing to explain why good old fashioned AD&D was fraught with competitive modules and modules with tournament rules assigning points to actions so at the end of an adventure we could all look back, tally up our numbers, and figure out who the best player was. But whaddyagonna do?
(In truth, I hate the whole obligatory lets pepper the blog post with images only remotely related to the text so it doesn't look like a big wall of wordage, but whaddyagonna do?)
Maybe a case can be made for playing Rules As Written in order to experience a game as it was originally conceived. Maybe the system itself has an underlying pattern of rule interactions which will be disrupted if one of them is left out. But, is it really worth it?
The biggest enemy of the table top role playing game, aside from people being unable to show up, is time suck. White Plume Mountain is one of my all time favorite adventures. I played it after-school in Junior High during the early 80’s. It probably took us four or five sessions to clean the mountain out. Did we play by the rules? I’m sure we thought we did, but with AD&D you never could tell. Shane is currently on his eleventh session and his players haven't even gotten to the crab bubble yet. Knowing who we were at twelve and thirteen years old, if we had played that closely to the rules and taken that much time to get through the mountain, I fear we would have died of boredom before it was over.
And that is not the way to win these kinds of games.
Wow, what a big beautiful pantload of possibility. I’m not being snide. I’m actually trying to be honest and somewhat level-headed about this, but isn’t it just like D&D to produce something which looks really good on the surface but is clunky and - dare I say - medieval beneath the frosting?
I was actually worried about going to the site. By all means it sounds a lot like what I have been doing with the Agama and what Mark Abrams has been doing with hisElthos Project. In light of it all, we’re just field mice scurrying from the shadow of a lumbering Tarrasque who for some reason or another has chosen to wander into our favorite pasture. It is a big deal, because it is D&D and like it or not, what D&D does the rest of the TTRPG world needs to react to. Honestly, I do think that what D&D Beyond is attempting to do is the future of the hobby.
But wow, what a mess.
EFFICIENCY IS MEASURED IN MOUSE CLICKS. As in a lack thereof. This is my own personal law of web design. The more mouse clicks it takes to do anything the less likely anyone will be willing to do it. D&D Beyond has you constantly clicking on needless things. There are green plus signs all over the place and these really should be something that floats downward when you mouse over them. Instead you end up clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking.
DUDE, WHERE’S MY STUFF?
It is fairly easy to switch between characters. Two clicks and you’re done. However, I created a magical item called the Abacus of Awesomeness (it’s solar powered!) and for a while I could not figure out how to get back to it. There is a menu item for “My Characters” under Characters so you would think that there would be a “My Items” link under Items where the “Create a Magic Item” link is. No. Instead you have to go to “My Homebrew Creations” under “My Content.”
So much for pattern recognition.
For the life of me I still cannot figure out how to give the Abacus of Awesomeness to Pidgeon Head, my Aaracokra (Aracokera? Arakocra? Let’s just call it what it is - a Kenku) Paladin. The manage equipment panel is laughably inept. The three green plus buttons for “Attuned Magical Items” makes about as much sense as the three shells from Demolition Man.
Adding equipment is a chore. Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Click. Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Click. Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Click. Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Click. Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Click.
How many suits of armor does there need to be in this game? Why does Armor of Vulnerability even exist? Do I sound like my dad when he first had to figure out how voice mail worked?
Yes, I guess I do.
QUESTION MARKS?
The site is peppered with little black question marks that provide insight in the form of a pop-up hint. Kudos for that, except they never seem to be where you need them to be. Thank you D&D Beyond for defining the word “Description” I was truly lost on that one. Now how about explaining the “Other Modifier” boxes in character abilities. Or how to add the Abacus of Awesomeness to my Aarakenku?
Another thing they forgot to do is put a half second delay on the mouse-over of the hint display. This keeps tips from popping up whenever you mouse over them. Trivial detail, but these things will gang up on you.
THE STUPIDITY OF THE SMART PHONE STRIKES AGAIN.
On the whole, aside from a need to be pretty (because it’s all about being pretty these days), I think many of D&D Beyond’s design problems stem from the need to work on a smartphone as well as a laptop and in some archaic corners of the world a desktop computer (remember those?). There are just some things ill-fitted to a postage stamp sized screen and designing stuff for a role playing game definitely feels like one of them.
It was a rainy day and we had a box of “Duncan Hines Decadent Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcake Mix” collecting dust in the cupboard. I opened the box to find two bags, the bigger of which was frosting mix. The batter mix was dinky. Not a good sign.
Oh well, I whipped it all up to create a pink slop tasting strangely reminiscent of Froot Loops. Thinking it needed some help, I chopped up some strawberries and mixed them in. It created just enough batter to cover the bottoms of two cake tins. In the oven they went.
While the cake was cooking I turned my attention to the frosting. The white bag? It was basically powdered sugar. Blended with a stick of softened butter and some water it created a substance resembling frosting but one so sickeningly sweet it actually hurt to eat it.
Knowing this would not do, I warmed up a block of cream cheese and blended it in with the juice of a lime. Better. It created something like a key lime frosting, yet it was still missing something. I bopped around the kitchen trying to figure out what. Maple Syrup? Cumin? Oregano? Vanilla Extract? Then I saw it, a tall bottle of a dark brown fluid with a bright golden cephalopod on the label.
If you don’t know already, Fish Sauce is fermented anchovy juice. It smells like King Kong’s armpit and tastes like the bottom of a dead fish tank, but in small amounts it can provide an amazing sense of depth to anything it is added to.
I tossed in a teaspoon and then another, test tasting both times. The general rule with fish sauce is if you add so much that people can tell it is in there then you’ve added too much. Of course, once you have added too much fish sauce there is no way to get it back out.
Just for good measure I tossed in a third teaspoon and then a small splash.
Taste….
The frosting is fantastic!!!!!
The cake came out. The frosting went on. What I ended up with was a very low, two layer tart-like strawberry cake which was a hit with everyone who tried a slice. I didn’t tell anyone the secret ingredient. For all they knew Duncan Hines Decadent Cake Mixes were bliss in a box. So....
What does this have to do with anything?
It has to do with the questionable sage-old advice of Know Your Audience. Not once during the making of the cake did I stop to think about who might be eating it. All of the taste judgments were my own and largely done without a thought. The only time I came close to second guessing my embellishments was with the fish sauce. I know my sister hates the stuff. Thanks to a bad encounter with a Fillet-O-Fish circa 1981, she cannot stand anything which comes from the sea. However, she also lives seven states away, and she probably still would have loved it because there was nothing fishy about the frosting. Nothing about the cake even remotely smacked of anchovies. Now if I had opened up a tin and laid the little fishes on top, pizza style, you probably wouldn’t be reading this because I would be locked away in an insane asylum.
When it comes to writing, whether it be for a story or a game, I step into the bubble of that world and separate myself from that big tangled mess of publishing and audiences and sales figures and such. I concentrate on making whatever it is the best I can by way of what I know. I simply cannot think creatively and also think about what my audience may think of it at the same time, not that I even know who my audience is to begin with. Duncan Hines may have millions to blow on focus groups and taste tests and production studies. I do not. And yet, what did all of that polling ultimately produce for them? A chintzy, bland, overly sweet cake mix which needed a whole lot of dressing up before it could even be considered edible. Anyone who buys a box on the basis of what I created is going to be sorely disappointed.
You can never truly know who your audience is. You can fool yourself into thinking that you do, but often all this does is cause a creator to file down the edges on whatever it is they are creating and lose that edge. So my alternative to Know your Audience is
Be your own Audience, but mind the Anchovies.
Being your own audience means that whatever you are creating needs to appeal to your own sensibilities above all others. Any time you find yourself writing something you don’t like but can justify by way of “this is what my audience wants.”
Just stop already.
I’m not saying you are wrong, but the world is littered with crappy things which could have been great had they been made by people who actually cared about such things. Look at the Top 40 music of pretty much any decade. Maybe you might get a handful of interesting songs, but most are just tunes made for the masses with about as much integrity as a cake mix.
Now listen to the song Big Balls by AC/DC. In it Bon Scott sounds like demoniac Winnie the Pooh. The rest of the band sounds like they just learned to play their instruments a few weeks ago. The song is not going to win any awards but the band is having so much fun it is hard not to enjoy it. Likewise, AC/DC may not be the best band of all time but the music they made was ultimately what they wanted to hear. They never sang a love ballad. They never cut a disco track. They never tried to rap. But if they had, it probably would have worked because that is what they wanted to do. AC/DC were never slaves to the fashion of the day.
But what about the Anchovies?
We all have anchovies. An anchovy is anything you love for one reason or another which other people might find distasteful. It is when dealing with anchovies that you have to realize that other people exist and that their hurt feelings may come back to haunt you.
In my novella Supernova, one of the main characters is Lt. Theresa “Tits” O'Shaughnessy. She is an anchovy. She is a blonde bombshell with big breasts and a demeanor that will never let you forget it. If you think I didn’t sweat over the thought of people reading up to her then putting down the book and swearing never to read anything I write ever again - you would be wrong. The world no longer cares for characters like Lt. Theresa "Tits" O'Shaughnessy but I was not about to give her up. She is there because the story needs her to be there. Ultimately, I did finagle the issue to make her presence a bit more palatable, but I don't think I filed off any of her edges. Only the other characters call her Tits, the author always writes O’Shaughnessy, over and over and over again (actually, I think I just wrote OS and then did a find/replace to fix it. Typing the name O’Shaughnessy is a repetitive action injury waiting to happen). She is also one of the smarter characters in the patrol. Anyone who accuses her of being a walking dumb blonde joke is playing off of their own bad attitudes rather than mine. Still. In our current climate where people are burned at the stake for making micro-aggressions against the masses - you have to mind your anchovies.
What actually got me writing today is news out of Sweden about the direction the new owners of the World of Darkness are planning on taking the game in. They want to make it grittier, darker and more realistic (gee - how original - never heard that one before), but what has everyone up in arms is a change to the vampire clan Ventrue. Apparently, they now can only survive by sucking the blood of small children.
On my shelf, I do have a number of World of Darkness game books from the 1990’s. I’ve never actually played the game, I simply like the books. If you want to understand my generation when we were crazy young 20-somethings, you could do a whole lot worse. The point for now is that I do not actually care what happens to Vampire the Masquerade or the Ventrue clan. The idea of monsters feasting on the blood of children is as old as Hansel & Gretel, quite possibly older, but it’s important to remember that in a Vampire game you play the role of the vampire, not the vampire hunter. If your favorite vampire character is of the clan Ventrue - guess what she is going to have for dinner tonight, and tomorrow night? Night after night? For the rest of eternity? If she lasts that long….
Yeah, that is going to rub people the wrong way. By all appearances this is definitely a case of mishandled anchovies. Of course, it could also be nothing more than a misconstrued message. The info was gleaned from a mission statement of sorts and enhanced by good old fashioned internet rage. In so far as I can tell it is not yet a part of the game. Who knows, maybe they will be making some changes in light of it all. Or maybe not.
Be your own Audience, but mind the Anchovies.
Because while we are all far more similar than not, those little difference can go a very long way. And not everyone loves the anchovies….
The funny thing is that I feel as if I have written this blog post a thousand times over, but the truth is I haven’t done that yet. It is just something I keep thinking about and milling over and over and telling myself I will eventually write but never do.
Until now.
I cannot say I don’t like Story Games because I have never played one. I simply don’t like the idea of them.
“But Jerry!” You theoretically think to yourself. “How can you say that! You’ve been writing fiction since you were fifteen years old! By now it should be in your blood. You, of all people. You should love story gaming!”
Nope.
Stories are boring, boring and predictable. This doesn’t necessarily make reality interesting. There wouldn’t be a need for fiction if reality was a non-stop fireworks extravaganza, but most fiction fails to work. We get the premise. We watch the plot line rise and fall. It all culminates with some big conflict at the end and then the credits roll. Wheeee. It’s like a county fair roller coaster ride, but without the vaguely threatening advice to keep your head and arms inside the vehicle at all times. You’ve ridden this ride a thousand times before and will ride it a thousand times again. If it causes you to puke with excitement then you are probably an eight year old.
THE TWO FACTORS
Ultimately, there are two factors which make a story rise above the rest. The first is delivery, how the author chooses to put it into words. What the creator chooses to show and what they choose to leave out. This a game can give advice on but is probably best left untouched by the rules. I mean, look at Dungeon World. It is actually a pretty interesting system up to the point where it tries to control the way you and your friends converse. The whole Moves business. For me that is where Dungeon World drives off a cliff and makes a flaming plummet into the gully of somewhat creepy control-freak hipsterism.
The second factor is the semblance of a real event. I don’t mean Batman grittiness or the dull pseudo-intellectual posturing of countless Oscar best picture awards. That is cosmetic. That is about using an appearance of reality to dress up a wholly fictional pig (and when is reality ever as dark and gritty as Batman? Or even as dull and gray as any superhero movie these days? Different topic for some other time).
The semblance of a real event is all about getting people to accept what is being portrayed as if it were actually happening. Magic and super-powers are not real but they can be acceptable just so long as everything else continues to treat them as if they were real. Where a game or a story falters is usually where it fails to do this.
Why?
It falters because our imagination doesn’t want unreality to succeed. The human imagination may be able to visualize and rationalize some pretty incredible stuff, but ultimately it only cares about reality.
The imagination does not exist to entertain us.
It exists to let you and I see through real-life problems before they occur and become serious real-life fuck-ups. Using the imagination to think of the unthinkable registers as fun because ultimately this is the exercise of a time-tested survival mechanism. If we happen to dress it up in unicorns and rainbows - fine - just so long as the imagination gets to entertain itself by treating the proposed situation as a real life occurrence, then it will pat us on the head and reward us with that sweet sweet sense of fun.
HIGH PLAINS SAMURAI
The game that has me writing this rainy dull morning is a little story-telling game currently being kickstarted called High Plains Samurai. Since I am about to kick it in the proverbial nuts I’ll have to include a link to it and of course donate to it. Maybe you should to. It’s actually a pretty interesting concept - Samurai, Gangsters, Gunslingers and Barbarians in a Steam-Punk Post-Apocalyptic future.
The beef I have with HPS lies in the ScreenPlay engine where, to borrow directly from the kickstarter itself….
“Players take on the role of Writers working with the Director to draft complete stories of action, suspense, horror, and survival. Through their lead characters, Writers actively drive the story and create epic action sequences as the central storytellers; the Director reacts to their descriptions while simultaneously challenging their characters along the way. For every description moving the story forward, another player will deliver its outcome to push it further, react to events, and embellish details with camera angles, special effects, even a character's demise.”
Granted this doesn’t stray too far from the traditional tabletop RPG setup of Game Master and Player Characters but it does change the intention of the game itself. You are no longer playing What If, unless of course the what if premise is “what if we were writers and directors making a b-movie in Hollywood?” but without the whole matter of dealing with an out of control cocaine addiction, a six-figure divorce, and a screaming inferiority complex.
No. Ultimately you are trying to create a puppet show. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this were on film,” replaces “Wouldn’t it be cool if this were real.”
HPS promises high-octane, wire-fu action, which makes me think of the tree-top fight from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or the Jedi fight scenes from the Star Wars Prequels. They are impressive feats of film work but ultimately they ring hollow because you know we are only seeing them because some team of writers and directors checked the progress of the film and decided that at that point an eye candy filled fight scene was needed to keep things interesting.
It is just hard to get engrossed when you know all that is going on, when the outcome has already been decided in advance because one character is the hero of the movie and the others are not.
To be engrossed we need to think of all that is happening as if it were actually happening. We care about the characters because they are relatable and their survival is not guaranteed. We need to know what they are capable of and why the characters choose to ignore or capitalize on those capabilities.
And it all needs to make sense.
THE MAKING OF JAWS
A few days ago I rewatched for the n-teenth time the 1974 Spielberg classic JAWS. It’s become a start of summer tradition around here. JAWS is not the perfect movie but god knows it does come close. The DVD also includes a bonus feature called “The Making of JAWS” which I had never seen before, so this was a first for me.
JAWS was a movie plagued by problems from beginning to end. Everything gave Spielberg grief - the weather, the actors guild, the people of Martha’s Vineyards, the robotic shark - to the point where the movie almost did not get made. Interestingly enough, in watching the Making of JAWS I couldn’t help but feel that if everything had gone according to plan they would not have made nearly as good a movie. You would have seen much more of the shark, far more scenes of people being eaten, and far fewer scenes of the little things which make it such an interesting film - but are really just there to eat up time left open by the malfunctioning shark: Chief Brody mugging it up with his son, the shark hunters hamming it up below the deck of the Orca, the mayor talking about how much he cares for the people of Amity Island while blindly trotting through the middle of a high school marching band - these sort of things are normally left on the cutting room floor because they do not fit the bill of “what people come to see.” With us, their presence in the movie registers as out of place. This increases the sense of uncertainty which in turn increases the dramatic tension which we the viewers feel humming in our bones as we sit there and wonder if it will all end in the way that we expect it will end.
JAWS does end in the way you expect it to end,
But it’s not the ending that makes JAWS great. It is that sense of uncertainty.
They're definitely going to need a bigger boat.
Certainty is boredom incarnate.
The same goes for games. If you don’t have the threat of a possible TPK looming under the dark waters of your game like a great white shark with cold dead eyes and the iron scent of blood in its snout, then it won’t carry much weight. Who knows? Maybe High Plains Samurai has this. It does entail dice rolling after all. I guess there is only one way to find out….
What can I say?
The Red EFT failed, and yet it succeeded.
Back in February I finished the digitalverse project (to the typical field full of crickets that all of my web projects tend to encounter, thank you) and barreled head-long into what I had been wanting to work on the whole time, namely finishing up my table top rpg The Red EFT.
In the four months since then I have re-written the entire thing and rebuilt the site I use to manage its resources. And if that doesn’t sound like a ton of work then it’s time for Miracle Ear. The only problem is that in the last few weeks I have come to the realization that what I’ve created is not really the Red EFT.
A Three Hour Tour.
The Red EFT began a little over two years ago with the intention of creating a mini-system which was complete and yet no bigger than 10 pages in length. At the time the game system I was working on was called the AGAMA and it was huge multi-book affair that in no way could be condescended to just ten pages. So I thought creating the Red EFT would be a nice diversion, a lark, a fling, an exercise, a three hour tour….
It was going to be small, really, really, finger-pinchingly small. Characters could be squeezed onto index cards. There would only be three abilities - Mind, Body, Spirit - and then a die roll for your calling. If you were a wizard then you rolled this die for all things wizardly and that covered it. No endless lists of spells or modifiers. All magic was wish magic and you and the GM figured it out on the spot. The game was not supposed to be accurate just fast, really really fast. Like an actual red eft, it would be small cute and quick. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Actually, at 10 pages it turned out to be quite boring, like a game of Gauntlet on a glitchy arcade machine.
Wizard Needs Food, Badly.
The game was too short. The limit was stifling, made it lackluster, colorless, forgettable. I was about ready to ditch the whole project and go back to working on the Agama when I noticed someone on Google+ launching something called the B/X Challenge: write an entire game system in 64 pages or less, like the original Tom Moldvay Basic D&D booklet. I’m not one for internet challenges, but I do love me some B/X D&D, and so I changed my goals. The Red EFT would now be a complete system in 64 pages or less. Sure. No problem. This should be easy!
If anything, the expanded page limit complexified the process even more. Wizards could have spells again, but what spells would those be? How would the new system deal with the tug of war between power and resources? Is encumbrance actually worth it?
For help I turned to the Agama and there the unthinkable happened. Right in the middle of a file save Apache Open Office crashed and took the entire players handbook - the core rulebook - with it.
My head is a bit like a pressure cooker. You can pack pressure up there and it will contain it, but at some point its got to blow and when it does that steam will shoot a mile high.
With furious vengeance I began to rewrite the Agama players handbook. Unfortunately, my closest backup was over a year old. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! The Agama was no more. I was going to kill it. Kill it dead! Kill it with fire! There was only going to be the Red EFT, and that was going to be the last goddamn game I would ever write. I’m sick of this shit!
The Big Rewrite.
And I did just that. Only, somewhere along the way I either forgot about or simply stopped caring about the whole 64 page B/X challenge. I reasoned my way out of the base three abilities. I brought back things like encumbrance because as much as people hate encumbrance it simply makes sense. I did eventually rewrite the players handbook as well as the game masters guide, and the world books and the character books and pretty much everything else I had ever created for the Agama system.
Doh.
Yeah. Without even realizing it, I had once again totally rewritten my main game system. Something I have been doing and swearing I would stop doing since circa 1992. All that was left was to come up with a new name for it. So far the system has been called….
The Game.
The Theater of the Adsurb.
The ToAd.
Tales of Adventure (versions 1, 2 and 3).
The Model Reality Kit.
The Agama.
The Red EFT.
But I decided not to. Granted, the game is now quite different from what it had been before all of this Red EFT madness began, I like calling it the AGAMA. It’s not an acronym. It’s actually a reference to a small colorful lizard.
I think I just like the sound of the word. I like the way it rolls off the tongue when used in conversation.
“Hey Dave, what’s happening?”
“Oh, we’re going to play some Agama this weekend. Wanna come?”
“What’s the Agama?”
“That’s the name of the game system. The game itself is something I’ve been building called Wayward Suns. It’s Cowboys vs Ancient Egyptians on a strange alien planet in the Alpha Centauri system. A lot of six-gun shoot-em ups with weird reptilian creatures.”
“Alright. Sounds cool. I’ll be there, what time?”
On top of it all, I am still somewhat taken by the original vision of the Red EFT: the idea of a quick little starter game built around the principles of the Agama that can be given away for free. You know, something for the kids to have fun with :-)
Someday.
Someday, I will buckle down and do it, but for right now I think it’s best to concentrate on finishing the flagship product before creating a scaled down version of it.
Yesterday, I fell off the roof.
It hurt.
Holy fuck did it hurt.
I haven’t felt pain like that in years.
It all started a couple of weeks ago when my sister’s family came for a visit. My brother-in-law (and don’t these stories always seem to start with a brother-in-law somewhere) was watching a football game and remarked about how bad the picture was. I don’t watch TV much and when I do I usually watch Hulu or Netflix, but Scott was right. The signal was as scrappy as a youtube video from a decade ago. The commercials in between the game were fine but the feed of the game itself were so pixellated you couldn’t make out the score.
And it was on all the channels. So I decided to cut the cable and give Comcast the boot. I looked around and ended up buying a Mohu Sky 60 Outdoor HDTV Antenna. It has a beautiful picture and if you can get by with PBS and Network TV I can’t recommend it enough. However, you will have to go up on the roof to install it.
In a way, I should have seen the fall coming. Premonition alarms had been going off all over the place. The day before yesterday I had written the Politics of Pricing blog post which prominently features a guy falling through the air, a screen grab from the New Order video Bizarre Love Triangle which is filled with people in suits flying through the air as if they had just flung themselves off a skyscraper, a video I had playing on a loop in the background while writing the post.
While tacking up the cable I even paused to look over the edge of the roof and wonder how much damage I would take if I were to - I don’t know - suddenly and inexplicably somersault over the edge of it. In the Red EFT this calls for a Save Vs Gravity. You take 1 hp of damage per foot fallen, in this case 10 to 12 feet, which is then ameliorated by a Body check. Fail and you take full damage. A terrible fail does double damage. A critical fail does triple. Succeed and you take less. Damage type is determined by what you land on. In my case, the ladder itself, which I think qualifies as blunt damage.
I even remember scoffing at the Mohu instruction manual with its warnings to never work alone and to always have someone holding the ladder you are working on. I’ve been up and down off the roof countless times.
Silly manual, I know exactly what I’m doing….
What eventually got the better of me was an aging plastic rain gutter the ladder had been propped up against. No problem going up, but on a trip down the plastic cracked. It was just enough to upset the footing of the ladder and send it flying out from under me. I went down, caught the edge of roof with my rib cage, flipped over backwards and plummeted. My butt hit the deck hard enough to crack a plank in it like a karate master.
First came shock. Surprise from the simple notion that I had done something as stupid as fallen off the roof. Quick on its coattails was an immense wave of pain and swearing, enough swearing that in an earlier age I would have landed myself on Santa’s naughty list for at least a decade. Finally, I started to grab around, check all the parts which were hurting (pretty much everything), and then laughed, happy to find nothing broken. Bruised all to fucking hell, ripped to shit (this is Florida, I was wearing shorts), but nothing broken. Thank God.
I wandered inside for some iodine and bandages, then wandered back outside to finish the job. Which is why I am actually writing this post. In role playing games there has been an endless debate over the after effects of damage. Usually, it comes down to one of two methods. The first is the Gygaxian method where you simply ignore it until that last hit point is gone and you die. The other is a more modern method where taking damage causes your character to take performance hits until you curl up and die. Normally I would say that the latter is the more realistic and that the Gygaxian method is just a necessary evil of a table-top game. In retrospect? Neither works.
Granted there was a period in which I was stunned by the damage (something that I don’t ever recall happening in an RPG), but after that wore off I found myself swept up by a surge of adrenaline and endorphins which would last for the rest of the afternoon. Instead of a performance hit, my character should have taken a performance boost. I found myself unable to cool down. After patching myself up, I immediately went back out, put up the ladder in a safer location, and finished the installation. When that was over I was still spinning like top so I took the dog out for a nice long walk, even though the bruises on my legs were turning as purple as plums.
It wasn’t until later in the evening that a certain stiffness would begin to set in. Now, at 7 on a Sunday morning, I am as rigid as a board. Typing is tough and it takes the help of my right hand to bend the fingers of my left hand into the middle finger I would gladly give to Comcast if they could see such things. Now my character would experience a performance hit.
So, to a degree, I have to side with the Gygaxian method. Our bodies instinctively see any damage taken as a threat to its existence and will respond with whatever it takes to make sure we continue to survive.
Of course, it could also be that I didn’t take enough damage. If I had broken a leg in that fall and sat up to find a femur sticking out of my leg, spurting blood like a fountain? Yeah, fuck that. I would have called it a day.
Then there is also the mechanics. How do you quantify all of this without unbalancing the rest of the system? How do you figure out when that moment of excitement ends and the stiffness begins? How much of a penalty should be taken? And is this even worth all the overhead in game time it would take to implement such details at the table? After all, it was just a simple fall, barely a footnote in most adventures. In the end, I have to side with the Gygaxian method. If not for the reality of it all then for the convenience.
Recently, I have been watching Dr. Lewis Pulsipher's videos on how to price downloadable digital content. And no I did not throw myself off a bridge right afterwards.
Tempted, but no. . . .
I’m more about books than video games, but this did push me to think about the never-ending headache which is the matter of figuring out what to ask for what you create. Striking the right balance is no easy feat. Too far to the cheap side and people will dismiss it as crap. Too far to the expense and they will laugh in your face. The margin seems to be growing thinner every day. Like a tightrope walk across a razor wire, you have to wonder what will happen when the two sides eventually cross and the price which once was too cheap becomes too expensive.
Enjoy the freefall.
A TALE OF TWO PRICES
It seems to me that when it comes to prices every product has two of them, a Value Price and a Buying Price.
The value price is a static price. It is the most anyone could be expected to pay for an item. Its real purpose is to give an impression of worth. The prices printed on dust jackets are value prices.
The buying price is a flexible one. It is set by the economic climate and the state of a product’s lifespan. The .99 cent sticker slapped on the dust jacket of a book relegated to the remainders table? That is a buying price and a miserable one at that.
The problem with the internet is that it runs like a vending machine. You post your book for sale, set the price, and only occasionally check in to see how it is doing. In many ways, this set and forget method is a good thing. You can sell stuff without having to be present to make the transaction. You can also be passed over by millions and left clueless as to why, which is what I think instigates the notorious race to the bottom.
My book isn’t selling. It must be that the price is too high.
I’ll drop it down as low as it can go and make up for the loss with bulk sales.
Bulk sales which never come because your internet price is both a value and a buy price. At $0.99 cents you have relegated it to the trash bin. Unless people know that your book should retail at $14.95 they’re not going to be excited to find it for $0.99 cents.
Maybe this is why coupons and special promotions are so important. They allow you to maintain the appearance of value while enticing people to buy at a reduced price. Which would you rather buy? A book that normally sells for $14.95 but today can be had for $4.95. Or a book that always seems to sell for $0.99?
BE HONEST NOT MODEST
Publishing has a lot in common with fishing. To be a good fisherman you have to go where you know the fish hang out. You have to offer them something which resembles what they normally eat. You let them nibble the bait a bit before setting the hook. Then you drag your reader into the boat, skin and gut ‘em and fry them up for dinner.
Kidding!
Although this also shows where the parallel stops. A fish you only catch once. A reader you want to catch over and over and over again and have them happy to come back for more.
Personally, I think you should write for yourself and then your friends, and maybe if it makes sense you should sand off one or two rough edges to make your work more palatable to that big effluvial mess known as the market. At least that way you will never disappoint those who matter most. Ultimately though, you do have to go to the market, see what is for sale and decide where you want your book to sit. If you notice that most of the ebooks you love and respect are priced between $8 and $12. That is where you want to be.
But my book isn’t worth $8. It’s not good enough.
I would pay $2.99 for it, but that’s about it.
Then why are you publishing it? It’s obviously not done yet. Is it a stinky cover? Get a new one. Is it unpolished writing? Do another rewrite. If the whole thing simply sucks then consider it practice. Push it aside.Do not publish it. If you can come back to it later and build it up to something worth publishing then do so. Otherwise, you are doing yourself a favor by leaving it behind.
Modesty is a good thing. It keeps people from coming across like self-aggrandizing jerks. But it can also be creatively stifling. Overly modest people often start to believe the effacing they do to themselves, that their place in the world is beneath greater people. They repeat this belief until they conform to it and ultimately are left with a low level of being with no way out. It is just as much a trap as bragging way above and beyond the obvious.
Modest or immodest? I think the most important thing is remain honest. When it comes to the end point of publication I think writers need to step away from themselves, forget all the work they have done or what they may be asking themselves to continue doing and just look at the work objectively. See it as someone who just came across it on the internet.
Honestly, how much does it seem to be worth?
And what could be done to make it worth more? As in those aspects you can control. Waving a magic wand and turning yourself into Stephen King doesn’t count.
NO SILVER BULLETS
It is also good to realize that there is no silver bullet price, no point where you can price your work and make automatic sales. The sale will come down to how good your work seems when first encountered. Continued success relies on how good it actually is. We may want the internet to change this but it never will. Even with kickstarters which sell promises instead of product, failure to deliver will eventually come back to kick the kickstarter in the butt. It's just a matter of time.
The world is a very unfair place. Established authors will continue to fart on paper and have it sell millions while unrecognized geniuses panhandle the interstate exits. But anyone who looks back at their grand failures to realize that they tried hard and what they created did deserve to succeed. They will at least find contentment, if not continued hope for the future. The author who looks back to find a bunch of half-baked works with ugly covers and reams of scrappy typo-ridden pages, all priced to sell at bottom of the barrel prices?
If you haven't picked up on this already, god knows I seem to sound off on it endlessly (at least to myself) I FUCKING HATE WORD LIMITS. It doesn't matter if this is "tell a story in 500 words or less" or "your story must be 2,000 words maximum" or "let's write a one page dungeon."
IT IS A STUPID GOAL TO SHOOT FOR.
And yes that is me shouting at you like a crazed subway lunatic with a drippy six-inch meatball parmesan.
Yet, at the same time, I will admit that there is no glory in splatting down words for words sake. Whatever you write, you should use as many words as you need to evoke an idea, not a word more and not a word less. As James V West pointed out, Isle of the Lizard God and The Shattered Temple are absolutely fantastic one page dungeons. They are the placemats you will find lying in wait for you under the greatest Grand Slam breakfast in Valhalla. But, if you were to play them with your friends and do it right if not rules as written you still would find yourself flipping through a bunch of books and spending valuable in-game time doing all those things that a normal adventure module should have already done for you. Both would only be improved by a few more pages of the stuff they might force me to waste time looking up.
Adventure modules are not novels. You can curl up with them for a good long read on a cold winter's night, but they are actually reference materials, things you glance at during a game. I like mine with big fat margins providing a lot of white space I can write notes in. Yes. Fat margined modules make the rocking world go round! The fewer long passages of text they contain the better they generally run. At the same time, a good adventure module should also have some substance to it. It should be there to help you create a sense of place, maybe even help you describe that dangerous corner of the world with a few florid words in (heaven’s forbid!) a text box.
If this can be done on one sheet of paper then more power to you. Otherwise, paper is cheap. Give that adventure what it needs to breathe. Murdering your darlings for the false god of appeasing the stunted attention span of the internet is just going to cause beautiful dead babies to pile up at your feet.
