Quantity Begets Quality - 15 Room Dungeons?

Last post's discussion of quantity begetting quality and Dungeon23 got me thinking about dungeon levels.  I've been noodling around with the theory of gauntlet dungeons for checks calendar almost three years (2021 - map generation and wandering lairs.  2022 - disruptive+fodder encounter design.  2023 - thinking about blockers), and I still haven't overcome inertia, because I want what I make to be good.  But this "quantity begets quality" argument suggests that this may be entirely the wrong approach - I should try making lots of potentially-crappy dungeon levels that challenge things and see what sticks.

If one were to approach challenge dungeon construction through the lens of continuous habit, the question becomes "what's a reasonable self-contained minimal unit that I could make a habit of producing, such that I could produce them in quantity?"

I think for a challenge dungeon, it's probably small dungeon levels, not just individual rooms.  A while back I picked up the Mausolean Maze of Mondulac the Mad.  It's an interesting product but I never reviewed it properly.  It's a collection of stocked, tileable geomorphs with a "hedge maze full of undead" theme.  I like its statement of "good vanilla" as an ideal for published products.  I think it has a couple problems though.  The author adopted the constraint that the level map and key much fit on a single pair of facing pages, which forces small maps and short keys.  The most keyed items in any single geomorph is 10, and there are very few (if any) empty rooms.  It just feels very dense, and there are only a couple of 'morphs that support 1st-level characters.  If you stumble in at 1st and actually do random selection when you move from one to the next as suggested, it's going to be a very rough time.

Tileable / composable small levels as a minimum unit is a pretty promising idea.  And in "challenge dungeon" philosophy, each one can challenge one or two tactics.  For a "dungeon dimensions" or "mad wizard did it" funhouse dungeon, tiling in euclidean space is also not required for composability.  Portals and teleporters solve many problems.

So what is the right size?  I think it might be about 15 rooms.  Using B/X's or ACKS' stocking tables, this gets you something like 5 empty rooms (one with treasure), 5 monster rooms (likely one lair), 2-3 traps (one with treasure), and 2-3 specials.  This seems like about the minimum amount of stuff to get a proper stand-alone "OSR dungeoneering experience".  It's enough rooms that it could conceivably be jayquayed, there's enough monsters to maybe pick up some allies against the lair (light faction play), there's likely to be nonzero treasure from the number of empties and traps and maybe the lair.  Sufficient empty rooms to rest in, route through, or mistakenly search for traps.  If you're tiling these, they could easily each be "a lair and its sphere of influence / territory".  Obviously these ratios are a starting point and all parameters are subject to mutation and selection, but it seems about right.

I wonder if such a format is an answer to the Five Room Dungeon meme, which is too small for much jayquaying and usually run very railroady, often quantum-ogre-y, with little interest in player agency...

As for the cadence...  I could definitely see doing a 15-room dungeon level per week.  Spend a night on the concept and encounter table, a night on the map.  The 5 empty rooms are easy, just need a little dressing.  That leaves you with 10 rooms to stock in 5 days, so about two rooms a night, some of which are likely to be pretty trivial.  And if you actually managed a tiny dungeon per week minus sickness/vacation, you're looking at 50 levels a year.  If you take the best 10 of them and glue them together, you've got a 150-room "kilodungeon".  And if your players decide to hare off in some other direction, you've got plenty of "b-sides" material ready to go...

One interesting question that perhaps my old prep logs would answer is - if you're running a game concurrently with trying to do this, would one level a week be enough that you could actually "throw away" a good percentage of it?  If your players burn through 15 rooms a week, and you prep 15 rooms a week, you aren't accumulating any slack for bad experiments.  Maybe this is where the megadungeon comes into play; restocking old areas that players retread frequently might be less work than coming up with new ideas, and the pace of exploration of new areas slows as distances from the entrance increase, so your ability to accumulate a buffer increases over time?

From the logs, it looks like the most new rooms they explored in one session was eight  during the first session, and that tapered down a bit for a while as they went back and forth with a lair, and then picked up again and stabilized around five new rooms per session.  So maybe 15 rooms per week is actually enough to build up a decent lead.  On the other hand, the Dungeon23 approach of one room a day would barely have kept ahead of my old players, provided that the rate of exploration didn't drop off again.

As for actual size of a tile...  I think 16x16 is probably plenty.  Given 15 rooms or so, if the typical size is 30x30, that uses 135 of the 256 squares in a 16x16 block.  So that leaves us with plenty of space for big rooms, long hallways, secrets, etc.  And room to deviate up from 15 rooms, I suppose.  12x12 would be adequate if we were willing to commit to minimal space between rooms.  14x14 might be ideal but it's just such a weird gross number, whereas 256 is pleasingly round.  If I decide I have the wrong tilesize, oh well.  Putting little shim-zones with boring hallways in between tiles seems pretty viable.

I don't know if I want to commit to creating dungeon levels on a cadence, but at the very least embracing the ethos of "don't wait pontificating for perfection, just make stuff and some of it will be good" and fiddling with making levels is probably something I should start doing.

Truer Combat as War

Was thinking more about Chocolate Hammer's Boot Hill campaign, and I had the realization:

This is much more Combat as War than any OSR game I've run.

We may like to talk about how B/X or ACKS or whatever is combat as war because poison is save-or-die and you have to actually prepare when you go to fight vampires, but ultimately I am forced to the conclusion that it's still basically combat as sport.  It's a much rougher sport than newer editions of D&D.  It's more like baseball, if you were sometimes the Yankees and sometimes the Pittsburgh Pirates, depending on the situation, and yeah sometimes you lose hard and and people get cut from your roster; unfair/asymmetric sport with permanent consequences.  But it's not no holds barred, please enjoy your complimentary assassins combat as war.

And this sort of settles a conflict I've had.  I've had this gut feeling that if I were to run a B/X-y type game again, I'd kind of want to run it fairly clean; here's a big dungeon to explore at your own pace, your various classes have tools for dealing with particular kinds of threats, you don't really need to cheese because you have the agency to go where you want and avoid hard fights until you feel like you're ready, and in exchange I would like you to, you know, not cheese too hard.  Because presumably if your crazy plan to research broken-ass spells or flood the dungeon worked, every other wizard would've already done it, so there must be an in-world reason that they haven't, but coming up with reasons the game world isn't totally broken every week is a lot of work that I'm not spending on forward prep.  It's fire that prevents me from motion.  And being Basic-lineage D&D, the system wasn't written with rules lawyers in mind anyhow - and that's part of what's attractive about it in the first place!

Maybe the argument I want to be making here is that while any single combat in B/X might be won in a single round by a single character, possibly cheekily / by CaW means, when you zoom out and look at the expedition as a whole, it looks a lot sportier - each class does have a role to fill, each class has some combats that are theirs to carry.  I'm not sure about this thesis and maybe it warrants further thought and elaboration.

In any case, this desire for a nice clean game of pure, fundamental, elemental Basic D&D is in tension with combat as war, because combat as war says "if you're not cheating, you're not playing."

Maybe the right metaphor here is limited war vs total war.  Keegan would argue that just about every society that has warfare has invented limited war.  If goblins and adventurers come into regular conflict with each other, there will probably be some informal conventions that emerge.

Maybe my conclusion is that "having seen what combat as total war looks like in an RPG when you really commit to it, maybe I'm more OK with taking a sportier position for (Basic) D&D."

Which isn't to say that I don't also want to run a maximalist combat-as-war game - I just don't think it should be (Basic) D&D!

Mahjong a la Hamming

This post is absolutely unrelated to D&D.  It is also not a particularly sober post.

 

I was introduced to mahjong last week (first the Old Hong Kong rules, then Japanese riichi mahjong) and it is surprisingly interesting.

 

I've never gotten into a traditional (pre-20th-century) game before.  I learned a little about the theory of chess while writing a chessbot in school, but I don't really enjoy trying to play deterministic, perfect-information games many moves deep; it has always felt sort of like fencing, in trying to make the second-to-last mistake (and then your opponent makes the last mistake).  I tried to wrap my head around go briefly but that was as deterministic and perfect information as chess, with even more spooky action at a distance (pieces influencing actions across the board via laddering potential, for example).  Poker was a little more to my tastes, because it is probabilistic with hidden information, so the best you can do is math rather than tree-search to infinite depths, but the betting strategy and deception are too central for me.  How can I deceive when others expect me to deceive?  I was into blackjack as a kid, which was nice because it was partial information and random but not entirely adversarial, but not really that interesting because relatively soluble and simple.

Mahjong, though.  Like poker, it is probabilistic and partial-information.  Unlike poker, betting strategy and deceiving your opponents are not so central; reading your opponents is useful (particularly for not losing by feeding them tiles that they need), but in order to win you pretty much have to be able to "play your own game" of building up a good hand from the drip of random tiles given to you, balancing the speed with which you can get a hand to a "victory if I draw the right tile" state against the probability that that draw will happen against the value of the hand if it is drawn.  So it's a game about a partially-controlled traversal of the lattice of hands; you don't control your draws, but you do control your discards.  As with forking in chess, there's a fair bit of trying to build win-win structures into your hand; if you have a 2-2-3 of the same suit, you can turn it into 1-2-3 if you draw a 1 and discard a 2, 2-3-4 if you draw a 4 and discard a 2, and 2-2-2 if you draw a third 2 and discard the 3.  So you try to build these structures that maximize your options for capitalizing on randomness.

It reminds me of Hamming's lecture, You and Your Research (Hamming, for those unfamiliar, did computing at Los Alamos and then Bell Labs, invented the error-correcting codes whose descendants are used to detect cosmic-ray-induced bit flips in your RAM, and has a lot of stuff named after him in computing).  Hamming remarks that a lot of people think success/fame is all luck, but that "luck favors a prepared mind...  you prepare yourself by the way you lead your life from day to day, and then luck hits you...  It is luck, but it isn't luck."  The mahjong player might say that luck favors a prepared hand, and you prepare your hand by the way you discard from turn to turn.

There are a number of other odd parallels between mahjong and Hamming's talk.  Hamming discusses the Matthew Effect - those who have had success have an easier time having more success, while those who fall behind tend to fall further behind over time.  Many mahjong variants have a rule where if the dealer wins a hand, he gets more score than he would if he weren't the dealer, and he remains the dealer for the next hand.  So one success at the right time can enable a string of high-value successes.  So the Matthew Effect is built in, beyond the usual level of "oh I'm up, I can afford to absorb some losses".

Another remark Hamming makes is that it isn't enough to do good/novel work quickly, to be prepared for the lightning - you have to do the work in a way which makes it valuable.  The story he tells is about an engineering problem that he was solving, which had wider implications for the debate over the primacy of analog vs digital machines for solving certain kinds of problems.  He could have just solved the problem for his use case, but he realized he was on to something more general and more important, and put the extra work in to elaborate on that, and consequently his work was of greater value.  The parallel in mahjong is that creating a hand which satisfies the constraints for winning a round is not that hard, but a hand which only satisfies the winning constraints is of low value; it scores you few points.  Recognizing the potential for high point-value structures within the hand and bringing those to fruition yields exponentially more points.  The exponential scoring system is terrifying and wondrous; it means that you can afford to make exceedingly low-probability plays and have the expected value still work out, because the payoff can be exceedingly huge.  But I think Hamming would absolutely agree that the impact of science and engineering work is scored exponentially; he talks about how Poincaré had relativity figured out before Einstein, but his formulation wasn't as clear, while Einstein's formulation was in a relatively accessible style and that made all the difference.

The correspondences continue.  Hamming's remark that you can't be working on important problems all the time, you have to pick small, insignificant problems that will grow into important problems, parallels the strategy of growing a lone middle tile into a group.  His remarks on having a direction that you're going in and not vacillating are absolutely a problem that I have in developing hands, where I try to pursue too many directions for development at once.  His discussion of courage vs stubbornness and Shannon's willingness to hold out for good randomness in his technical work correspond to the potential big payoffs of the scoring system for holding out rather than abandoning a potentially big hand.

 

Hamming tells a story about how Bell Labs wouldn't let him have enough programmers.  Eventually this led him to ask the question if he could get the machine to do the programming, which "put me immediately at the forefront of computing.  What had seemed to be an obstacle turned out to be an asset.  Admiral Hopper has said similar."

And then in mahjong, what seem to be obstacles can often turn into assets in scoring, like pinfu (a hand with no tiles that are worth points on their own, which instead earns bonus points as a whole) or a hand with too many winds and dragons (which has the potential to become a very high-scoring "13 Orphans" hand).

"Is what you're working on important, or likely to become important?  If no, why are you working on it?"  "Is the hand structure that you're building one that lets you either win quick or win big?  If no, why are you pursuing it?"

It's just bizarre to find a game where a philosophy that I recognize as legitimate is so...  embodied.  If Hamming's views on the world are accurate, and mahjong is applied hammingism in the small, then...

There is a moment in Iain Banks' The Player of Games where the protagonist observes that the society with which he is interacting treats its central game as descriptive of life, and thinks of life in terms of the game.  I am, obviously, the rankest of novices, which makes this obvious cringe, but: I don't think I've ever met a game with the same potential to correspond to reality as mahjong seems to have.  An abstract tradgame has never hit me in the gut like this before.

Maybe part of the staying power of traditional abstract games is that like the abstractions of mathematics, you can understand more situations through their lenses / metaphors than through the lenses of more concrete games; the mahjong lens is more general than the D&D lens or the Stargrunt lens, because there are parts of the D&D lens or wargaming lens that obviously do not apply to most situations.

Perhaps when I say that perfect-information deterministic games are "not to my taste", what I really mean is that I believe that they're sort of irrelevant because life is subject to a great deal of chance and uncertainty about the world beyond just what is in the head of my opponents.  Perhaps when I say that poker is not to my taste it is because I believe that generally there are things that you can do to strengthen your own position besides communicating, that randomness isn't so strong in reality as it is in poker, so poker is likewise not a very good model of reality.

But if a traditional game does seem to correspond to reality, then one of the things which was an obstacle to me in chess, learning the opening books and studying the accumulated understanding of the game, seems much less burdensome.

Gauntlets and Embracing the Funhouse Dungeon

I was perusing my archives and came across this post on Dark Souls.  The section on gauntlets jumped out at me.  As noted previously, I've been considering trying to run an open-table OSE game, stealing bits from ACKS and elsewhere.  But I would need a dungeon.  I haven't been able to bring myself to make one.

My past dungeons have been fairly simulation-driven.  What was this place before, what was this room when it was inhabited.  And my players never really...  seemed to realize that background was there and make inferences based on it.  And because they were built to be "real", my dungeons tended to be similar to each other, most of the time.  I can point to definite similarities in the layout of the mountaintop monastery in the Bjornaborg campaign and the necromancer academy in the Shieldlands campaign, four years apart.

I think it was some combination of boredom and too much work that made me tired of making dungeons.  Rathell was a reaction against this, and I consider it a partial success - it was topologically interesting and fun to build and run NPC opposition in.  But it was too much Rathell.

Gauntlets provide an interesting out for "too much of the same".  Take a large dungeon.  Split it into "levels".  Jayquay connections between the levels.  Make the levels "test" different things.

• Class gauntlets - does your party have / have enough
• Clerics - undead (especially incorporeal), disease and poison
• Thieves - most dungeons are sort of thief-checks already.  Traps, locks, sheer surfaces, secret doors, enemies who sound alarms.
• Fighters - hard to say, because they are already so central / default.  I guess in ACKS where fighters cleave up, decent-sized groups of enemies who aren't big enough to waste a sleep on.
  
• Wizards - also hard to say, because they do too much.  Big non-undead lair fights where you need sleep, as a low-level example.
  
• Gear checks
• Ranged weapons - open areas with lots of broken terrain and pits and enemies who have ranged weapons 
• Melee - fog, lots of small rooms and tight corners
  
• Reach weapons - enemies who are dangerous to engage closely (poison blood, damage auras) or who have reach themselves
• Small weapons - confined spaces, enemies who grapple, enemies who swallow whole
  
• Iron spikes - areas with lots of portcullises and evil doors that shut by themselves unless spiked open
  
• Rope - pits
  
• Lanterns - wind that extinguishes torches (before continual light anyway)
  
• Axes, shovels, picks - wood, earthen, and stone barriers (or Barrowmaze's bricked-up doorways, for example)
  
• Lycanthropes and vampires already sort of fit this model as "gear check monsters" 
• And gargoyles and other enemies immune to nonmagic weapons
• Are shriekers and cave locusts silence 15' radius checks?
  
• Spell - maybe the right way to look at wizard checks is areas that get a lot easier if you have a particular spell available, and to consider it on a per-spell basis.  Detect Magic, Read Language, Dispel Magic, and the elemental resistances seem like sort of obvious ones.
  
• Culture / practice / adaptation checks
• Mapping - mazes, areas with lots of very similar rooms where it's easy to get lost if you don't map or do it badly
  
• Speed - areas with long hallways that take lots of time to traverse and "the park closes at sundown" areas.  Fast enemies who pursue.
  
• Encumbrance / carrying capacity - heavy treasure, heavy doors that need a lot of strength to open.
  
• Big party - 20' wide or wider hallways, where holding the line with just PCs isn't going to work
• Small party - 5' wide hallways, where large parties just get strung out and can't bring their power to bear on any particular point.
• Diplomacy - big sentient lairs who you can negotiate with but who are very dangerous if approached aggressively
• Courage / resolve - Strong but low-morale enemies, magic tricks that reward the first player to solve them (as also seen in Barrowmaze)
  
• Temperance (vs greed) - monkey traps, where the encumbrance is sufficient that if you try to take all of the loot you get got on the way out
  

And then you pick multiple.  So you might have a crypt with lots of locks and traps and undead which is a lot easier with both clerics and thieves, or a maze of narrow twisty passages full of portcullises which needs mapping, iron spikes, melee, and small parties to traverse efficiently.  And then if there's an area that your party is ill-suited for, you explore for routes that let you bypass it for areas that are better for you.

The interesting combinations are probably the ones that put you on the horns of dilemma.  Stacking both fog and lots of narrow corridors isn't very interesting, because they both encourage melee.  An area full of pits and portcullises and archers and high wind is interesting because you need a bunch of different gear and it all competes for encumbrance.

I'm not proposing to go maximalist with this.  Obviously players will find novel solutions, and that's good.  And there's no need to make every area so tightly-themed that (say) there are no living monsters in the crypt.  And if you can find a way for it to make sense within the world, great.  But using checks / testing as a source of inspiration for mixing things up sounds very useful.

I feel...  sort of dumb for not looking at designing dungeons for old-school play this way.  It's a very gamist lens.  It's very consistent with the conception of D&D as training.  It might also work especially well with an open table - if, on any particular day, you happen to get a weird party composition based on available players, that might allow them to punch through parts of the dungeon more easily than might be possible with a more normal / balanced composition.

And if you were a mad wizard building a funhouse dungeon to reward the best heroes, maybe this is what it would look like.  Proving they can do anything is part of proving they're the best.  It would probably work well with the Dungeon Dimensions too.

I worry a little about doing this though.  If your players know that you're doing this, does it detract from the immersion of the place?  But if they don't know that different parts of the dungeon will vary wildly in difficulty by party composition, then they're probably going to complain a lot when they beat their heads on stuff.  When they need a large party the one guy who doesn't like dealing with henchmen will be salty, and when they need a small party the guy who has all the henchmen will be salty.  I dunno.  Is it worth it?

If I write a blog post about it and spoil it, will I only get players who are already totally on-board with doing whatever is necessary to win, the players who "have no style at all", who don't benefit from this lesson, while players who might benefit from the challenge avoid the game?

The other predictable follow-on question: if this applies to building dungeons, does it apply to building wildernesses?

A final thought - looking at dungeons in this way, as structures composed of challenges first and foremost rather than places within a world being simulated, is very compatible with the sort of "multiple DMs, each of whom has their own megadungeon, running for a shared pool of players and characters" style of organization that was reportedly common back in the early days.

What's the Point?

This is, ultimately, the question I've been wrestling with for the last year or so.  Why play D&D?  Especially OSR/TSR D&D, with encumbrance, logistics, prime requisites, and PC death.

This is an attempt at an answer.  It's only about half-coherent, and I can't tell whether it's obvious or just obviously wrong.  I don't love it, and I don't expect you to, but I figured I'd get a rough draft out.  I guess my new bar for 2018 is a post a month; maintenance doses.

D&D is an artifice for character-building for the participants (traditionally, poorly-socialized young men).  Success in OSR D&D requires a number of properties which are useful in real life, which may be worth taking the time and energy to develop (and to encourage one's acquaintances to develop) in low-risk environments.

What are the lessons that various antiquated features of OSR D&D are aimed at teaching?

• Stats in order - Play the hand you're dealt.  As Hamming said, "I will do the best I can with what I got."  
• Prime reqs - In terms of class selection, you can fight your rolled "nature", but you'll get a lot further faster if you play to your high stats.  Different classes demand different virtues of their players; thieves need risk-tolerance and faith in the rest of the party to come rescue them, wizards need patience, caution, and careful spell-timing, fighters need courage, persistence, and willingness to sacrifice themselves, and clerics need humility, the ability to accept that sometimes you're not the star of the show.  Prime reqs push you towards classes that you don't usually play, and situations that test virtues you might not be so good at.
• Mixed-level parties, characters with very different stat distributions - Life isn't fair.  If you're on the weak end, resenting the strong won't get you very far; work with them for mutual gain.  If you're on the strong end, treat those weaker than you well, because you might have a reversal of fortune at any time and end up back at the bottom of the heap.
• Monoclassing, minimal build - You are not special by default; you are Joe Fighter by default.  If you want to be somebody that people will tell stories about years later, it's on you to do something notable, not just to be something notable.
• Mapping, encumbrance, rations, Vancian magic - Come prepared, plan ahead, pay attention to the details.  Neglecting them can get you killed.
• PC death - Memento mori.  Some day, you will die.  Yes you, reader.  You can run from it, or you can accept it, figure out what you want, and go get it or die trying.  It's important, I think, that unlike eg Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia, death is not short-term inevitable in OSR D&D.  You need players to get attached to their characters, and that doesn't happen when death is too frequent.
• TPK / Near-TPK situations - How panic-prone are you?  If other players are panicking, do you keep your head, or do you catch the panic?  Can you calm others?  Watching panic spread through a group of players is really remarkable.  When you get crushed, do you ragequit, or reflect calmly on your mistakes and return for vengeance?  The reason PCs don't make morale rolls is that their players are dealing with their own, very real, morale.
• Levels / fully-quantitative and exponentially-scaling advancement - If you want to get ahead, you have to be willing to take some risks.  After the first couple levels, it doesn't just happen anymore with any sort of regularity.  You need to say "I want to level", to choose it.  And then you need to put in the work, take the risks, and probably get a little lucky.  And that's true of life too.  I'm hitting this point with my career, where I've done well but the organization I'm at is just small.  I find myself with a choice between slow, pretty-safe advancement over the course of years, or choosing to prioritize advancement and doing the work to make that happen, either somewhere else or via personal projects in my free time.  Since I'm here writing blog posts, you can guess how well that's going.
• Phases of play (dungeon / wilderness / domain) - Advancement has side effects, most of which involve new challenges, more responsibility, more patience, and more paperwork.  This is what happens to conventionally-successful people.  You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can stay in the dungeon forever, but you're not going to get over 6th level if you do.
• Old-School Wish - Be careful what you wish for.  Someone was once very surprised when I mentioned that I give out wishes in my games; she said "But wishes destroy campaigns!"  And I laughed.  No, wishes are temptation.
• Rulings, not rules - Negotiate for things that you want.  Don't appeal to authority; convince me.  Whine, bullshit, do math, resort to bribery, whatever, these are valid approaches and you should learn them all.

In conclusion: I really do think OSR D&D presents its players with challenges which are well-suited to the development of mindset / personality traits which are adaptive, and rewards them for performing those virtues, not merely playing someone with those virtues.  Other games foster different virtues; 3.x rewards you for reading rulebooks, finding loopholes, and doing math, which are very useful skills.  Traveller...  rewards you for automating the trade system, which is something, I guess.

What place does Fun have in this conception of D&D?  I agree with Tao that Fun Is Not The Point.  Fun is, however, a necessity.  If your game is not fun, your players will leave before learning the lessons the game could teach them.  So strive to make your games Fun Enough (probably Type 2 Fun); there's a balance.  Unfortunately there may be a race to the bottom with fun; games which are more-fun tend to outcompete games with are less-fun in the marketplace for players.  These games which are more-fun also tend to lack the features which promote controlled but real adversity, and consequently growth.  I do not know how to resolve this problem yet.

What place does Narrative have in this conception of D&D?  Likewise, narrative is a device.  Humans like it, and therefore you can exploit their preference for it to make your game more appealing, and consequently more effective at cultivating virtue.  I have been wrong about narrative.  There might even be some aspirational "play the sort of person you'd like to be" upside to dealing with characters and stories, but that's not something I would know anything about.  Classes are a very Jungian structure to begin with...

What place does Simulation have in this conception of D&D?  If you seek to prepare your players for Real Life, making your game reasonably realistic (at least to the level of "actions have consequences, which you can predict by analogy with real life, except when noted by the rulebook") is sensible.  Simulated details provide a hook for Attention to Detail, and can also factor into Convince Me.  I have probably over-invested in simulation in the past (but it was fun for me, so not a total waste I guess).

What place does Game have in this conception of D&D?  The game element, of luck and challenge and risk and reward, is pretty central.  But I suspect one of the lessons to be learned from OSR D&D is that yes, you can play the game well, and you can win it, but it's sort of hollow and the reward of power is tempered with paperwork, as opposed to setting out to do your own thing and winning on your own terms, like Rary.

What is the role of the DM in this conception of D&D?  Courtney hit the nail on the head with "shaman leading the group's collective vision-quest."  You are here to help them become what they could be; to point out their flaws, to put them under eustress, and to reward them when they grow.  And in this light, the ritual character of the D&D game which I found so disturbing seems perfectly natural.

I apologize, DMs, for adding "spiritual guidance" to your prep burdens (using a loose, materialist definition of "spiritual", as in "of or related to the human spirit; ie, morale, emotion, and character").  I certainly do not consider myself qualified in that department.

All this still doesn't answer the essential question of "is it worth it?"  If you're spending 12 hours a week on prep+game for four people, you're looking at effectively three hours each of time investment per week, for a very ill-defined return.  Could you do better by just...  unstructured socializing with these people for the same amount of time, and talking about their problems?  I think maybe no - the game and the ritual provide a context where failure and self-examination are tolerable, where we can get at hard truths precisely because we're all lying.

The ultimate measure of the game, from this perspective, might be "do people outgrow your games, and go on to live happy lives?"  I spoke with one of my old players recently, and he mentioned that he has come to see RPGs / storygames as a form of "group therapy."  I don't know that I'd go that far (those are very soft words), but I think it's reasonably consistent with my meaning.



Addendum:

I don't mean to say that TSR D&D was intentionally designed as a training program.  I think training is a welcome, desirable side effect which can justify the activity; for another example, consider The Morals of Chess or mahjong's correspondence with reality.  Norbert Wiener, in The Human Use of Human Beings (one of the seminal books of cybernetics), discusses the function of play, and argues that generally, play is training in vertebrate species, who come into the world with much more plasticity than eg invertebrates; you will never see an ant play.  We humans play as well, and for the same reasons: training and pack-bonding, in preparation for the difficulties of life.

Mad Ramblings - Wargames, Dreamworlds, Nihilism, Sandboxes

This is not a well-structured, carefully-pruned, cohesive post.

Sometimes I think the game I really want to be running is not D&D, a fantasy RPG with dungeoneering, but a fantasy campaign skirmish wargame.  Ditch hitpoints, switch to single-digit numbers of Warhammer-style wounds, use an armor save instead of AC, and make characters largely replaceable.  Remove character detail, improve speed-in-play, perhaps increase tactical detail (as discussed back in Starmada, there's a big difference between character-creation complexity and tactical complexity).  A lot of this would just be nice on the DM side - I don't want to think about how many HP this goblin has.  It's 1HD, it has 1 wound, done.  A shift to wargaming mentality also does some interesting things for party composition; each player builds a warband from some fixed pool of resources.  "Just one sixth-level wizard with no henchmen" and "a big pile of second-level fighters" both become valid, interoperable ways to play.

The primeval purpose of play, as seen in young animals, is training, for food acquisition, mating-fights, or flight.  What are we training for?  With a wargame it's pretty clear.  With D&D it's much less so.  Maybe we're training for everything, but when you defend everything, you defend nothing.

On the other hand, rather than "I want to run D&D as a wargame", it may be more true that I seem to always end up running D&D as a wargame, and making systemic changes would make my life easier, but not more satisfying.  I'm not really sure why my games seem to keep ending up as wargames.  I think I enjoy the tactical challenge of actually giving players a good fight (and a good fright).  I also feel that I have lost confidence in the quality of my creative output, leaving tactics as the only place I'm willing to go nuts.  The well feels dry more than it used to.  Part of this, I suspect, is that I've basically stopped consuming fantasy media.  The last fantasy book I read was Wizard of Earthsea about a year ago (I did read Beowulf and finally finished the Saga of Burnt Njal this winter, but those doesn't quite count).  In terms of videogames, I think the only fantasy stuff I've played in the last year was Skyrim (lousy) and Hammerwatch (arcade, empty).  Skyrim was a strong contributing factor to launching the last campaign, actually - "If as many people loved Skyrim as seemed to, the bar must be lower than I thought; maybe I should give it another shot."  In any case, not much fantasy input, not much to remix and quietly steal.  I tried tapping dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations - that's how we ended up with a mad city-dungeon open to the endless void of space, showered by metal shavings from the decrepit cosmic engine that burns the souls of the damned to spin the earth.  No seriously, that's where the copper pieces came from - they fell out of the sky and into the dungeon as the engine ground itself towards inevitable failure and the End of Days.  Really the embarrassing part is that I put something as mundane as ratmen in such a place.

Reflecting on that, I was remiss to omit that I began reading Kill Six Billion Demons some time last summer, and I greatly enjoyed its Planescape-ness, its strangeness.  Still do.  So I suppose perhaps that influenced me more than I thought, but I put my own spin (ie, Warhammer-esque) on it, and thereby took most of the strangeness right out of it.

What I have been reading has been mostly history and sociology, which are relevant to D&D but not in useful ways.  D&D (and RPGs generally) are fundamentally based around emulating stories; myth, legend, books, movies.  I have gotten very skeptical, suspicious, of stories.  Stories simplify the very complex into nice simple causal chains.  A good story is always simpler than the reality of the situation; it's an authorial duty to cut out parts, to simplify for human consumption (Venkatesh Rao argues in a very roundabout way that all human organizations are based on such simplifications, claiming that leaders create simplifying myths for their underlings to live within).  Making wilderness illegible, or making running a domain hard because of historically-reasonable administrative information shortages, is not conducive to producing any sort of resonant narrative.  They're interesting thought experiments, but probably terrible in practice.  Which is a better story, the one that people all know, that riffs off of will resonate with them: Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, or King William and the Census?

At any rate, I suspect my nonfiction reading has made me a worse ACKS DM.  Played in a more typical D&D fashion ("band of roving murderers saves kingdom"), things like administrative information shortages could be turned into reasonable narratives, but when it comes to players looking at rulership, it gets mighty tedious to have to maintain both a true set of information for my own use, and a plausible false set of information to feed players.  In the case of an NPC governor deceiving an NPC king, I don't have to do the latter.  Frankly I have little desire to do the former anymore either.  I need all of my paperwork tolerance for taxes this season.

You know what else I'm starting to hate?  Character levels.  Having mechanical advancement be a thing that the system does means that players (well OK, people like me and my players) will aggressively optimize for it.  ACKS has this problem where the level of risk you have to take in order to make enough money to level at any sort of reasonable* pace results in levels being attritted away by casualties faster than they are earned.  I like the exponential XP curve; I really do.  It means that you can bring in 1st-level guys and they catch up, provided that any XP at all is being earned.  Domain XP breaks this, by providing XP only to the high-level characters in the party, and leads to the gap opening rather than closing.  The real problem with the OSR's XP curves (for us) is that they're build to support loooong-haul campaigns that run for multiple years of real-time.  That's something that we never do; in the six month duration of my typical ACKS campaign, players tend to get from 3rd or 4th level to 7th or 8th level.  Calibrated on 3.x, my players are frustrated by this slow progression and unwilling to take the sort of risks required to accelerate it.  ACKS dangles the domain carrot, of safe monthly gold and XP, and they really want to skip getting beaten with the wilderness stick (having labeled it as a poor risk-reward balance previously).  This is frustrating for me, because I feel that we haven't even scratched the surface of wilderness play (for example, tactics in the wilderness), while I find domain play tedious / boring so far.  It's kind of funny if you interpret it in a certain light: as adolescents the fantasy was to kill the dragon and win the princess, but as adults the fantasy is to be the guy at the top of the hierarchy who collects taxes from the safety of his castle while other people do the dying and the dirty work.  I miss Tim's meandering / anti-domain style of play.  Probably I should switch to some other retroclone, but I suspect my current playerbase (such as it is) has been accumulated in part by the allure of domains.

It would be an interesting experiment to bring a bunch of PCs in at low domain level (8th or 9th or so) and say "OK that's it, no leveling, all advancement will be Traveller-style through gear and hirelings and domains and achieving ends-in-the-world" (or just lower the level cap to 9th across the board...).  I've also been thinking about how poorly the leveling system as it currently exists does at supporting common narrative tropes.  The characters who start the weakest, the farmboy and the squire, have the greatest potential, while the characters to start strong, the knight and the wizard, rarely gain.  Lancelot and Merlin and Han Solo never get any stronger; Arthur and Luke do (though I guess this could also be interpreted as a game with a lower level cap).  What if you had the option to start at a higher level, but your maximum level was lowered accordingly?  This is a much more interesting use of level limits than demihumans; make it correlate with age at the beginning of the campaign.  Starting older gives you XP, but limits the new tricks your old dog can learn.  What if henchmen simply couldn't outlevel their masters - they could continue accumulating XP, but without adequate mentorship, they can never reach their full potential.  There are lots of interesting things to try in this space.

In any case, stopping or capping leveling suddenly introduces a gaping existential hole - why play?  I had hoped that ACKS, by making the domain game mechanical and providing XP for interacting with it, would encourage players to interact with the world on non-mechanical terms.  This was foolish; if you have mechanics for interacting with something, it will be interacted with mechanically at the exclusion of non-mechanical interactions (for another example, see 3.x Diplomacy hacks).  This is the underlying logical crux of the OSR's "rulings, not rules" stance, and its opposition to skill systems.  It also relates back to old thoughts on reliability and aim-of-playing, which loops back to "why play?".  Last spring, when I quit, I had been reading Interaction Ritual Chains, which discusses the process by which sacredness is manufactured through ritual (by which is meant routine, roughly-weekly interactions where a set of participants gather, isolated from the rest of the world, and waste resources).  I observed that this description fit the weekly D&D game perfectly, and was left very conflicted and disturbed about it all.  It left me asking "why do we really play?  Sure we have our surface reasons, that we like to kill monsters and gain levels, but is there another level of motivations underneath it where we value the game in itself?"  I observed that this potential treatment of the game as lightly-sacred was consistent with my behavior on one occasion, where I wrecked my bike on the way home from work and wasn't sure whether I'd sprained or broken my wrist, but went to run the weekly ACKS instead of to the hospital (I ended up there the next morning when the pain woke me up at 0430).  That is not the sort of thing that rational self-interested actors do.  Past-me is an idiot and the ACKS ritual made me so.  There is something weird going on here.  There is also a conflict between Interaction Ritual Chains and Rao's schema here, in that Rao doesn't believe that the organizing myth-makers get caught up in their own myths.  When I was reading Interaction Ritual Chains, I was elated, that now I understood how to create values, and the keys to power, to binding man, were in my grasp.  It was not until later that I realized that I could not help but become caught in those values myself, at which point I destroyed all of my social rituals (except the inescapable lunchtime at the office) and strove for hermit-hood, moral freedom, and the rejection of fantasy.  Success has been mixed; habits, personal rituals, are hard to break, and it is draining work.

I did not viscerally understand nihilism / moral relativism until Interaction Ritual Chains showed me how the sacred sausage is made.  It is one thing to be told "all morality is constructed", and another to be told exactly how it is constructed and at what cost.  I'm still not sure what to do with that information.  I suppose I can link this back to the bit above about leveling by noting that removing explicit / absolute mechanical objectives (like XP / leveling) is killing god (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase and meaning) and exposing the players to that same paralyzing freedom, of "all is permitted but nothing matters; freedom, and futility, are the only absolutes."  This ties back to the article by Rao, where political leadership requires simplifying political realities for human consumption.  It is also true that moral leadership generally requires simplifying moral realities for human consumption.  XP and reward system is essentially a moral choice (albeit a laughably small one), and delegating that choice down onto players is probably not what they're looking for.  They are here to play a game, to escape the spirit of gravity and the burdens of life, maybe for some occasional catharsis, but not to stare into the abyss.  Sandboxing in general has this problem.

One reasonable response, though, is that while the sacredness of moral norms may be an emergent property of social organizations rather than a reflection of any cosmic significance, that doesn't invalidate their usefulness.  Sacredness and morality formation are a mechanism for something (probably social cohesion and ingroup predictability) - if they weren't worth their cost in "wasted" resources, they wouldn't have emerged over and over again, in every society across human history.  Now granted, they may provide a fitness advantage to societies in competition with each other rather than to the individuals within those societies, who are materially poorer as a result of ritual expenditures (but the success of those individuals' genes and memes over the long term is tied to that of the society in which they live).  In any case, my response, cutting out all sacredness without really reflecting on its function, was like that of the D&D3.0 group that removes attacks of opportunity or the XP cost from creating magic items, or bans grappling because it's complicated, without understanding the effects that these will have on the system (spellcasters even more overpowered than normal).  Chesterton's Fence applies here:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

But enough of that.

I also miss the competitive-cooperative nature of the first ACKS campaign.  I've been reading some game theory stuff lately and there is a category of "non-fixed sum" games that describes observed player behavior during that campaign well.  It also helped that there were a variety of vigorously-argued value-systems / player utility functions present in that campaign, rather than a tacit convergence on the "whatever maximizes GP/XP" utility function that I see more now.  There's no playfulness anymore, and this is probably my fault for setting lethality high and leveling so slow.  I keep hoping that we'll hit the point of fatalist playfulness - "we're all going to die, so better to die for something, heroically or entertainingly, rather than waiting for the eventually-inevitable lame, random, or cowardly death" - but I think character advancement, and specifically the risk of falling behind the rest of the party, discourages this.  So I suppose there is still some competition, but it's boring, tacit competition that drives inaction, rather than entertaining competition that drives action.

I've come to the conclusion that the Death and Dismemberment table just isn't worth it.  It's funny about 10% of the time.  The other 90% of the time it just sucks - either you get an injury that doesn't matter for your class, or you get one that does and then you repeat the same "hope for effects that don't matter" procedure on the RL&L table.  If I were to build a new one, I'd probably just make it a roll between "mission killed" (out of action for the rest of this adventure), "multi-mission killed" (out of action for a couple adventures), and "campaign killed" (maybe there's enough left of you to retire, but your adventuring days are done), and leave details up to players.  I really want to make the bedrest mechanic work.  It seems like a good way to encourage players to maintain stables of characters and to swap out for mission requirements.  It sort of works for henchmen, but if a PC is out for bedrest, adventuring is often delayed, because playing a henchman risks being outleveled and because PCs are the highest level (hence most useful) and missing out on XP for a PC means falling behind on already-glacial leveling.

In conclusion: great dissatisfaction!

Trilemma

Holy cow.  Ars Ludi linked to Trilemma yesterday, and this guy knows what's what.  Good posts I've read so far:

• Useful Dungeon Descriptors accurately expresses my difficulties with random room contents tables, and takes a clear stance in favor of informed dungeoneering and informative dungeon design.  Monstrous Effects on Terrain applies the same ideas to the wilderness.
• Non-Mechanical Difficulty Levels for Monstrous Threats, the post originally linked by Ars Ludi, provides a good explanation of why my players feared wyverns so terribly, as well as a good mental framework for making things scarier then their raw numbers would otherwise indicate (or less scary, I guess, but why would you want to do that?  Oh right so elephants aren't CR7 or whatever, and to explain why commoners can safely keep cats as pets).  Reminiscent of Traveller's per-species reaction roll tables.  This whole schema, and particularly Cohesion, seems perfect for differentiating the otherwise forgettably-similar low-level humanoid species.
• Gameable Campaign Capital provides a useful taxonomy for understanding and perhaps encouraging player investment in exploration-driven campaigns.  As a concept, it may help explain the failure of the ACKS game when we introduced new players (too much reference buildup in the world and among the old guard, which held no 'currency' with the new players).
• The whole Dirty Dungeon concept, which Trilemma mentions here and here, is intriguing.
• How Far Can You See on a Hex Map? is useful for the obvious reasons, if fairly easily derivable.

Also, not exactly useful but entertaining: apparently the 2012 ACKS game had a lethality of somewhere between 100 and 125 milliWhacks for PCs (I figure somewhere between 16 and 20 total sessions and about 4.5 players on average), and somewhere closer to 250 milliWhacks for henchmen.  ACKS: About As Deadly As Fiasco, Unless You're a Henchman.

In any case, more fodder for wilderness campaigning and always good to find a vital blog to read.  Sort of a breath of fresh air from outside the OSR, really (disclaimer: this is not an attempt to define the OSR, but more a statement that I do not get the impression that Trilemma identifies as Of The OSR).  He seems very well-rounded, taking what is worth taking from both storygames and the Old School.

Natural Language and Causality

Does it strike anyone else as strange that all natural languages (that I have met so far) are built around cause, effect, and intentionality?  The whole separation of subjects, verbs, and objects necessarily injects causal inference into every statement - verb happened to object as a consequence of subject's nature.

Contrast this with the nature of raw experience, where causal relations are never explicit in any single action, and can only be extracted from prolonged observation.  The causal information density of language is much higher than that of sensory experience, but at the expense of accuracy and nuance.

Contract this also with the mathematical formalism of the function, where we relate a 'cause' and an 'effect' through enumeration of all causes and all effects which follow from a certain 'law', and none of which are really actions.  Here there is no inference - only truth, of a sort.

What does this have to do with RPGs?  Not sure.  Am tired.  Maybe relevant to players forming causal inferences about sandbox settings, and the value of providing NPC adventureres and rumors to inform them of some of the details of the universe's operation (like "Wait, you killed a bunch of wyverns out in the wilderness?  I bet they had a lair and it's full of unguarded treasure...").  Causal information density there is evidently much higher than traipsing around in the woods for a couple of months...  and the mathematical formalism corresponds to letting them read the encounter tables.

Maybe also relevant to learning new games, which is a topic I have been considering lately (coworkers desire one-shot).

I suspect that this will not be the last philosophical, maybe-but-probably-not-relevant-to-gaming post in the queue.

A Broker of Consequences

Parenting advice from one of my coworkers:

"I tell my children that I don't deal in reward or punishment; I only deal in consequences.  Reward and punishment are matters of opinion; the edict 'If you eat everything on your plate, I will give you a bowl of peas and you will have to eat them all' is a reward if you like peas, and 'If you eat everything on your plate, I will give you a bowl of ice cream and you will have to eat it all' is a punishment if you're too full to eat any more.  Consequences, on the other hand, are a matter of fact, and I make it clear to them that I am a broker of consequences.  If you do X, I will do Y; whether or not you choose to interpret Y as punishment is up to you."

I'm not sure if it's particularly good parenting advice; upon further examination, I'm left a little unsure of the intent in that arena.  It certainly seems reasonable DMing advice, though, where the source of punitive intent (say, a king who has been offended) is (or should be) divorced from the agent responsible for enforcing consequence (the DM).  The DM does not punish; the DM administers the logical consequences an action within the world.  And hey, if you needed to end up in the royal dungeons to ask a political prisoner some questions about where you can meet his conspirators to bring his plot to fruition and you have a good escape plan, it might not be a punishment.  But save versus death to avoid contracting some unpleasant malady from the filthy dungeon bedding...  (consequences!)

Anyway, I thought "broker of consequences" was a wonderful turn of phrase for describing the role of a sandbox DM.