Posts Tagged "tao-of-dnd" from 2016

I think I reacted too strongly to this comment. The part about "staying up [above the barrow] until Friday":

https://juvenis-campaign.blogspot.com/2016/12/round-2-aleksandra-gets-bitten.html?showComment=1481777209488#c7826802657064704866

I read it and thought, "Oh, then I should just get Gudbrand out of here so that the game goes faster." It seemed like I was dragging things out unnecessarily.

But I should have confirmed with you and the party whether I was actually moving too slow and whether removing myself until Friday (or whenever) was OK, instead of just immediately choosing to run away.

Without even factoring in our bad choices (which are certainly unevenly distributed), our luck has been brutal. Awful awful attack rolls, and when two guys put down criticals, one dealt 0 damage and one dealt like a total of 2 damage.

Reading "Playing at the World" got boring after about 2/3 of the way through, and I got tired of the author making the same old mistakes about what roleplaying games can be rather than what most people think they are (i.e. children hero games), but one thing I appreciated about it was learning about the long, long history of wargaming for practice and testing of military procedures, and, since the 20th century, usage of freeform roleplaying in psychology and therapy contexts.

Hah -- for once the real world data means you get to avoid a massive undertaking!

I really like this, Alexis. I will admit I had never heard of "CLO" before we started the Juvenis campaign, so it's no wonder I didn't cotton onto that as a road to wilderness damage, etc. Once again your point about D&D as a teaching tool has been reinforced. (And again, with the article you linked about clothing insulation not being related to material.)

It's almost as if people have used roleplaying games as teaching and practice tools for hundreds of years and a game based faithfully (though not slavishly) on real-world information is capable of expanding one's knowledge of said real world ...

We have two assassins, a druid, a cleric, and a ranger. Between us we are a buccaneer, a fence, a holy man, a gambler, a horse trainer, a stargazer, a prize-winning axe thrower, an extremely good dancer ... I think we have all the makings of a solid crew! And I'm excited to play a character alongside all of you players.

Thanks Alexis for volunteering all this time of yours. You were up front about it being 10 hours of work for 90 minutes of online play and that's hugely generous.

Name: Gudbrand Andersen Lillesund

Mmm, a human raised among halflings? Interesting.

I'd like to wait to name my character until I know his birthplace, please. Of course that means waiting for the vote to be settled and for you to roll birthplace - I'll check back soon.

1. Human Sweden; 2) Human Norway; 3) Elvish Lands of Finland-Karelia

Oh, of course -- the two who already have birthplaces are in the Donbass campaign.

Ah, yes, chandler-assassin, a lesser-known variant of the thief-acrobat. I'm excited to play already!

Should my background say that my place of birth is "unknown," or is that a leftover error?

Strength 16

Dexterity 16

Constitution 13

Wisdom 11

Intelligence 13

Charisma 10

Male
Human
Assassin

1. Western Europe; 2) Northern Asia.

Read the link. Got it.

I meant I got wound up by "looking at you Maxwell..." i.e. I took it as more serious than intended.

I didn't mean that the vote on the initial play area was winding me up ... other than that it's exciting.

Dang, text communication is hard! No wonder you wrote us that "keep it short" post. I'll stfu now.

Damn dude, you had me all wound up!

Regarding attention to detail: both of us skipped the é's in Frédéric's name, but you didn't comment on that. What, in your mind as the DM, is the difference between typing an e instead of an é, and mistakenly adding a k? I'm not being salty: I know this is important to you, and that my words here represent me as a potential player, so I want to be clear on what you expect and why you think the way you do. And I'll try hard, I promise, to double-check everything before submitting.

As for regions: I swear that nowhere in the post did you say whether you want us to pick "big" regions (e.g. Western Europe) or "small" regions (e.g. Britain, France, etc.). My assumption would be "small" ones, but just in case (and to save a little back and forth) I'll answer both. Hope that's OK.

Elswhere.

I love your enthusiasm, Frederick! I hope you are welcomed aboard.

Oh, forgot to list my other commitments. My own games are on Sunday evenings (weird, right? who does that?). I work out three days a week (usually Tues/Thurs/Sat or Sun) but there's always time in the gaps.

Lastly, I am on Pacific time.

I am interested. I think seeing the world as a player is sure to improve my DMing. It will acquaint me with the concerns of the players, firsthand, in a world run well enough that I know I'll be learning good lessons I can apply back to my own DMing. Plus I haven't played in forever and it's a different type of satisfaction than DMing.

As for commitment: you've seen my work and my posts, and my comments here. Are those enough?

Availability: I'm more or less around 24/7. I have class and thesis deadlines as the semester comes to a close these next few weeks, but nothing I can't handle. I'll probably pick a time every day to check in for certain, then do additional checks when I can. That time can be adjusted as we go.

It seems to me that the rules for underwater action are shaping up nicely here.

Do you have any thoughts regarding resistance of underwater pressures, which will get higher and higher as the party goes deeper? One aspect of this could play out as a reduction in AP, but since you've gone for using extended rounds instead of increasing action AP cost or reducing combatant AP, perhaps there might just be an amount of pressure (i.e. depth) above which rounds are extended even further in length.

I also want to voice my appreciation for the concept of the "successful swing" because it scratches a particular game design itch: namely, reusing extant components of the rules for new purposes. Here you've introduced a new way to read the attack roll, which adds extra excitement into each throw of the die.

What made you settle on the -8 modifier (ninth level reduced to first) as opposed to some other?

Ooh, undersea wilderness. Kelp forest, coral reef, fields of mussels and other shell creatures. And above it all the sun... which gets dimmer and dimmer the deeper they go.

One thing I want to work on eventually is rules for the gradual transformation of ordinary items into magic ones, by virtue of ritual and social significance, history, and so on. There might even be room for a "number of hits/kills" statistic which leads to weapons becoming better; it's a bit videogamey, and of course the player wouldn't know how many such occurrences they'd need to reach additional power with the weapon, but surely my game has room for "blood-drinker" types of weapons.

My word. That's a total 180-degree turn from your weekend's activities and emotions. Good luck, and take care of you and yours.

I appreciate the words, Alexis.

Obviously I agree with you on this point or I wouldn't have a website where I'm doing my own accumulation of detailed rules (often by tweaking and borrowing yours.)

But the problem I find myself running into is this: at this time I would not want to run the kind of disease scenario you give as an example here. Not because I think it's not good D&D -- it is, we don't have to go into that -- but precisely because I don't yet have the rules to support meaningful assessment of disease, injury, and so on. So I feel like although I want to run more complex scenarios, I feel like I can't make it meaningful without least a draft of the relevant rules in place.

Sometimes one writes rules to expand on a quick ruling made during the game, and sometimes one does it because it's pleasing to flesh out part of the game-world.

Did you have an amputation go down in a recent session?

Loving that art connection, Danny. In Alexis's case there are already skills such as History which are keyed to periods of the world and/or periods of time. I think applying such constraints would make giving the thief an objects-of-art recognition study quite feasible -- as long as we are talking a thief who is closer to "jewel thief" than "ordinary criminal underclass," which seems reasonable for mid-level knowledge-type skills.

Good goddamn job.

Can you explain why tech level for dragons would be so low? I was under the impression that tech level also measure a kind of "cultural advancement level" based on intelligence and that aside from some of the chromatic types, dragon intelligences are above average or better.

Congrats on a successful weekend, Alexis.

It's a shame the organizers were all fluff, with not enough balls to give you even a token spot on a debate or a panel. But you'll try again, won't you.

Damn, Alexis. Between this and the big physical map, I think you're going to get a hell of a fucking response at the expo. I hope there are a ton of lesson signups and book sales.

Good to hear. I wasn't able to listen to the last couple ones on Soundcloud for some reason. YouTube should work.

Jeez! What fun ... and so much tension!

Whoa, I've got a bunch of those speckled Chessex d20. I guess I should do a big old test on them.

Hey, you typo'd my last name. Can you please fix it?

I'm looking at the tables. "Th hd" is "thousand head," but what is "mt" such as for "butter & ghee"? Is it "million tons?" Maybe, but then some things come in "th mt," which would be "thousand million tons" ... anyway, I want to double check. And I've no clue what "thbcm" is. Can you spell the units used here out for us, please? Some hunting around the Industrial Commodities site didn't cut it.

I had my first game session in the last few years, finally, this past Sunday. I'm taking lessons with Alexis at the moment and sent him my post mortem about the game session, some thoughts on stuff that tripped me up or didn't work well on this first outing. He wrote this post and the next one (When Trade Tables Go Bad) in response to my issues.

That's not to mention the fact that my lesson earlier that Sunday ran to 90 minutes, fully half again as long as what Alexis gave as the duration of each lesson. Folks, you're gonna get your money's worth if you pay for this class.

Your point is made. Those are some fast horses.

What rules do you use for setting weapons against a charge?

These are quite good-looking.

I think the charging rules seem fiddly on paper but can't put my finger on why. I trust you when you say they ought to work at the table.

Horses seem damn good! Finally we are not subject to the eternal regime of "every fantasy person ever can ride a horse, let's leave it at that so we can just pretend they are cars." Keep it up.

Message received. Thinking hat on. (Although it might have to be subconscious thinking as I leap to some other part of the game and work on that.)

I like how the damage works here. The AP and damage tweaks contrast well with the way the ordinary weapons work. It's immediately clear you're not going to be too hardcore with your fists unless you're really strong, but the option is there. And -- hallelujah -- you even got in a rule to give gauntlets some love. The more the rules can make decisions like "wear helmet or not," "wear gauntlets or not" meaningful, the more a player's satisfaction at triumph is justified, because they have to weight more and more angles and factors and still come out ahead. Good good.

Congratulations on the milestone!

I'm glad to see you talking about us four editors as if we were full contributors, but at least in my case you're giving too much credit: I just pop in to your wiki once in a while to zap typos and clean up a sentence or three, that's all. I know some of the others have written full pages -- good work, guys.

I landed on the Crews page when reading the Bandits entry and wondered if you'd go here next.

One thing I like about these posts that I think you haven't come out and said yet, is that not only are you building up detailed descriptions of encounter types and fleshing out the way the world works, you're also presenting good examples for things the player characters might themselves do (or hire folks to do.)

Even though you call this flawed, I still think it was a hell of a read.

You talk about how good human beings can be come good players, and good players must be good human beings. I think it's also possible for people to become good people by becoming good players -- which means that both bad D&D habits and bad personal habits deserve a second chance and slow but firm retraining, when a new player comes to the table. The selfish or narcissistic person might be able to gain open-mindedness or integrity by "practicing" those behaviors as part of successful gameplay.

Excited to see how you convince Excel to pull this one off. Sounds like quite a task to me, but it's not my chosen medium.

Also: I hope that you have been able to extract some enjoyment from moving in and settling into your new place. With any luck you're reading this from your favorite computer chair, fully moved to your daughter's home.

Holy shit. I thought this was going to be about characters accumulating stress points from a modified Homes and Rahe scale.

I hope that the medical services are able to do their job well. Best wishes, Alexis.

Alexis: you say one doesn't need to pre-generate all the manses in the kingdom, and maybe that's true.

But suppose I'm using your hex-group chooser, or something analogous, to get the lay of the land for the area the party has just moved in to. If a manse is created by that system, then surely it makes sense to have the system also go ahead and suggest a type of manse as well. It would color the perception of the surrounding area, to know whether or not (for example) this manse was held by the owner or was being run by the steward.

I smell much potential for a manse generator (if that last table of yours was not itself the output of such a tool).

I dig it, Alexis. My own historical knowledge is lacking on many fronts and you take phenomena apart so well. Silly question maybe, but have you ever thought about writing a history book in this kind of style? Whether or not it's geared toward improving one's D&D game might be a separate question.

I wish you the best, Alexis. I hope there is some good fortune around the corner.

Tim, I think the point already is that certain things would be favorites (giving the bonus) and the rest would not. Not that all 200 or so things would grant the bonus but that certain ones would, per character.

No reason you yourself couldn't make one of those favorites a Very Favorite, I suppose.

A college friend, himself an amateur sailor, would host singalongs with his ukulele for the whole dorm, at which he sang many a folk song including Barret's Privateers. Thanks for stirring that memory up, you two (he's graduated now while I remain.)

Baron, you might also enjoy South Australia and Fiddler's Green.

Great series Alexis. When the D&D work rolls around to improving these aspects (hirelings and naval combat) of my own game, as usual I'll have to come back and consider your approach at length. I especially like determining the crew independent of its members at first; I was thinking about that but didn't come up with anything that put the crew first, so was stuck on "how do I avoid crew quality being something like an average of member traits and thus more bland for larger ships."

I think the tension of having the die roll each round, not knowing if it's going to be a quick turn or a slow one, is only made to seem tense by the pre-existing tension introduced by the external factors (such as a frigate bearing down on the party's little ship.) And even if it were somehow special, it'd be equalled or bettered by the "countdown to turning" clock that the roll-a-number-of-rounds approach has (i.e. the approach outlined in the last table you've posted here.) As a player I'd rather have something to look forward to, and sweat over (knowing the turn will happen in X rounds) than sitting there just tossing a die over and over. It wouldn't feel the same, I think.

That's the stuff.

(and they asked why I was unable to enjoy play in the games other people ran on campus ...)

Frankly, with as much as a well-leveled party has on the line, I'd be tenser than those ballista strings if I were in a party going seafaring on Planet Alexis. God damn! So many ways to get it put to you!

Lots of risks. Lots of fear. I'd be all for going the long way around ... so that's a win for your tension-production, eh? As much as a theoretical player can count for, anyway.

Some q's:

I know you don't use regular cannons and firearms because magic is hell for a store of gunpowder, but what about the possibility of iron or stone balls with a bit of powder in the middle and a short fuse to get explosive ordnance for one's catapults?

And that might mean adding a result to the hit table where the ball lodges somewhere in the enemy ship and then goes off.

Any thoughts on magical projectiles? does your world have Greek fire?

God damn, Alexis. Ship rules that sound fun? That only puts you ahead of every other DM and every other company-made ruleset I've ever seen. Hell, just having ship rules that (ought to) work, period, puts you way up there.

I'm trying not to sound sycophantic, believe me. But I also wish fervently that the people who charge $40 a book and somehow spend millions on publishing RPGs could just sit down and do the research and write good fucking rules. So I'm inclined to shout out when I see stuff I think is good. One growly bear present.

I hope things turn around for you very soon, Alexis.

I can't donate any more money at the moment, but I'm willing to do editing work on The Fifth Man, if you want another set of eyes.

I laughed at the idea of Admiral Village. Thanks for the reality check.

Of course there would be mechanical associations for each result -- but no, I didn't write any.

I want to go have a head-scratch about how the personality rating would manifest in certain responses, as you touched on. That sounds like good fun.

Please allow me to take a stab at some traits for the Seasoning quality:

I've had trouble loading this and the 4th podcast, but I think the problem is on my end, not SoundCloud. Will listen when I can.

On the one hand, aha, I'm not crazy!

But on the other hand, I'm certainly dumb, because I think I might have forgotten my copy at my ex's house when I moved out last year ... so it goes. I'll take a look when I get home.

Thanks for the the clarification, Alexis.

I was just rereading these the other day in preparation for having players again this summer. Thanks for putting them all in one place.

While reading about the goblins I remembered you also wrote one or two posts about goblins in caves, farming cave plants and generally just being, you know, actual living intelligent humanoids, and not just convenient kill-fodder. Something like that. I've done a google site-search for every combo of "goblin" and "cave" and "mushroom" and the title I thought one post had, "Wyrd" or "Weird", and can't find a damn thing. Could you link it?

Uh-oh ... my rudimentary approach to defining trade routes so far has basically been connect the dots ... well, "tell the computer where the towns are and let it connect the dots based on finding the shortest path," but suffice it to say there's no sub-hex detail being considered yet*.

Of course I'm the one who defined how "shortest path" is calculated for the road finder, so I could go in and tweak it so that deserts and jungles are harder to cross, and so on ... but that sounds like that might be missing one of the points you're making here, which is that one ought not to just wave one's hand and say "the desert is all like this" and "the jungle is all like this."

Good luck with the kickoff.

I'll admit to having invented those particular hoity-toity terms on the fly, but I don't think the concepts they denote are baseless or empty. No "authority" has put these forth other than myself, Alexis, so I'm sorry if I wasn't clear that I was trying to explain my personal viewpoint -- albeit one I think others could benefit from adopting.

The topic of "Rules for the DM" in general is something that seems to tie people in knots.

"But the DM can break/change/ignore the rules," they say.

Yes, but those are the "rules of interaction," which govern how entities in the world function. The DM can declare that these goblins know how to use poison without having ranks in Poisoning; or that on the DM's say-so, PVP cannot result in a death, so get your shit together guys; or, having rolled* HD for the camp of orcs, decide to place high-HP ones at the front lines; or decide that this particular NPC paladin can't lay-on-hands for some reason.

One part of my rules is a DM Code of Conduct. It doesn't have a lot to it yet, but one line is:

"When the players are disputing possible courses of action, the DM must not and will not take sides in any way."

On the right track for your question, I think.

I'm in when I return to the States this summer. I still might not have a game, though -- we'll see what the summer coworkers say -- and that makes me wonder: do you think these lessons will be better or have more effect on those who are currently running a game? Do you anticipate having to change or add to the subject matter at all for those who are stuck in "hot rod in the garage" mode, tinkering?

Jeez ... makes me wish I'd never had to move a single damn time these last few years ... my high school games may have been pretty bad when I look back on them, but I had so many players I had to run twice a weekend.

You often talk about the importance of the world being living and breathing, the NPCs/entities must be people and not just cutouts (or else they ought to be glossed over -- don't make the player talk to every prostitute and barkeep if they're just looking for a certain street), and so on. In my mind this means that "adventure" is something that arises out of action/reaction by players and NPCs as both go about their business. Have I got that right? In that case, how does that square with the dichotomy you seem to be presenting between "world" and "adventures in it" in the proposal for class 3? Is it the case that what you mean is that naturally some of the happenings or "hooks" the DM puts on the pile will be more "adventurey" than others? I'm kind of confused. You don't give quests (although players may find them.)

There are private (group or solo) lessons for dancing, voice, acting, cooking, every musical instrument and every sport. Yet the culture surrounding this, OUR art form, does not have lessons, and actively decries trying to make one's game better as pointless and elitist.

Bring it on, Alexis, there's a gap to be filled.

Alexis,

You're right, I'm certainly not in an environment where I can actually do Dungeon Mastering. I'll sit tight.

What's the homework for those with no players?

I'd do this exercise for those I last played with, a couple years ago, and who I'll likely be playing with again come this fall, but they've probably changed plenty as humans so I'd be working off half-remembered conceptions of who they used to be. Not fair to them.

Question: what is the effect of having multiple references to "market" for a given city? One "market" references makes that city a market. What do extra ones do? Are there are certain items or services which are priced based on that -- tariffs, taxes, entry fees, looking-for-hireling costs?

Things I'd pay money for:

History lectures or essays (like the post on the Don Cossacks)

Wonderful answer. Thank you Alexis. I was hoping the answer to purchasing in a non-market center would generally be "can't do that here" but I am glad you gave us the skinny on WHY that is (guild relations & community standing). Most useful.

As always, the effect of seeing how much damn info you have about the real world is that your side of the grass seems awfully green -- but I'm striving to build up my system in such a way that I could, one day, start plugging in real world data instead of the computer-generated stuff I'm working with (we'll see about that when I'm good and ready.) Plus you're 30 damn years older than me so I should just cool my jets! Planet Alexis wasn't built in a decade.

I've got a request: please answer some questions about the difference between market and non-market towns in your system.

I recall from earlier versions of the trade system that towns without a market reference have their resources assigned to the nearest market-having town. Am I right on that?

I especially desire details about the following: what's the gameplay difference between market and non-market towns? Can the players actually not buy anything at all in non-markets? If they can buy some things, how do you determine what they can buy? Is it related to infrastructure?

@ Ozymandias:

I had the fortune to see an "original pronunciation and original bawdiness" performance of Much Ado About Nothing as a college freshman, directed by a theater senior who'd just finished their thesis on the topic. It was nothing short of hysterical.

Point taken, consider me humbled ... it's easy to get used to what one already has.

Wow, can you say "wild magic hotzone"?

I'm staring into a special machine that lets me use the written word (itself an invention) to communicate my thoughts to you with nothing but my hands, my human language faculty, and basic computing skills ... but this thing is quite a narrow straw to force thoughts through, I find. Even if I can type decently fast. And most of the time I have to go back and edit edit edit edit edit before the idea shines.

I often get the feeling while working on my gameworld* that I'm not really the one creating it -- it's more like I'm carving away at something that exists outside of myself, the contours of which I can see, and my work is just bringing that thing to light.

Do you ever feel like that, Alexis? fellow readers?

Furthermore I can see in my mind's eye very clearly what a given part of the whole would look like in its ideal state, and how I might get to there from where that part of my game/world is now. Then it's just a matter of using my hours each day ...

You know me as living in Oregon and California -- but no no no, I'm not there right now -- I'm in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, People's Republic of China. Add another international location to the list :)

Would you like readers of the preview to note down typos and such while going along, if we catch them?

I put myself down for $50 CAD initially but I've changed it to $25 just now, wanting to be cautious at first. (Currently can't actually pay anything because I'm awaiting a new credit card after fraud attempts on the last one; for the same reason I'm not yet part of your Patreon.) Other than your joking years ago about D&D BnB, I don't think I've seen anyone propose paid D&D before. I've never had to think seriously about it so I don't know for sure what my number would be. I would raise the number if things went well, in which case 50 CAD ($40 USD) would not be unreasonable. That's $10 USD per running.

I put links to this post and to the Lulu page on my Facebook, along with a blurb expressing what makes you the king of this scene and why your work is Quality.

It does tend to go with fill-in-the-taxes sheets, yes. Call it a bad habit left over from my starting with 3.5e.

Apology really not needed, friend. I think there's nothing wrong with getting worked up with plebeian D&D. There's a reason I typically excuse myself from D&D-related conversations with random nerds -- it's just not worth trying to explain except by shoving your blog link at them or (when I have one) inviting them to my game.

Whoa whoa, let's be clear here: I do not use a standardized character sheet and haven't done so in years. I agree with you on that 100% and I love seeing the wacky documents players come up with to manage their characters.

My fuckup here was clearly the saving throw thing. I never once thought about the opportunity for tension afforded by not having those numbers provided during chargen, so thank you for yelling about that, or I probably would have continued not seeing it.

I've encountered the problem of there being too much damn stuff for a completely new player to learn the first day. I think there's merit to saying "you're playing a fighter, roll the dice like this for your scores, here's some basic equipment and some gold if you want more, now play the game and if you enjoy it you can continue with this guy and/or make one of a new class".

And if they chose to make a new class character, that would be the one and only time I'd ever allow a person to transfer XP character-to-character -- then there's no incentive to stick with the fighter even if they don't want it. (not that there's much XP from a session or two, but new players in particular might get attached to even a small sum as being theirs.)

Cool link. Have you run into anything like this before? "Shit, it looks like only one dude in Germany knows about these Viennese nut puddings" or what have you.

You've been posting quite a bit the last few days, never would have known you'd gotten the job. Congratulations on that bit of fortune.

You've come around to this point -- "characters have a dozen or so things that make them happy and thus grant bonuses to this, that, or the other" -- a few times over the years and it's a good one. One more way to finagle some points for their characters ... while simultaneously getting them to absolutely care where they are and what goes on there. Good stuff.

Also want to say that, leaving aside the depth of the research into references and their placements, it's the piece-by-piece construction of larger items from smaller ones which makes your end result so valuable. Treating everything like building blocks.

The player looks over the table, frowns, says "but what I want to make a..." and bam, you've hooked them. "Draw up a design and/or a list of materials, player. Show me what you've got: I'll meet you halfway." If they're the type to be playing D&D for the long term then this will snag them like no other, I am convinced of it.

When you have a moment, can you explain the relationship between coal and ice? I'm baffled. The books I've scared up on google have been of no use.

Best of luck as you continue on with the writing and editing, Alexis.

I don't know if this is how you roll, but could you elaborate on how you would actually run the "half the day is wasted" result? Say they're in a market city: do you just ask everyone but those characters what they're doing today, then when everyone else is done say it's the afternoon and go around again, including the previously langorous ones?

I suppose this is butting up against "how is the flow of time handled in your game," an altogether larger question since it also ties into the core DM skill of managing tension.

Dammit Alexis, I want to play in your game! I want to have to give a shit about this kind of thing!

I doubt it needs saying but every time I read some new innovation you've cooked up I shudder to think about how ludicrously FAR BEHIND the DMs I've known are. And that includes me, honestly, because even though I'm trying to follow in your footsteps it will be a while yet before I have players (the ones I wrote to you about a little while ago backed out). So I'm still only a "hot rod in the garage" theoretical DM right now, weeding my rules patch and planting my world bits and wondering what the garden's gonna look like in five years.

I'm loving this, Alexis. Great to see a fresh view on the trade system from end-to-end.

Alexis, when you've returned from Planet Book, I have a question about part 3, Locating References.

"I've put brewing and metal goods into the forest because the fuel from the trees makes the best opportunity for heating the grains and the forges that are necessary. These details matter. It means that although the Crow's Nest mountains produce no meaningful ore, the ore from those mountains that do (around Marzarbol and Heap) must be hauled to the furnaces and waterwheels of the Border Forest to be processed. So what will the party find on the roads? Wagons full of stone making their way steadily north to dump their valuable loads."

I'll scan the wiki pages for typos.

Enjoying the clean writeup even though the material's not new to me -- but you could probably write quite the short story about your fingernails or a piece of lint, so who's surprised that it's a good read?

This map feels nice and sunny. Or maybe "sandy," depending on how much of that is desert.

Christ, that was 19 months ago?!

Of course it has to be central. No question about it. One who doesn't want to put in the work will not do any work in any form -- they won't question the rules, they won't build up houserules and precedent, they won't need somewhere to organize any of that stuff.

This is good stuff.

Alexis, responding to your point above:

Wanting to start a wiki for one's own world requires that your houserules are extensive enough to require real documentation. That alone means that anyone playing by the book or mostly by the book is right out. And of course you've also got to have actual persistence in playing the same world and ruleset, which means long-term play.

Take those requirements together and guess how many DMs satisfy them both. One in ten thousand? Dunno.

For any newbies reading the site:

Alexis's experience system solves all those stupid fucking problems you've been having with the total ass-pull figures listed in every monster manual ever. Even more important, however, is that it balances risk and reward - one component of it is "take more damage, get more XP".

Finally, EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, it allows the party members to GAIN EXPERIENCE EVEN IF THEY RUN AWAY.

All of a sudden, there is real actual game-mechanical support for engaging your basic tactical faculties and pulling out of a fight you can't win -- and lo and behold, you retain all the XP earned before breaking away. Because, y'know, feeling out the enemy and then fleeing to fight another day MAKES SENSE and is how ACTUAL LEARNING WORKS.

I'm all for it. The only way to bring on the era of civilized tabletop gaming, free of manchildren and crap DMs, is to put our feet forward and insist on it, one table at a time.

In this vein, my rules include a DM Code of Conduct. There will one day be one for players as well. (Like everything else in my rules, both are work in progress.) Perhaps these could be condensed or converted into pre-game oaths, re-affirmations of commitment to the principles of a good game.

Alexis, I'd like it if you could expand on something you touched on in the podcast -- maybe a whole post if you're game.

You said you ran a made-from-scratch world for 4 years. I believe you also said (listened a couple days ago and soundcloud giving me grief) that the problem with running a completely from-scratch world is that there's just never enough detail, it lacks the endless layers of accreted history and readily-available troves of information that the real world has to offer.

Yet you managed to run it all the same.

I meant the "Congratulations" to be on the 2000 posts post. Sorry.

As for this post: I'm gonna go hunt the movies down and watch them since I never have, so I can read this. Thanks for giving me some homework :)

Congratulations!

Jesus, it's like an alternate universe.

There are all these people in that situation who want to play D&D and who don't like this weird pseudo-D&D ... but they're afraid that if their own games don't work out, they'll miss out on more of the bland pseudo-game?

I feel really sorry for them. I can't imagine being so terrified of your own game "not working" (give it time, dude!) that you feel compelled to participate in something which calls itself D&D and yet is utterly unrelated.

What I wonder is how many of these players think that the way these games run is normal-ish, since all the "unofficial" games of D&D they've played in previously have been just as scripted (i.e. non-game) as this one.

Coming up on a thousand wiki pages!

I love this! I don't have a bard class in my world but if/when I do, I'll incorporate this for sure!

I'm feeling it. Gathering my hirelings and getting them all tipsy before battle is a great mental image. Coming out with a little bonus HP and morale for all of them in the bargain? Too fun.

I like it. Easier to use than your rules from a few years ago without sacrificing anything, as far as I can remember.

You point out that there are the games that are awesome but get tinkered on to the exclusion of actual usage -- design in a vacuum -- and those that are not as sexy but which see actual play.

It looks like it may have been made with the Garry's Mod tool built on top of Half-Life 2, one of the uses of which is to pose ragdolls* and edit their faces.

Matt, would you mind telling us how it was made? I'd like to know.

*ragdoll: a 3D model for a game character which reacts to physics events, such as motion, explosion, etc; corpses, for example, will often be ragdolls, and can thus be moved around, kicked, etc.

I was asking so that I could understand the agent's motivation and thus be able to understand how I would present one as an NPC. Thanks for the confirmation: and from your response now I see that it is doubly in the players' interest to find an investor, since the DM can then cause a town to be set up which is another win for the players' expedition.

PS: I encountered an issue with your donation link as an American. The donate link defaults to my being a Canadian, so naturally I changed it to my country. However it stubbornly only offered me my choice of Canadian province instead of American state, and refused a payment otherwise. Going through the regular Paypal website and entering your email manually worked fine -- in case anyone else encounters this issue.

Let me check my understanding about one section.

The purpose of hiring the agent is to offer them an investment opportunity ("get in on the ground floor") in this treasure-seeking dungeon expedition that is being staged.

An interested agent would make an investment (i.e. provide money or resources, allowing the party to make further purchases of men, tools, etc), and furthermore would be able to attract people to come out and try to snag some of the new money (the treasure) being recovered, by setting up shop as vendors, smiths, etc for those doing the treasure recovery. Thus a small settlement will come together.

Haven't read Subnormality in a while. Thanks for the link, it was a good read.

The whole "reject your characters because of a rule I won't tell you" is to my mind no different from the crappy kind of gameplay where the DM has a special secret trigger/password/course of action and won't let anything else work to solve the puzzle, scenario, etc.

I do not know why the quoted blogger is so proud of having magical hidden rules. I won't even touch the fact that these are magical hidden rules for "character backstory"; I think Alexis has said all that needs to be said about that (here and in other posts.)

Impressive drawing skills you've built up there, love the character artwork.