What Is the Right Chance Of Random Encounters?

Sometimes I see people ask this question. In many cases, it's an indicator that the person asking is inexperienced or maybe even just stupid--because of course "the" right chance of random encounters depends entirely on the scenario you're running. You need to know a lot more before you answer the question.

Let's run down how this can be decided:

First: The Realism/"Realism"/"Simulation" Problem

Some people have less fun when their implausibility meter goes off. Some game mechanics are designed to quiet this particular species of the mind's many monkeys.

 AD&D had frequency attributes for creatures--that is, some creatures were "Common", some were "Uncommon", "Rare", or "Very Rare". You're more likely to run into a wolf than a greater demon--so far so good. The problem with building random encounter tables entirely around this logic is that, for the rest of the game, every time the players cross a week's worth of hexes they are just going to be fighting wolves or standard bandits over and over and over. After a while, this is just grinding--especially when the players are leveled to the point where a fight with a bunch of wolves is a one-round affair. At a certain point, the simulational logic starts to work against the fun.

I am not the first person to point this out. The last time I remember it being pointed out a clever commenter pointed out that one could run encounters on the simulational logic not of rarity but of aggressiveness--so there are lots more wolves than demons, but a demon is more likely to see five people wandering through the snow and want to mess with them than d4 wolves are.

This is better than frequency alone, but by most simulational logic* a wolf pack is exactly as likely to attack a first level wizard and two fighters as Gandalf, Conan and the guy from Gladiator out for a morning stroll. So the grinding problem still remains because wolves don't know what level you are.

How To Actually Decide On Random Encounters

The truth is that even the "in-game logic" that player characters would be constantly running into creatures is underwritten by the GM and game designer's unavoidably totally made-up ideas about how many total creatures run around this forest, dungeon, castle or whatever. 

The actual most important question when deciding on random encounter frequency is what role random encounters are supposed to be playing in the part of the game you are running. 

In some scenarios, random encounters are nearly the whole game. 

For example: the DM creates a hexcrawl full of places. Ruins, lakes, swamps, cities etc--its like a whole land. The players are on an adventure where the idea is to explore this land. The DM then creates a random encounter chart whose basic purpose is to randomize which creature appears in what conflict-characterizing landscape. Without that random encounter table, there may be no enounters with NPCs or creatures at all.

In these cases, you want to think about:

-How big is the total area to be explored? A single dungeon? An island? A kingdom? A continent?

-Given that, roughly how much of it do you expect PCs to cover in a session? Is this exploration a one shot? A few sessions' work? The whole campaign?

Then, given those answers, stock the tables such that the PCs are running into some of your ideas about what constitutes a good creature encounter a handful of times per session and perhaps all of them by the time the expected exploration period ends. If the table has 100 entries each weighted at one each, estimate a frequency that gets you to 100 rolls on that table by the end of the time you spend in that place.

In some scenarios, random encounters just exist to keep the players honest.

For example: the DM creates a dungeon where each room will work just fine without any additional challenge--they already have creatures and traps and what-have-you. Another example: The DM creates a hexmap that is mostly just to flesh out the space between interesting adventure areas (dungeons, cities, ports, ruins overrun with gnolls, etc).

In this case, the only time you're even rolling encounters is if the players waste a lot of time--like checking for traps over and over after a failed roll in a dungeon, or building a massive dam to cut off water to an enemy fort. The encounters do not have to be there for the scenario to be interesting, they just have to be a natural (and fun) barrier to certain attempts to game the system.

You basically want the random encounters to make the players think "We dare not tarry here!"

When this kind of situation arises, the main thing is to decide how much time would constitute dawdling and have a meaningfully threatening thing show up about a third of the time (2 in 6) when and only when the dawdling happens ("every ten minutes in-game" is a common definition in dungeons, an extra day would be a common one in the wilderness).

In some scenarios, random encounters are supposed to be half the game.

This is fairly common in both wilderness and dungeon situations--the location's stocked with (a) interesting places, (b) interesting places with creatures, and (c) places that may be meh but suddenly become more interesting when there are creatures (like a rope bridge over deep water).

This kind of location makes (in-game) sense especially if its a place that is going to be traversed and re-traversed many times by PCs. One time they come through and there's a nymph in the treehouse, next thing they know there isn't one, but there's always a crocodile in the moat, it all feels more "lived in" that way. It's also way easier to make a really big hexmap this way.

In this case, when devising the chance of encounters consider:

-How much of the area do you expect the PCs to traverse during a session? (Let's call this amount of area a "stretch".)

-What percentage of a typical stretch needs to be "activated" by a creature to be interesting?

Then just make the encounter percentage match that.

Alright, carry on.

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*One objection I can imagine: If all creatures can read "aura" one could argue that they can sense weakness so are less likely to attack high-level PCs than low-level ones, but at that point the logic of simulation is so close to magic and magic is so close to "what makes the game fun" that you've basically made the idea of simulation entirely subservient to other priorities.

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We Talk About Carcosa, Realms of Chaos, Book Design, Record Collecting and more

James Edward Raggi IV, owner of Lamentations of the Flame Princess and I made a video--the second episode of "Educating James"--we start out talking about the relationship between his record collector mentality and the design of LotFP books and move on to talk about a bunch of other game and game-adjacent things.

00:00 Intro 00:46 James’ Record Collector Rant 04:17 Vornheim As Zine 06:08 James Vs The Human Race 11:04 On Fancy Game Books (including Carcosa) 17:05 Zak’s Favorite Fancy Books (Including Realms of Chaos and Mayfair’s DC Heroes) 23:38 On Book/Product Design (including Nebulith, the LotFP core book, Vampire: The Masquerade, Deities and Demigods, AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide) 33:50 Design and Characters (including Seclusium of Orphone) 41:16 Vibes 44:34 James Talking About Vinyl 46:07 More Book Design (including Outcast Silver Raiders) 47:59 Fascination (including Warhammer Fantasy and TSR UK) 50:43 Keep on the Borderlands modules 54:26 The Hobbit Movies 58:00 The One Thing James Hates (more about record collecting--and tunnels) 1:00:53 Coda (including Akira Kurosawa’s Ran)

The next episode will be spicy--we argue about free speech.

Because David Lynch Died

This is an old post which I'm re-posting because David Lynch died. A stray observation here--that his work frequently nailed the distinctive spot where you don't know whether to laugh or be terrified, has come up for me over and over in the years since it went up.

Mood and Morality

This is about achieving a mood in a game (or in a movie or book or whatever).

A basic rule of aesthetics is getting one desirable emotional effect generally means letting go of another desirable emotional effect. Like: the epic mood and the zany mood don't usually peacefully coexist--Kermit the Frog is good and Achilles is good but having Kermit show up in the middle of the Iliad would fuck the Iliad up and make it something else. And we're all familiar with the great "Should I allow my player to name his/her PC Jimbob the elf?" question.

Now what we're specifically gonna deal with here is: the moods that are especially accessible by using the fantastic--the nonreal. That is: magical or sci-fi or otherwise surreal elements.

Here's a scale:
So there are 4 categories of mood here lined up from least to most serious.

The basic idea is: during any one specific moment in a work you can get any 2 adjacent emotional effects simultaneously fairly easily and if you're real good you can get 3 adjacent effects in a specific moment. You can't get nonadjacent effects without the one in between. So: no horrific-funny without also weird and no heroic-weird without horrific. You can also loop around and get heroic-funny (generally in the form of "we-like-the-hero-and-root-for-him/her-because-s/he's-funny"--a swashbuckley mood) but heroic-funny-weird and funny-heroic-horrific are stretching it and are pretty hard to pull off all at once. Again, we're talking emotions/moods achievable in a specific moment--like Hellboy comics are sometimes horrific-heroic and sometimes heroic-funny, but no single moment is heroic-funny-horrific all at once because the emotions involved somewhat contradict each other.

In a long work you can get all of them, but it's a challenge. In an actual session of a game you can get all of them comparatively easily (you have hours to fuck around and drift through moods)--but in a game product effectively articulating even one dominant mood is hard--what with the rules and details mundanifying your every step--much less 2 or 3.

The reason for this is because all these moods require a different point of view toward what's going on. "Funny" requires a degree of detachment (or hostility) toward whatever its object is, "heroic" requires investment in its success--attachment to the object (note also that "heroic" doesn't just mean "containing a hero" it means authentically feeling that blood-pumping I-hope-this-guy-wins-and-that-guy-loses emotion), "weird" requires a level of confusion about judgment, and "horrific" requires deciding something's threatening.

In the example I used several ways at looking at the fantastic idea of "part-man/part-bat".

So way over on the left we have the image that pops into our heads when someone makes the familiar observation that "Batman is a guy who goes around dressed like a bat". Like any fantastic conjunction, the idea can be made to sound silly. We are all well aware that anything in D&D can be made to sound goofy if you just say it right: "Elves are like people but with pointy ears and better". The fantastic is incongruity and incongruity can always be made funny.

Now in the middle is simply "weird". Simply weird is hard to achieve, because it means it's genuinely in the middle: an incongruous element which is neither frightening nor funny or is both frightening and funny. The hard part is that different people will see the thing presented as "weird" in different ways. Like that middle picture of the bat with the horn-ears might scare some children but might strike some adults as hilarious and strike others as just, simply, "weird". Weird in its pure form represents a collapse of moral judgment altogether--if we are sure we can just laugh (funny), we know it's harmless, if we are sure we should just run (horrific), we know it's harmful.

The vast majority of things in the world of entertainment which are described as "weird" end up sliding off toward also being "funny" or "horrific". When they do neither it's impressive (classic Surrealism occasionally achieves this) and when they do both it's impressive. For a master class on the emotional multivalency of "weird" see the films of David Lynch--though which parts are funny and which are scary and which balance perfectly being neither but still weird will vary from viewer to viewer.

It's an aesthetic disaster when something intended to funny-weird just comes out scary-weird (see: clowns and small children) or vice versa (see: low-budget horror movies or the Fiend Folio). The important point is just as how--when considered from a historical point of view--"weird" represents a fulcrum between fantasy and sci-fi--when considered from a mood point of view "weird" represents a fulcrum between "so out-of-place-it's-funny" and "so-out-of-place-it's-scary".

Now we get over into horror, and the horrific is not funny. Mating a human with a bat is definitely a scary idea. (And most incongruities can be made scary--maybe even rabbits with unicorn horns). Horror movies can be funny sometimes, but the moment of horror--if that emotion is to be maximized--cannot be at all funny in that moment. If you are going full-on for as-scary-as-scary-can-be, then levity has to be banished. The funniness (on reflection) of the talking rabbit-head in Donnie Darko or the guy in the bear suit in The Shining can't be in our minds during their scenes or else the effect is ruined--we need to be so emotionally close that the detachment necessary to see how essentially funny these things are is short-circuited. A good sign you are really scaring people is that all jokes made fall flat and seem weak. Black humor can work with horror, with weirdness as the translator, creating a vertiginous, giddy, creepy funny that probably won't send you running from the theater, but might give you nightmares--see: Eraserhead. This is more the realm of the disturbing than the shocking.

Now at the far end of the seriousness scale is the heroic. A man with characteristics of a bat is more than a human, is able to achieve what other humans can't. The heroic mode is even more serious than the horrific because, basically, the humorous undercuts and limits the heroic to a huge degree. The jokes have to be very specific: If the jokes are at the expense of the hero then the hero is no longer sympathetic, if the jokes are on the villain then it no longer seems like a credible obstacle for the hero and if the jokes are on the world then it risks seeming like a place not important enough to save. As said above, almost the only way to effectively have heroic-humorous is if it's the hero telling the jokes, which puts you in a pretty specific genre quickly (Spider-Man/Pirates of Caribbean/Ghostbusters territory--"lite") which makes it hard to get to the weird.

If a heroic story tries to go the long way around and tries to meet the weird by going through funny either the weirdness or heroicness has to be sacrificed. Like the timewarp Bill Murray faces in Groundhog Day never really feels emotionally "weird" and the adventures of Barbarella never seem emotionally "heroic" (you might like her but you don't really root for her). Either the weird part makes you more interested in seeing crazy stuff happen (regardless of what it means) and so not become invested in the heroism or the heroic part makes you more invested in judging the rightness and wrongness of things through the haze of humor to feel the eerie burn of weirdness.

Agent Cooper and Pee Wee Herman both achieved a certain level of funny-heroic-weird--if we like them and want them to win, it's because they're charmingly funny and weird. And when we experience this charm, we are unafraid--when Agent Cooper is credibly threatened by horror, he narrows down to simply heroic. And when people say Pee Wee was scary--well, they weren't talking about horror movie scary.

Also, the heroic can't blend with the "simply weird" without going through the horrific. Why? Because the heroic requires moral certitude--a hero (as opposed to a mere protagonist) in this sense is someone we can get behind and what they're doing is something we believe in doing and most importantly--the emotional "high" of seeing heroism (rather than simply knowing a character is the "hero" and going along with it because it's in front of us and we want to see some action) requires the audience to share this moral certitude. We cannot thrill to the slaying of The Emperor if we like the emperor. The aesthetic effect of the "simply weird" is, on the other hand, achieved by it purposefully not telling us what to think. Horror is the translator. We can only root for Dr Strange when he faces Shuma Gorath if his weirdness is frightening. If it's not, we'll just sort of be baffled by the situation and not emotionally sure enough to want Strange to defeat him.

When totally achieved the feeling of weird-horrific-heroic is (and should be) fundamentally emotionally unsettling. We are rooting for the hero to destroy something s/he and we do not totally understand. When Jeffrey defeats Frank in Blue Velvet it doesn't feel exactly right--it's like he's destroying part of himself, when Elric kills a freakish monster we aren't totally sure he has any more right to live than it does, when Lovecraft's protagonists escape the terrors in his stories we kind of don't care--the terrors are more interesting than the characters.

Which is all to say the certainty of the truly heroic and the uncertainty of the truly weird coexist as uneasily as the attachment required for the heroic and the detachment required for the humorous.

A good example of how this all works together in games is the mythos of the original Warhammer: It hung out largely in horror-heroic, but could migrate over to horror-weird (Realms of Chaos) and over to funny (orks--and the general black humor throughout) but funny-heroic just couldn't authentically happen. When the orks fought the space marines, either you have to feel like the space marines are the butt of the joke (no longer convincingly heroic--emotionally speaking) or the orks are just one more inhuman abomination (the Space Marines not getting any of their jokes). Another example: sometimes the Joker is funny--but as soon as Batman comes around, he isn't any more (though he is often, in these moments, weird and horrific) and if he is, then Batman suddenly looks impotent. You can have all these "notes" but not at the same time, and not without considerable effort.

Which is all to say: Morality and mood are tied together. Certain effects become almost impossible in the presence of others and so, as always, you have to realize that people who want one are going to have to make less of a big deal of the other. Deal.

This is Fascinating and I Love It

 

So this is an interview with Rick "I wrote Warhammer 40K because nobody in the company thought it'd make any money" Priestley about all the unfinished projects that he can remember at Games Workshop during his tenure there.

It's magical and wonderful.

-Fantasy wack-races game with the Warhammer races each having their own vehicles

-Monster-gladiator management game

-Dried-up north-sea post-apoc vehicle game with onomatopoeic combat system 

-A version of Necromunda/Confrontation 40k set on a decrepit Eldar craft-world with warring Eldar gangs

-Not one but two failed space combat games trying to use (two different) aspects of real-life physics 

-Halfling as Emperor of the Old World because every other option got killed

And a lot more--plus interesting insight into the financial realities that made these games go unmade.

Probably the most interesting thing I've seen about games in a year or two. So many ideas here for any DM or designer.

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PC Backgrounds Only Faster

One thing I initially liked about 5e was the skill list--it seemed like a reasonable compromise between all PCs of a class seeming to have identical skillsets (old school) and "Use Rope"-level useless granularity. A few of them felt superfluous (Investigation f'rinstance) but it was basically ok.

The Background system in 5e, whereby a player has a race, class and then a secret third thing they used to do was interesting especially if you have an established world like I do because everybody's bringing a little more meat to the table. I also works well if you often have newbie PCs played by newbie players mingling with 10th-level, 10-year veterans rich in lore.

Being fairly old-school by inclination, however, I did not like how long character generation took--especially for new players, for whom I do not like to create the impression that the game is more complex than it really is. Backgrounds seem the worst culprit here: everybody creates race, class and stats, I can do the modifier math for them, and picking spells and weapons is fun. It starts to feel stupid when rattling off the background list though--so here's what I do:

When running The Zak Hack I just ask "What did your PC do before becoming a (wizard/fighter/thief etc)?" they usually have an answer right away. Then I give them 2 skills they don't already have implied by the job and some useful job-related trinket and move on. (Demon City handles this via the "Occupational Skill" which in turn is influenced by Call of Cthulhu NPCs who all have their own job as a %ile skill, like "Gravedigger 78%").

For example last session my pal Devin made a half-elf wizard and he said he used to be a plumber so I gave him a choice of (pick 2) Persuasion, Perception and Sleight of Hand, plus a guild letter of introduction and some tools.

Then the only question was what are elves doing with plumbing but let's be real, for elf cities the fountain budget alone is staggering.

Three Kinds of Mystery

Ok, there are three kinds of mystery in stories--

Classic 'What's Gonna Happen?' Mystery (diegetic mystery)

This is a mystery to both the audience and the main characters in the story: They are wondering how events will play out (or, in the case of a Sherlock-Holmes-style-mystery have played out). What will happen to Jack, Wendy, and Danny in the Overlook Hotel is a 'What's Gonna Happen?" Mystery, as is who framed Roger Rabbit? and who did the murder on the Orient Express and what will happen when we have these two couples swap wives. It's often the basic engine of the plot.

This happens in RPGs all the time.

WTF is Going On Mystery? (temporary narrative mystery)

This kind of mystery is created not in the story but by the way of telling a story. These are things that are not immediately known to the audience but are understood by the characters involved and we only learn them by following the story. Nearly every first line of a first-person novel involves this mystery (Who is narrating? What kind of person are they?) It was the best of times and it was the worst of times? For who? In the first scene of Pulp Fiction where we see Jules and Vincent talking in a car about the Royale With Cheese we don't know who these guys are. We don't know what they're about to do. We don't know where they're going or why. These are WTF is Going On mysteries. When Luke Skywalker first talks to his aunt and uncle about Ben Kenobi, we don't know who that is yet. These are temporary narrative mysteries--things kept secret by the writer until they want you--the audience--to find out.

One hallmark of good writing is very careful control of this kind of mystery. A lot of lackluster writers tell you where you are and who everyone is right away and so waste a lot of the potential of this kind of mystery.

This one is rare in RPG sessions, since the whole point is players need to know enough of their characters' POV to make decisions.

Eternal Mystery (mysterious-vibes mystery)

This is a mystery that never gets answered in the story. It can overlap with the other two, but also not. The point of this mystery is that it is never revealed and is part of the vibe. The lady or the tiger? What's in the Pulp Fiction brief case? Why is a guy in a bear suit giving some dude a blowjob in the Overlook Hotel? Why does Agent Cooper keep dreaming of a dwarf? These things just are. They make the situation seem mysterious but will not be revealed in the story.

This is a bread-and-butter device in pulp storytelling and so is all over RPGs. 

Some notes

• One thing sequels often do is take something conceived as an mysterious-vibes mystery and turn them into a temporary narrative mystery. In the original two seasons of Twin Peaks Agent Cooper keeps talking to a "Dian" on his tape recorder and that's just a thing he does. In the much later Season Three, we meet Dian--she's Laura Dern. Lovecraft stories are full of this--we hear a mysterious reference to the Pnakotic Manuscripts or Necronomicon in an early story and its just meant to be a mysterious name, but then in some later story (occasionally by another author) it is revealed what that thing is. The big alien "space jockey" in Alien had this done to it.
• One element of stories called "surreal" is the deliberate piling up of the second two kinds of mystery: we get a load of details and we don't know which are actually things that we need to pay attention to because they resolve and which are just weirdness. This tension is part of the excitement in these kinds of stories but if the proportions aren't right it can make someone check out because the mysteries begin to feel "hollow"--that is, there's no reason to wrestle with them.
• You can also pile the first type of mystery onto these two to make a Twin-Peaks-style mysterious mystery story mysteriously told, but unless you take care to highlight the first kind of mystery's importance (as Twin Peaks did by reiterating the question "Who Killed Laura Palmer?") the audience may not ever realize there is a plot to uncover.
• The massive part of the appeal of RPG campaigns is that everyone feels a great sense of the first kind of mystery as a campaign begins--unlike so many stories we don't who will live or die, how long the story will last, or often even what it will be about. We know more about a movie from its trailer or a book from its jacket than we do what will happen in a campaign with our characters--even if we know all about the characters at the start.

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Intelligence In The Land of Player Skill

Gamers often discuss the idea of "player skill" vs "character skill" in games. That is: my wizard can speak Elvish--that's character skill--but my wizard knowing that a slow, tough monster with no distance attacks is best attacked with distance attacks is player skill. I know that so my wizard knows it.

In most games I like, what my wizard does is the result of both.

Some people don't understand how the Intelligence stat works in games where player skill is an element (since an intelligent player can add so much to the character's vocabulary of ideas) and I thought of this the other day:

A high-intelligence PC functions like a modern person who has a phone with internet and remembers to use it.

Do I know who Jonathan Livingston Seagal is? I do not, really. I remember the name, that's all. In fact I got his name wrong. But if I had a higher Int I might not have. But I have the internet so I can look him up and then know. A high Int PC would have a better chance of already knowing.

A high Int PC has facts at their disposal. 

As we know: not everyone who has the internet and uses it is actually smart. For example, just because they can all google what a logical fallacy is doesn't mean that they'll avoid using them in their own thinking. The person "playing" these people isn't smart, even though they have the information.

A high-Int PC played by an average-Int player player is like most people on the internet: lots of access to facts, very little ability to use them to figure things out.

An average-Int character played by a high-Int player is like a clever person on an alien planet--they can figure stuff out, but only if they get help with what everything they're looking at is, does, or why they'd want to do it.

So there you go.

The Book of Jerks

Jennell Jaquays died. It sucked, she was always very kind to me.

I would go on about her but considering how shitty people are on here I don't want to invite people trolling about it.

If you don't know who Jennell was you can read this.

--

Anyway back to the grind:

So a while back I was thinking about how I wanted random encounters to look and developed the "meat on the table" method, where the Random Encounter Table was one really long table and contained not just the creatures but a little bit of what they were doing when you ran into them.

After thinking and running a little more, I decided a few other things would be helpful, one of them being what I call the Book of Jerks.

It's basically a list of NPC villains that have just enough detail that when you random encounter them--or their cronies--they have a deeper adventure hook there if you need it. Like:

I wrote 100 of these entries plus 100 more to update how I handled dungeon random tables--they're hard to do because ever dungeon is different, but I settled on a system where pretty much each entry gives you a pair of results ("Giant bat or Thief") so that the results are flexible without being vague and then did 100 more for encounters on the water.

With the previous encounter tables that makes an even 1000 encounters in the brand new Broceliande Random Encounter pdf.

Avalable for 15$ in The Store. If you already have the old version let me know, I'll throw in another 5$ pdf for free. As always, these pdfs come with the current complete bestiary so have monster stats.

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Some Raw Kael

 

When you're in the game blog game, what you're doing is writing nonfiction where you are describing fictions.

That's also what movie reviewers do--including Pauline Kael, the New Yorker's old critic--widely regarded as the best. Is she? She's interesting, but often wrong and gross. But whatever--either way, she had a way with prose and there's a few RPG-adjacent Pauline Kael lines that will stick with me til my grave.

Her take on Boorman's too-late-to-be-psychedelic Excalibur is about right, spotting its best images for what they are:

When Mordred is fully grown, he wears golden spiked armor and, on his head, a gold gargoyle mask that his own sneering mouth completes. This apparition of evil comes closer to mythological scale than Arthur or Lancelot or Guenevere or any of the others do.

and:

The Dark Ages section, with its armored brutes—they’re like crustaceans tearing each other apart—is a thrilling piece of moviemaking.

Her Time Bandits review not only actually explicitly references D&D, but actually kinda reads like a review of a D&D campaign:

Time Bandits

UK (1981): Fantasy/Comedy

110 min, Rated PG, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc

Written by two members of the "Monty Python" group, Michael Palin and the American expatriate Terry Gilliam, who also directed, this surreal adventure fantasy has been conceived as a movie for children and adults. It's about a little English boy who is hurtled from one era to another by a pack of six dwarfs who have stolen The Supreme Being's map of the holes in the space-time continuum, and it's as picaresque as you can get, with Ian Holm as Napoleon, John Cleese as Robin Hood, Sean Connery as Agamemnon, Ralph Richardson as The Supreme Being, who's too busy to get his three-piece-suit pressed, and David Warner, who's a great-looking Evil Genius--he wears talons and a Nixon nose out of a David Levine drawing. (The light shining up from hell makes his nostrils red.) All this seems to do something for the 8-to 12-year-old boys in the audience-the ones known to be very high on d & d (Dungeons and Dragons)-that it may not do for adults, who will probably see and hear a lot of jokes without feeling much impulse to laugh. The whimsical rhythms of the vaudeville-skit humor often seem to be the result of mistiming; the interludes with Palin and Shelley Duvall as wonky sweethearts are especially musty--the two of them seem more amused than the audience. Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It's far from a bad movie, but it doesn't quite click together, either. The director doesn't shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.

"Suffering from a surfeit of good ideas" that haven't been satisfyingly shaped and wasting "magical incongruities" is definitely how you feel trying to wade through all the RPG material that's been put out over the years. And many is the GM who has piled on another goblin when theres too much going on to fully freak everyone out with the one they already have.

...though if pulp entertainment tells us anything, it's that the other problem is there are no bad ideas--which Kael alludes to in her review of Godard's kinnnnda heist movie Bande à part.:

It's as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines.

 There's a reason Tarantino named his production company after it.

Kael was notoriously hard on Stanley Kubrick's films--not dismissive, but still hard--but she had a way of moralizing about their creepiness that only made them seem more unique:

She said cyberless-punk classic A Clockwork Orange might be "....the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy."

On Barry Lyndon, the greatest treasure-trove of D&Dable NPCs in the history of cinema, Kael opines: "The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely."

Fair enough, but look at those sheep, neither people nor things.

She made the same mistake with Blade Runner--her Nexus 6 eye identifying everything about the film's virtues except for the fact that that's what they were:

"Ridley Scott isn’t great on mise en scène—we’re never sure exactly what part of the city we’re in, or where it is in relation to the scene before and the scene after."

Spoken like a true Manhattan bumpkin just dropped off in downtown LA.

Noir is mystery and mystery means you don't know where you are, or why. Even gamers know that--that's why even though D&D is all about maps, Call of Cthulhu isn't. It's also why Manhattan--the orderly little isle of named neighborhoods and numbered streets--isn't where Hammett or Chandler lived.

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At other times, Kael's descriptions are like the stylish picture on a disappointing VHS box--they evoke way more than the thing she's reviewing.

Her take on Vampire's Kiss-- "This may be the first vampire movie in which the modern office building replaces the castle as the site of torture and degradation."

That is 100% a Demon City mini-campaign. Or Call of Cthulhu if you don't have 20 bucks.

Same for this stray shot from her review of Octopussy:  "The picture doesn't deliver on the chic perversities suggested by the inelegant title (and some of the decor)."

I don't know what would, but I know James Raggi would publish it.

For more chic perversity, here.

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Why Everybody's "Deeply Magical" But Humans

Elves have magic--they're so magic that there's boots just called "Boots of Elvenkind" and they're magic just because they're elvenkind. Halflings can't be seen half the time, even when they're right there, and they just stumble ass-backwards into the best artifacts in the game. Dwarfs are out here mining mithril and making armor and axes that're double-strong just because dwarfs made them. And gnomes are always talking to badgers or whoever.

But humans are just these guys. If you found a "Axe of the Human Lords" what would that even do?

A great mystery--but I just now figured out why.

This table:

The demihumans all have level limits.

So, ok picture this:

You're elves, ok? Just won a fight:

Here comes the human general:

"Hail to thee, brave captain of the elderkin! Were it not for thee and thine veterans of aeon wars untold we mayhap would not hast defeated Sauron!"

"Not a problem, bro! He sucked, It was an issue, had to be handled."

"Yeah fair! Cool, so I talked to the DM and he says we get 9 billion seven hundred and sixty-eight thousand xp for defeating the horde of unfathomable darkness bent on wending all life and time round the iron gauntlet of its iniquitous will. So it looks like your share is...."

"Nah keep it."

"Whoa what? Are you peacing out on the campaign? Tolkien says next week he's got a one-shot with halflings!"

"Nah just we're all 7th level dude. We can't level up. And I checked with our wizards--they're all maxed out at 11, too."

"Truly the songs were modest when it cometh to praising the generosity of the eldár!"

"Nah its cool man, is it cool if we take the items?"

"Like the magic items?"

"Yeah...sure?"

"Cool! See you next week!"

Why are all the other races but us so magical?

After a certain point, every time they go adventuring, they get all the items. That's why Galadriel's over here just giving campaign-saving items away because she's got extra.

Campaigns Are Inconvenient--And Always On Your Mind

Here's a thing you notice if you hang out in fan spaces--I'll use comics as an example because with games it'd be confusing.

A comics critic/pundit/gadfly starts talking: "Batman Batman Batman Spider-Man Iron Man Batman Superman X-Man X-Men Spider-Man Batman"

But then they're asked what their favorite comic of the year is--is it any of those superhero comics? No it is not. It is some indie comic they haven't mentioned all year.

They then go back to talking about Spider-Man and Batman.

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I don't think they're being disingenuous or just trying to sound smart. I think that person genuinely does like the niche indie comic that they are trumpeting far more than the latest iteration of the fannish pop stuff they spend most of their free time in the fan-space talking about--even when they're not being paid to talk about that popular market-dominating thing.

Because the thing is, no matter how much you love any slice-of-life indie comic: it started, it ran for a few years or months, and then it ended.

Batman, on the other hand, not only has had thousands of stories, not only has been in print since 1939, not only is connected to Wonder Woman, Aquaman and every other character in his publisher's intellectual-property universe, not only has been translated into every medium imaginable where even more stories are being produced, but also: will have a dozen more stories out next month.

If you want to talk about only what is topical and what just happened--your favorite indie comic is over when it's over. Batman is still making moves. Stupid moves, maybe, but who doesn't want to talk about stupidity?

Even if (and perhaps especially if) all you have to say is how bad the new Batman material is compared to the stuff you like, there is always something to talk about. Whereas your favorite indie book is just sitting there, still being done and finished and not breaking news.

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This isn't just about market share or popularity--it's about the content mill continuously putting the subject in the commentators' head. There's always something new going on with the X-Men, even if it's not new. You can't say that about Maus.

In the world of RPGs the equivalent isn't just a product with a content mill (like D&D or Pathfinder) it's a campaign.

Lots of you have off-label favorite games. Maybe you even get to play them once in a while. But what do you talk about, spread the word about, kibitz about? Your favorite game over and over? No: you talk about the campaign you're in.

You talk about what's going on--even if you like Barbarians of Lemuria better you're still talking about the breaking news: what happened in your D&D campaign.

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I especially think about this in terms of the games from the indie RPG boom that are mainly good for one-shots: they have limited popularity not just because they're one-shots (there are, for example, indie-crazy groups happy to try a different indie game every month) but because you just don't want to keep talking about a single session that happened 4 months ago.

Despite indie rhetoric that games designed for one-shots and mini-campaigns should be more popular with busy adults than the time-consuming, scheduling-nightmare, lore-heavy, years-before-you-even-get-to-cast-Fireball-gorilla in the game store that is Dungeons & Dragons, the fact is that life-devouring games just make you talk more about them, which means people hear about them more, which means they get popular.

I also wonder this: do one-shot-friendly games have a popularity ceiling? Like: a point of popularity past which they just can't grow?

I don't know. Anyway I guess we'll eventually find out.

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Collectivity, Cooperation and Challenge

Failures of Collective Spirit

Everyone on the internet, and many people who aren't, have had an experience like this:

-"Hey guys don't we all love this boat we're on!"

-"Yes we do! Or, at least--it is better than having no boat!" all agree

-"Ok, do whatever, have fun doing your thing just please nobody press the red button or the boat will explode!"

-Someone--just for funsies, or for clown clout--presses the red button.

-Boat explodes. Everyone regrets this.

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This is a failure of collectivity.

That is: a set of behaviors that everyone involved acknowledges benefits everyone, including themselves, and someone just cannot stop themself from putting some other short-term personal goal first.

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In a role-playing game one of the fun parts is having your PC do weird or funny stuff, things you wouldn't do in a more practical world--the fun of being someone else.

In a role-playing game with a heavy challenge element (one where there's a real threat that you will lose a character and therefore no longer be able to play the game in the specific way you were having fun playing it and have to start over and do it a different way) the usual best strategy to succeed in the challenge is to engage in collective thinking.

This can involve explicit planning--"We all benefit if we kill the monster and get the treasure, so let's pay attention to who we each are as a group and figure out how to use those aptitudes to best do that", but it can also involve just, as a player, being aware of who the other peoples' characters are and what they can do.

Many people experience a mild conflict here in the moment:

• They want to succeed!
• They also wanna do what they wanna do because its playtime, dammit!
• (Also sometimes failing because one PC cannot help but be the squeaky wheel they are is fun, too.)

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Outside a role-playing game online there are other obvious examples of this in forums online:

For example, there's no piece information that can be passed on via namecalling on a forum that can't be passed on in some other way, but someone will, eventually, always do it even when there's an explicit rule against it. Somebody gets bounced and nobody is hurt but them.

Every time somebody does one of these things they're failing to act in a way that's best for everyone--including them--and they know it, but they just can't stop themself.

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D&D and Cooperation

D&D is very much a game about cooperation.

It is much more so than most triple-A video games or nearly any other popular entertainment you'll be involved with outside of actual sports.

This is an oddly-smothered point.

The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy about cooperation, as is Star Wars. The ideal that people with diverse skillsets and attitudes need to work together to achieve laudable long-term goals is deep deep in the DNA of the media that inspired most RPGs.

The current post-5e, post-Critical Role, post-D&D The Movie temperature of conversation about D&D broadly online emphasizes many things including:

-Character-creation options (related to conversations about peoples' interest in video game character gen options) and the ability to use them to express yourself

and

-Progressive social principles.

Considering this, its very odd that one of D&D's radiant innate progressive virtues--the emphasis on working together--isn't placed front and center all the time.

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Here's Why

Despite any open claims of holding to progressive principles, the people most responsible for the current conversation in RPGs absolutely suck at collective thinking. So many pay more attention to what happens to an imaginary orc than to a real human player at the table with them.

I know. I've seen them play games. I was often in games with them.

Right now the conversation is defined by:

-the post-Storygame narrativist scene which largely grew out of people being unable to communicate with their fellow D&D or Vampire or RIFTS groups, especially in challenge-oriented play and so invented games full of rules to police interhuman communication or simply gatekeep any player out unless that player wanted to play the exact narrowly-defined microsubgenre of game they themselves wanted to play instead of just agreeing they all wanted the fucking ring to go in that fucking volcano

and

-2010s OSR veterans who, when given a choice between politely asking one sacred crackpot friend to stop lying on the internet or letting the entire ship sink, absolutely chose letting the ship sink

I reiterate-I have seen these people play games. 

They are absolutely blown away by 101-level collective-success tactics. See you're outnumbered? Back up, close the door, pour flaming oil on the floor, drop marbles in the oil, have a resilient PC hold a torch over the oil (remember which PCs are resilient!), ready to drop it, protect the wizards. Works all the time.

They are filled with shock and awe by even just the most basic gestures in this direction, they will make you leader immediately.

Patrick Stuart once killed one of Zach Marx Weber's PC because he thought throwing green slime on him would help.

If the current version of progressivism in the RPG scene seems oddly fascist, I'd posit this is why--these are the people who have absolutely zero practice self-governing, who made their clout by talking about how they were proudly unable to play with anyone else and needed very new very specific new gates built to keep people out rather than just learning how to throw a party.

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Universal Ultimate Theory of OSR Play

GO! PLAy! GO! NOW! HURRY!

After two decades of RPG theory, I have boiled down the principles of the Old School Renaissance RPG down to a single maxim.

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(Oh wait before that, important announcement on the legal front:

That's the third case down if anyone's keeping track. Details here, anyway...)

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This principle explains why we keep playing D&D despite the creator and copyright holders' tremendous flaws.

It explains why we keep playing old versions, with less detail in the characters.

It explains why we tend to disdain too much backstory or involved character creation.

It explains why we so often hack an existing game instead of playing custom-built games from scratch.

It explains why we favor compact, easily-portable and modular blog-sized bits of content that can fit lots of versions of D&D.

It explains why we don't do Session Zeroes much.

It explains why safety tools, while not incompatible with OSR play, aren't really a big thing in OSR.

It explains why "on-boarding" of all kinds--where the DM carefully explains to the players what the premise and expectations of the campaign will be, are--is disdained.

It explains why the GM is given as much power as the group will let them have.

It explains why we the OSR is so improv-friendly and the modules often ask for improv.

It explains why rulings (on the spot) are privileged over rules (new books, to be read).

It explains why 3d6-in-order, character-dies-roll-again is so common.

It explains why dungeons are so common.

It also explains why certain post-80s improvements to games have been picked up by the OSR--including expressing to-hit as a bonus instead of a chart value and improvements in layout and adventure packaging, and various rule-of-cool hacks.

It's this:

I wanna play.

That's it: I wanna play now. I want to play an RPG right away!

I am busy I am an adult. I do not have time for anything!

ROLL ALL THE DICE AT ONCE! HURRY! GO!!!

OSR PRINCIPLE NUMBER ONE

Any innovation to the RPG experience which extends the time between all the players figuring out when they can all meet to play and when they will actually start playing is unlikely to become standard across Old School play, no matter how great the other advantages of said improvement.

OSR is born of desperate, time-poor circumstances. We play 2 hour sessions before everyone goes to work or school, we play in hotel lobbies, drunk, because 3 people were all like....Hey! We should Play!!!, we play in a box, we play with a fox, we play with dice made from our own blood, we play. We need to play asap!!!!!!

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An example

Several months ago I talked about the possibility of my suicide on this blog. This was occasion for great consternation on the part of the good-hearted people in the RPG-o-sphere.

I had a long zoom conversation with Jeff Gameblog and James Edward Raggi about the various problems in my life created by people who had been inspired to make game stuff by myself, Jeff Gameblog and James Edward Raggi. They had initiated contact because they were concerned, but they had no idea what to do.

Jeff finally said "Well...we should play a game."

I almost said "Go fuck yourself."

Like: given fake felony accusations destroying my life your plan is we play a game? Jeff my dude.

But I decided to play.

What did we play?

We played D&D. Not even LotFP.

What characters did we use? Whichever ones we could dig up fastest from games we already played.

What edition were we using? We still don't know.

What spell list are we using? Couldn't say.

Are we using LotFP or Holmes or AD&D or Moldvay versions of spells? Figure that shit out as we go!!

Why? Why not any of the other games or variants on games we have all had so much fun discussing over the decade-plus? Because we wanted to play NOW. Jeff runs his game in a tight 2-hour slot between waking up and getting his kids to work. There is not time for fripperies like playing a game we don't already know already.

No reading no figuring no planning. Get a character, get a dungeon, get a guy, get a girl, get a they, get a whatever, get in there and playyyy.

As the game expanded, we got new players.Who did out first recruit play? A henchman that was already there. Who did they play when that character died? An ogre that was already in the dungeon. What were their stats? We figured it out as we went.

Does this mean each rule we use is possibly not the most optimal one? Yes!

Does this mean the lore is an utter patched-together trainwreck devoid of subtlety? YES!

Is this reliance on the One Game totally fair to other games--including ones we ourselves wrote? NO!

Does this means over a dozen years of pondering all of us have done about clever hacks of the building blocks of D&D got ignored? Yes!

But we played! And so we had fun, more of it, faster! We logged more fun-hours! We are playyyyying. 

Efficiency is beautiful, efficiency is art.