If I Have To Say "Mome Rath" One More Time My Face Will Fall Off

THURSDAY

We were somewhere around West Adams on the edge of the freeway, when the Wayz began to suck balls.

I remember saying something like "We can't stop here, this isn't, like, where the place is."

But the Lyft girl had my back, and soon I was 8 blocks away, in an inflatable orange chair in a building with a plaque outside saying "The main issue in life is not the victory but the fight, the essential thing is to have fought well" which didn't make much sense to me but I took four selfies next to it anyway.

I didn't have much choice: there were a lot of people talking in official capacities at Indiecade The International Festival Of Independent Games but mostly about videogames, which I don't make. There were games to play though, so I did. I'd like to think I fought well, but when you're strapped into VR goggles watching ping-pong balls the size of cantaloupes bouncing off a waffle grid, it can be hard to tell.

I met a Pole and at least three Tylers. I know at least that much. I was informed my books either were or were not at the warehouse.

Eventually I had my only meeting of the day--with a company that made games, TV shows and comic books. I knew had read and enjoyed at least one of the comic books. I looked into the rep's blue eyes, eating Twixes "That was a good comic," I said. It was true.

After meatballs, there were prizes. There were game celebrities I didn't recognize making jokes about each other and saying "devs" and "triple A" and using acronyms. "All these other nominated games look amazing," I thought "I don't deserve to beat any of them". I didn't. Zoe Quinn had great shoes though. Back in Culver City there was a woman at the bar on a first date--Mandy and Stokes gave her a lapdance and kept taking their clothes off. We played a game with- but not of- cards.

FRIDAY

They still make things at 9 in the morning. It's not just that my books are missing, it's that ALL the merch is missing for all of Indiecade. This makes me feel better. 

There are game designers here from France, Poland, Germany, the UK--they ask me why Americans are so neurotic about language, I introduce them to root beer and tater tots. Maybe I am going to hell. The books show up though.

There are a lot of beautiful and very loud machines--a lot of people see a table full of books and just keep walking and I am cool with that, confident that my people will find me. Ok not confident but whatever. I am better off than the guy next to me with the text adventure who has to somehow explain that yes this is a computer but there won't be explosions. It's a good game though. I have his card somewhere. I have a million peoples' cards. I have all cards ever made and there are no cards left on earth. Maybe I should have cards? One day I will have cards. According to this one I met Luke Crane.

Somehow we end up at the same bar where the girls were taking their clothes off the night before. Probably because walking-distance Culver City on a Friday night is like a strip mall in a midwest town with a really important football team. The foreigners ask my advice--I told them art couldn't participate in the societal imperative to suppress the awareness of violence even if it wanted to and also get out of Culver City.

SATURDAY

I am fucking Abe Lincoln tired, but I can still pitch Red & Pleasant Land. But can I run it? People seem to think so, except one perceptive girl who notices that due to the Alice's randomized level-ups her thief can't do anything the person running the Alice can't. Well almost--I try to explain that she's got Languages, which is actually a useful skill, and that the Alice's saves are fucked but I'm so fried from talking about croquet balls and rapiers for hours on end with no sleep I barely believe myself. I won't realize I was right all along until I run the numbers the next day--but by then it's been so long since I slept I've forgotten whether you roll over or under saving throws. Seriously I forgot Red Box I am losing my mind. One kid makes a wizard named 'Bread" one makes a fighter named 'Neighborhood Asshole'.

The Red & Pleasant Lands are sold out by the end of the day, though. So I'm doing something right or everyone's stupid.

I come home to a thick and sugary smell which confuses me until I remember I'd told Anne to make a coat out of marshmallows. There it was, dangling from a floor fan to keep it away from the dogs.

There are two things they never mention about marshmallow coats: they're fucking heavy and women look great in them. We were having a birthday party--people dressed as Wolverine and Jarvis Cocker came, and a girl with sequins instead of eyebrows. It all ended with the birthday girl on my lap serenely mumbling about a game where pugs smell each others' butts which is a net win for Independent Gaming I think.

SUNDAY

Get away from the marshmallow goo all over the floor. Get in the car.  Where am I? Wait: It's preview time and we can preview each others' games. Except I can't because someone has to run this game.

For three days I've sat 20 feet from this video game that looks like exactly like weird spatial nightmares I've been having since I was four and the only game that won two awards and I never get to try it. It looks amazing. I don't vote in the Developer's Choice Award because I haven't touched most of them. People sure do ask a lot of questions. Yes, I drew it. I wrote it. Yes, D&D. It's not technically a game it's a supplement. Where can you get it? Who knows? Stores? I guess? This is Vornheim, get it instead, it's cheaper.

There are at least three other games here with Alice In Wonderland stuff. Meanwhile somebody has a game where you throw trucks that is literally powered by your thoughts.

Event staff tells us abruptly to pack up our gear, there'll be some end-of-Indiecade awards. The People's Choice award goes to Bad Blood, the Developer's Choice award goes to a Macbeth-themed game, the Press Choice Award goes to a game with big colored buttons called Codex Bash, the jury's Special Recognition Award which encompasses not only the normal nominees but everything at Indiecade goes to a fucking book called Red & Pleasant Land by Jez and fucking me.

I'm like what even is that? They give me a trophy with a Nintendo controller and Beavis and Butthead on it. Then I get some fried chicken and explain to some guys who made a game where you power up by screaming into a headset that the best videogame is Space Marine. Then Stokely rolls up EXACTLY WHEN THE SINGALONG PART OF BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY STARTS and we go to a party where we got to smash a virtual reality asteroid and it was scary and then we went to Venice and the only bar on the beach had a Doors cover band and Stokely tells the international game designers about being locked in a vault then there was a bartender in a Green Bay Packers shirt who was like "Oh you did Red and Whatsit Land I liked your game man" and me and the Pole and the guy from Bristol who made the big colored button game finished our drinks in the closing-time light of total exhaustion and weird victory.

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Vrokk, Isle of the War Wizards

I was talking to Anders about the Goblin Market and how after a while it doesn't take too long to make up content for a place once you get its "voice"--how most GMs invent little pocket-worlds they can, over time, learn to easily occupy, mentally.

These blog entries keep track of accumulated lore and developments, but they also work almost like a spell before GMing. I read through and by the end I'm there, and I can act and react like that place when I have to run a session because I go to the right headspace.

So anyway here's Vrokk...

Nominally ruled by Queen Jayeleene, whom the player characters rescued from Royal Fist Monkeys long ago, Vrokk is, practically speaking, a clutch of feudal magocracies.

Queen Jayeleene

The extremely vain and jealous queen has become increasingly eccentric, demanding all powerful women on the isle wear masks. They humor her.

The most powerful War Wizards of Vrokk are all equally subtle or inept, for, despite near-constant intrigues, the political constellations have barely shifted in the last century, save for the disappearance of Cyanotica Bast, whose arcology was then occupied by a demon of sloth named Anaxorchas.

Cyanotica Bast

There are rumors that Anaxorchas planned to overrun the nearby arcology of Nithrinn Poxx but so far this hasn't happened. Nithrinn Poxx has been behaving strangely--no less abritrarily than usual but somehow a different flavor of arbitrary.

Nithrinn Poxx

Clarissa of Oog and Hargen the Insidious have both long resided in the city of Vrokk itself.

Clarissa of Oog, she has a second mouth where her left eye should be

Hargen has recently developed a passion for Yoonish cloud pheasant, and has been eating nothing else and done nothing else but eat for the last 17 days.

Hargen The Insidious

No-one is sure quite why Vrokk attracts so many powerful magicians. Some say there are things buried beneath it, deep in the Cube, where the earth communes with itself in cthonic meditation relaying endlessly a tale of itself to itself and skin between the real and the dreamt is stretched like skin over the wide mouth of a deep drum.

What you do in Vrokk is hexcrawl between the wizards and their wars and their scheming. They're great for inscrutable assignments.

For instance:

-The adventurers need to locate a rottweiler. The dog is a witness to a territorial violation by a swallow acting as familiar to Nithrinn Poxx. The dog's wandered into a zone wracked with a spasm, which contracts and births hybrid moths which seek high office in Vrokk and, mistaking the rottweiler for an important official, have captured it and are at attempting to interrogate it.  Nobody has "Speak With Animals here so it's all a pill.

or

-The upper reaches of a flooded cathedral on the coast has been repurposed as a dock for Queen Jayeleene's fleet in its campaign against the Rogue Traitors who seek to plunder and harry the isles. The problem is the vicious sea elves infesting the cathedral's lower reaches. Something about repatriating a relic? And totally of course one of the other wizards is helping them just to be an asshole.

Vrokk is not natively exotic, but exotic things are done to it. The landscape is sporadically metamorphosed and beaten, its disrupted geography bears old scars--things unimagined grow in the spaces between watchtowers and armies.

The culture is languid, advanced, coded, suspicious, brittle, and tolerant in the lazy way of places where no one really likes anyone else. Everyone's mind idles on some distant plane or awful future dream of violent conquest. Sensitive visitors find themselves trying not to offend the sorcerers with their vulgarity until they realize everything does. Talking, eating, breathing--all necessities form a kind of painful background static to the War Wizards, not least because it reminds them of all the realities they have themselves yet to transcend.

The mighty War Wizards eye your party from godhood's lobby, wondering how best to use them to shorten their wait.

"The Fetid Shit Stink Of Right Wing Power Fantasy"

Why Someone With 8 Unfinished Kickstarters Never Saw Star Wars But Hates It Anyway--And Why That Makes Perfect Sense

Vs Goliath

I haven't seen The Trailer--there's not much point in rushing to watch a trailer for something your girlfriend will die if she doesn't see. A bedazzled pink Millenium Falcon on a wire hits me whenever I stand up in bed because it is always overhead, chasing a pink tie fighter on another wire and always pursued by a pink Slave 1. I have no choice.

With regards to Star Wars I am lazily optimistic but not terribly invested.

But One Man (read this in a very heavy In A World Voice), Is Not Pleased...

Hill got really upset that Star Wars was going to be at Disneyland:

"Right Wing Power Fantasy" is Reactionary Art Critic move #5 by the way, dating back at least to Max Nordau's "Degeneracy". 

I wondered if Hill was alone here, but no--here's vigilantchristian.org echoing his fears of Star Wars leading to a Fourth Reich...

Hill has been forced to interrupt screeds to acknowledge some cognitive dissonance...

 ...but even then, takes a licking and keeps right on ticking...

...and this is not even everything that comes up when you search Hill and "Star Wars". Point is, Hill's got big ideas and it takes only a few seconds to find them.

Well we all do.

But Here's The Kicker

For the love of God, Montresor.

"I'm mostly in it for the Right Wing Power Fantasy"

The Larger Point

Now of course what any conscientious reader will be wondering right now is either:

-Yeah dude, everyone already knows Hill, game designer, RPG gadfly, avid advocate of online harassment, and Concerned Parent par excellence with the 8 unfinished Kickstarters is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, why should I care?

or

-Who is Hill...and why should I care?

Maybe you shouldn't care--if you don't think that cool game stuff you want to play can come out of discussions about games we have online, you can probably stop now.

Anyway: this is about a much larger thing, it's about a way of talking about films and books and games that Hill advocates and represents but that goes wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy beyond them. 

Here's a weird fact: the fact that Hill would repeatedly attack some movies without having ever seen them is 100% in line with the deepest underpinnings of the theory of art criticism that Hill and fellow RPG Drama Club critics subscribe to.

The method is:

1. Listen to a summary of whatever it is.

2. Assume the only message of the thing is that what happens in it is what should happen in real life.

3. Decide whether that would be good or not.

Since, in this PMRC-style worldview, a piece of media's message always baldly mirrors its elevator pitch, you don't have to look at it, and a story is only worth telling if it's worth imitating.

In this view, we are all those teenagers that got run over in the street after watching The Program. Machines doomed to live out only the awful destinies hack writers imagine.

So you can assess, say, Star Wars, and assess it over and over and over and over on multiple websites without ever experiencing it because "the" message is what matters--this has corollaries:

Message does not emerge from style. Messages do not differ from audience member to audience member. The way an actor acts cannot convey a message. The way a director directs cannot convey a message. The sets, designs, costumes and use of mise en scene cannot convey a message.  

100 plus years of film criticism, Pauline Kael, Cahiers Du Cinema, Susan Sontag--these things grown-ups notice about how craft and performance alter meaning and how audiences receive things--do not matter. That thing where someone might notice that Alan Pakula's use of geometry in camerawork slowly turns The Parallax View from an almost Fall Guy like dueling-banjos romp into a horror movie about the terror of physical space itself does not matter.

That moment where you--being sentient and self-aware--go through a thing with your brain and your snacks and drinks and then notice what happens to your own self and the selves around you after that experience? That thing doesn't matter. That thing social scientists do where they find out what people in bulk do before and after a possibly attitude-changing event? That thing doesn't matter.

Real experience doesn't matter in a mode of criticism built on finding out if you can spell out what you hate using the alphabet soup of somebody else's art.

What matters is you found a trope and you wouldn't want that thing to happen in real life, that makes the thing bad. This is the mode of criticism-via-plot-summary used when you see people decry D&D as being "about" racial genocide or go "BUY MY GAME WHERE YOU CAN FINALLY TELL STORIES ABOUT..." some big concept that is more interesting than the game itself will ever be.  

A prime example is the Mother Jones story Hill references above --it contains no science linking Star Wars to militaristic attitudes, it just points out Star Wars kicked off a spike in awesome toys and dares the reader to make the leap to so...Reagan, Nicaragua, right? Right? Conveniently ignoring that the post-Vietnam era saw such a massive drop-off in military recruitment and US enthusiasm for overseas engagement that we now have mercenaries do most of the work for us. Pentagon officials frequently discuss the difficulties of waging war in a post-Vietnam environment yet, oddly, never talk about the delights of doing so in the post-Star Wars era--with which it almost entirely coincides.

The '80s wartoys that the article laments (StarWars, GI Joe, Voltron...) were lavished on a generation of teens less willing to go to war for their country than any previous one...

Bizarrely, military recruitment keeps going down even though
they keep making more Star Wars stuff.

Probably out of sheer coincidence, that drop-off between 90 and 98 coincides almost exactly with the Star Wars generation reaching recruitable age. An eight year old who had a Hoth playset in 1981 would be an 18 year old telling the Gulf War, George Bush Senior, and the hippie parents who sent his approval rating through the roof to go fuck themselves in 1991. Star Wars kids didn't turn into whitebread patriots, they turned into riot grrrls and invented Lollapalooza and bought hip hop by the ton until it was the most popular music in the world.

Is that a bad metric? Is it unfair? What would be a good one?

These questions don't matter in the world of "message" criticism. Things aren't things--they're "Stories About..." topics. And how you feel about the topic tells you all you need to know about the thing, relieving you of the burden of having to know about the thing.

This mode is freakishly common in RPG discourse neither despite- nor because of- the fact it's totally intellectually bankrupt but because it's a fun way to make the critic seem wittier and cleverer than what they're criticizing. Check me out I'm noticing HP Lovecraft is "Some dude fearing otherness in Connecticut", I am the cutest nerd. 

In reality, art is not reducible to its themes. If it were, there'd be no need for it: once you believed the right things you could give up on art.

The levels of complexity present even in the dullest work of art are impenetrable to these folks (or they pretend they are. Ask them about some murdercentric media they like and they're suddenly Roland fucking Barthes). To take only the example near to hand--Star Wars was envisioned by Lucas (and seen by many of his generation) as a pro-Viet Cong allegory of the Vietnam War and by later film critics as a film whose stylistic choices alone (big budget epic heroic fantasy) undermined this subversive message and then by still later critics and Occupy activists as a film whose stylistic choices (bricolage and diversity=good guys, cleanliness and corporate uniformity=bad guys) reinforced a leftist message but then so wait gun control and on and on...

They're all wrong (the only consistent message Star Wars has been proven to have sent en masse to the public is "more Star Wars and more things like Star Wars") but at least they saw the movie before spouting off. 

"Awmm soopuw ekthighted about the Wight Wing Powuw Fantasy"

It goes without saying the messages people take from Star Wars are manifold not because Star Wars is such a many-splendored thing but just because it's a thing at all. Experience isn't simple and the way the world's 6 billion humans process any two hours worth of made-up stuff is even less simple. My point is an interpretation by someone who hasn't experienced a thing--or, more generally and extending to people besides Hill--topical broadbrush criticisms that could have been made by someone who hadn't even experienced the thing are a fucking pox.

If the thing someone says about the thing could've been said about the Netflix blurb of the thing, the thing they said isn't smart, and they aren't smart, and they make the conversation worse and slower and everybody should start ignoring them.

Mandy with her tie fighters. As a disabled bi feminist immigrant sex worker,
she's obviously in it for the right wing power fantasy.

You can pretty much cherrypick anything until it sounds like shit if you want. I could say Hill's beloved Vampire (which Hill's career is based on) is basically about pretending you're better than everyone else because you're a sexual predator (or folkloric and metaphoric interpretation thereof). But I wouldn't because I realize that would be stupid and shitty and reductive and, if you think of games as important or the people who create them and enjoy them (for a wide variety of legit reasons I can't even begin to catalogue) as real humans--profoundly unempathic. People like what you don't like and you don't know why and you're too scared to go outside of your tinkertoy vision of what's wrong with the world and to enter someone else's head long enough to find out.

Chicken Little Criticism needs to stop and the people who promote it need to stop being supported by the RPG community in any way. You don't get better games or better gamers by accusing your fellow humans of making or loving fascism based on a TL;DR.

Those people who worked on that thing? They're people. They deserve an "innocent until proven guilty" just like everyone else--if you want to claim they're so stupid that you know more about what their art says to people than they do, you need to do better than "Well that's what I heard!".

The only right wing fantasy here is Hill's and it's a very old one--the fantasy of using art to parent the world.

EDIT:

May 15, 2017--Hill has now denied having written any of these things. It can't possibly be a joke since Hill has said they don't believe in "it's a joke" as an excuse. So I guess they have some computer security issues or are lying again. If you interact with them, ask which is true:

EDIT:

Oct 23, 2018--The lavender bars in the quote above indicate Hill's speaking on RPGnet, the gruesomely sexist and reactionary mainstream RPG forum which Hill and friends called home for many years. Since then Hill's been kicked off the forum for doxxing someone while attempting to support another fake-Nazi scare.

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Goblin Market Works Like This

...not the poem about alegorically eating snatch by Christina Rosetti, the actual grand bazaar in the goblin city, Gaxen Kane.

-Only goblins and otherlike Boschean horrors shop in the goblin market. If you're a human you'll want a disguise. If you're an elf you'll want a disguise and an ambulance service on speed dial.

- So basically there's a lot of things in the Goblin Market so if the players are looking for specific items you can just offer a base chance a thing that sounds "Goblin Markety" is there coupled with whatever random tables you have around for weird potions, magic items and oddities you've got.

- In addition to this, random merchants will just shove things in players' faces while they look for whatever they're looking for and try to hard-sell them to the players with goblin sales pitches. It's no fun unless you do this. Here's what they had last night:

Tongues: You cut out your own tongue (irreversible) and stick in one of these. The merchant doesn't know where each is from but they are educated and speak 4d6 languages each.

Grinding beans: Small roasted brown beans that can be ground to make a dark powder. Dripping hot water through it makes a beverage that supplies energy and alertness. From the West.

A human girl, fully functional, w/cage: Age 7, stolen from Vornheim, a merchants daughter. She cries a fuckton and wants to go home.

Oil of Bislee: Makes a pair of warriors into berserkers for a turn, they must remain chained together though.

Fleshflies: They fly off toward the nearest living thing other than the party. One use.

Deed of ownership to a massive home in Gaxen Kane. Respected by local authorities.

Small grig (cricket-legged fairy) paladin in a cage fashioned from an emptied lantern.

Hollowhog: Basically a Pig of Holding. Acts otherwise as an ordinary pig of slightly below-average intelligence.

Crossbow bolt that can anchor in stone or any other substance and cannot be removed. Stolen from some dwarves who made it.

Imperial Foo Creature: From Gaxen Kane. Might be a trained Foo Dog from Oriental Adventures. Might just be a shih-tzu with baubles in its hair. Hard tosay. Your call.

Faerie Curse Removing Nut (someone else made this up) Let a cursed person sleep with the nut in their armpit on a new moon's night and the nut will turn black as it sucks out the curse. If the nut is then eaten by someone before the next dawn, the curse will transfer over to them, if it's not eaten by anyone by that time the curse will return.

-The big theme of the Goblin Market is everything can be had For A Steep And Perhaps Terrrrible Price. If the item itself isn't already a double-edged sword, roll d12 for an appropriate price for any given item:

1. Piece of luck (Next Natural 20 or critical success is taken by the merchant)

2. Ten minutes of your life (Goblin picks which, shows up for a random ten minutes some time in the next adventure while you end up living in some goblin merchant sitcom for 10 minutes)

3. Shadow or part thereof, like say just the arm. This makes Hide In Shadows harder.

4. A relationship. What exists between you and x now exists instead between x and the goblin. Sometimes the price is very specific, like your relationship to your grocer, sometimes the goblin lets you pick.

5. Your right to wear shoes. Spiritually speaking, that is--this isn't just legally binding, the gods themselves will not allow your PC to wear shoes once the deal is made.

6. Your semblance for one day. Goblin merchant looks like you for one day. What could go wrong?

7. A unique item of sufficient value or novelty you might have to trade. Interesting magic items are accepted, but also anything real weird.

8. An hour of your dignity. Last night the PC was placed on stilts terminating in turtle feet, fitted with in an unflattering dress and made to wear a hat of meat. Also a rude phrase was written across his back in the tongue of Gaxen Kane. It wasn't such a big deal until he tried to steal some striped hats.

9. Your help acquiring a pair of striped hats. Probably worn by some civilians in the market over there. Getting caught results in an awful goblin trial using some freakshow legal system that makes Vornheim's look like a model of stately prudence.

10. Your gender.

11. Your complexion. Genuinely replaced with a goblin complexion.

12. Your sense of time. Was that a turn? Hard to say. Did you sleep 8 hours? Who knows?
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Thought Eater 1st Round Winners & Rules for The 2nd Round

So all the essays for the first round of the Thought Eater Tournament are in and the votes are counted.

We can now go on to the second round, where there's a pretty good chance all the writing will be pretty juicy.

The winners are listed at the end of the post. Both winners and losers may feel free to reveal their identities and authorness in the comments if they like along with their blog addresses if they have them and anything else about themselves. You can also publish your first round submission on your own blog or wherever now.

Winners will go on to the second round, which I'm going to do a slightly different way. The second round is called "Say something original about". The key word is 'original'. Nobody else can have ever made, to your knowledge, whatever point you're going to make. It can be as mundane as "I first read Lovecraft while holding a Pink Panther plushie and so I associate Inspector LeGrasse with that"  but it must be something that has not been said before. After you're 100% sure nailed original down, then make it interesting.

First round winners, you must pick a second-round topic from this list of dead and battered horses:

Say something original about JRR Tolkien

Say something original about HP Lovecraft or Call of Cthulhu

Say something original about Fritz Leiber

Say something original about Warhammer

Say something original about 4e

Say something original about 3e/3.5/Pathfinder

Say something original about Pendragon

Say something original about Vampire

Say something original about Shadowrun

Say something original about Rifts

Say something original about a movie that's RPG-relevant

Say something original about a classic RPG module

Say something original about any RPG illustrator

...as in the first round, you'll be paired with someone else. If an odd number of folks right about the same thing, you'll be paired with someone who wrote about something else--but that seems like the best way to do it since these are more topical than the other.

Your second round thoughts are due a little over one week from now, Sunday October 25th.

Here are the first round winners, in the order they were published:

Realism: First one

Books: First one

Things that don't work for you: Second one

Cute: First one

How relationships to characters change: First one

Infinite: First one

Rehabilitating an ignored or derided rule: First one

Why people choose games: First one

Common people: First one

People and their relationships to their PCs: First one

Group dynamics: Second one

Wonder: First one

Players making stuff up: Second one

Alignment: First one

Realism: First one

Evil: Second one

Abilities that allow you to skip parts of the game: First one

Brevity: First one (by a nose)

The essays on Forgotten RPG thing that's brilliant and Memorable Encounters TIED--they both go on to the second round

The essay on Emulation beat the one on Super-Intelligent monsters

The one about Time Management in Chunks got a "Yes" vote to go on the second round.
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Thought Eater: Dread Chunks Orphan

Oh wait, here is an orphaned essay for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament. The competitor didn't show up due to a logistical error.

For people who are new here: this isn't by me, it's by an anonymous contestant assigned to write about the topic: Time Management for the contest.

We need to decide if the author goes to Round 2.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

If you think this one is good enough to go to Round 2, send an email with the Subject "UPCHUNKS" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +, if not, send an email saying "DOWNCHUNKS". Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

DREAD CHUNKS AND SOME TRICKS

Dread occurs in slowed time fat with annihilation. This sick anticipation is felt when a moment feels dilated, possibilities morphing the homogenous pulse of event-event-event into a taut skin tearing in cracks. It is this skin that the DM stretches and plays like a drum.

I’ll argue that D&D time is felt and remembered in chunks. “Let's figure out how to kill this thing" is a chunk. "Let's talk to this queen to see what info or stuff she can offer" is a chunk. "So we raided the castle" is a chunk, too. Even combat is felt and remembered in chunks, not rounds; ask players to recap their last game and they'll say something like "We found this spinning ruined chamber, then we fought this curse-spewing orc, and the orc wrestled with Phil for awhile, then Charlene cut off its head with her Mug of Endless Misery." Finding the new dungeon is the biggest chunk of time, then fighting the curse-spewing orc is a chunk within it, and the smaller yet still distinct chunk of "Oh shit we almost died but then killed it" resides within.

So D&D time is felt and remembered in fractals. In memory, chunks of D&D time become bounded with their inciting event, complication, or resolution. While D&D sessions don’t tend to follow a classical three-act structure, remarkable chunks of time within them do. Without any of those three narrative-enriching steps, a chunk has no mnemonic; without a mnemonic, a chunk will be boring to inhabit. This bland chunk will also feel arbitrarily isolated—common evidence for this is a player looking dazed and saying, "Wait. Why are we doing this?" This reveals a potent DMing test: The day after a session, verbally summarize the session to someone else; if you have trouble recalling mnemonic-laced chunks, ask yourself what went wrong. The related heuristic: If a D&D session doesn't contain at least a couple good mini-stories, it was boring.

A DM sensitive to pace makes sure that players are aware of the chunk of time they're separating from the flow of the game. Player indecision is like a block of ice in a narrow river, growing larger with quibbling and stasis. If this indecision nears paralysis, or crystalizes from a post-snack crash, then it's the DM’s job to play Kafka and axe the fuck out of the ice (or blowtorch it). If a chunk of time feels solid and immovable, then the DM should make a decision, toss out another adventure hook, or deploy an event to make the players act (maybe by grabbing onto a new hint or from an NPC) or react (maybe by trying not to die). These chunks of time need to be both distinct and porous to new possibilities, info, and danger. But how is all of this different from simply saying that players remember memorable events? There is a shape to many memorable events in D&D (the chunk), and all recap-worthy events in D&D unite their players in both time and emotion (and so strand them together on a chunk).

So what’s an ideal flow of time in a D&D game? I like dread and horrible spectacle and my players like dread and horrible spectacle, so I make sure that at least one time-dilating roll occurs per session. "Let's see if it rips off a limb…", or "Roll to grab onto the ledge…", or "Make a very important Wisdom save…”, or “You hear a thick wet gnashing…” are verbal shortcuts into Dreadland. But for moments of dread to feel surprising and coherent, they must A) stand within, or start to isolate, a distinct narrative chunk and B) accrete from fate (i.e. from player action, tables, and the voice of the dice). A session of steady and minor thrills that seem natural to the circumstances of the game prevails over DM-manufactured Big Decisions (read: railroading) and exercises in demiurgical cruelty, at least for my players. Flow is subordinated to circumstances which rise from percolating consequences, but if my DMing is good, doggedly managing the flow of time of a session helps shape these circumstances.

So if my players are bored, an inciting opportunity will draft risky rolls—time gets juiced with adrenaline, and its river flows with risk and loot. If my players seem harried, their options frayed and characters maimed, an opportunity for in-game then meta-game rest turns time medicinal—time now doused with alkali, its river flowing with jokes and reorientation. When a game is good, the players feel in unison the composition and shade of benevolence/malevolence of time; when a game is bad, two players are trying to swim upstream while three are hunkered down on a dammed up chunk. This points to a mandate for DMs with split parties: Enthrall the inactive party into the flow of time of the active party.

D&D is a game of risks. If your character is devoured by an acidic sludge, there's no reshuffling the cards and dealing another hand. Your next 3d6 rolls create the grammar through which you engage the world that just killed you. The exploration and raconteur's presentation of these risks makes up D&D. If we assume that a skillful DM is already aware of what players want from their sessions, then the subtle manipulation of time becomes the most important of DM skills because you don’t get memorable events  without sharp consequences, surprises, and memorable boundaries. Time is the stuff in which all risks swim, so push your players in, foam it up white and deadly, and know when they need to grab onto an already-sweating glacier.

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Thought Eater: Emulation and Super-Intelligent Species

Here are the last two essays for the first round of the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

Again, these aren't by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG writers for the contest. 

Like yeasterday, each was assigned the same topic as a first-round opponent who didn't show up. So I paired two orphaned essays on different topics. We still have to decide which is better.

I have cleverly combine both topics in one image because
This Island Earth was originally a book.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...

First One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "EMULATE" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

I like talking to a friend, my son calls Kügel, because he can’t pronounce his name well. He is a long-term philosophy student, gamer and avid reader of cheap fantasy novels. Today I talk to Kügel about “Evocation vs Imitation vs Emulation in adapting literary source material to RPGs“, my topic for the first round of the Thought Eater essay contest.

We have some difficulties defining the three terms, maybe because English isn’t our native language, maybe because we are not that smart. “To emulate“ seems to have two meanings.

1. imitate with effort to equal or surpass

If this essay is supposed to find out which of the three forms of adaptation is the best, emulation automatically beats imitation. Per definitionem, says Kügel.

2. The other meaning of “emulate“ is more interesting. A program can be emulated on a computer, it wasn’t originally written for. What the original program and the new program do looks very similar to the user, but the programs are actually different. Emulation in this sense works best when a text is adapted from one system to a similar system. The fairy tale “Hänsel und Gretel“ can be translated from German to English, for example. German and English are both languages. But can the story be emulated as a film? Or as an RPG?

At first, we understand the difference between evocation and imitation, but talking about it for a while, we get lost. To imitate means to copy superficial elements, all the details of a text. To evoke means to create a similar atmosphere, to write in a similar style, to copy essential elements only, like the more important parts of the plot or the structure.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre“ is a clever adaptation of “Hänsel und Gretel“. You have a group of young people getting lost in the wilderness. You don’t have two children abandoned by their parents. You have cannibalism, but no witch. You have an isolated house, but it’s not decorated with ginger bread. Both stories create a scary atmosphere.

Thinking a bit more about evocation, imitation and emulation, the lines get more blurry. Most texts which “evoke“ other texts also copy some superficial elements and emulation just seems to be a more accurate or better form of imitation, depending on how you define it. Kügel says the topic is unclear, because the terms we deal with are too similar. “And what is literary source material anyway?“, he adds. “The plot? The characters? The style of writing? The world the story creates?“

I propose to work with this: Playing an RPG, you can refer to a text in different ways. One extreme way is trying to imitate as many elements of the text as closely as possible. MERP springs to my mind. The other extreme way is to refer loosely to the text, in an abstract way, and only copy elements you find essential. “A Red & Pleasant Land“ does this. You could call both forms of adaptation “imitation“, the first one “emulation“, the second one “evocation“.

Kügel says: “Your essay will be disqualified. Let’s think about this in a different way. Try to be original. What works best for a GM?“ Kügel doesn’t like to work if he can avoid it. He says: “Which way needs less preparation?“

Well, if you are good at seeing the structure of a text, picking up elements that interest you, changing them, combining them with other elements and filling the gaps, a concept like “evocation“ works for you. If you are good at memorizing lots of information and reproducing it, a concept like “emulation“ works for you.

Kügel says: “Remember. ‘Opinions differ round-up‘, and ‘Well it’s a balance‘-style essays will be disqualified.“

Ok. Here’s another, more personal way to look at it. As an experiment, I wouldn’t mind adapting “Hänsel und Gretel“ as an RPG and stick to the original as closely as possible. Of course, the first thing that would get lost in the process is the plot of the fairy tale and with the plot a lot of other elements would transform. Being an improvisational effort of a group of people, RPGs open up texts anyway. Because of this, one could argue, when adapting a text, a concept like “evocation“ works best with Role Playing Games. It gives enough space to improvise.

But there is something else. I usually don’t feel too comfortable with people who stick to all the details of a given game world and obsess about it. I live in Germany, a country populated by square headed people.

“You said, we were playing ‘Hänsel und Gretel‘, so why did we encounter a wolf on the way through the forest? This is not ‘Little Red Riding Hood‘, is it?“

“It was just a wolf, an animal. It didn’t say anything. It ran away.“

“Why do we keep finding little bones and wooden objects where we left the breadcrumbs? Where is the gingerbread house? And why did Hänsel just disappear? That wasn’t supposed to happen. Where is the witch? I don’t like this.“


Second One

If you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "SUPERSMART" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

Ways to handle super-intelligent monsters

When handling super-intelligent monsters, there are three different options you have: Either you are super-intelligent yourself and can just emulate them as a GM, they are incomprehensible horrors from beyond time and space, or you gotta fudge it. Let's examine:

If you happen to own an intellect vastly superior to that of your players, super-intelligent monsters shouldn't be much of a problem. Just stop dumbing them down. Stat them, let their plots evolve and then have eat all those puny and unworthy player characters, anticipating their every move, knowing their very thoughts. As I'm writing this with the time-frame of the Thought Eater Contest in mind, I'm assuming you are not a superhuman artificial intelligence reading this, so the assumption is that you are only somewhat smarter than your players at most. If you read this in the future and you are in fact, some scary digital construct, good for you.

If you plan your super-intelligent monster as an incomprehensible horror from beyond time and space, things are easy to wing: Just have it do random shit and then enjoy the puzzled looks in your players faces. If you can shup up about this method, they may do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to making up motivations for your Fauxthulhu. It's like when Star Trek fans invent theories about how the teleporter works. But you need not care: The thing is so incomprehensible, it's crazy. One moment it's all about attacking, then it recedes, maybe distracted by something happening in another dimension or whatever. It's probably also about as much capable of communicating with the player characters, as we are capable of talking to ants so you can save yourself quite a lot of thought on that side as well.

Where the real beef is, is a monster that is super-intelligent but only to an extend as to make it still comprehensible and capable of interacting with the players on a base that's more than what we would do with bacteria. Say you're fighting some mastermind who does indeed have motivations that the player characters can wrap their minds around but at the same time runs countless machinations to thwart any opposition. Of course you cannot outthink your players at that level – if you could, you'd probably play with someone else or be busy exploring the very fabric of space or creating ageless works of art or whatever super-intelligent people do.

You're gonna have to fudge it and your players will have to accept that. Whatever the player characters will come up with – the super-intelligent monster will have anticipated it and prepared for it. Retroactively set up traps (wherever nobody stepped/checked yet – the SIM of course knew where they'd look first!). Have sure-fire spells and surprises fail. The only real way to overpower something that smart should be brute force (if at all possible) combined with a true element of chance. Your players rolling dice to find out what their characters are going to do next won't cut it – it's gonna have to be an element of chance in-game. So if the characters decide to flip coins and leave things up to chance, then they may defeat the super-intelligent monster. Or they will just have to swarm the thing – two dozen cats could, after all, conceivably overpower a human. If they'd cooperate that well.
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