Scale of Grimdark to Cute Fantasy Correlated With Creators' Behavior

 

Click to enlarge

As the graph clearly shows, at least in popular traditional fantasy: soft creators are bad, brutal ones are good. Possible theories:

A) Random Noise: There's no trend and this is just sampling error or something. Counterexamples welcome.

B) Jamie Lee Curtis Thesis (Grim Art Causes Empathy): Plausibly imagining terrible things makes you take moral choices more seriously.

C) Jean-Paul Sartre Thesis (Empathy Causes Grim Art): A person who takes moral choices seriously knows fantasy from reality and uses art as a place to safely explore dark feelings.

D) Art-as-Religion Thesis (Comfort Fantasy Amputates Empathy): An imagined world without terror or grey issues stimulates in the audience an expectation that problems should be able to be solved without reference to other peoples' needs or safety.

E) "I'm Baby" Thesis (Lack of Empathy Creates A Desire For Comfort Fantasy): A belief that the world is too horrible to handle so its ok to be self-absorbed also leads them to seek escape in worlds lacking in complex problems or difficult choices.

F) Self-Defeating Insular Fandom Nightmare Thesis: Note that creators on the cute end of the graph tend to be "from the internet". Grim fantasy has been increasingly ascendant in popular culture since the '60s and so many people who became successful in traditional ways ply its byways while safe fantasy as respectable pursuit is a result of the internet's refocusing on the aesthetics of underserved marginal communities (women and lgbt people looking for escape from a patriarchal world) but in addition to being more female/queer these creators are also more internetty and so reliant on internet communities--and internet fan communities are toxic and make people evil.

G) Inherent Profitability and Horizontal Competition Thesis: Either because they are inherently more dramatic thus appealing thus profitable or because that's the current public taste and thus profitable, grimdark creators make more money and don't exist under as much competitive pressure as creators doing comfort art. The comfort art creators are fighting over limited space and so do terrible things. 

I have no idea which of these, if any, is accurate.

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Quicky LotFP Druid

I just finished a short module and while writing I realized I reference "druid spells" all the time and there aren't any LotFP druid spells. So I made an LotFP druid.

The module is an evil fairy land sandbox it's in the Store for 5$. 

Here's the druid:

Quick LotFP Druid

HP  1d6

Spell Progression  as Cleric. 8th and 9th level spells can be gained at the end so long as you have more 7th level spells than 8th and more 8th than 9th.

Saving Throws  as Cleric

Base Attack  +1 to hit

Gain  1 skill point per level including first for...

Animal Handling  (starts 2 in 6) (you get this in addition to a charisma roll--either one succeeding is success)

Bushcraft  (starts 2 in 6)

Climb  (starts at 1 in 6)

Search  (starts at 1 in 6

DRUID SPELL LIST

FIRST

Blending (as Invisibility in forests)

Darkness

Faerie Fire

Light

Locate Animal or Plant (as Locate Object but limited to, y’know, animals and plants)

Mending

Purify Food & Drink

Spider Climb

SECOND

Charm Animal (includes giant animals) 

Darkness, Continual

Delay Poison

Heat Metal

Light, Continual 

Magic Mouth 

Resist Cold 

Resist Fire

Speak w/Animals

Stinking Cloud

Wall of Fog

Web

THIRD

Charm Plant (includes plant monsters) 

Cure Disease

Gust of Wind

Howl of the Moon

Plant Growth

Remove Curse

Sacrifice

Speak With Dead Animals 

Speak With Plants

Water Breathing 

Water Walk 

Wings (as Fly)

FOURTH

Dig

Divination 

Hallucinatory Terrain 

Neutralize Poison 

Polymorph Others 

Polymorph Self

Wall of Fire

Wall of Ice

FIFTH

Airy Water

Animate Dead Animals 

Cloudkill

Commune

Faithful Hound

Insect Plague

Stone Shape

Transmute Rock To Mud 

True Seeing

Wall of Stone

SIXTH

Barrier

Find the Path

Flesh to Stone

Heal

Legend Lore

Move Earth

Speak With Monsters 

Stone to Flesh

SEVENTH

Control Weather

Camouflage, Mass (as Invisibility. Mass, works only in forests) 

Earthquake

Grasping Hand

Part Water

Statue

Vision

Witchlamp Aura

EIGHTH

Maze

Symbol

Trap the Soul

Shape Change, Animal

NINTH

Imprisonment

Shape Change

Module's 12 pages, looks like this...

Character Optimization and Easy Mode

Here's something I don't understand.

Everyone's familiar with the idea of "Hard Mode" and "Easy Mode" in video games. Hard mode is for people really into developing whatever skills the game tests (or, if you're really lucky, making money in tournaments) and Easy Mode is for people who don't and also it is often considered an accessibility feature.

All that's easy to get. People know what that means.

Then in tabletop RPGs we have these endless circular discussions for twenty years on the internet (and for the entire life of the hobby if you count fanzine pages) about "Character Optimization".

Character Optimization is basically just playing on Easy Mode.

A few minor differences between video games and RPGs:

• Rather than just flip a toggle, you are doing (depending on system) either a lot of math by yourself or a little math by yourself in order to play on Easy Mode.
• It only works if the GM predictably gives you the kinds of challenges that are better solved with your build than otherwise and you consistently choose to use those solutions.

Why do people keep going around and around about this? What's complicated here?

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Sacred Crackpots

Sacred Crackpots 

There's a kind of person who causes a lot of problems in all kinds of communities that I call the sacred crackpot.

The sacred crackpot has three main characteristics:

1. The sacred crackpot talks about their emotions online all the time.

2. The sacred crackpot inspires protective feelings in other people in their scene online because of this.

3. The sacred crackpot says things that aren't true, a lot. They either lie all the time or are too emotional to fact-check anything.

This is how hippie gamers describe them.

(Concrete Examples in the Online Game Scene)

OSR: Paolo Greco, Goatmansgoblet/Brian Yaksha, Jensen Toperzer, Terra F, Evlyn Moreau

Story-Games: Ash Kreider, Robert Bohl, Fred Hicks

Pathology

Here's the typical course of the sacred crackpot hurting people:

1. The sacred crackpot gets emotional on some subject and says some wildly untrue thing about a victim.

2. Instead of responding properly ("That's a bold claim, do you have evidence ?") the people watching just smile and pretend it isn't happening and that a false accusation hasn't just been injected into the Googleable world.

3. The victim or someone else who has a conscience, then, is stuck calling them out all alone. They call out the crackpot because that legit is the only reasonable thing to do.

4. The crackpot just gets emotional and lies more and performs pain more and harasses their victims more.

Crackpot Allies

The super-unusual thing about this kind of aggression is: nearly everyone watching agrees exactly about what happened. I've never had a frank one-on-one conversation with even the storiest storygamer or dreamiest sworddreamer where the person pretended Ash Kreider or Brian Goatgoblet actually had a point. They know their friend got emotional and said something that wasn't true.

There's an obvious right thing to do: get the crackpot off the internet and into therapy--or at least have their friends swarm them with "Hey please stop, you do not have the emotional resources to finish the fight you're starting" every time the crackpost gears up into attack mode. And, of course, nobody does it.

The allies of the crackpot have, and create, a curious position:

1. The sacred crackpot is viewed as somehow the community's responsibility and not the community's responsibility.

2. The allies view the online community as like food or water or medicine to their crackpot. To deny the liar the community would somehow be like denying them a basic resource they need to survive and so cruel. Nobody goes "Wow maybe an internet environment where people launch false accusations and try to cancel each other for money and clicks all day isn't the best place for my emotionally fragile friend?"

3. Allies are totally unwilling to even try to stop the crackpot from harming innocent people when they make shit up.

4. Everybody acts like the whole "making shit up" is essentially victimless and there's no reason not to keep the crackpot around, in the warm Web-based bosom of the community they lie to.

5. The crackpot continues to crack, never reforms, never improves, keeps lying in community after community, keeps creating real problems for more and more people.

6. Eventually, the crackpot's rewrite of history is even believed by people who come in later whose only source of information is the crackpot, and who aren't sophisticated enough to ask victims or anyone else for a record of the original attack.

7. The crackpot continues to harass their victims forever with fake accusations and nobody wants to stop them because they Have Feelings and therefore can't be criticized.

Question for you, reader

What do you do?

Please answer in the comments.

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Every Tomb, Every Tunnel, Every Inn, Every Mountain

It turns out all of the (or most of the) Baedeker Guides are online now, thanks to Emory University.

If you don't know, the Baedeker Guides were ostensibly travel guides but were really a kind of post-Victorian, early-car-tourism, pre-internet attempt to catalogue the contents of the entire planet in the form of tiny red books with fold-out maps. They were so monomaniacally detailed that one intelligence officer described them as "Written by spies for spies".

Here's one of the fold-out maps--keep in mind this fit in a book that was small enough to fit on your outstretched hand, without going past your fingertips:

Here's a random page about the National Gallery from a 1908 Berlin Guide:

Third Floor. (Lift, see p. 87.) The Anteroom (I) is decorated with good mural paintings by Paul Meyerheim, representing nature at the different seasons (covered at present). This room contains chiefly paintings and sculptures of the early 19th century. Paintings: to the left, *898. ./. G. v. Edlinger, Count Preysing; 605. Joh. Heinr. Tischbein, Family group; *568. Anton Graff, Portrait of himself; 606. ./. H. Tisch¬ bein, Councillor Ch. Fr. Robert; *218. Tassaert, General Zieten (bronze bust). *561. A. Graff, Portrait of himself; *b()3.Friedr. Tischbein, Lute-player; 484. A. Graff, Female portrait; 197,198. Gottfr. Scha¬ dow, Frederick William III. and Queen Luise (bronze busts); 554. J. A. Koch, Sabine landscape; 1060. J. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Annunciation; above, *49S. Wilh. Schadow, Thorvaldsen, Wilhelm, and Rudolph Schadow; *856. Joh. Jac. Biedermann, Landscape near Partenkir- chen; 413. J. A. Koch, The convent of San Francesco di Civitella in the Sabine Mts. — *144. G. Schadow, Princess Frederica of Prussia (terracotta bust); *593. A. Graff, Henriette Herz; 908. Heinrich Filger, Princess Galizin; 577. Anna Dor. Therbusch, Henriette Herz as Hebe; *196. G. Schadow, Bust of Crown Princess Luise (plaster). — 1081. Rafael Mengs, Portrait of himself; 380. Fr. G. Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt; 525. Ed. von Hews, Peter von Cornelius; 366. K. Chr. Vogel von Vogelstein, Ludwig Tieck, the poet; 525b. Ed. von Heuss, Friedr. Overbeck, the painter. — 201, 202. Gottfr. Schadow, Designs for monuments to Prince Leopold of Dessau and Zieten. — Smaller sculptures by G. Schadow and others. Room II, to the left, contains Frescoes from the history of...

They are completely fucking bananacrackers.

And like most things that are completely insane, they're of great interest to RPG fans. If you're running Call of Cthulhu you're totally sorted for every turn-of-the-century city and most of the countryside in the western world plus a few places outside of it. If you're running a fantasy world, just pick a random part of the Belgian seaside and start describing nearby hills and lighthouses.

I have a few of these at home--Egypt, Paris, and Southern France--picked up in London in Cecil Court (the famous street of cranky old London antique book dealers--the guy in the all-Lewis Carroll bookstore is so mindbendingly hateful I think Bernard Black was based on him). Every few months I pull one out and contemplate drawing all over it and turning Paris into some fantasy city I made up but I don't.

Anyway you don't really have to because yeah.

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Game Writing, Writing Writing, “Lazy Writing”

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Craig Raine is a poet, but he wants none of your pearl mist and opium dreams. Here he is, in 1979, writing about an experience nearly every writer of his era already had—using a phone:

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,

that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it

to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up

deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

It’s a truism that a great artist takes an experience that’s familiar and, through writing, makes it new. When William Carlos Williams tells you about eating the plums that were in the icebox because it is common and he is excited about the challenge of making it live again.

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Another poet called both sex and death “the horizontal mysteries”. This is the opposite kind of thinking.

Writing a game mechanic often requires this kind of opposite—rather than wanting to know how to make familiar experiences different, we want to boil different experiences down to similarities.

What do seemingly disparate experiences have in common? What widely separate necessities can be explained with one single mechanic?

Wait are Magneto’s powers just telekinesis but less? Can the crossbow rules work just like the gun rules? Can those work like the “call lightning” rules? Can the mechanic we use in the fantasy game for the power of the crystal ball be used in the spy game for the quality of the surveillance drone? 

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This is part of a tension in game writing: Engaging writing is often about making the familiar seem new, game writing is often about making what appears to be a wide variety of phenomena expressible using a small number of tools. Some examples:

-Reskinning:

Sometimes a killer monkey with a knife and a goblin just have the same stats. So you’re reading along and this killer monkey seems pretty cool and you get to the stats and it’s, ok, nothing special. Is that a little uninspiring? But then you use it at the table and your players are like “Oh whoa, remember the killer monkey?”

-Games' "Library content":

Library content is that store of creature abilities and other re-usable ideas that come with a game. A hallucinogenic mushroom and a hall of mirrors might both rely on the Confusion spell for their mechanical effect, even though they're different things. 

-Abstract stats:

Nights' Black Agents has vampires with an ability called "Monstrosity"--i.e. how intense any given monstery power they use is. On paper, the creature can fly, resist magic, climb walls, charm people, but lower down on the paper it's just "Monstrosity: 4".

-Tropes:

“Point Break and the Fast and Furious are basically the same movie”. Well, they aren’t, but…

(Chart by Andy Ryan)

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One of the things you see people who can't write (at least in the first--at the top of this page--sense) complain about is "lazy writing" or "bad writing". This is, so far as I'm aware, never used to say that writing is bad like somebody wrote his cloak was as black as sin, and instead always means that someone used a common trope the complainer does not like. Or, more precisely, used a trope the complainer discovered after deciding they didn't like the work for some other reason.

It's a strange formulation since the phrase itself is a lazy shorthand--the critic substitutes "writing" for "plot" and "uses a common trope" for "bad". Write better.

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When you actually do the work of game writing, switching between the two modes--describing the lush variety of things there are to put in front of players versus finding the DNA that unites them--can be a little dizzying. 

If you keep an eye, it's easy to see who is good at only one or only the other.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Playtesting

Because time's a flat circle, gamers are asking about playtesting again.

Because no-one has the ability to learn, the meta-conversation about playtesting is more interesting than the conversation. It always goes like this:

Kickstarter Careerist Take

We have of course playtested extensively and also spellchecked and indexed and sensitivity-readed and bought DeviantArt of the highest quality and so should everyone and we do all things at the highest of qualities unlike those that are not named that might be others than us. This is how The Importants do it.

Consumer vs Capitalism Take

Angry gamers who grew up Extremely Online on video game websites spending their allowance on glitchy randomware before YouTube previews were a thing think it should be a capital crime to not to playtest and quote extensively about editions of D&D that made them angry that weren't playtested the way they think they should because they consider that edition "broken" and now that they've been around long enough to have turned into game developers themselves claim their games have been extensively playtested by which they mean the game's a Fate hack and Fate is playtested. And also maybe their friends played it.

Arty Game Writer Take 

I tried hard I am earnest I wrote a game it is a poem playtesting is a luxury for capitalists buy my game no-one has ever played it no-one will it is too unique like I am it is an expression of me there are 3000 of me.

Consumer of Arty Games Take

I really would like to try some of these arty games but there are so many of them and I'm not sure anyone has ever played them so either I buy them based on the title or I have to join The Community and be part of the Discourse to find out which and which so and...

a) that's great I love the discourse also ps here's why my cousin's fanfic is problematic

b) I'm buying it based on the title, I can't get a group together ok more video games

Jaded Old Arty Gamer Take

We playtested man. We learned. We heard you. It takes process. It takes iterations. It takes Takes. It's like you go to the mountain and there's a chill wind. It's a winding path. There's goats. Maybe a climbing antelope. Years of meditation. Lava. I have a ponytail. One day you'll be like me. But, baby steps my embryos! You don't need to be there yet. There doesn't need to be you yet. Playtest? Do, don't, visionquest, whatever. It's the experience. Does anyone have to play a game?

Old School Gamer Take

Eyerolling because the last thing they bought was 87 Magic Giraffes of the Outer Planes and they know one day they'll maybe use two of them because that's what you do, you pay 5.99$ and get 87 giraffes and then talk about it and then its tuesday and you use it and buy another and playtest whatever giraffes.