11:06 PM Jacob: 3.0 and 3/5 have lots of things that make good sense-- but they still sometimes violate my old intuitions, and I find it easier to remember rules learned when I was 13 than rules that make sense.

11:10 PM me: Yeah, at first I questioned some of what was being given up by simplifying things like different classes going up at different xp rates, etc. But a lot of it is really good: many fewer tables, more careful balancing (hopefully) between classes, and stocking the complexity in the DM's xp calculations, rather than on the player's sheets.

11:13 PM One notion I had was that a campaign could toddle along for a while, and then go through a wormhole to some mysterious land where everything works just a little differently. Eventually the players figure out that everything's working according to ye olde AD&D rules (or something), and you can feel the difference, if any.

11:14 PM Jacob: Order of the Stick's very first strip had the characters experience the 3.0/ 3.5 transition.

11:15 PM but I like it as a mystery for the players to solve, too.

makes it all quite meta

11:16 PM one of the big problems with a good-rules, good-mechanics RPG is that there' s never real mystery about the way magic works

me: Yeah, I thought OOTS was cute, but it's a pretty slight change really.

Hm. Whaddaya mean, precisely?

11:17 PM Jacob: have you read the damn Robert Jordan novels?

me: No, and I can't say I feel the worse for it, since they seem to cause y'all so much pain. :)

11:18 PM I've been burnt by Terry Goodkind, too, btw, but it's not his fault.

Jacob: hah

and I haven't read him. But generally...

11:19 PM Tolkien aside, because we don't meet the Wizards until they already know everything...

in magic-intensive fantasy literature, since magic screws with the rules of the universe, there's a struggle to learn what it can do and what it can't.

Early Tim Hunter.

11:20 PM or in a different way Earthsea

me: For God's sake, man, why aren't you posting stuff like this and your response to my book comments up on Trollkien, and keeping my vanity blog alive for me!? :)

11:21 PM Jacob: hee. gmail saves the chat; we could just copy and paste

me: Oh, don't think I won't.

Jacob: but do you see what I mean? people complain about the spell-slot system, but I think that's a symptom

11:22 PM the underlying problem is: for an RPG to work, you have to be able to just look up the spell effect-- and that's not how magic feels in fantasy

11:23 PM Jacob: and having the players occasionally not know, quite literally, what the rules are might be a fun way to get that feel back

me: I totally do see what you mean. Although I think people complain about spell-slots from the other side of the perspective

me: That is, after you've read Harry Potter, you know how the spells work: they do what you want, whenever you say the words and wave the wand. None of these namby-pamby limitations that are just in there so the barbarians feel like they can compete with the awesome wizards.

11:24 PM Jacob: yeah, but screw Harry Potter's magic system with a ginsu.

me: Fine, but you know it's not the only one.

Jacob: you say two words of pig-latin. wtf?

11:25 PM me: It's not pig latin. Come on now.

Jacob: I know. It's pidgin-Latin.

me: But the idea of "learn a spell, you can use it whenever" is pretty widespread.

11:26 PM Jacob: that's fine. But Harry Potter spells are so precise, and easy, and limitless, that they feel much less like magic to me

11:27 PM studying isn't studying the fabric of reality, it's studying more pidgin-Latin

11:29 PM Jacob: I think abolishing spell slots, but making spell effects more unpredictable-- and, especially, making there be fewer basic "spells" that everyone can just look up in a book-- would generate the right feel.

me: Ok, before I go on, in response to HP, in fact there's a lot of uncertainty that goes unexplained and people tend to disregard -- all those classes, Ron is screwing up spells left and right, and Neville can't do them, etc.

Jacob: true

11:30 PM me: Harry (and Herminone, and anyone when they need to for plot reasons) don't have a problem casting spells, so it just looks like saying "Expelliarmus!" really fast.

11:31 PM But I'm not going to defend the Potter system of magic as the end-all and be-all by any means.

Jacob: and presumably the teachers do engage in research to create new spells (I wonder what the publication requirements for tenure are?) but we don't see that

me: Have you looked at the Mage part of White Wolf's World of Darkness?

That sounds a bit more like what you describe.

11:32 PM They are teaching in prep school.

And tenure doesn't seem to mean much, considering how often Dumbledore's job seems in jeopardy. :)

Jacob: we'll see how the wizards-are-c00l crowd like it when we abolish spell-slots but make most spells other than Light and Cure Light Wounds require a cauldron and a minimum of 1/2 hr casting time. :-)

11:33 PM heh

but,no, I haven't looked at that system

11:34 PM me: Well, that's the other side of the RPG coin -- you need to have some cool Gandalf stuff to do or they're not worth bringing along.

Jacob: I've got a kick-ass gaming store round the corner; I'll go browse the rulebooks sometime

But other than Light, Gandalf cast about three spells the whole series!

11:35 PM he had Power, even if he didn't cast twenty spells a day

me: I'm not intimately familiar, but I get the distinct impression that spells are more -- fuzzy. Like, you cast a spell and when it works, it helps you, but the actual effect isn't well-specified ahead of time.

11:36 PM True. I say "Gandalf" and I mean "Dude with a flowing beard in a storm with lightning coming out of his hands." It is the power of Tolkien that makes you think that guy's Gandalf.

("you" = "me"

)

11:37 PM Jacob: got to go to bed soon!

11:38 PM I should also look at the huge d20 system rulebook somebody published on a license of the damn Jordan novels-- see how it handles magic

no-- damn. It's the George RR Martin novels, where magic hardly existsme: Bummer. Like his writing, though.Jacob: Martin's?

11:40 PM me: Yeah. Haven't read any Jordan stuff. Only read the comic the Hedge Knight, actually.

Jacob: The Martin novels are much better than the Jordan, certainly.

But the first few Jordans are more addictive. crack is bad for you...

11:28 PM me:But what I was thinking about my dream campaign that relates to this is: as I've written before, magic seems very disruptive to society. ("How's a regular king supposed to rule without an army of wizards and clerics to help him?")11:39 PM me: Ok, so here's a notion of mine. Take as read that magic comes along and is disruptive: invisibility alone just screws up medieval society like crazy. So take the campaign story as the development of magic is similar to the industrial revolution, with new magic being developed all the time and winners and losers coming out of it, and strong social forces trying to control magic, restrict it, etc. And lots of people coming up with new spells to do things like build bridges and pump water, and run society, not just shoot lightning bolts.

11:41 PM Jacob: I like the big idea

me: Okay, I'll let you go to bed. I just thought making magic more "new" to the society at large, and trying to force PCs to wrestle with making magic work to keep society from unraveling, might be similar to your idea that magic should be uncertain. Dovetail with it, at any rate.

Jacob: yeah, definitely.

11:42 PM ok, off to bed now, more another time

me: coo

Game comment and annoying blog behavior

It occurred to me today that in some ways the most likely new PC is Orchead (although the name is unfortunate). He's behaved notably against racial character, told us a considerable backstory, and been a necessary companion to continue the quest.

In other news, I set Blogger to demand that comments be approved by me to eliminate the occasional spammy comments I was getting. However, Blogger doesn't email me to let me know someone's commented, so if I've been slack on the blog, the comments (really, Jacob's comments) are stuck in limbo. I'm going to try to rectify that.

Update: I believe it's fixed. The comment notifications were being sent to an old email address. Should be working now.

Commentary -- or is it snark? -- on dndblog

Why is it that Barik's bluff checks always fail due to his poor speaking of Orcish? I think I came by the language just the same as Acavel did.

I'm not asking why Barik's bluff checks fail -- that's the dice talking -- but it seems a sort of weird justification, since knowing Orcish goes by a completely different route, rule-wise, as bluffing does. Using it once, I could understand, but it seems to be the only way Barik's unconvincing.

Not that I want to suggest that Barik's got any personality flaws, but he at least has a dwarfish personality; in addition, I like to think that the average Orc doesn't think like me. Perhaps the average Orc might notice these things?

Perhaps even more significant is what the Bluff is actually about. Although Tau'regk mentioned it once, it certainly seems that the general Orcish opinion is that we're "a bunch of traitors". So the thing I'm trying to conceal is that we are, in fact, the guys who've been attacking and hiding out, NOT the fact that we aren't actually orcs. Hearing my poor Orcish diction might suggest I'm not an Orc; noticing the subtle awkwardness of body language of someone who's unused to lying might suggest we're not just headed to the Tasty Dwarf for a beer.

This does bring up the rather silly oversimplification of language in D&D 3.5: pay the skill points and voila! you're indistinguishable from a native speaker. In my dream campaign, I hope to make "knowing a language", "being fluent", and "equivalent to a native speaker" as separate achievements of increasing difficulty. (On the bright side, I'm not going to handicap you for not having any ranks in a skill, like Scott does.)

D&D 4.0

This is just a general feeling, and I haven't looked at all the wonderful online stuff that'ssupposed to be better than what we can get already on our own, but I think I'll stick by my previously asserted position: WotC are a bunch of whores, spoiled by Magic, who are trying to market D&D like a software franchise that demands new serious investment from its consumers every year or so.

3.5 made some stupid arbitrary changes, but also tried to fix up some problems in 3.0, which was fine and to be expected because 3rd edition was a big change and there hadn't been much in the way of D&D development for quite a while.

But it's not a merry-go-round. We buy it, we buy ongoing content and modules and sourcebooks and whatever. Tweaking the rules so that we buy new copies of books we already have, new copies of the same old modules and whatnot just because they need to be updated to some some uselessly edited new version just makes me think you're the enemy and that I'm happy living in 3.5 for another decade or so, thanks.

Evil Wizards! (of the Coast)

My comrade-in-geekdom Jacob clued me in to this.

My response:

They're a bunch of whores.

That's probably a bit too blog-raw for a family blog, so let me rephrase:

I meant: I read their bitching about polymorph, and they're operating
from base assumptions that are precisely those which I think are where
the company's interests and the player's interests diverge.

Hm, the first way conveys the same meaning with a lot fewer words.

Polymorph's too powerful because sometimes people make creatures that aren't
balanced with other creatures of the same HD value. Whose fault is
that, again? Might it be the company that seeks to profit by pushing
more and more content on collection-prone gamers? And has sometimes
ignored whether the new additions were actually advancing the fun and
balance of the game?

Polymorph's too powerful because there's so many sourcebooks
with so many monsters out there. See above, plus: the power of a spell
is accommodated by giving it an appropriate level (and stuff like
duration, xp cost, etc.) You think polymorph's too powerful, give it
some costs and/or raise the level. Or just scale the HD limitation,
either by tying it to caster level or making it less than 15 HD.

Oh, and since when did a generic spellcaster know about all
the monsters in all the sourcebooks? Throw a knowledge check in there
to see if they even know of the creature they want to turn into. (Only
necessary if they're digging around in some expansion book to find the
killer munchkin creature, which is your own fault, but apparently
that's the sort of wizards they play with.)

The ideal "take the form of another creature" spell would limit the caster's options to a very small list of choices (possibly as low as one). To replace even a reasonable fraction of the total functionality of polymorph, then, would require not one spell but more than a dozen, scattered across various levels and class lists.

This is ideal only in terms of making it easy to implement a computer game
using d20 rules without a human DM involved. Not unlike saying "wish
can imitate any other spell of a lower level, but nothing you actually
come up with on your own", which they almost but didn't quite say in
that spell's description, IIRC.

The idea of changing into some animal of choice is a
fundamental magic idea. Removing it from the game is unthinkable.
Stripping flexibility from it is sacrificing what the game is about
because of the designer's inability to find a practical way to
accommodate it. Given the other restrictions available, and that the
"problem" is of their own making (why not have a "Polymorph into any
critter from the Monster Manual", and a higher level "Polymorph into
any critter we foolishly published in our `canon'"?), I question the
sincerity of the "We didn't make this change lightly, and we care
deeply about everything, and after a lot of thought we think this is
the best solution for all concerned" blather at the end.

Finally, they talk about "this errata document", as if there's
a "Polymorph FAQ and Errata" doc somewhere. I don't see it, just the
errata lists for all the books. If you made the design change from the
polymorph POV, why not provide an actual "errata document" that shows
what changes were made to the various books? Seeing as I'm not going
through all my books and actually writing the errata in the margins,
that would be a lot more useful to me, and presumably is what you did in
the first place (find all the polymorph references you wanted to
change, rather than go through book by book and change everything on
all topics before going to the next). Otherwise, save your noise about
how much work you all did and who deserves credit for this "document"
that I can't see.

(Powered by ScribeFire.)

Recurring villains

Scott misses the point of this earlier post. It's not the recurrence of villains that's annoying, it's the "no chance of cornering or defeating" part.

We had a hobgoblin that Barik freaked out by "coming back from the dead" with healing potions. He ran off, and we ended up meeting him later and wiping the floor with him. Nobody complained about him, and not just because he was relatively easy to defeat the second time around.

The issue was, when we fought him originally, it certainly seemed like (a) it could've gone the other way in our first encounter, but even more importantly (b) it wasn't a priority to us whether he ran off to face us later or not -- we had other fish to fry.

Either one of these elements is sufficient for a recurring villain to be appealing to both players and DMs (and movie audiences). Specifically, (a) gives the players the impression that the encounter didn't have a foregone outcome, and we hate to be run on rails: some of the best "recurring villains" are completely organic -- they just happened not to die in the first encounter. I say (b) is more important because it establishes what sort of encounter we're having, and some useful hint of that is critical in every encounter.

Players want to have some sense of what sort of encounter they're having, so that they can behave appropriately. (Characters in movies don't have this problem). If you run into Darth Vader in the opening scene, you know that you should probably keep your head down and your mouth shut -- this is a bad guy you're developing a hate for now, but that you aren't really expected to confront until later on. If you run into an opponent whose roughly at your level, and there isn't some ongoing plot effect (like you have to kill everyone who might report your existence, for example), then the encounter can resolve in dozens of acceptable ways: you can defeat and kill them, defeat them but they turn tail and run off, capture them, reach some sort of standoff, get captured by them (and manage to escape later), get beaten by them and you run off, etc. In many of those results, both parties survive, and might run into each other again, and that'd be the kind of recurring villain that can have lots of development and dynamic relationship if they keep surviving, or just provide a little thematic consistency if they only last two encounters.

(A somewhat rare possibility is the recurrent thorn in your side who's unquestionably weaker than you: an enemy who surrendered and you let live, for example, who you then keep running into in circumstances where they can continue to annoy but not really harm the party, and it's never convenient enough or necessary enough to eliminate them. A rather funny example would be if Scott's lovely backstory of an orc grunt had a happier ending where he ran away, and the audience got to hear about this guy who happens to be in every orc horde the party ever fights, and haplessly manages to survive several times.)

I'm not sure if Jacob correctly interpreted John's original comment: I thought he meant that right now, in this fight, we've got multiple enemies who, having given annoying speeches and fired off magic attacks at us, smirk and "just vanish". I certainly find that annoying. Even the orcs I know wouldn't follow someone like that -- it's cowardly, leaving their underlings to face the mean PCs, and just because they're fodder doesn't mean they want to be treated like it. :)

Similarly, the most annoying sort of recurring villain is one that seems very much scripted to be a recurring villain from the beginning. There's an encounter, and, contrary to player expectations, things play out in a way that seems helpful to the DM's plot, and impervious to player attempts to derail it.

Anyone who tells you...

that Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series isn't top-notch fantasy is an idiot.

Okay, I haven't read the whole thing (I'm partway through book 2, "The Subtle Knife"). But it's awesome. It transcends subgenre. Which might sound stupid, but lemme finish. It's not an alternate history story, quite; it's got a lot of parallel worlds, but that's only incidental to the first book, and there's more to it than that. It genuinely blends fantasy and science fiction (specifically, a fantastic description of dark matter). It's a child-heroine fantasy too, complete with absent/evil parent issues, and oh, did I mention it's also a sequel to Paradise Lost? And just for flavah, it's got a cowboy air balloonist. And talking polar bears!

Tolkien. Lewis. Pullman. Not a stretch.

Comics -- Marvel advertising for the opposition

I tried to let it go. I read Deadline, and although I of course caviled to whatever geek or wife would listen, I didn't make too big a deal about it. Occasional references would come up here and there -- I recall a bit in Alias, and the whole Civil War storyline perpetuated the offense.

But in "The Initiative: Avengers", it's run amok, and I can't keep quiet any more.

What is the slang, in the Marvel Universe, for superheroes? The answer, obviously, is "capes". Capes are referred to in Avengers #1 (not New Avengers, not Mighty Avengers, just Avengers -- little too much vengeance, people?) four times. Admittedly, sometimes they're used to mean the superhero, and sometimes they're used to refer to the expected costume of a superhero, but nonetheless, capes are clearly what superheroes wear.

Only, of course, it isn't, unless all these Marvel people only read DC comics.

Go down the list of Marvel superheroes, and just like kid sidekicks, capes are in extremely short supply. Rather less common, in fact, than your average ren-faire. Spider-Man? Captain America? Hulk? Iron Man? Wolverine? Fantastic Four? Nope, capes are definitely NOT superhero standard issue. Here's the most visible heroes with capes in the Marvel Universe that I can come up with (let me know if I missed someone).

Dr. Strange -- (Yeah, it's a cloak, still counts)
Storm, old costume (I've got no idea what she wears these days)
Thor
Marvel Boy/Justice/Vance Astrovik
Sentry
Vision
Quasar
Stingray
Sabra
Ghost Rider (Western)
Nighthawk's wings sometimes kinda look like a cape.

I might've missed someone more visible than Stingray, but overwhelmingly, the Marvel Universe is filled with costumes that DON'T have capes. Why would anyone start referring to heroes as "capes"?

Unless they've been looking at Batman and Superman, that is. Unsurprisingly, I don't recall any instance of Marvel Universe denizens seeing a DC comic book in-story, while we DO know that in-universe comics include "real" characters such as Captain America (at one time drawn by Cap himself).

"Masks" would be more appropriate (though still with many exceptions to the rule). But if you're going to go to the effort to make up a fictional jargon, shouldn't it have some semblance of internal consistency?

I feel like this promulgation of "capes" has to be some sort of intentional but misguided "irony". In the entire aforementioned Avengers #1, Justice has a cape, and no other character, new or old, including the Mighty Avengers that make a cameo, has one. Is this supposed to be some sort of dig at the distinguished competition -- when the Marvel superheroes are unpopular, they're referred to as capes? In my opinion, it just sounds like you don't care which company or comic culture you're writing for.

For my fellow obscurists, and in the interests of full disclosure: at the center page (where the staples are), thre's someone in the background with a cape, and someone flying in the background next to Stature who has semi-capelike wings. Are these identifiable characters, or just made up "new recruits"?

Update: I see in Avengers #2 that Phantom Rider (is this _not_ the Western Ghost Rider?) has a cape. Also, Hardball says, of the others flying away "half those guys have capes or wings, and it's not like we're gonna grow a pair of---" What? Capes give you the power to fly? Where would he have gotten such a notion?

Oh, and looking back at Avengers #1, I'd like to comment that artists' depictions of Warbirds outfit have really seemed pretty inappropriate for a while now, but (see p. 12, counting ad pages) I really wish they'd stop drawing it as a thong. She was the first feminist super heroine, for crissake.

And now I see that in Avengers #2, in the big splash page, they couldn't resist another look at Warbird tushie. Classy, the way the search for the next pussycat doll is classy.

Follow-up to dndblog comments

I would like to agree with Aaron that "a good fight should make us all feel much much better", but there are two related points that occur to me:
1. a year from now, a random fight with grimlocks, unless it segues into the big boss killing us all, isn't going to be nearly as memorable as the whole "Drusilla ends up with one leg covered in...well...you get the picture. (Hey, this is an R rated game, not NC-17)."

2. unlike face-to-face D&D, there's a near-timeless record on the blog of what has gone before. Jacob and Scott have talked about "turning this into a book". Maybe we shouldn't be so pretentious about it, but the fact is, the story's all there to be read, warts and all.

I guess I wanted to point out that while I want to feel better, if we go from grisly scene of grim torture to grisly scene of sexual disempowerment, always being (gratefully) distracted by a new fight, I feel like I'm being used to contribute to a story I don't want to be a part of.

And I don't want that to seem too high-falutin'. Just because I don't want to be a part of a story doesn't mean that it's wrong to tell. Fabio says "if `no obscenity' is a rule here, I will more than happily respect that." I don't know if that's a rule here. I'm not trying to make the rules unilaterally. I'm just saying that there's a rule _for me_, and the line is somewhere between "obscenity" and player characters ejaculating on each other. I figure these rules are decided as a group (with a lot of weight given to the DM), and I don't want to speak for anyone but me. I think I've expounded on my position enough -- I'd like to hear what other people want out of the blog, narrative motif-wise.

I also agree with Jacob that this "spiral" isn't anybody's fault. Fabio's tried to play his weird character, Scott has expanded on it and pushed the envelope, Aaron's attempt to shut the issue down without sacrificing game actions got misinterpreted, and I, for one, didn't have the wisdom and initiative to come up with an in-game response. In retrospect, I think I should've just tried to kill Slthm.

Sexual Assault in D&D -- an antipathy spell I failed to save against

Hi. Been a while.

I owe you an explanation for my long hiatus. Well, that actually depends on who you are, but I do owe the 3 or so people who are actually going to read this an explanation.

Some time ago, a lull in the dndblog campaign led to some discussion of the question "what are the most memorable moments of the campaign so far?" And I think my response was some of the distinctive game-action moments. But it occurs to me now (especially now) that those aren't actually what I remember most vividly.

Until February, the most vivid moment was Bishop anally raping a half-orc with a hot poker. Which is still a creditable second. But Slthm ejaculating on Drusilla, having his penis ruptured (or not), with attendant jokes from Gonzo Gamer, and Scott casually "moving the game along" -- there's Grimlocks to kill, you know -- has clawed its way deep, deep into my brain.

And I'm not cool with either of those. Frankly, I'm surprised you are.

Figuring out why I'm so upset by the Slthm-Drusilla scene has been instructive for me. Of course, there is the nature of the thing -- coming on someone against their will is a particularly violent and repellent act, not sexual in any sort of good way. (Hannibal Lecter and I agree on this.) And of course, this is a narrative, not factual, which makes it worse. Gonzo thought (and presumably still thinks) that "a taste for sexual harassment is a nice touch for any PC!" I don't think I can communicate how much I disagree.

Dungeons & Dragons is, partly, a jointly developed story. The skeletal structure of the rules presumes an adventure story of heroic action. The DM develops the setting and the plot, and the players provide the characters. I want to contribute to a story of overcoming adversity, conquering evil through courage and wits. But now we've got a story in which the one woman is treated like...like a fucktoy, is the only way I can think of to say it. Aaron's participation in this endeavor is playing and developing Drusilla's character, and his/her serious acts are met with "oh, Slthm's into S&M, and spews on her". I don't have any interest in being a part of that story.

It's gratuitous, but I don't care about that. It's prurient. It's debasing. I used to encourage my wife to read what we were up to on the blog. I thought about telling my students about the blog, and encouraging them to check it out if they hadn't seen games like this before. Mentioning the blog's current webpage to a class now would be professional suicide. With good reason.

I'm probably coming across as prudish, which I think Jacob will confirm I'm not. I think there's a swirl of issues that have come to a head, and it's more than just my visceral response to Slthm's scripted behavior that I have trouble coping with.

Going back to the collaborative storytelling idea: D&D players have conflicting motives. Once the character is developed, we want the character's actions to reflect that character. But separate and sometimes in opposition to that, we want to preserve the storytelling experience -- to keep playing the game. Barik found these humans irresponsible, corrupt, foolish, hostile -- and yet came up with reasons that he should go along with them. At times Grell, Bishop, Acavel and Slthm have earned the distrust and dislike (to put it mildly) of the party, and yet we have put up with each other and even sacrificed ourselves to help other members who clearly weren't worth it in-game, but we were focused on the big picture of "making it all work" rather than just playing our roles.

Feeling like the DM is just screwing with you is pretty common (and usually just paranoia from a run of bad luck), but in this case, another player is causing the problem. Gonzo has more or less said he's screwing with us -- "I've never played such a disruptive character -- I'm having a blast!" is the message I'm getting from him. In other words, he's having a great time putting us in the position of having to choose "keeping the game going" rather than "playing my character's role", because he's been playing his role with complete disregard for keeping the game going.

This is exactly the same message I got from an irritating jock when he announced how much he liked just trying to get under people's skin sometimes, really prod at them until they couldn't take it. There's a word for a person who is consciously trying to make your life difficult because it amuses him. The word is asshole. I didn't have the impression until recently that Gonzo was an asshole, but one thing I'm sure of, I don't like playing games with assholes.

I was (literally) dumbfounded by the response, or lack thereof, by the DM (and his PC, Bishop) in this scene. Gonzo started the whole "horn-dog" moment, but the DM followed it to its grisly conclusion, and then tried to move on as if nothing of significance had happened. I felt rather similarly back at the Bishop torture scene, which Scott clearly laid out in careful detail, then remained obstinately unresponsive as Barik and Acavel refused to let it drop. I was trying to convey then that both I and my character are not okay with this, and that if that's the sort of thing we can expect out of this story, we'll pack up and head for a less evil place. Now that I think of it, we haven't seen the "bad guys" in this adventure do anything as evil as members of our own party. (The hill giants eating Agar is the closest, and I suppose Acavel has suffered dire stuff in hell, but that doesn't seem the same.)

It's late -- I'm going to start summarizing.

As you know, we all have various pulls on our time. Work is demanding more of my time than it used to (new job), family, the everyday tedium of living, and thankfully several avenues of recreation. For the last month and a half, it's been more appealing to play PlayStation games or read comic books (From Hell has taken quite a bit of time -- lots of chapter notes) than to try to wrestle with the issues of the dndblog. Because, frankly, this whole scene's left a bad taste in my mouth. And the one thing Scott's DMing philosophy and the limitations of the blog format guarantee is that it's going to be a long long time before we reach another shortlived "victory moment".

So, I kept not getting around to it and kept not getting around to it, until here we are. I know, my nonresponsiveness is a lousy coping mechanism. That's been made abundantly clear to me several times before, but it's a negative behavior I have that I may never be able to shake. I apologize for disappearing for so long without a word. As the last several years indicate, it doesn't happen all that often, and I'll try not to do it again.

Which brings us to the present. What do I do now? Well, blogwise there's nothing to do -- Barik is apparently Stone-boy of the Nine Toes at the moment. I hadn't meant for this to come off this way, but looking back over this, it looks a lot like a "here's why I'm ditching the blog" message. That's not my intention.

But let's be honest. Maybe you're just thrilled by all the edginess and drama that ejaculating gnolls and anal penetration with hot pokers provide. Maybe you find delicious the feeling of being on tenterhooks because of the maverick play of characters who don't care what the fate of their character, the party, or the game is. That's fine. If that's the way you want to play it, then maybe Barik would be happier off doing something else.

That's not what I want. Overall, I've enjoyed the experience of the blog, I want to know how the story turns out. It's been fun to get back in touch with Jacob and Aaron, and interesting to find out how two strangers (John and myself) who I'm pretty sure wouldn't abide being in the same room in real life can meaningfully work together and communicate in this game. Until these recent events, I had the impression that Fabio was an interesting guy that has some common research interests with me. I don't want to leave.

I'm not trying to make this as some sort of ultimatum or a "I'll come back with these conditions" kind of thing. If Barik gets unstoned, I'll play him. I'm not telling you what to do -- but I am telling you, if this story continues down the road it seems to be, which seems to me to end with turning Drusilla into nothing more than the butt of doggie-style sex comments and the game disintegrating into a competition of whose character is the most entertainingly dysfunctional, my entry's going to be that Barik commits suicide, death by opposing army if possible, but he's not picky. That Barik, such a zany guy.

DMs make the best teachers

I ask you, what's a game?



The notion of "game" is intuitive, but tricky to pin down, especially with the advent of videogames, MMO communities, etc. But here's a vague description that's not too far off the mark: a game provides challenges, and somehow quantifies the player's progress through (or victory over) those challenges. D for instance, and all RPGs, are "about" facing trial after trial after ambush after trap after trial, coping with each in one way or another, and getting rewarded with levels and booty, the better to face the next hurdle.



A class is also supposed to provide challenges, and quantify the student's progress through (and ideally, victory over) those challenges. It's harder to find distinctions between games and classes than similarities.



What are the traits of a good teacher? Some are strict, some are friendly, some are innovative, some stick to tried and true methods. But a good teacher makes classes compelling, makes the subject interesting, keeps students interested.



Thus, the post title. A dungeon master (or any other game designer) starts with a bare structure, and builds a compelling environment, and a dramatic storyline that doesn't just make you follow it, it makes you play a part in it.



If anyone's got a good campaign idea for College Algebra class, pleeeeeze let me in on it. Seriously.



Of course, every good DM uses some of the fine resources already out there. I'm going to start out with Module Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits.



"Okay, Stephen, you're the thief, hiding under the drow altar. Peering out from under the black velvet, you count 46 legs. Meanwhile, from her vantage point peering down from the balcony, Vanessa the barbarian sees 16 drowish heads. After your companions report what they've seen, it's up to Ashley the mage (who has the highest Int): how many driders and how many drow are out there?"

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rats...

I'm annoyed (mostly at myself) that I didn't post promptly. As a good dwarf, Barik'd much rather get a useful MAP than blindly follow an inconsistent and suspect gnoll. But, you sit around too long and next thing you know, you're in some lizard lair and the DM's asking for the marching order again.