Preview of the Lantern, December 1635

A month late, or rather I've skipped a month, but I have the lantern available to be looked at for those few of you who contribute $10 or more to my patreon each month.  As ever, the Lantern will be available for $7 come the 21st of this month.

This image is of the back page, since I posted the front page a few days ago.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 14

One last business before we can move onto spells. The turning undead concept was good — a small bridge between combat and faith, permitting a solid bullet in the cleric's arsenal under specific circumstances. There are game issues with it — overall, the randomness is troublesome, especially at higher level, where the effect either works as a dead fizzle or a machine of the gods, without nuance. And the latter is too powerful in game play, too often, especially with lesser undead. But... there's no fundamental problem with the rule appearing here, as an early construction where few undead existed. Later, as more undead emerged and the game deepened, the swinginess of the mechanic became harder to justify. No need to go into this now. We can move forward, as this, like other recent metrics, is perfectly servicable.

A full explanation of each spell follows. Note that underlined Clerical spells are reversed by evil Clerics. Also, note the Clerics versus Undead Monsters table, indicating the strong effect of the various clerical levels upon the undead; however, evil Clerics do not have this effect, the entire effect being lost.

An odd insertion, oddly written. We introduce the spells for seven words and the comment on the table above. Writing this in the opposite order would be more typical. But meh.

From here, I must adjust how the content going ahead is deconstructed. With regards to the spells, none so far as I'm concerned were badly conceived. Thus there's less need to criticise the writing or their intent. If written by Gygax, these are his better work, more careful to be sensible and with a greater consciousness in their application to game play. Perhaps because these were more firmly established in game play than the earlier part of this book. In either case, I think my focus here has to be upon those present-day persons who might be trying to play these rules "as written." Holes for game play proliferate throughout, as I shall try to outline. Get ready to be bored.

EXPLANATION OF SPELLS:

Magic-Users:

1st Level:

Detect Magic: A spell to determine if there has been some enchantment laid on a person, place or thing. It has a limited range and short duration. It is useful, for example, to discover if some item is magical, a door has been "held" or "wizard locked," etc.

As the later Players Handbook identified, matters such as range, casting time, duration, area of effect and such were either ignored or rendered inconsistent. For example, how far out from the self can the caster detect magic?  Not line-of-sight, the spell says so, but still, "limited" is hardly definitive. I live in Calgary, where on a clear day I can see the Rocky Mountains sixty miles from here. Every now and then we get a particularly effective atmospheric refraction, so that without editing a picture like the one shown can be experienced live. I've had incidents where I was walking in some part of the city towards the mountains during a weather change, where the distance peaks were visibly receding as I watched. It's a profound effect.

As the game moves from tabletop mechanics to the imagined setting, where the application isn't just applied in combat but in any situation that might come up through prodecural operative party actions, firm limits had to be imposed. But this need not be discuss further here. That can be left to another time. For the moment, let's just discuss the individual spell functions.

Issues bound to come up with detect magic here include the kind of magic, the strength of the magic, whether or not the magic is dangerous and even whether or not it's a spell. The door is opened to these things because I can identify, specifically, if the door is "held." That's a specific spell I'm identifying; so why shouldn't I be able to specifically define the presence of others I find? Does it include the presence of an invisible person? If a person is charmed? Whether someone is presently engaged in ESP with a member of the party? Or either clairvoyance or clairaudience? How about if an opponent is protected from normal missiles, or is confused, or protected from evil? These details matter, and a "rules lawyer" is going to want to know why hold portal or wizard lock are special among other spells that have active, continual components that are also magic. A "ruling" here isn't definitive — an issue that many DMs refuse to understand... because a ruling, like any enactment of legitimacy, must logically apply, and not arbitrarily.

Rules are a contractural arrangement between players of a game, regardless of the DM's presence. In monopoly, we agree to pay each other, we agree to throw two dice, we agree that jail occurs on the third double and so on. This largely unspoken agreement is something we learned to accede to at the age of five or six, when we found ourselves playing games with siblings or friends and grew tired of these things always ending in fist-fights. "Fairness," we understood, enables shared expectations among the participants that enables "fun" that doesn't collapse into chaos. This principle applies to the presence of the DM, just as it applies to everything humans do cooperatively. The position of the DM does not contradict this.

Arbitrariness breaks this contract. It transformes the DM from interpreter into a despot, opening the door to cronyism among the players, an entitlement to abuse players, to channel and affect play so as to serve the DM's purposes and not the general welfare... the result is a toxic atmosphere where those who play enjoy the privileges bestowed upon them by the DM, while others quickly find themselves driven out.

This distinction isn't a point of view that's universal within role-playing any more than it is within business culture, the legal system, politics or world governments. Many, many, many persons in all fields practice arbitrary approaches to their purposes all the time, from parents to believe firmly that "because" IS an acceptable answer to every query, to D fucking T who has weaponised the ineffectiveness of the judiciary branch to impose ridiculous, nation-destroying actions upon a helpless minority. Arbitrariness is widespread; it's going to happen in D&D and those who pursue it will be loudly vocal, aggressive, abusive and conceited in their embrace of it. And because they make up a substantial part of the audible community, there will always be some jackass who points out other such fucknards as a justification of bad actions. But within this tiny space of this tiny blog, no. If the spell will recognise the footprint of a held door, that it should likewise recognise the footprint of a person affected by charm, invisibility, confusion or any other like spell.

If that's not wanted, than the spell must be defined more exactly. The above says "for example," indicating plainly that the examples given are not the only possible cases. If they should be the only possible cases, than the wording of the spell must reflect that. Loose language creates problems in rule-making. And as we process through these spells, we're going to see repeatedly how they can be re-interpreted perfectly fairly based on nothing other than their attempts to fix something as complex as this in less than 50 words.

Any time the words "for example" appear in a rule book, it's an open wound inviting queries about the mechanic. Think of it as rainwater finding every crack and groove upon the ground: arguments and hard feelings about a game campaign will accumulate in such spaces and strive to erode the ground beneath, until the structure collapses. Thus, never trust anything that's been written about game codification — language is hard and words are never without colloquial interpretations that only multiply when words are placed next to each other. Rewrite every spell description of every spell you use in your game to hammer down how you want them to work in your campaign. And then do it again each time your ruling is challenged in a way you didn't expect. Rewriting a law is not an "arbitrary" practice, not so long as the rewriting, once done, is fixed. So long as everyone can see the rule, and count on it over time, it's no longer a "ruling." It's a rule. And that's our goal. Not to replace rules with rulings, but to codify rulings into rules that the players can read, examine and act upon.

It took 1500 years of human civilisation possessed of writing to codify laws in stone (Hammurabi); it took another 1700 years before the practice of laws evolving through precedence became a consistent practice in the most civilised of places (Greece, Rome). The effort, once begun, inevitably failed about 800 years (4th century Rome) thereafter... and was not rediscovered for 800 years (early Renaissance) after that... about 700 years ago from when I write this. So in all, it's taken us 5,500 years to get to the level of legal behaviour we practice now. It's no surprise that a great many DMs believe that Hammurabi knew the best approach... and they don't hesitate to run their games that way, assuming that the DM is fucking god or something. But that is not what we call "civilisation."

Having set the precedent for discussing these rules, then, let's continue.

Hold Portal: A spell to hold a door, gate or the like. It is similar to a locking spell (see below) but it is not permanent. Roll two dice to determine the duration of the spell in turns. Dispel Magic (see below) will immediately negate it, a strong antimagical creature will shatter it and a Knock (see below) will open it.

Much like "for example," "and the like" does not hold the portal, it opens it. A quick examination of a thesaurus searching the word "portal" quickly reveals that no actual obstruction is necessary for a thing to be defined as that. Technically, anything that is a "way in" or a threshold, including from one room to the next, is a "portal," and by use of the words, "and the like," we've now let all of them count. And since dungeons and ordinary sized constructions do not define "portal" as a thing, an entrance as large as the egress of the Colosseum of Rome, also a portal, can be held by the spell. The same can be said of cave mouths, curtains, a street between two walls... if, in fact, I throw a blanket across the middle of a corridor, by definition it becomes a threshold, and I can cast hold portal over it.

Correction would require stating that the portal must have hinges, or a obstruction that must be physically opened using muscle power. Otherwise, other interpretations are absolutely on the table. Still, arguably, the spell as it occurs in the game IS pretty weak. Why would the blanket-on-floor option necessarily be a bad thing? If we accept it, we're not breaking the game... we're turning an anemic, almost decorative spell into a flexible field tool. That Gygax and crew anticipated this is immaterial — the anticipation of new uses for a spell are always present.

The fault in this occurs when the player or DM choose to expand the spell to things that are not a portal, a way in or a threshold: a bottle, say, or the buckle of a belt, or any other thing that happens to "close" but shares no other charactistics with a passage through. If language exists as an expansion of a rule, it also stands as a boundary to that function; for portal cannot be reinterpreted to describe things that are not that, unless the DM chooses to ignore language as the principle being respected.

Conceivably, a large enough box or perhaps a coffin can be physically entered. If a cleric in my campaign, inside a coffin, were to cast hold portal on the lid, I'd likely allow that. Arguably, if there is a vampire within the coffin trying to egress, again, the argument holds. But to keep liquid from emerging from a bottle? No, I'd probably call it there. Another DM can disagree, and that's fine. BUT WRITE IT DOWN, so the same argument can be applied at another time. Don't just suppose it applies in this one situation — and remember that once it is written down, you as DM are as subject to that rule as the player. That's the contract.

Read Magic: The means by which the incantations on an item or scroll are read. Without such a spell or similar device magic is unintelligible to even a Magic-User. The spell is of short duration (one or two readings being the usual limit).

It's not quite perfectly so, but nearly so... the spell permits the reading of the magic language, that by which "spells" are written. This isn't defacto stated however; does it include a glyph, which is not part of this language? The door is open because "an item" isn't strictly defined. I do not know of what item to which the description refers; I know of no other magic language that is included in a magic item outside of scrolls. And if such language does occur, how is it separated by definition from a rune or glyph — which is immaterial, of course, since neither are mentioned in these rules. But if we're running a game with these rules in the present day, we must state whether such things exist to our players, since they know what these things are and that they're normally associated with D&D. It is hard to separate "standard" D&D concepts from this rule set, given that some of them don't exist yet.

Read Languages: The means by which directions and the like are read, particularly on treasure maps. It is otherwise like the Read Magic spell above.

Quite straightforward. My sole point to make is that its not clear if I can cast the spell upon other persons who can then enjoy the benefits. Presumably, it is, but it does not state as much. Reasonably, if the spell is cast upon a person who cannot read at all, the spell should still function normally.

Now that I think of it, the spell doesn't specifically state that only one language can be read per casting, so I assume I can read however many languages I can fine within the spell's duration (which isn't stated). I did have a player once ask if when the language was "read," did that mean translated into the character's comprehensive language, or if the recipient's thought process was reconfigured in order to recognise the specific nuances of the language being comprehended. In other words, if I were able to read Russian, would I merely understand what was being said, or would it mean I was "thinking in Russian." The player had a reason for this, but it was ages ago and I don't remember; I do believe I granted her the latter interpretation.

Protection from Evil: This spell hedges the conjurer round with a magic circle to keep out attacks from enchanted monsters. It also serves as an "armor" from various evil attacks, adding a +1 to all saving throws and taking a -1 from hit dice of evil opponents. (Note that this spell is not cumulative in effect with magic armor and rings, although it will continue to keep out enchanted monsters.) Duration: 6 turns.

Technically, the spell does not specify "evil" enchanted monsters. The wiggle room here is the question, "enchanted."  The strict definition of the word (none occurs in the White Box) is, "put someone or something under a spell; bewitch." Suppose then that in a battle in a dungeon far from any sort of water, I cast "waterbreathing" upon a perfectly ordinary non-magical enemy. The range is 30 feet; in the White Box, no save is specified. Thereafter, that enemy is by definition "enchanted" and cannot enter my circle, even if that enemy is 20th level or a 16 HD monster. Food for thought.

Not saying this is how the spell should be interpreted, but it's plain that "enchanted" MUST be better defined. Nor is another word, like "evil" or "supernatural" sufficient. Every single monster the spell protects against should be recorded and made available to the player. It's a finite list. There's no reason why this work can't be done inside an hour.

All right, I need a break. That's enough.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 13

Ah, memories.

This chart is worth the price of admission. The concept is wholly sound, playable — if simplistic, which is entirely forgivable, since it's the prototype of a lot that was to follow. The argument that the later DMG overdid this is fair... I'm not included in that number, but I can understand that the straightforwardness of this is a breath of fresh air, given all that was to follow.

The need to balance clerics and mages, too, makes sense, since fighters have to be given something that puts them ahead of the other two classes. That all attacks cause the same damage has been embraced by a large number, though I think it tosses out a significant game choice in testing one weapon's power against the space required, it's weight, it's durability if dropped and the number of hands it needs. But all that doesn't really need to be a part of the game, if the DM feels a need to cut the detail somewhere.

The accompanying page 20, too, is straightforward... and heck, this is the centrepiece of the game. So long as this was constructed well, the remaining inconsistencies and mess of introductory content could be ignored. I played hundreds of hours of D&D that consisted of just fighting one group of monsters against another, or one party against another, because the feel for not knowing how it would come out was enough to seize my imagination at the time.

My first post talks about how my 1st level fighter, needing a 14 on this table to keep from being turned to stone, failed. I only know I needed a 14 because now I can look at the table... hell if I could remember it otherwise. I didn't complain when it happened. I was hopelessly confused and I didn't know what a basilisk was, but once the concept was explained, I was ready to roll with it. My personal character's success was not what mattered to me; what mattered was the concept of this game, and how that blew my mind. It really did change my perception of what a game could be, and as is self-evident, effectively my life as well. I wound up giving myself completely to this. While others went off to be other things, I stayed and did other things so they could support this. A fair evaluation of that would be to say I was, and am, obsessed.

But that doesn't blind me to the problems here, which I don't need to dig into again just now. I repeat, these guys were not geniuses. For all the cleverness of the above tables, and the pleasure I've found in implementing them and offspring they spawned, nothing in the above is more complicated than might have appeared in any of a hundred wargames that were actively being played at the time. Just as the comment I made about repulping car ad content in a post yesterday, the same goes for the familiarity we all had with tables that designated hitting, movement, interdictory fire, retreat, enfilade and half a hundred other things that made straight up box tables. Good on these guys that they knew how to copy well. Good on them that they understood how to adapt the concept to this particular ideal. But don't miss that the above is quite simple. It's not rocket science. It did not take a "genius" to make.  Calling these guys geniuses just because they succeeded is not a defacto truth. It's absolutely possible to pull a Homer. Rich business folk do it all the time.

Which brings us to a completely different discussion regarding the White Box. There's little value to be found in debating the existence and coordination of spell-use. Obviously it worked. I'd argue that this, better than the combat table, provided real value to the game as a whole, since it solved the esoteric, hard to visualise problem that magic creates.

Consider. A boardgame assumed a bounded reality: movement rates, attack ranges, line of sight, terrain effects and so on. Every rule depends on stable physics: what can you see, how fast can you move, what are the dictates of ballistics, a simple understanding of what can and cannot happen. The concept of magic — and here, think of it before D&D solved this — obliterates the framework. The very idea supposes that effects can be created out of thin air, in an unbounded fashion that ignores physics. Line of sight may not be necessary, range is a movable feast, movement isn't even necessary for the caster — or its achieved by teleporting or levitating in ways that typical wargame combatants cannot.

Even the visual represention of magic is a huge challenge. Your figure, your friend's figures are represented on the board; but the moment that magic happens, it is both physical and not; a blast is assumed to take out this number of enemy, or damage them somehow, but the actual representation of the magic isn't necessary, since it happens in a blip of time. Thus, all of that, like a flying arrow, doesn't get represented... it has to be imagined, which necessarily tests the participants to keep up with that. So all of that magic, once created, has to be memorable enough so that when I say "protection from evil" or "hold person," you must know what I'm talking about. In fact, everyone at the table does. Think of it as consensus hallucination. We say the fireball happens in this circle, and every player appreciates what that means, together. Habitually.

This abstraction is an enormous hurdle to overcome. And for a lot of us here, thinking about trying to explain spells to some players, it's still a hurdle that exists.

Suppose you're going to fashion a group of spells from scratch, and you don't have the above to work with. Some of this was made for Chainmail, so assume you don't have that either. It's 1969, you've got the moon landing in the background and you're thinking, hey, "What if I wanted to create a list of spells that a warlock or witch could conceivably cast in a wargame. What would I start with?"

You see the issue. Even the decision to do that is an enormous connection that needs to be made. The idea of people casting spells has been around for about 15 centuries and yet, aside from Alistair Crowley, who's ever tried to codify them? And let me tell you, what Crowley codified is not D&D worthy.

Magic in literature and myth is story-motivated, not strategic. It obeyed the emotional logic a writer needed, not the qualitative framework of a board game. The game needs range, duration, something that challenges the magic's automatic effectiveness... and none of this exists as a concept as the crew of the Eagle are nearly crashing on the moon. So where do you start?

To begin with, the range concept comes first. Magic is a sort of ordnance. That gets us out of the myth and folklore story stranglehold. If we see magic as a tank shell, that presupposes that it isn't cast by virtue of imagination. You can only cast your magic "bomb" so far, and otherwise according to fixed principles: line-of-sight again, with area of effect.  The duration of that effect matches other game elements such as dropping smoke upon an enemy position, which is established logically by real world combat simulations. The amount of effect, the number it affects, that gives a graded scale of how dangerous the magic bomb is... and that permits a heirarchy of scale. This magic is a 1st level "bomb," that's a 5th level "bomb" and so on.

The limitations of the bombs becomes self-evident. Just as a tank hasn't infinite shells, the mage can't have infinite bombs. In fact, we can reason that a lot of them, like fireball, are so dangerous that if the mage can manage then more than once a mass combat, it overloads the mage's power... so we imagine the mage's "magazine" being loaded with a group of individualised shells, none of them the same, so that there are enough shells to be fired to keep the mage in the game, but not all of a type that overtips the balance.

This concept of battlefield mechanics is what keeps the magic system from getting out of control, giving it a sensible, internally consistent and quantifiable structure. The scarcity of shots is absolutely necessary — otherwise, the combat balance of the mage is shattered and the overall system as well. This system has endured, despite later iterations, because the magazine structure was respected. Later game editions ignored it. The result has been the necessity to turn the fighter into ordnance as well, which as completely flattened the game into a boring, meaningless broth. Except for the words used, every class is essentially the same gun.

But the temptation has been to presume that spells in the game are, well, "magical."   But the magic system was never about the fanciful beauty of showy imagination. It's about importing the language of artillery tables into the imagination, and calling the resultant physics "magic."

The real nuance is in how the "magazine" was able to include ordance that had nothing to do with battlefield mechanics. Read languages, light, locate object, wizard lock, clairvoyance and -audience, water breathing... these were problem-solving ordnance, designed specifically to allow the players to overcome specific game obstacles outside the combat system. This is where the system truly shines, because it excuses the game from the endless combat treadmill without presupposing the only exit is role-playing. Such spells proliferate for the mage in later systems, as it became clearer what the game could be about.

With this in mind, look at the cleric spells. More than a "healer," the character is an enabler, one that helps avoid traps, acquire knowledge from animals, identify powers outside the ken of others, even force the will of others to pursue solutions. While the mage really is the tank of the party, the cleric is the intelligence office, running the M*A*S*H unit as well.

Looked at this way, we can see the cleric isn't a "weak mage" and it's just the party medic either. It's an interlocking system that permits the party to attack, prevent, repair, recon and maintain morale, while generating the ongoing process of game narration, both inside and outside the active adventuring itself.

That's the brilliance hidden in the simplicity of the early spell charts. They define not just what a character can do but what role they play in the team’s operational structure. The cleric is command and control, the mage is fire support, the fighter is the line unit, and the thief (once introduced) becomes reconnaissance and infiltration.

And then the later game, after AD&D, fucked all that up, partly by treating every character as though they could "do it all," and then pretty much steamrolling over the game so that there was no game to play. The interplay between these classes has been so overwritten now it's rarely understood how well they worked together.

The Upcoming December Lantern

For those who may be concerned, there will be an issue of The Lantern, December 1635, available for preview on the 1st of November. The public version will be available on the 21st of that month. The principle writing is finished, the editing is ongoing and I am making ads to fill out the content. I'm a bit stuck for a back page, so if anyone has an idea, I'll certainly consider it, but I have faith someone will arise before the end of this week.

Chat's image generator has completely gone to shit and is now no longer useful for what it could do easily just four months ago. I don't know what's going on; visually, different sorts of errors were proliferating every day throughout this month, such that by just five days ago, it simply refused to render a clear image at all. Clearly the chat-5 rollout failure has the company in a tailspin, such that they're rushing around making changes without considering the consequences. The text function is always showing signs of wear, so that I can feel the goal posts moving even as all I want it to do is comment on work to see if it's either accurate or if what I'm writing makes a good impression on the reader. I suspect that it's going to become the "Betamax" of text-generation platforms, soon to be replaced by a score of alternatives.  I've recently found one, it's generating GREAT pictures for me, more quickly and in a format not that different from chat. Strange times when a doofus running a company can simultaneously throw an advance out to rival the internet and months later sabotage it idiotically.

In any case... I'm sure that given my melt down a month ago, some folks were worried, but things are fine. The stories on the cover shown are all finished and, in my opinion, excellent. I look forward to working on the issue after this.

Enjoy the Ride

Let me deviate from this series a moment. I had a conversation this morning and I want to get it down before I lose it.

I'll start with some ancient history. In 1988, CD sales surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and in 1992, they surpassed the sale of pre-recorded cassette tapes. CDs did, at the time, feel better; they were easier to handle, we weren't aware of their degradation rates (which are awful), they're smaller and in general the newer, niftier way to listen to music felt cool.  But it would be stupid not to note that one reason that CD sales surpassed other formats was because the same persons responsible for selling the CDs made those formats.  And as everyone pointed out bitterly at the time, we were being forced to buy a lifetime of albums over again as CDs. It was a terrific moneygrab by the recording studios... and when asked about it, they said a lot of bullshit that amounted to, "fuck the customer, we're doing this."

Between 1988 and 1991 in Canada, it was not possible to buy a vinyl record at a mainstream music outlet. The only option was to buy CDs.

And eight years later the music industry was shafted by the launching of Napster, which their clever format change enabled.

If the music industry hadn't make the push into digital media in the late 1980s, the entire timeline of personal audio digitization would have slowed by several years, maybe even a decade. Much of the early commercial incentive to produce affordable CD drives, blank discs, and digital-to-analog converters came directly from the consumer audio market — the desire to play and copy music. Without that mass market, CD drives would have remained a professional or data-storage niche. Companies like Sony, Philips and Yamaha developed consumer CD-R technology largely because music buyers already owned CD players, and record labels were selling billions of CDs. That base of hardware justified R&D for writable discs and affordable burners.

If vinyl had remained dominant, there’d have been little reason for households to own optical drives at all until data-heavy computing needs (software, multimedia, backups) grew enough to sustain the market independently, likely not until the early 2000s. Audio piracy would then have taken a very different path — slower, perhaps remaining tape-based well into the decade, or moving laterally into mini-discs and other analog-digital hybrids. File sharing like Napster relied not just on digital formats but on standardised, already-ripped audio libraries sitting on hard drives. Without the CD revolution to normalise that digital music layer, the infrastructure for ripping, compressing and trading songs online would have been delayed, possibly until broadband and solid-state storage made digital music independently attractive.

In short, the labels’ forced digitization didn’t just accelerate the CD market — it created the hardware ecosystem that made their own downfall technologically inevitable.

This is old news. This is not what my conversation was about this morning. I'm including the above for context.

Between 1997 and 1999, a series of artistic programs flooded into the market that identified themselves as "artistic assistance" or "instant-aesthetic" tools: CorelXara, MetaCreations Bryce 3D, Poser 3, Kai’s Power Tools and Kai’s Power Goo, Synthetik Studio Artist, Microsoft PhotoDraw and others. These programs marked the first time that software openly promised to bridge the gap between imagination and ability. They didn’t just give users digital brushes or palettes; they offered to do part of the creative work themselves. A person with no training could drop a mountain into Bryce, smooth a human figure into existence in Poser, or warp a photograph into surreal fluidity with Kai’s Power Goo. The selling point wasn’t mastery—it was transformation. The computer became a kind of collaborator, quietly taking over the technical or aesthetic parts that used to demand skill. What had once been a slow apprenticeship in technique was now a series of sliders and presets that made beauty achievable in minutes.

As the 2000s progressed, the things you could do with these programs grew by leaps and bounds, until the line between artist and operator began to blur completely. Each new version added smarter automation, richer presets, and more “intelligent” correction tools that could compensate for nearly any weakness in composition or draftsmanship. By the mid-2000s, programs were no longer just assisting creativity — they were manufacturing it, translating vague gestures into polished, gallery-ready output. What began as a set of digital conveniences evolved into a creative prosthetic: filters that could mimic entire schools of painting, renderers that could light a scene like a film set, and interfaces that promised to make anyone an artist with enough clicks. The underlying message shifted from "learn to create" to "let the software create with you," and that shift quietly redefined what it meant to make art at all.

Untold thousands of children grew up with access to these tools on their parents computers or were introduced to them in grade school, so that by the early 2010s, we had created an entire community of "artists" who self-identified as that, but had never actually committed any art they'd ever created without the help of a computer... and that subtle distinction — between those who used computers to express something and those whose expression only existed because of the computer — became invisible almost overnight. What emerged was a generation fluent in aesthetics but not in craft, people who knew how art should look without ever having learned how art was made.

But it didn't matter, because the demand for generated art by 2015 was monstrous. Those who graduated from an art school with the right papers found themselves in a ready made career — and the irony is hard to miss. We’re talking about a considerable number of late-teen and twenty-something young adults making oodles of money as “artists,” their actual job title. For the first time, the label didn’t require struggle, gallery shows, or a patron—it came with a salary, benefits, and a workstation. These were kids who’d grown up surrounded by digital tools that turned experimentation into creation, and creation into a marketable skill. What had once been an unforgiving, unfulfilling, failure-ridden aspirational vocation was now counted alongside the coder, the data analyst and the technical research. A hipster in the richest salon in New York City might be an "artist" working for a company no one ever heard of, but with the money to pay for a $900 do. Being an artist had arrived.

Then Covid happened.

Overnight, the machinery that kept the creative industries running locked up. Studios couldn’t access shared servers or asset libraries, licensing contracts became tangled in jurisdictional and insurance questions, and managers who had built entire workflows around in-person oversight didn’t know how to function without seeing people at their desks. Overnight, the constant churn of projects—film previsualizations, ad campaigns, game assets, UI design—just stopped. Even though the artists themselves could have kept working from their bedrooms, the bureaucratic systems around them couldn’t adapt fast enough. Deadlines vanished and approvals stalled. But Covid sucked for everyone. And the processes that enabled working from home was slowly managed, so that by 2022 the atmosphere was clearing, the work was ramping up again, the business was getting on its feet and there was a sense that this "work from home" thing would be something that companies would just go on doing once the fog lifted.

And then... A.I.

All the fast-tracking of computer generated artistic production under the human hand over the previous two decades had been flying along. "Art" was less drawing and more "generally sweeping your hand over what you wanted changed."  Work that would have taken a really gifted physical artist in 1985 a week to do could be done in a couple of hours by anyone with a reasonable understanding of the computer tools available. The entire digital art ecosystem had evolved toward efficiency and manipulation rather than construction. The skill had shifted from creating an image from nothing to knowing how to command and correct what the software could already generate. Artists had become conductors of process rather than builders of form — editing, refining and directing outcomes instead of producing them stroke by stroke.

It is any surprise that all A.I. really had to do was lift the "conductor" out of the loop?

When seen this way, with the changes in artistic design that we've seen, A.I. isn't that big a leap forward. It's the next obvious one. Just as the sort of writing quality that's needed to produce an advertisement for a car can be easily generated — there are hundreds of thousands of car ads written by human writers that can be digitally pulped and recast — it's just as logical that the sweeping movements of "artists" could be likewise assigned without the real people any more. And no, I'm not kidding with those quotes. None of these people were ever an actual artist. Most of those in 1999 were... they took their experience and applied Synthetik Studio Artist to it and made some fantastic things. But that's because those older horses had learned not only how to use pencils and paints in two years of art class, but had spent forty years learning the actual language of art.

The youths of today who played with the toys in the 2010s, who are now crying because their careers are shattered, were never really artists. They were just a different kind of coder, who got a chance to make a lot of money because they hit the market at just the right time. There was no such market for 20-something visual coders in 2001, and there won't be one again for visual coders in 2026. Because that's the speed at which our technology moves.

What I'm saying is that they're not special. They're taking advantage of a self-styled label that they didn't earn, while actual artists who did actually earn that label right now AREN'T crying because they're not affected. A.I. can't recreate their art because there's no mountain of content for A.I. to re-pulp. I write articles that A.I. can't conceive of, because I think of things that no one else has thought of. That's how I stay ahead of the curve. It's how all artists do.

Those who are getting eaten alive?  Calling yourself an artist doesn't make you one. If you're an artist, then do what artists have always done. Find a way to make yourself relevant, stop pretending the world owes you a free lunch. You've had all the free lunches you're ever going to get. A lot more than most get.

Why did I start this post with that business about compact discs?

Without wasting our time talking about whether or not change is good, we need to realise that change always begets more change. The fat cats at Capitol and Sony though they were controlling their market, making tons of money, until someone got creative with their little tech development and came near to flattening their entire industry. A few brilliant programmers thought it would certainly be convenient if programs could do more than let people draw on computers... what if, they asked, the computer could help? Made sense. But obviously nothing ever stops at the property line. Someone, somewhere, is always figuring out how to make this thing better, how to get something out of it that hasn't been thought of already... how to shake the pillars of heaven, as it were. That is never going to stop. Forget complaining about A.I. Not only is it here to stay, it's already fast becoming... in someone's imagination, we don't know who... a thing it isn't right now.

And we have no idea what that's gonna be. So get a grip, find a place from which you can navigate yourself... and enjoy the ride.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 12

Levels: There is no theoretical limit to how high a character may progress, i.e. 20th-level Lord, 20th-level Wizard, etc. Distinct names have only been included for the base levels, but this does not influence progression.

I guess it's fascinating. Here this is, yet no acknowledgement that effort explaining how gain experience past the name level isn't given. As though assuming it has been explained, somewhere, and so it doesn't here, where it belongs. One thing's for certain. Confidence is very high.

Dice for Accumulative Hits (Hit Dice): This indicates the number of dice which are rolled in order to determine how many hit points a character can take. Pluses are merely the number of pips to add to the total of all dice rolled not to each die. Thus a Superhero gets 8 dice + 2; they are rolled and score 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6/totals 26 + 2 = 28, 28 being the number of points of damage the character could sustain before death. Whether sustaining accumulative hits will otherwise affect a character is left to the discretion of the referee.

Interesting language here. We're talking about generating hit points,  so normally the verb would describe how many hit points the character "gets," but here it's how many the character "takes." True enough, it's the number a character can "take" before dying, but when that's explained, the word used isn't "take," it's "sustain"... again, an interesting word choice, since the latter means in this context, "to undergo or suffer," as an ongoing thing. So as I "sustain" damage, i.e. suffer, I remove the hit points I "took" when I generated my character. Meanwhile, damage "sustained" is also "accumulated," which means gather together or acquire an increasing number... so strictly in a language sense, I'm acquiring suffering against a thing I take as a characteristic of my character.

Thank heaven I had a DM at the time to explain it to me. Without him to tell me that hit points were a thing I got and damage meant losing those hit points, I've have been in hot water trying to figure this out with my grade 10 vocabulary.

That's not the only one, either. Why "pips"? I know what a pip is, it's the dot on a die. When the die reads 5, there are 5 pips showing. But here the word is used to describe the modifier to the die, not the actual dots on the die. The "number of pips" referred to here are things added to the pips that we add together from the various dice.

'Course, I'd be amiss if I failed to point out that in D&D, "pips" only appear on the d6. There are no pips on a d8 or a d4, both of which are used to roll hit points. At least I think they are. It's funny, I went searching, and the entirety of the books include the words "eight-sided" just once, on page 29 of The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. To determine wind direction. No other instance occurs, except to say that the eight-sided die is included in the game. Several of the monsters, as well as treasure, uses a range of 1-8. That's a cursory search, of course; I may have missed something.

So... even when we have a rule that's perfectly fine, that's still used, that's ordinary and practical, that anyone can understand when it's explained to them... the language in the book not only gets hyper-creative explaining it, it does so while folding that same language into other language that also doesn't make sense. The effort is so elaborate it deserves recognition as an achievement.

Fighting Capability: This is a key to use in conjunction with the CHAINMAIL fantasy rule, as modified in various places herein. An alternative system will be given later for those who prefer a different method.

This is found at the bottom of page 18. It has nothing to do with what begins page 19, and it does not refer to hit points. I understand what it's saying, but we already knew the combat system for these books could be found in chainmail, and at any rate, this is the Men & Magic book, not the Adventures book. So apart from what it means, why is it here? Why mention this at all? Because they had three blank lines at the end of the page? Which could have been used to better explain hit point acquisition?

The writers may have very well BELIEVED they were telling us something important here. I just don't know what that could have been.

Spells & Levels: The number above each column is the spell level (complexity, a somewhat subjective determination on the part of your authors). The number in each column opposite each applicable character indicates the number of spells of each level that can be used (remembered during any single adventure) by that character. Spells are listed and explained later. A spell used once may not be reused in the same day.

There, simple enough. There's a list of spells in the book, they're rated a certain level, you can pick whichever you can cast so long as you don't pick it twice the same day. No memorisation, so for those who dislike that later rule, excellent. No personalised spellbook either. None of this using the same spell over and over. Essentially, a good, solid reason why someone wanting a more direct, simpler system for spellcasters would come to this version of the game. Yay, it happened.

From this comment from Nathan P. Mahney, this is too coherent to be from someone with a tenuous grasp of English, so it's apparently not Arneson. I find it hard to believe that Gygax would admit to the "subjectivity" of what spell goes on what level. I could be wrong, but that feels... too humble for Gygax.

Levels Above those Listed: Progressions of Dice for Accumulative Hits, Fighting Capability, and Spells & Levels may not be evident. An 11th-level Lord would get 10 + 3 dice and fight as he did at the 10th level; but at 12th level, he could get 11 + 1 dice and fight at Superhero + 2. At 13th level dice would be 11 + 3 with Fighting Capability at Superhero + 2. A 17th-level Wizard would get 9 + 3 dice and fight as at 16th level, just as an 18th-level Wizard would get dice of 10 + 1 with no change in Fighting Capabilities — the change coming at the 19th level, fighting then being done at Wizard + 3. An 11th-level Patriarch would get dice of 7 + 3 with Fighting Capability unchanged; at 12th level dice would be 8 + 1 with no change in fighting; and at 13th level the Patriarch would get 8 + 2 and fight as a Superhero — the next change in Fighting Capability coming at the 17th level.

Why isn't 11th level +2? If it goes up by +1/+3 over two levels as it seems to, why is it 11+3 at 13th and then 12+3 at 17th, a four-level gap?

Honest, sorry, I just don't want to untangle this. Here and there a pattern seems to emerge, and then the next line breaks it. If the fighting capability for the Cleric changes every third level, then if it changes at 13th it ought to change again at 16th. Here it says 17th. It's all ridiculous. Why didn't they just write better and include the whole table instead of some crappy pictures earlier?

I suppose that if the printed tables were already set, and someone thought, "Oh, wait, what if they go above name level?" someone said, "If we make it a table we have to go back to the start and do the typesetting all over again, blah blah, lazy lazy, blah blah."  And the next person said, "Right, well write something" and Gygax said, "I'll use my notes, they'll be fine."

There, explained. As well as I possibly can.

Nathan wrote (link above), "Gygax rushed this out the door because he was worried someone else might beat them to the punch." I can accept that on the face of it, but it raises questions. Who else was "racing" them? Has anybody got a name? And if so, why didn't they do what forty other copycats would start doing in 1976... just invent their own version?

A rushed print deadline would explain why so much of this text feels like it was lifted from someone's notes scrawled on yellow foolscap notepaper, but it's not like there was a corporate deadline, right? And people keep telling me, the creators didn't know it was going to be this successful. That they were just throwing it together on a lark, not because they thought it was really going to sell. So then, why rush? We live in the world of self-made creative products, thrown out in the form of millions of daily products thrown onto various websites and product movers like Amazon and Etsy. Are any of those products (counting only the ones that cost a fair bit to make) anywhere nearly as badly put together as this? 

Wikipedia gives a price of about $2,000 that these guys had to lay out to make this thing happen in 1974. In today's money, that's about 12,305. Now, without thinking of what that would buy in terms of game design in the present day (not much if you want to make a splatbook), just think of that in terms of your money coming out of your bank account to make your project. Nothing else. They were out $2,000, you're out $12,305. Would you pay out the equivalent of $12,000 in the year 1974 to make this thing happen, and then not make sure the language was fine? Would you treat it as a dumping ground for illogical paragraph note inclusion?  Is this how you would value an amount of money which for them was what $12,305 would today cost you?

Spending $2,000 to launch a product in 1974 was a serious commitment, and for that investment one would expect a finished, polished product. At the time, that amount of money could have paid for proper typesetting, editing, and consistent design even at a small printer in 1974. So the poor quality wasn’t inevitable. It really suggests these makers had the money to blow, that it didn't come out of their own pockets. This thing reads like someone's daddy paid for it. If so, we wouldn't know it. We know that Don Kaye and Gygax each put up a thousand dollars. But if that came from an aunt, an inheritance or drug money, the internet wouldn't acknowledge it because the last source was the two partners.

The real question is, where did these two incompetents (based on the product's quality), these two hobbyists in their thirties, get that money in 1973? Neither was sitting on wealth. Gygax was barely scraping by, working odd jobs, raising a family; Kaye was a friend with a steady income but not deep pockets. If the money didn’t come from their own disposable income, it almost certainly came through family support or quiet personal backing. The product matches that profile perfectly: it feels like money that wasn't earned through personal risk or sweat equity. If it had been — if either of these guys had been gambling rent money — the book would've been tightened, edited, typeset properly and proofed. People who risk their savings don’t casually publish incoherence. The whole project reeks of people who could affort not to care. That would explain the slapdash text, the missing tables, the laissez-faire approach to editing. I suggest that its probable that these guys thought they had nothing to lose because it wasn't their money.

And let's face it. Gygax was never good with money.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 11

The last post was not that popular. I'll try to cool it down.

As before, page 17 lacks any text so we'll just deal with it as a whole. And just to keep a nice face on it, the less that's said about the art here, the better. Thank gawd there was a label.

Time and time again I've tried to carry forward the use of "veteran," "warrior" and so on as standardised names for class-level states. Once upon a time I had every lable from every class in the original Players Handbook memorised, but in my games the players just wouldn't buy in. After a while I gave in and said "2nd level fighter" like everyone else. I thought it was a good idea. No one else I ever played with thought so.

The 5+1 HD for the swashbuckler is odd, but not really a big deal. It's a bit out of place that the previous page ceased to give experience for the 11th level wizard... but here we have wizards above 11th. The same is true of the lord, which needs 240,000 x.p. How much does the lord, 10th level need? No idea. It's just hole after hole after hole with this content.

It's one reason I don't think we can dump this all on Gygax's shoulders. True enough, I recognise his prose style, but there are at least three different recognisable styles in this work; and the experience discrepancies between page 16 and 17 are a case in point. Page 18 discusses experience but doesn't settle this question; page 19 has a heading, "Levels above those listed" and this doesn't address it either. Yet it makes it clear that there are 13th level patriarchs and 17th level fighters. How much experience does it take to get there?  Not actually said. You and I know... we've played other games and we have other versions to pull from. What did someone who didn't know the makers personally do in 1975?

Is it worth hammering at these deficiencies, page after page?  Perhaps not. But look how many there are. I can't write one of these posts without finding four of them. And so far, we're on page 17. There are 108 pages altogether.

A sensible person would just stop. When I used to talk on my blog about how shit this set was, I got all kinds of pushback, telling me I didn't understand, I didn't appreciate what it was, I wasn't properly respectful, a whole host of things. But exactly how does one just ignore this many errors? If your grocery store made this many errors in pricing, organisation, labelling of things and so on, you'd find another grocery. If your maid cleaned your house with this level of attention, you wouldn't tolerate it. If your boss treated your paycheque this way, don't pretend you'd just overlook it. I really love the game of D&D, and I want it respected. Is it so much to ask that we just admit what plainly visible here?

Experience Points: Experience points are awarded to players by the referee with appropriate bonuses or penalties for prime requisite scores. As characters meet monsters in mortal combat and defeat them, and when they obtain various forms of treasure (money, gems, jewelry, magical items, etc.), they gain "experience." This adds to their experience point total, gradually moving them upwards through the levels.

Gains in experience points will be relative; thus an 8th-level Magic-User operating on the 5th dungeon level would be awarded 5/8 experience. Let us assume he gains 7,000 Gold Pieces by defeating a troll (which is a 7th-level monster, as it has over 6 hit dice). Had the monster been only a 5th-level one, experience would be awarded on a 5/8 basis as already stated, but as the monster guarding the treasure was a 7th-level one, experience would be awarded on a 7/8 basis thus; 7,000 GP + 700 for killing the troll = 7,700 divided by 8 = 962.5 x 7 = 6,037.5. Experience points are never awarded above a 1 for 1 basis, so even if a character defeats a higher-level monster he will not receive experience points above the total of treasure combined with the monster's kill value.

Only Gygax would see this as eminently logical. Tell me honestly: any of you out there ever played this rule?

It takes a certain dissonance to assume that all monsters with more than 6 hit dice are made alike, or that a "dungeon level" can be fabricated to such perfection that a mathematical calculation can be practical in dispensing experience to players who will — should we try to explain this rule — likely not react that well. Even if we want to do the math, it's additional time spent dragging the momentum of the game down, while the DM patiently performs long-division twice, once to get the ratio right and then to distribute the final number to the party. Thank gawd the calculator was invented by 1973. Though the affordable version just barely so (the TI-30, Oct 1972). It's possible that invention gave Gygax the motivation to invent reasons to use it. Just as we now invent reasons to use new apps.

I don't know what to say. Anybody want to argue that this isn't just ludicrous enough that we can't just move on?

It is also recommended that no more experience points be awarded for any single adventure than will suffice to move the character upwards one level. Thus a "veteran" (1st level) gains what would ordinarily be 5,000 experience points; however, as this would move him upwards two levels, the referee should award only sufficient points to bring him to "warrior" (2nd level), say 3,999 if the character began with 0 experience points.

Granted. I imposed a rule like this in my campaign also. My only contention is the word "adventure" here because it suggests that a whole narrative series of events must occur before experience is given. Chances are, though, that he means one combat, just as any of us might. It's an ill-defined word, but given that no glossary is attached to this work, and the words are used interchangeably as though we came out of the womb with the knowledge of how to interpret them, this is the best we have.

However we frame this, we must admit that there have always been some — and yes, going back to the 1970s — who could never play this game because they couldn't get past the books. They didn't have the imagination to fill in the gaps, or surmise that it probably took either 360,000 or 480,000 x.p. to become a "10th level lord." Not everyone is that clever. And true enough, we've pointed out that these books expected you to have a brain in order to play; they assumed you had made sense of the rules of Tractics and Napoleonics, so you could manage this. But after the game became popular, the consequence was that a lot of "not-brain" people got involved, and wanted to join the rush, who also thought dragons were cool and liked the art of the Dragon Magazine and who didn't see why they shouldn't also belong just because the rules couldn't be pieced together rationally.

There's a problem that arises with that and maybe you're familiar with it. If people can't play a popular game "right," or even remotely related to some kind of right that maybe you're familiar with, there's nothing to stop them from playing it wrong. I don't mean a little bit wrong... I mean totally wrong. As in, um, assuming the game is about pretending to actually be the character and speak in purplish language, while getting rid of the rolls altogether, and experience altogether, and limitations altogether, and so on. Once the rules are loose enough, and once there's no clear standard for what "right" looks like, players can take the game anywhere. And where a game is popular, those who "don't get it" far, far outnumber those who do. They show up in droves for game cons and tournaments, they start whining that the system doesn't work the way they want it to, they complain about how boring the combat system is and "why can't my character be a minotaur or a dragon" and a thousand other questions that, eventually, ripped this game into tiny pieces that are mostly incomprehensible outside a single game group.

I can go to the remotest parts of the world and set up a chess board and play anywhere with anyone... we don't even need to speak the same language. But I can't play the game that's being played at the next table at the nearby gamestore, when we all speak English. Maybe the rest of you don't see that as a problem. I do. And it's a problem because a group of students and ex-students felt so lazy they couldn't define the words they casually threw around in a text, while inventing unbelievable nit-picky math problems that had to be solved just so. That doesn't see a little bit, um, stupid?  Like not knowing whether to put the cart behind a horse or a sheep?

It's evidence that they DID have the room to clarify these things. They COULD have taken the time to do so. They had room for Gygax's bullshit. That could have been cut and replaced with a two page glossary, hardly an out of place thing at the time. For all I know, there's a glossary somewhere in these books. When I find it, if I find it, I bet the definitions there won't fit the use of the words here. We've already seen multiple examples where the same word means different things.

See, I would pull it back. But it's really hard for me to turn a blind eye to this stuff. I love this game too much.

 

 

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 10

Pages 15 and 16 are largely tables, so I'll present them as images, which is more practical for blogger than trying to translate them into text.

What can be said is limited. I have no special problem with any of this as it is. I fully realise that space is at a premium, and that likely the quality of press the writers were working with would tend to bleed should they have attempted a smaller font. They may in fact have been limited to the use of traditional typesetting, where the letters had to be physically arranged by hand in trays, word by word, with a composing stick, which was a handheld tool that held the type in place. Little slivers, "spacers," were used to provide consistent gaps and separate individual letters to produce paragraph justification. The process is meticulous and might be done alone or with other people working at the same time.

I learned how to do this at Simon Fraser Junior High in Calgary, in 1979, because the school had such a press. It's fascinating, honestly, and I hadn't possessed my passion for writing fully at that time, though it was coming fast. We had only a few font sizes to choose from, with pretty much all of them outside the norm being for Headings, not smaller words. The ease with which we could run out of "e"s or "z"s was an issue, not one that a city newspaper would have dealt with in the 1930s. By the 40s and 50s, phototypesetting and offset printing began to replace hand typesetting, but the latter was still around in small towns when I was a boy.

It's because of this sort of experience that I'm often impatient with readers who see only the words. Where an underline passes through a word rather than under it, where it belongs, that says "typesetting" to me.  In typesetting, underlining is done manually using a physical tool like a ruling pen or a hand-held underlining device. It's possible that the typesetter misjudged the alignment of the tool here, causing it to cross over the characters instead of appear under them; it might have been that after the placement, something in the frame shifted that caused this one little bit to move out of where it should have been; and it might have been placed insecurely to start, by an amateur, not realising that it could shift after the press began to operate.  I can't think of any way this could have happened if the print had been done by phototypesetting, which I also learned how to do years later when working for the U of C Gauntlet.

We can frame what the publishers of the White Box set did as an amazing achievement, to employ such a backward technology in a gigantic effort to produce these books... made more amazing now that the readers understand the obstacles that had to be overcome. I cannot buy in, however. Every press overcame these obstacles; universities published weekly papers of more than a hundred pages using this process. We see it as monumental and difficult — they saw it as ordinary. It's in the perspective.

I think the lesson here is to comprehend just how far in the past the set was... and how advanced our present is. If the set is clunky, creaky, troublesome and clumsy, granted, there's room to be made for that. But English was still English then, the grammar that was applied to every other book, magazine, brochure and newspaper in 1973 was also in place for the White Box set. Their failure to use grammar properly is not excused by their having to use the technology they had. It could be argued that proper grammar and consistent language usage were even more important as they were the primary way readers engaged with knowledge at that time. If anything a higher level of scrutiny would have been applied by contemporaries than we apply today, when visual and spoken media far outweighs writing.

I'm being deliberately contrary here to make a point. It's generally assumed that the concept of D&D, set alight by this set of rules, is proof that the books are good. What I'm arguing is that the concept was so powerful, so meaningful, so game-changing, that it succeeded in spite of the total failure of these books to do their work. Each time in the last week that I've had someone come forward to correct some thinking of mine regarding the opinions I've given, it's to say how they interpreted the rules. They don't quote the rules to me; they don't say, "See this word here, that refers to this concept." No, what they say is, "I always thought it meant..."  That right there is the problem. If you thought it meant something, then whatever it actually did mean is a movable feast. That you thought of it that way doesn't mean everyone did, it doesn't mean I do, and that's a sign of a communication done badly. There's no excuse for that, no matter how much you love this set of books.

In technical writing, especially for something as intricate as a game that relies on clear communication, there’s no room for ambiguity. If the rules were effective, everyone would be quoting the same passages, using the same language to describe the game mechanics. But instead, players filled in the blanks with their own interpretations. Which only makes for a number of inconsistent interpretations. That's not how we make games well.

Complimenting that is the pile of evidence for how little actual knowledge the makers had of things they casually included in their rules. Take the example of the "potion or wineskin" weighing the equivalent of 30 pieces of gold.  A wineskin typically holds between 33 and 50 fluid ounces, about 1 to 1.5 litres of liquid. To quaff that amount would take most likely a few minutes. For most people, just drinking, it would take anywhere up to 20 minutes. If you quaffed all of it as fast as you could, two things would happen; first, you'd be terrifically bloated. It would also put tremendous pressure on your bladder... and for some of you, who have reached my happy age in life, you should also know that drinking a flood of water this quickly will cause the liquid to skip the bladder and just continue right down your small, and then your large intestine. Resulting in... while, I assume you can guess.

Yet, we're of course able to quaff a potion in a fingersnap, which is... the same weight as the wineskin? How, exactly? An empty wineskin weighs about 0.5 to 1.5 lbs. (225-680 grams). If the potion bottle, which is denser than the wineskin, were to hold 1 liter of water, it would be the size of my milk carton, 10 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. Want to quaff that in one round? Hm?

Somebody is going to raise their hand and say, at this point, "I always thought it meant that because the potion bottle is more fragile, it needs more space in the player's backpack, because it needs to be stuffed somehow with cotton or such so that it doesn't break." Uh huh. Gygax makes this exact interpretation at the end of the 1979 DMG. But what if I don't use the stuffing? What if I use my clothes? What if I make the bottle unbreakable somehow? How much does it weigh then?  Even if it automatically breaks, that still doesn't make it somehow weigh more than it does. And how do we know how much stuffing is actually needed? And why isn't the stuffing given a weight?

I hate to go all Occam's on this, but really it just sounds like they had no fucking idea what a wineskin was, nor any actual idea how a potion flask should be sized, so they just pulled convenient numbers of out their ass and said, "Trust us." That's not very... um... rational. But no, I'm not done.

During the medieval era, you know, the time D&D happens in, stated firmly in the introduction of this book, the florin and the ducat were the two most common coins of the time period. Each weighed, somewhat inconsistently, 3.5 to 3.7 grams. A rare gold coin, like Britain's angel, was sometimes closer to 6.5 to 7 grams.

IF a potion or a wineskin weighs 30 g.p. in any system based on the actual size of actual gold pieces, it would weigh about 3.8 ounces. This is only possible if its empty, since the liquid would obviously weigh more. The shield above weighs 18.5 ounces, or about 1.2 lbs. The plate armour weighs 6 lbs.

This has always been, for me, the grossest evidence of not doing their research, which has continued to be foisted on the public since. I don't really care if we want to use an arbitrary measurement and then use it for weighing stuff. What I don't understand is why "pounds" wasn't a practical measurement here, and why "ounces" weren't, since they could never be misconstrued, while the re-invention of the gold piece as an object that weighs 12 times the weight of an actual medieval gold coin was "simpler" somehow. How is it possible to misconstrue that plate armour weighs 75 lbs? Or that a shield weighs 15?  WHY does it have to be translated through gold pieces. And why, if it does, is the SIZE of the gold piece inflated to this gigantic hunk of metal that never existed at any time through history?

Because, Occam again, the writers didn't know jack shit about the time period they were writing about. And even more inexplicably, The arbitrary system of weight based on gold pieces instead of using practical, real-world measurements has carried over through the decades, even in more modern editions of D&D. It's not an "early" issue; it's a persistent flaw that has been perpetuated by decades of game design without addressing the core problem.

WHY?

No, don't bother. Because you're going to start with, "I've always thought that..."

As far as the rules for calculating encumbrance? Same question as to the equipment list: how much do clothes weigh? If I drink a beer, and I haven't pissed it out yet, how much does that change my encumbrance?

Again, I have no real problems with the context of this next page, either. My issues with the previous page have everything to do with a lack of proper research and an overly simplistic approach to an issue that either deserved more time or should have properly been dropped until it could have been given more time. If I were publishing this book, encumbrance would not have made the cut. It doesn't belong here, because the work needed wasn't done. As is, the concept adds nothing to the game and is therefore utterly disposable. Which is exactly what D&D players far and wide did with encumbrance.

This page, 16, however, is simple and straightforward game mechanics. The numbers don't need discussion, the columns are fine, we can assume that once you hit those level peaks you're done. I have nothing whatsoever to add. It's fine. In fact, it's probably the best page of the books so far.

The barbarian is fine. Comic-style, of course, superhero musculature on the thighs, better drawn than anything else here so far, the sword's a bit long but that's irrelevant. It shows how the poorly drawn dwarf from earlier really is pretty much the barbarian above. If I had seen the image when I started D&D (and I don't remember having done so), I'd have probably thought, "Yeah, awesome."

Bitchslap

In essence, a "sandbox" is usually ascribed to be a world built for freedom of motion rather than the delivery of a fixed narrative. The DM prepares places, factions, resources and tensions but doesn’t predetermine which ones will matter. The players decide where to go and what to engage with, and the narrative arises from the friction between their choices and the world's structure. What distinguishes a sandbox from a plotted campaign isn’t the absence of design — it’s that the design creates potential instead of direction.

That's not my definition, that's ChatGPT. It's beneath me in this day and age to spend a lot of time quibbling about this word or that in a definition when I have a program to do it for me. I changed one word in the above. Bonus points if you can guess it.

I have written numerous posts in defense of the "sandbox." I have talked about how systems should be designed to "take the DM out of the loop," to effectively sabotage the DM's freedom to be arbitrary. I believe that a list of imposed narratives ("1–3: bandits raid; 4–6: plague spreads...") does not really provide choice for the party, it merely catalogues which story the DM's going to force on the players first. I've sparred with dozens of naysayers who tell me I don't understand, that the "sandbox" I've defended really isn't one, that I'm a fraud, that I'm playing mindgames with my players and so on.

But I haven't had any of these conversations in years for a couple of reasons. First, because I've stopped using "sandbox" in my head to think about the game I design. I don't really think its a good label, it's a hypersimplification of what's really happening and it's a metaphor. Of late, as a writer, I'll still use a metaphor of course, but when I'm trying to define something, I try to avoid them. Not using a metaphor puts one less thing between the message I'm telling and the reader's comprehension.

Likewise, I don't use "railroad" anymore, either. I don't care if it's meant as a verb or a noun, because it's a metaphor and therefore unclear. I prefer, "arbitrary DM manipulation of players" because that doesn't have another meaning. It can't be spun by pretending its a form of grammar. The DM should not use assumed authority not rightly granted to dictate the actions or otherwise manipulate or enforce actions upon the players without their sincere and informed consent. There, that's even clearer. No metaphors necessary.

When I see someone use "sandbox" or "railroad" in an argument, I think immediately, "That is soooo 2011. Fourteen years and they've learned nothing."

The other reason is that, for me, the argument is settled. Nobody anywhere is going to rationally come forward and say, "I prefer to run a railroad." They're going to frame that sentiment in a lot of other gobbledygook that rationalises, "I feel perfectly justified in fucking over my players, because..." and so on. So basically, if you're still fighting this fight, you're doing it against an enemy that doesn't exist. The present justification, "I’m just telling a story," "I’m maintaining tone," "I’m guiding pacing," are all using corporate speak to justify what corporations use it for: "We're exploiting you, you're ripe for exploitation, you need this job, so we've invented this language to make you warm and fuzzy while we bend you over a table. Really, we love you. Spread your legs a little wider, please."

The people on the net NOT using corporate speak separate into two groups: those who don't care any more, because they're done explaining math to ignoramuses; and those like me, who talk about the "agency" of players without talking about it. For years now I've just assumed my reader knows what I mean. My rhetoric includes, plainly, that I'm speaking of the players being given agency to do whatever they want in the game setting, without any expectations whatsoever, from a belief that whatever they do, I can adjust, roll, design in my head and have it ready for them by the time they get there. If I need an extra three minutes, this is a good time to go to the bathroom, get a coffee, whatever. I dungeon master at the speed of a firefighter putting out a fire. The fire isn't going to do what I want, it won't give me very much time to pivot, so I've learned to pivot as fast as I have to. I wrote a book about this.

When I read others, or hear them, talking about how they can't do this, how they have to urge the players this way or that to manage them in a finite system, because "no one" can build a world at the speed that the players can change their minds, I think, "amateurs." 

Anyone who thinks it's easier to fight a fire than it is to DM has their head on wrong. If a fire, if a war, if an emergency room, can be run at the speed they experience, then any DM who really tries can do it too. It requires just a few revisions to the thinking process.

Let's start, first of all, with the "story." Stories take a long fucking time. You need to invent characters, provide exposition and reason, provide motivation for said characters, invent a solution that resolves that motivation, create an end destination and have it all make sense, because that's what stories do. This takes a really, really impractical amount of time. Even in the space of a week, doing this well really isn't in your wheelhouse unless you're a writer, and an educated one at that, and still you're going to steal to get it sorted in that amount of time. You haven't the chops to INVENT something from scratch that fits this exact place and time where the players are. And you're certainly not going to manage it while the first starts eating the second floor.

Which is why, when you invent a story — or buy a story — you're going to milk that puppy for everything you can squeeze out of it, because when it ends, you're fucked. Not only do you need another story, it needs to compete with the first one and you have to hope your players liked the first one enough that you can sell them on committed to that eventually sucked-dry story concept again. Good luck with that.

So that's your second problem, and it doesn't just apply to stories: sustainability. You have a fingersnap of time to get these players' imaginations to catch on fire, a need that's crippled by them knowing you want this more than they do. They have no reason to buy in; and if they do want to buy in, it's not for the same reason. So now, whatever you do, it has to please everyone. Good luck with that.

No matter how good it sounds, no matter how many are trying to sell you that storytelling creates "a better game" or "more excitement," inventing a narrative is the driving a train equivalent to a dead stick. You may be flying now, but it's going to crash and when it does, you won't have a train. How's that for a metaphor.

I can hear the whining. "But Alexis... how am I going to run a game if I don't know what happens next?"

I don't know... how the fuck do you play chess?  What blankety-blank said you were entitled to know what happens next in a D&D game?

That right there is the crippling dependency foisted upon you by the first module you ran, which made you stupid. It was so nice, so comfortable, so convenient to know what would happen next, you never put down that security blanket. And it's enslaved you ever since, dulling your mind so that as a DM you have to wait for the players to act while you already know everything, while you're bored, while you're wishing they'd just stop dicking around and opening the next door. The only fun part of those modules is when the combat happens, because then it's like a sport. If you roll the dice honestly, and the fight's a good match, you don't know who's going to win.  You know, the way a GAME works. EVERY GAME. 

Just not this one, just now.

But hey, if you want to go on giving guided tours the rest of your life, have at it.

How many times has it been said? The DM's role is to describe what the player sense about their location. The players then ask questions or explain their actions. The DM provides the reaction of the setting to the players actions, or describes what can now been seen, heard, touched, etcetera, that couldn't before. Why precisely do I need to know ANYTHING before the players get there?

I've explained that situational awareness provides an ability to recognise patterns in accumulated experiences. If I run D&D for a year, the number of experiences running D&D, if I do it once per week for what I did at the time, 5-6 hours a session, I'll gain around 250 to 300 hours of listening to players tell me things they want to do and what they want to know. If we assume around 30 such phrases per hour, that's an experiential pile of some 7500 to 9000 queries or statements. Just one session offers 300 to 360. Just one session is enough, if you're paying attention, to provide a semblance of patterns that a focused DM can create. If, then, after a game, we go through what we heard, and think about it, then we have time to build patterns out of patterns.

Once a set of patterns are comprehended, either consciously or not, one's situational awareness in a fleeting moment of time allows for the prediction of what players are going to say next, if given exposition about any number of specific things that naturally repeat in games. The players want to go through a door, the players want to fight the bad guys, the players don't know what to do next and want to talk about it, the players want to interrogate the NPC and so on. As this predictive ability accumulates, more and more accuracy is gained. And so, like seeing three moves ahead on a chessboard, a DM can see three moves ahead on the players deciding what to do when entering a given room or whatever.

So I don't have to prepare for every contingency, just the ones I haven't any experience with. And that's pretty darn rare after ten years of running... and what's more, D&D really doesn't offer that much for players to do other than to talk to NPCs, fight them, deal with hazards, move from place to place and  make plans. And if you know your setting cold, I mean really cold, then all of this is easily managed without that much effort.

Of course, you've gotta fucking practice. If your answer is always, "Room 17 says..." then you're not practicing. You're a tour guide.

Still, if people tell you that no amount of practice is going to make this possible, then you're probably going to believe them. Remember when you decided you were going to learn guitar?  And you found that practice was hard? But it was so much fun to play Guitar Hero? Well there you go.

I play D&D. You play D&D Hero. That's the difference between us.

And just because you make pre-gen programs for your D&D Hero game doesn't mean you're doing what I'm doing. When I sit down to run, I have a prediction for what's going to happen, but if it doesn't, I'm fine, I can roll with it, I can invent something here and now that will let the players use their agency to find what they want and go where they want and never feel like I'm boxing them in. But if they don't do what you expect them to do... then you're rapidly flipping through your text trying to find where your D&D Hero should start up again, so you can feel safe and secure in your dependency blanket.

Yeah, I know, you're having a good time. Well, sure. Think whatever you want to. But I've had the choice to do it your way, and I find it pretty boring. Like knowing the Mariners were mess this up months ago.

I don't mean thinking they probably would. That gives you hope. But knowing. Which really sucks, doesn't it? For me, that's what your D&D feels like.

I was going to call this post D&D Hero, but after writing it, the title used seemed more appropriate.