The Black Elf Follies ...

My apologies for being quiet the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been plowed under with rehearsal and concert schedules for both the ensemble I’ve been in and my college chorus’ alumni reunion concert, celebrating the conductor’s 40th year at the helm.  (NUCS forever!)  But since you’re not here to hear about my singing ...

One of the hoary old standbys of gaming discussions is the player who bucks the campaign’s premise.  I've editorialized on what many call “special snowflakes,” a term often applied to the resulting PC, but more along the lines of my distaste for the term being used as a code slur for “Anything I don’t like.”

But that doesn’t touch the original syndrome.  Allow me to quote from a post in one of these debates, which illustrates one side of things.

Whether this is a problem and who’s [sic] problem it is all depends on who's being the asshole. If the players wants to interject something cool or unusual into his character because he has a fun idea and it's going to get him into the game more and the GM pulls some sort of "No, in my world elves aren't black!" or "there are no female dwarves!" bullshit? That's the GM being a dick. That stuff is just another way for GMs to take the often reasonable "this is mostly my world and ideas" and throttle the players with it. This is also where a lot of GM horror stories come from, especially if people push their own pet peeves, control issues, or even racism and sexism through this crap.

No, screw that noise.

In joining my game, you're joining a campaign.  It has a defined game system, a defined setting and a defined milieu.  Someone agreeing to play in my campaign agrees to all of these elements. It is not "mostly" my world; it is entirely my world. Characters are created within that setting, as natives to that setting, and exist within that setting. If you don't like that setting, if you don't want to engage with it, then what are you doing at my table in the first place, instead of seeking out a campaign better suited to your needs and preferences? 

For my part, I miss where insistence on rejecting the setting helps someone "get into the game more" -- it sounds like, by so doing, the player would be getting into the game LESS -- and I definitely miss the part where (say) Being A Black Elf is the sort of make-or-break character creation decision which makes the difference between a Fun PC or an Unfun PC.  (As to that, I also miss the part where a GM is a dick for refusing to permit a character that doesn't fit with his setting, but a player isn't a dick for refusing to play a character which does.  Come again?)

Are black elves part of my gameworld?  No.  Would I prevent you from playing a black-skinned elf? No. But, by definition, you'd be playing someone wildly abnormal.  Most people would presume your PC to be accursed in some fashion ... and very likely they'd be right.  Cityfolk would more often than otherwise recoil from you, villagers would grab the torches and pitchforks, and any ghastly crime committed within a week of your arrival OR departure would be presumed to be your doing.

That's the point where most Special Snowflake players throw a tantrum. See, they're usually fine with playing their bizarre I Must Be Different Than You Peons characters ... but they're not nearly as sanguine, in my experience, with facing the fallout of their choices, and often throw out accusations that they’re being unfairly targeted or “punished” in some way.

I reject, contemptuously, this concept.  If you decide that you're going to play an assassin, you run the risk of the law and heroic types hunting you down.  If you decide that you're going to play an orc, you run the risk of prejudice and fear in areas where orcs aren't well loved.  If you decide to run a priest, you'll run into people opposed to your faith.  These are all your choices to make: I am not going to force you to play an orc, an assassin or a practitioner of an unpopular faith.  If you want to play a character that twigs as few knee-jerk prejudices as possible, you can.

There are prejudices in my campaign.  Some make sense; many don't.  People are down on one another for the many reasons this happens in real life: racial, economic, class, home town, profession, nationality, ethnic group, hair color, speaking voice, what have you.  I quite understand people who don't want to encounter prejudice in their gaming, the same way there are people out there who don't want to encounter violence, who don't want to encounter fantasy ... what have you.  You've every right to seek a campaign that meets your requirements, and I wish people the best of luck in finding one.

Let me reiterate: the players don't get to decide what is or is not true in my game setting.  I do.  The details aren't up for voting.  If I wanted a Generic Fantasy World where anything goes, I'd play one, and no doubt that campaign would attract those who prefer such settings.  I don't want one, and I don't play one, and my campaign has attracted a couple hundred players who prefer those settings.  I am no more about to change fixed details for every newbie who can't stand coloring inside the lines than I'm going to stop running GURPS because that newbie prefers to play D&D, or that I'm going to stop running sandboxes because that newbie really prefers a nice, straight railroad track.

Here’s another quote from one of those debates: "Is the consistency of the world really that important compared to all you having fun at the table and being friendly?"

Why is it that some presume that "consistency" and "fun" are mutually exclusive values? My players like the consistency just fine, and they not only have fun, but they've been having fun for many years. Three of my current players have been gaming with me for over twenty years; a fourth has been doing so eleven years.

But hang on, let's turn the question around. Let's say you've just joined my main group. There you are, with the aforementioned four players. You're the newbie at the table. Why is being inconsistent really that important to you, compared to everyone having fun at the table and being friendly?  Don't you think it's UNfriendly to decide that the setting doesn't apply to you, and that you don't want to follow the guidelines that every other player's not only followed, but have done so for many years?  Wouldn't, in fact, YOU be the disruptive one here?  Why should the fun of other people be spoiled for your benefit?

Magic-as-technology, take II.

The noble paced for several moments, back and forth, before whirling on the wizard. "I have told you I need a Wand of Fireballs now, Sana!  Obey me at once, and no more shillyshallying!"

The wizard just sighed, slowly, quietly.  "Your Venerance, I have explained the problem on several occasions now.  When you commissioned me to craft a Coronet of Awesome and Tumescent Rulership, that locked me in to ten months solid of enchanting.  That effort cannot be passed on to another enchanter, even were one available.  Which there is not.  If I shift now to create so much as an enchanted tomato planter, that wastes seven months of work and the vast -- and unrecoverable -- sum of gold you have already invested."  She paused, for a long moment, before continuing. "That would of course, Venerance, be your decision to make."

* * * * * * * * *

Knobgobbler, my first kind commenter, gave me the notion to elaborate on the theme, something I would've done sooner or later anyway.

Caveat: we're talking realism here.  If you insist on million-person cities, Spelljammer-level ubiquity of powerful magics and all the trappings of High Fantasy, terrific ... just handwave what you want and have done with it.  YMMV.

Let's say you have a respectable sized city of 10,000 people.  (This really is a respectable sized city; it'd make the top five in England at most points in the medieval era.)  If wizards are as common as blacksmiths, you've got about 20.  Terrific, right?  Plenty of enchanting muscle!

Well, now, hold on.  Are all those folks practicing enchanters?  Of course not.  There are two major factors.  For one thing, most fantasy game systems require wizards to be of a certain power level to be a successful enchanter, excluding some -- or many -- wizards from ever doing it at all.

For another, why would every wizard be a professional enchanter?  Take Master Elaina, the water wizard -- sure, she’s the city’s most powerful mage, but she’s a full-time adventurer; she’s not enchanting for a living.  Mistress Syrielle is a legend, but she’s mostly retired now, and spends her time puttering in her garden from her wheelchair.  Master Ravenswing works for the Duke, mostly in divination; he’s not enchanting -- at least not commercially -- for a living.  “Whisper” is the hired mage of the richest fellow in town, and they say her telepathy and anti-thief magics are why he’s so rich; she’s not enchanting for a living.  Master Nightflame is the professor of thaumatology at the local academy; he’s not enchanting for a living.  Neither is his sister Arathena, who got stuck with the Guildmaster job of the local wizards’ chantry after Syrielle retired, and is hip deep in paperwork and disciplinary hearings.  No one trusts Master Halar the Pervert any more since he fell into the bottle; he’s sure as hell not enchanting for a living.  Whether anyone trusts Master Pando after the magical accident (he's yet to be able to cope with enclosed spaces, precious metals and the color red), he doesn't seem to be enchanting these days.  And Master Detheril is the new Knight Marshal of the city, and on the short list for a coronet the next barony that opens up; he’s too busy drilling the troops to be enchanting for a living.

So you might have ten enchanters; you might have half as many.  Just remember, though, if everyone else is an enchanter, you don’t have spare wizards for anything else.  Need someone to cast a divination spell for you?  No one available; they're all enchanting, remember?.  Want a wizard to teach your party’s wizard a spell?  Sure, spend three months in Nightflame’s next class (it’s about necromancy, by the way), and you can; otherwise, not.  Need that magical scroll written?  You’re SOL; they're all enchanting, remember?

Well, alright, half of what’s left.  Six enchanters, then.  How liberal is your game’s enchanting rules?  I use GURPS, myself (and let’s ignore that published material suggesting that only one wizard in ten be of a power level high enough to enchant at all, shall we?).  Purify Water sounds like a good, basic spell; an item that is self-powering takes 550 mage-days to enchant.  Which means that all six of those wizards, working together, can reasonably bang out an item in three months; it can purify nearly 3000 gallons of fresh water per day.  In a year’s work, they can enchant enough to handle all the fresh water needs of the city for drinking.  (Unfortunately, the cooking, bathing and industrial needs for fresh water are about TEN TIMES as much.)

But sure, they stick with it for a decade.  Now the city has plenty of fresh water, magically created!

Fair enough.  But it doesn’t have magical streetlights.  It doesn’t have magical weapons.  It doesn’t have magically created food. It doesn’t have anything else enchanted.  And even that much rests on a few very flimsy premises:

* Every enchanter is a skilled water enchanter.  Why would they be?  Is every wizard you run?  Mightn’t they just as likely be earth enchanters, or fire enchanters, or temporalists, or communications specialists?

* None of them have any better gigs going on than creating fresh water for the city.  What happens when agents for Countess Silvermist come and ask a couple of the enchanters exactly how long they plan on playing Third String Waterboy for the Duke, when they could come work for the Countess for double the pay and their own private towers?

* As I mentioned in the pertinent GGF post, nothing ever goes wrong.  The Purification items don’t get stolen and sold on the black market, the city’s enemies never decide to ruin them, the wizards never strike for more money, the city always pays on time and in full, none of the wizards ever gets sick, the Duke never concludes that the city has plenty of water already and the money’s better spent refitting his cavalry troop after they got pasted in the last battle, the fire that torched a fifth of the city miraculously missed the Water Works, or the Duke’s never an egotistical snot pissed off that Countess Silvermist’s water purification items are made of gold, so his ought to be too, ditch the old ivory ones?

So sure; there are some ways wizards can have a material impact on life in a city.  If your system has a Predict Weather spell, one forecasting mage can save the lives of a lot of fishermen.  One wizard with long distance telepathy ... well, we know what instant communications can do.  A battery of wizards, as a long term civic project, well funded, might be able to implement ONE change - pure water, magical street lights - as long as that change is simple, and nothing goes wrong.

So do the math for your own systems.  How many people get to be journeyman wizards?  How many wizards are capable of enchanting?  How many wizards do you want to task to do other things: battlemages, teachers, researchers, detectives, adventurers, court wizards, mages-for-hire and fussy old coots who just want to putter in their gardens and not be bothered.  Does your magic system encourage/require specialization?  How long does enchanting take?  Can just anyone use an enchanted item?  Can an item work without supervision?  How fragile are magical items?  Do they have charges, after which they expire?

This is why you don’t have “magical” economies.

"The Golden Age is over ..."

One frequent riff you see on RPG forums is that the "Golden Age" of roleplaying games is over.  The writers' favorite local gaming store has closed, there doesn't seem to be as many gaming groups as they remember, their favorite publisher has folded, the faces around the table are middle-aged now, there hasn't been any new releases for their favorite game in a couple months, and Those Damn Kids are playing weird card games or focused on World of Warcraft.

Much wailing and chestbeating ensues, along with helpful suggestions as to how to turn it all around.  If only everyone spent a certain amount of money a month at the local gaming store!  If only our favorite games became much simpler!  If only we found a media license to rally behind!   If only, if only, if only ...

"The Golden Age is over" is a riff pushed in every hobby, by every culture, every fashion, every sport, probably since Ug the Caveman was grousing to his mate Ugina about how the damn cavelets had no respect for tradition.

What it means to each one of us is that for a year or two when we first started a new hobby, everything was fun, snazzy and wonderful, we were full of zest and vigor ... and then things changed, and we got to be jaded oldbies.  Beyond that, the alleged "Golden Age of Gaming" people think existed never really did.  It wasn't that all America played RPGs.  It's that, for a few years in the 1980s, a honking lot of people played AD&D.  And that was never a "golden age."  It was a fad, ephemeral as fads always are.  Seriously, does anyone you know still plant Chia Pets or collect Beanie Babies?  How many young folks in your neighborhood are kung fu fighting or wearing Hogwarts robes for Halloween?  Do businessmen uniformly wear pearl grey jackets with either yellow or pink black-polka dotted ties?  How are things hopping at the local jazz nightclub ... wait, discotheque ... wait ... ?

But the RPG era being "over?"  Hah.  Hardly.  We have more choice than ever before:

* Adjusted for inflation and the size of the product, gaming books are hugely cheaper -- and the production values light-years better -- than they were a generation ago.

* There are far more alternate systems and alternative ways of doing things now, and with the leavening of LARPs, online freeform and MMORPGs to crack us out of the immobility of Doing Things The Way They've Always Been Done.

* There are dozens of systems on the market.

* While small-press publishing has (contrary to the recentist tunnel vision of many) always been a part of this hobby, the Internet and online retailing has made it far more possible for its products to be widely known and succeed.  The indie game of a generation ago -- crude mimeos at the local Copy Cop, illustrated by the writer's SO -- would be counted lucky if it merely gained traction among FOAFs and the apazine cognoscenti.  Now they're available for purchase worldwide and sell in the thousands.  Production values are the best ever, and even small-press publishers enjoy slick print runs, quality art and full color interiors.  Advances in computing turned the scrawled crude maps and laboriously typewritten rules of the 70s into DIY works just as good as professional publishers churn out.

* Online retailing has eliminated the necessity for nearby FLGSs -- and put gaming into the hands of people in areas that scarcely saw it -- as well as greatly reduced the price of product, as well as providing a selection no FLGS ever could match.  As to that, RPGs can be found in the big box retailers.

* The Internet: forums with instant dialog, company websites with instant rules clarification and errata, game finder sites that stretch beyond tattered sheets of notebook paper tacked to dusty FLGS corkboards, thousands of fan sites with variant material there for the download, research resources at a fingers' touch.  Videoconferencing and software support even free us from the need of having fellow players on the same continent, let alone in the same building.  (Hell, Wikipedia alone is a diamond mine for any GM in search of better information or verisimilitude.)

* PDFs: dozens of gaming books fitting into a space measuring as little as 15" x 12" x 1.5", as well as bringing long out-of-print golden oldies back to life.

There are more ideas, more styles, more milieus, more choice than ever before. 

Now yes, gamers, your groups have aged ... because so have you.  Honestly, did you expect that your players would perpetually be 20 years old?  Or, perhaps, are the 20 year olds hanging around their peers instead of the geezers (just like you did back in the day, come to that)?

Now yes, gamers: your local gaming store may have folded.  Mine hasn't. (In point of fact, the three gaming stores I patronized in the Boston area in 1978 are still in business. †)  There's another one twenty minutes south of me, run by a friend of mine.  But in any event, these never formed more than a small minority of the gaming spaces available to hobbyists, many gamers never relied on them for more than product, and in any event they were rare outside of metropolises and college towns.  No local store?  You can get your goods over the Net at a large discount, and in mere days.

Now, yes, gamers: we're a niche hobby.  We're going to stay that way.  Which is alright.  People have been playing chess for centuries.  Model train clubs have existed for generations.  Classic car clubs have existed for generations.  Folks still gather around for board games, to listen to 50s folk music, to hike the Appalachian Trail, to do a lot things that are niche hobbies.  Honestly, my fun isn't validated by gamers in Wichita and Wiesbaden and Warsaw and West Cupcake, Saskatchewan.  I'm good as long as I can find players right here in my hometown.

Swear to God, if all this had been available to me thirty years ago ...

I have, right in front of me, one of the surviving copies of my 1970s homebrew.  It runs 91 pages, laboriously typed up over some months on the cheap Smith-Corona manual I'd picked up for college.  The magic list isn't included; that's a handwritten manuscript half again the size that I quailed at typing up.  Some of the ideas that went into it evolved over three years of back and forth in A&E, and it's a messy hodgepodge with far less by way of cohesive vision than "Ooo, that rule looks neat!" Revising anything meant retyping an entire page, if not an entire section.

It wouldn't take me months to type that now.  It'd take me about three days.  It wouldn't take half a year to vet ideas off of my transcontinental buddies; now I'd just put them up online and have people tear them apart in hours.  It isn't that I'd have to spend much of what little disposable income I had on other systems just to see how they did things; now people online can tell me.  It isn't that I'd have to wait for the latest issue of Different Worlds, Alarums & Excursions or The Space Gamer for interesting new variants and ideas; I can Google to get in touch with more websites than I can count, and I've bookmarked dozens of them.  It isn't that I'd have to spend days in a library to fact-check my basic assumptions; Wikipedia's right there.

What there is is less media buzz about tabletop gaming, but I'm down with that - a lot more of that was negative and disparaging than otherwise. What there are are fewer dilettantes, the boys who drift into a group in school and drift right out the moment they come to think the activity isn't cool and won't help them get them laid, and I won't lose much sleep over that either. Tabletop isn't the happenin' new fad any more, but no hobby gets to be, perpetually.

I've been around for almost the entire length of the RPG hobby, and honestly, I think the Golden Age of RPGs is right now. 

 

† - (2022) Or were at the time of the post in 2013, anyway.  Nothing's eternal; The Games People Play in Cambridge and the Boston branch of Complete Strategist (which started out as Strategy and Fantasy World, just a couple blocks from my university) are out of business, and Hobby Bunker moved well north of the city.  There are still a number of game stores in metro Boston, granted. 

GGF #5: “X” Is The Opposite Of Fun

A closely related tenet to #4 is this one.  It’s come out in many variations, but the gist of things is what you see in many Internet debates: arguments which boil down to “Realism isn’t fun,” “artistic expression isn’t fun,” “immersion isn’t fun,” “narrativism isn’t fun,” “ backgrounds aren’t fun,” “originality isn't fun,” and so on and so forth.

Now while I take the whining with a great deal of salt -- you will never, ever convince me, for instance, that someone who’s mastered the character creation and combat rules of a multi-hundred page corebook is grotesquely inconvenienced to the point of insult by the GM asking him to read five pages of background material -- that much isn’t a fallacy, per se.  What is fun for you is what is fun for you, and that’s a true thing no one ought to gainsay.

What is the fallacy is the premise that Only The Type Of Gaming I Do Is Fun, which leads inexorably to “... and every other kind is Not Fun,” which leads inexorably to “... and no one with a lick of sense could possibly like them.”  It’s also married to a curious anti-intellectualism.  Curious, even though anti-intellectualism is a profound element of American culture, because one would think that the average gamer, who fancies himself smarter than the mundanes -- and indeed openly prides himself on being smarter than the mundanes -- wouldn’t himself disparage scholarship, excellence, artistry or taking pains.

Yet he does so.  Often.  (That is, when he’s not riding absurd, tunnel vision hobby horses, such as that of a certain celebrated game designer who wrote his system to include about a half dozen types of sword, and a dozen types of polearm.  Many of you know whereof I speak.)

Seriously, how often do you see people pull this sort of garbage outside of gaming?  "Football isn't fun" just because you prefer hockey or NASCAR?  "Rock isn't fun" only because you prefer jazz or folk?   How would you react if you heard someone assert that people who liked Italian food were dopes, because he liked Greek food?  You'd think he was a moron, wouldn't you, and not because of any deficiency of Greek cuisine?

C'mon, folks, is it that hard to wrap your heads around the concept that certain people want to play certain styles?  That a whole lot of people have found the games they want to play, they neither feel a need to, or have any desire to, experiment with others, and they resent the hell out of the implication that there's something wrong with them for it?  Heck, there's even some other basic issues: for example, my wife -- having been exposed to too many loudmouthed ubergeeks in her formative years -- has a violent dislike of Doctor Who.  Period, end of statement.  (I watch downloads to my computer while she's off watching her own shows.)  Would some of you catcall her nonetheless for refusing to buy into a Doctor Who game?

(My wife's comment to a forum thread about the theme: "Everyone has a couple I-like-what-I-likes. I'm sure some of those posters have the one brand of breakfast cereal they always eat or the one brand of jeans they always wear, and they'd be mad if they were told something was wrong with them because of that.  So let me get this straight. Some people are mad at their friends for not wanting to try new things. Really? Or is it that they're mad because their friends don't want to play what they want to play? Why are their friends in the wrong for not wanting to conform when they don't want to conform themselves?")

------------------------

And there you have them; the Gaming Geek Fallacies.

GGF #4: My Game Is Great, Your Game Sucks

We are an intensely tribal lot, and we take our gaming choices very, very seriously.  We're polarized into making so many choices - often based on the first thing of that type we encounter -- identifying with them out of reflex, and defending them to the death ever after. Of course, since deep down we believe the world is a zero-sum one, no one can possibly like a choice we reject without it taking away somehow from our own sense of self-worth.

This turns into a battleground, and there’s no end to our ability to pick fights.  Be it D&D versus other games, GURPS vs Pathfinder vs Hero, OD&D vs AD&D vs new D&D, 3.0 vs 3.5 vs 4.0, tabletop vs LARP vs MMORPG, prep vs. no-prep, dungeon fantasy vs story game, sandbox vs. railroad, indie vs. “mainstream,” it isn’t so much that our choices are to be virulently defended: it’s that anyone choosing otherwise is seen as a referendum on our common sense and good taste, tantamount to an insult.

For instance, I remember a thread a few years back where GURPS and D&D were being compared, and some people went into a hissy fit over the assertion that GURPS is more flexible than D&D.  Well, it is -- GURPS is a much more free-form, skill-based, point-buy system that furthermore is generic, where D&D is a game that limits the available types of character one can play and which seeks to emulate one genre, and one genre alone.  No kidding GURPS is more flexible.  It was designed to be.  But you know?  A computer does a heck of a lot more than a hammer does, and is a heck of a lot more versatile.  That doesn’t mean that if I’m doing some carpentry, what I want is anything but a hammer, and using my desktop PC to bang in nails isn’t going to work as well.  A honking lot of people feel that D&D is the game to play for the dungeon fantasy genre they want, and have felt that way for decades.

But that’s tribalism talking: for those fanboys, to ascribe a virtue to some other game that their own game allegedly lacked by comparison -- even if that game didn’t seek that virtue, and even if they wouldn’t want it to have that virtue?  It was a personal attack, to be opposed with all their might.  To call GURPS more flexible than D&D -- for it to be seen as more "anything" than D&D -- carried to those fanboys the implication that there was something at which D&D was inferior.  That was plainly intolerable.

After all, why else in the wide green earth would we possibly care that some stranger over the Internet not only plays Some Other Game, but resolutely rejects playing Our Game?  Because, of course, we Have To Get Everyone To Agree.  It’s vitally important that gaming groups stay in lockstep over system, genre, milieu and playing style, well ... because it just is, that’s why.  Otherwise the tribe fractures, and we can’t have that.

GGF #3: Magic Changes Society

We know in detail -- if we're at all paying attention, that is -- about the magic and enchanting capabilities our game systems allow. The game companies which publish those systems are usually eager to sell us game settings.  These generally provide a good picture of how many mages of what degree of power live in those lands, by way of depicting key NPCs, from the Royal Sorceress to the fussy old enchanter puttering around his dingy shop on the corner. 

And time and time again, in setting after setting and system after system, GMs and players alike badly overestimate the amount of magic available to make life as rich and wonderful as necessary for the PCs to get anything they want on demand, without having to wait for it, and to not have the daylights taxed out of themselves to boot.
                       
I've read a lot of D&D campaign settings. I've seen Greyhawk and Lankhmar, Al-Qadim and Blackmoor and Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and the D&D version of Rokugan and NOwhere (with the sole exceptions of the somewhat ephemeral settings of Eberron and Spelljammer), do you find these vast world changes. The cities, for the most part, look like any old pseudo-medieval fantasy city; the rural areas have farms and villages and things like any old pseudo-medieval fantasy fief. The shops depicted in these supplements don't have magical boxes where you insert a few gold and POP! WHIZ! a sword pops out; they have smithies where armorers pound them out on anvils. The farmers don't sit back and watch the priestess of the Earth Goddess de jour witch up some crops; they are depicted as sowing, growing and reaping in a fashion a 12th century Burgundian villein would recognize. The fantasy cities aren't fed by hordes of clerics casting Create Food or Goodberry; they're depicted with bakeries and butchers and grocers and stalls in open markets, all operating in a nice low-tech mundane way. People drink from fountains and wells, not from Decanters of Endless Whatever.

Many of the armchair fantasy economic theorists blithely presume a unique degree of efficiency in their gameworlds. Because there are X number of wizards in town of a high enough level to enchant Create Water items, of course the city has pure fresh water in ample quantities. Because there are enough clerics of Y level, of course there's free healing for all and enough food to cover. Because there's Z number of gold coins coming in, the city can afford to have magical streetlights and airships and levitating elevators and all of that.

Life doesn't work that way.

In what gameworld is there depicted a Mordorian totalitarian state, where every citizen works cradle to grave on the ruler's pet projects? (And, if there was one, why would the PCs be exempted?)  Few enough. You're not going to have every wizard of enchanting level doing nothing but pouring out civic goodies. They'll be enchanters, yes ... and also battlemages, teachers, researchers, detectives, adventurers, mages-for-hire and the aforementioned fussy old coots who just want to putter in their gardens and not be bothered. You're not going to have each and every priest buckling down and creating food every day, all day; they'll be holding services, doing pastoral work, being bureaucrats, researching, indulging in cloistered monasticism ... and there'll be the fussy old priests who just want to putter in their gardens and not be bothered.

Beyond that, hang on here.  So you do have X number of wizards enchanting, and that’s enough to make sure the city has that pure fresh water?  Alright, so stipulated.  So who’s enchanting the magical street lights?  Who’s enchanting flying carpets?  Who’s enchanting the animated war machines?  (And who, out of curiosity, is creating the enchanted swords, armor, wands, elixirs and other widgets so beloved of PCs?)  That would be “no one.”  If I have $100 in my pocket, I get to take my wife out to a fancy dinner or I get to take her to a nice show or I get to take her to the Bruins’ game or I get to pick up four new hardcovers or I get to buy a couple new pairs of dress pants.  I can only do one of these, and I certainly don’t get to do them all.  The same principle applies with magic in a fantasy society.

Another crucial error of the armchair theorists is in assuming that everything always goes right. What, the chief enchanter never gets drunk and breaks her neck in a fall the week before the UberDingus is finished? No funds or materials ever get diverted by corruption ... or flat out stolen? The enchanters never find out a month in that what they thought were the fifty rubies needed as material components for that civic enchantment are in fact a bunch of doctored garnets?  (Or, alternately, that war the PCs were involved with in Altania has cut off the only bulk supply of rose korf feathers ... can you get by with substituting king korf feathers?  No?)  Gee, sorry, but that fire that torched a third of the Palestra District before the mages put it out got the Mill Pond Waterworks, and half the city's Create Water items were destroyed?  That stuffy king is peeved that HIS Bowls of Endless Food are only silver while he hears the Bowls over in Vallia are made of gold -- so he just commanded the wizards to make up a whole new set. And so on.

(Never mind that hello, die rolls?  How often do those spells work perfectly and automatically?  Seriously, folks, if the electricity in your home, your Internet connection, or starting your car failed as often as one time in twenty, you would be rioting along with everyone else.)

Then, there's the Who Has The Gold Makes The Rules precept.  Let's say there's a wizard in the city who can send long-range, one-way messages ... call it five times a day, for the sake of argument.  Cool!  Now the PCs can get word to Grand Master Bolan in Warwik City that they found the dingus, and the Master can stand down the alternate plans.  Not so fast.  They're in Seasteadholm, and that's the only wizard in the city capable of casting the spell.  That's an incredibly valuable spell: the baroness wants access to it to send messages to the capital and to her liege lord in the provincial seat, the regimental commander wants access to it to reply to his superiors, the commodore of the naval squadron wants to alert his counterpart in Shelaxin -- a hundred miles down the coast -- that he's chased the pirates in that direction, and every wealthy merchant magnate and compagnia in the city wants to order goods real-time, or alert the financial interests in the capital that the pearl fishers hit a rich new strike.  The odds are that each of those Magic Messenger uses are bought and paid for, long in advance, and the wizard isn't about to cough up Baroness Vydra's slot just because some ragamuffin adventurers (who are going to blow town day after tomorrow anyway) walk in demanding instant service.  

(And finally, who says that the populace is down with it?  The oilsellers and charcoalers aren't going to protest ubiquitous Create Fire items?  Impoverished farmers aren't going to riot over the Create Food items?  "Hey, the midwives have been talking about all the stillborn babies coming out in houses next to magical light posts! The wizards are trying to sterilize us!!"  We're surely not stipulating that low-tech societies are any less gullible or prone to diving headfirst into insane conspiracy theories as our own, or in prioritizing the common good over I've Got Mine, Jack.)

I have, whenever these economic discussions have come up over the last several years, asked the people who talk about the endless capacities of D&D player-characters why the writers, editors and creators of the D&D product lines don't seem to act as if they really do. I've yet to receive much of any answer at all, let alone a good one.

Lacking the same, I'll fall back on the only logical inference: it isn't depicted that way because it isn't that way.

GGF #2: We Have To Have One Of Everything

No, we really don’t.  The concept of “niche protection” is one of the more bizarre tropes the wargaming roots of our hobby’s stuck us with.  Let's see if I have this straight: we decree that a questing team needs an artificial balance of certain archetypes (archetypes that, I might add, are not necessarily found in all of the fictional stories which are the underpinnings of the hobby). The players are compelled to make the expected selections, often ensuring that one or more run a character he or she does not wish to play. We then design pre-packaged, commercial "modules" so that a party lacking the proper percentage of these archetypes is punished for their failure to make the "right" choices in rollup.

What are my problems with it, I’ve been asked?

*  It's not only entirely artificial, the roles are arbitrarily chosen. The Tank / Blaster / Healer / Rogue paradigm presupposes -- farcically -- that these are not only the only roles conceivable, but that they're the only ones desirable. 

*  It's a self-justifying paradigm; we need to “protect niches” because some game systems are designed so that you can't succeed without them. 

*  Decades of RPGs with freeform or skill-based systems have proven we don't need them ... and never really did.  Heck, this isn’t universally the case across genres.  I’ve heard some of the most rabid defenders of niche protection concede that they don’t feel it’s necessary for SF or supers games.  Why not?  Is there some reason why “niches” for fantasy is essential, but not for other genres?  Is it that SF novels or comic books lack identifiable archetypes?  (Pretty tough, when the comic book superhero genre is so archetype-ridden as to be the provenance of the terms 'Tank' and 'Blaster')  Or is this more of a case that the first really big RPGs for SF (Traveller) and supers (Champions) were classless systems lacking easily definable and exclusive niches, so people weren’t conditioned to think they had to have them for those genres?

*  It’s quite easy -- truly it is -- to write scenarios that don’t require (say) a thief or a priest to succeed.  Heck, I’ve had all-warrior and all-magician groups, and I’ve had campaigns go for years without characters who were any good at disarming traps or could call upon divine healing.

* It retards creative thinking. I remember quite well a niche protection debate where a poster flung the gauntlet at me: what if a locked door is key to the scenario and you didn't make the party bring a locksmith along? Huh? Huh? Well, says I, the party could bash the door down. Or the wizard could witch their way through somehow. Or they could pull the pins on the hinges. Or they could look for another way into the room. Or they could find out who had the keys and filch/bribe/seduce them from the owner somehow. Or the GM could devote a scrap of brainpower to developing scenarios that didn't have a skill he knew the group lacked as a point-failure source. (This, of course, would require that (a) the GM didn't play out of "modules," or (b) exercised his privilege to change them if he did.)

* What’s wrong with redundancy?  Characters die.  The player with the key skill can't make the session. There are countless circumstances where multiple characters with the same skill make the task go much faster or much more safely ... never mind that combat redundancy is only ever, well, “redundant” if you never fight more than a single opponent at a time.  (I view the "But I have to be The Best in the party at something!" as the province of whiners channeling stereotypical 1950s Hollywood women who go into hissy fits if another woman shows up to the party wearing the same dress.)

* It reflects fictional sources but poorly. Especially before the late 1970s and the advent of gaming fiction, duplication of skills was rampant. Did JRRT worry that Aragorn and Boromir had much the same skill set? Did Fritz Leiber worry that his dynamic duo were both thieves? For every movie with Only One Of Everything, there was a Seven Samurai.

Beyond that, niche protection is one of the more angst-ridden subjects in gaming.  People get pissed off when they feel their "thunder" is being stolen.  People get pissed off because they think it was their turn to run the mage.  People get pissed off because they're being forced to play the cleric, again.  People get pissed off because it seems THAT guy always gets to play what he wants.  People get pissed off because one niche is (or is perceived to be) poorly balanced against another.  People gets pissed off when playing Niche A because someone in Niche B is doing a perceived aspect of Niche A better.  People get pissed off because the only face time they get is when someone wants a lock picked or a wound healed, and the rest of the time they’re relegated to being REMFs.

Much of what drives the ongoing controversy about railroading GMs is related; with the widespread practice of running nothing but commercially-produced “modules” straight out of the shrinkwrap, paired with a deep unwillingness to change a jot of them to suit their groups, GMs and groups require that the niches be filled because the modules (allegedly) demand it of them.

My wife, for example, played in a campaign in high school with her cronies. Around a bunch of testosterone-soaked boys, she was stuck with being the party healer. The concept didn't bug her, per se, and sure, she got to roll dice a couple times a session and do her healing spells. The "niche," however, didn't guarantee her a say in tactical planning or decision making, and in fact she didn't have one. What the rest of the group valued was the ability to put hit points of damage on the enemy, and that she lacked.  She was stuck, however, with the character she had and wasn't allowed to trade out for an archetype which would be better respected ... because they “had to have one of everything.”

Even the alleged virtues of the system, as articulated by its defenders, are weak:

* It's good to play characters who aren't good at everything?  Terrific, then design one ... who’s stopping you? 

* It's good for weak characters to be useful?  Shouldn't this be enforced with group dynamics and by the GM instead?  (Or, well ... in a skill-based system, a character doesn’t have to be “weak” just because he’s a performer or a scholar.  Better not jeer at Tanri the busker, because she works out at Saragam’s dojo and she’ll whap you upside your head.)

* Characters in class systems have different "flavors?" What makes restricting the number of available roles more varied and interesting than taking what you want?  (Beyond that, my flavor is oreo, thanks.  If you can’t hack any ice cream other than vanilla-chocolate-strawberry, whatever; you stick to those.)

* Characters ought to have defined functions?  Why do I need to have one-word labels for all my characters, and what makes this a virtue? 

* "Enforcing the genre expectations?" Please. If the GM can't manage to run the anticipated genre and the players aren't interested in running the anticipated genre, no character class written will compel them to do so. You can never legislate the munchkins out of existence. You can say, bizarrely enough, "Nice try, but no."

* It’s too hard to design characters outside of pre-defined niches?  Quite aside from that there are countless gamers out there who don’t need training wheels, many a game has optional “templates” based around popular roles, without requiring that players choose one or the other.

Alright, so some game companies would have to do a lot more work to write adventures which could be solved in more ways without niche protection.  (Other game companies, the ones who work with classless systems, seem to manage just fine, of course.)  But how many of us don’t work with commercial “modules?”  What’s our benefit in buying into this fallacy?

GGF #1: Gunpowder Is Naughty

We’re heavily influenced by first perceptions, and the greatest influence on fantasy fandom for generations now has been Lord of the Rings, which depicts a bucolic agrarian paradise threatened by dystopian industrial enemies.  Written by a man whose upbringing and early years were in the grim industrial cities of Birmingham and Leeds, the trope -- from his pen -- was unsurprising.  How this trope turned into a granite-hard prejudice against gunpowder (and against anything smacking of technology more advanced than simple machines generally) in fantasy RPG settings is another matter.

Geeks, by and large, are not nearly as erudite as they fancy themselves, their knowledge all too often coming from a mashup of their favorite fiction, dimly remembered college textbooks, Some Article They Read Somewhere, That Movie They Saw Last Month, and -- in recent years -- That Guy's Blog or Facebook Post. 

In particular, they’re crappy historians.  People get these shibboleths about How Things Were Back When imbedded in their consciousness, and they will never, ever, ever shake them.  (There’s a scientific term for this: "confirmation bias.")  My first wife is a recognized quilting historian, something I pushed her into because of her frustration that idiots she ran into in the Society for Creative Anachronism kept telling her that quilts weren't period.  Now in an era where clothes were so expensive you made a point of disposing of yours in your will, it'd take a moron to imagine that people just threw cloth away, at any point in history after textiles were invented -- and what you do with otherwise unusable fabric scraps is quilt them, a practice which has been documented going back several millennia.  Alas, those mooks were firmly rooted in the paradigm that quilts were invented by 19th century pioneer housewives industriously churning out Log Cabin patterns, and defended their POV to the death.  (She'd found something like twenty solid citations to back up her own knowledge that quilting was a practice dating to antiquity.  I suggested that screw it, she should accumulate two HUNDRED cites, and batter the idiots to death with sheer volume.  Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.  Eventually, she was the first person in SCA history to receive the highest honor for arts and sciences based on quilting research.)
                                   
It's the same thing here. We know that cannon were first used in Europe in the 1200s, and we know that they were ubiquitous by around 1350, the time handguns started to come into vogue. We know that well into the era of arquebuses, they were very inaccurate, temperamental and took longer to reload than many fantasy combats last. We know that longbows were far superior weapons to arquebuses -- the adage about needing to start with the archer’s grandfather in order to train him properly seldom pertaining to a RPG’s skill system -- and not many gamers whine about wizards casting powerful spells which blow the bejeezus out of foes at range.

But in the same way those SCAdians -- who fancy themselves as having an informed handle on history -- work nonetheless under their own unfounded delusions, gamers seem to equate arquebuses and muskets with the speed, accuracy and stopping power of modern firearms, and well, machine guns and assault rifles aren’t capital-H Heroic, doncha know.

The funny thing is that you not only can’t blame JRRT any more, you haven’t been able to blame him for decades.  From Roger Zelazny to Jerry Pournelle to Brian Daley to Joel Rosenberg, the guns-in-fantasy concept has been around for a long while.  (Heck, Dave Hargrave and Steve Jackson put them into their fantasy systems back in the 1970s.)  Can we stop making the sign of the cross at it, please?