Medieval "Facts" Most Players Believe

Yeah, we know – or have a dim awareness, in any event – that gamers are misinformed, if not badly wrong, about many aspects of low-tech life.  And that's understandable.  People grab dice and come up to the table to play a fun game, not to become experts in medieval European culture.

Still, for those of you who appreciate verisimilitude – and if you've come this far in my blog without rolling your eyes and stalking off, you're likely among them – here are a few examples of what gamers get wrong.

Taverns: The standard fantasy RPG tavern is a large, large place.  It’s full of travelers, the common room seats a hundred or so, and there are several floors of guest accommodations above: it really marries our 21st century expectations of a large modern restaurant with the Marriott or Hilton. 

This just isn’t often the case in the medieval period.  Taverns seldom had much in the way of short-term accommodations – separate “hostelries” did that, which were basically glorified boarding houses.  Deep into the 19th century, most were relatively small, neighborhood places that might seat a couple dozen people and had very limited wares: you ate a chunk of bread and whatever was in the stew pot, and you drank the house beer or ale, or an overpriced bottle of wine, and that was where you and your neighbors often went for dinner.  With a deep unwillingness to waste food that couldn't readily be preserved in any event, the tavernkeeper would have the grub on hand she expected to use, and a large group of travelers would have her either frantically dicing potatoes from the root cellar into the cauldron or scrambling to the neighbors for extras ... which would come to the travelers at a large markup.

In early modern England, due to unforeseen consequences of a law, any homeowner could open a "beerhouse" out of his or her home, upon paying two guineas for a license.  The law was repealed twenty years ago, but the remaining license holders were grandfathered, and there are still a couple spots left where the neighborhood "tavern" is no larger than a sitting room, with a couple kegs of booze around.  I read an article on one that was even done on the honor system, more out of tradition than anything else -- the elderly lady whose family ran it for a couple centuries died ten years ago, and her non-resident granddaughter and heir still lets the community keep it up.  This sort of informal arrangement was common in medieval times, and there were shopowners who'd set up a barrel of brew in the evening, put out a few stools, and played barkeep for a couple hours.

Literacy: Gamers badly underestimate medieval literacy rates.  In the countryside, sure – people in medieval Europe were 90% illiterate and up.  In the towns, however, 50% literacy wasn’t at all uncommon, and the totals went up with the artisan classes and higher.  The two key elements were Gutenberg and the Reformation, during and after which the ability to read the Bible was considered crucial.  (Writing, however, was another matter, and many a Renaissance peasant could read but not write.)  In other areas, especially in China, literacy was also prized and relatively common.

The whole fighting-men-don't-need-to-read-that's-for-clerks riff is an inaccurate, modern-day revisionist view of the western European Middle Ages much beloved of Hollywood and fiction.  What, the western Europe that included cosmopolitan Italy and Spain?  The one where noble-born trouveres were filling France with tales, poems and song?  The one where young nobles were raised to have numerous "accomplishments" – to know how to dance, write poetry, play a musical instrument?  Not really a bunch of unwashed barbarians, folks.

Off-the-rack: This didn’t really exist; if you wanted clothes, weapons and the like, they were made to order, and took about that much time.  Artisans would have sample displays of their wares – say, for instance, a silversmith with a row of spoons, each with a different decorative pattern – for buyers to choose between.  They also often had waiting lists, so that new custom-fitted suit of armor?  Yeah, you might be cooling your heels in town a couple months there.  The armourer needs to finish the three jazerans for the men-at-arms of the countess – the one whose patronage he's had for five years now, and hopes to have for many years after the pushy adventurers he's never seen before are long gone.

Food and drink: “Iron rations” and “waterskins” are staples of character sheets, and it’s presumed that PCs do well on them for long adventures.

First off is salted meats. That's great for shipboard and military life, where you have dedicated cooking teams with cauldrons and the ability to boil out the meat for an half hour or more, which is about what salted meat takes to become edible. Most adventurers don't carry cauldrons around and often have limited supplies of fresh water needful for boiling or soaking.  (Smoked or jerked meats are more of a pain in the neck to produce, considerably more of a pain in the neck to produce in bulk, and don’t keep nearly as long.)  I once took a bite out of a piece of salt cod, to see if it was really inedible without boiling.  Trust me -- * gag cough gag * -- it is.

Second is hardtack. This is really ironhard, and requires soaking or pounding to make it at all edible; pull it out of your backpack and take a bite, and you’ll chip teeth. It keeps forever – there was a bit in the paper last year about a researcher eating some preserved hardtack made for the US Army during the Civil War – but it really doesn't save all that much in the way of space over buying a loaf from a farmwife every day of march, and the older it gets, the more it gets infested with weevils.  This’ll do adventurers no harm, but the players might be a bit creeped out.

Third is water itself.  Beer, ale and wine were as common in medieval Europe (as was tea in the East) as they were because drinking the untreated water was a sure road to cholera and other nasty diseases.  Unless you were filling your waterskins from a mountain stream, you were taking a big chance.  And even there ... my favorite camping guidebook has an anecdote from one of the authors of drinking from a cold, refreshing mountain stream in the Arizona desert, and happening to glance upstream to see some buzzards.  Investigating, he found a dead horse, smack in the middle of the stream, a couple hundred yards up from where he drank.

Fourthly – and something gamers usually slough off – food was routinely adulterated.  Hardtack needed to be baked at least twice, and often wasn't, which sharply reduced its shelf life and durability.  Bakers were often brought to trial, not so much for cutting their flour with sawdust, pipe clay or fuller's earth, but by doing it in such amounts as to be impossible to turn a blind eye.  Meats ... well, let's just say you'd need a strong stomach to read about all the things that were done to them.  The party relying on "iron" rations might well find, two weeks from civilization, that their rations are no good.

Finally, the diet just sucks.  No green stuff, no vitamins – a party eating nothing but that junk for a month is going to be less than 100% when it comes to fighting.

Travel times:  Thirty miles a day is a number used frequently in gaming books ... that being the short-term forced march capacity of a military unit in top condition, with a supply train, in good weather, over good modern roads or flat terrain, and not paying a whole lot of attention to flank security.  For adventurers, it's not true.  Horses don't, contrary to most beliefs, make long-distance overland travel go particularly faster – it's that riding on horses tires the travelers out a great deal less.

For another thing, medieval roads almost uniformly sucked.  Full of mud, filled with ruts and holes, indifferently maintained when they were maintained at all.  (Look, if your countryside is constantly plagued by orc bandits, do you think that the road crews are magically safe?)  Rivers didn't come with convenient bridges, spaced a few miles apart: they came with the occasional ferry, for which you might have to wait a good hour for the bargemen to finish their lunch on the other side and pole back, presuming you don't have to march ten miles out of your way upriver to the next one.  (And presuming you know where the next one is.)  Strong, large bridges are creations of large kingdoms with complete control over their lands, silver to burn, and the peace and stability to use it.  (The aforementioned orc bandits not existing, y'see.)

10-15 miles a day's considerably more realistic.

Guilds:  I touched on this in an earlier post, but your average gamer, raised in a largely meritocratic Western democracy, has a mental image of a medieval guild that more or less squares away with modern-day trade unions.  (It's okay.  The origins of the trade union movement, coming about in societies deeply hostile to unwashed craftsmen exerting economic power, sought legitimacy by claiming descent from those guilds.  They weren't historians either.)  This was not close to being the case.  Medieval guilds were part of the civic power structure, they were there to ensure that the guys already on top of the food chain stayed there, and they were notably hostile to threats to their power.  Membership was very restrictive, they got many laws passed to squish outsiders, and they had quite a few anti-competition/innovation rules to prevent journeymen from getting a leg up on the others; enforced hours of operation, hiring limits, a ban on new techniques.

Mariners' Quarter II

Sign of the Melting Block:  This old time ice selling family business has recently been taken over by Shalla Luathaich, the grand-niece of the proprietor, who has retired to the countryside.  In reality, “Shalla” is the priestess Tantra, cleric of Mallia – the dread goddess of disease – who with her three acolytes sacrificed Shalla and her grand-uncle, forged the right papers, and plan to use this business to spread disease throughout the Old City and the ships leaving for foreign ports.

Venturers’ Guild Hall:  This five-story wood-and-stucco building houses sailors and harbor pilots; fishermen have their own Guild and are not welcome here.  Non-able seamen are discouraged from hanging around save for entrepreneurs or sea captains hiring for voyages (and pay a fee to the Guild for the privilege).  Membership costs a gold sovereign, which is taken out of the wages of a sailor’s first voyage.  The annual tithe is 15 silver sinvers or 10% of a sailor’s wages (whichever is higher), and that too is deducted from seafaring pay; captains who mislead the Guild in order to mulct this are harshly treated if caught, and blackballed on a second offense.
                           
On the first floor is a large lounge where captains and officers gather, and where a large cork board tracks known shipping.  There is an administrative office, where a wall covered with cubbyholes hold messages for passing vessels.  The Guildmaster’s office is comfortable and kitschy, with the walls covered with nautical bric-a-brac, there’s cabling instead of moulding, and so on.

Most of the second floor is taken up by a meeting hall where Venturers can hold rallies, and there is a separately run teahouse on the 2nd floor balcony upon which the sailors take tea and shoot the breeze.  

On the third and fourth floors, low cost (and mediocre quality) food and beds for seamen are available barracks style.  Supervising the barracks hall is Salty Leofri, a former bosun’s mate.   The fifth floor has modest “lockers” for long service mariners, with room for a bed, table, chair and seachest and not much more.  Notables include:  

Seldon val Troon, Dorval’s half-brother, is the Guildmaster, a position of enormous political influence and the reason why the val Troon family have plucked this plum.  Seldon is a qualified captain, but has his post far more for reasons of politicking than any other, and he is quite good at it.  A lean, hearty man who loves life.  He asserts his title for all its worth in public politicking, but never here or among his guildmates.

Nath “Hawkeye” val Troon, son of Seldon, is the chief harbor pilot.  In this post through nepotism, he is tolerated largely because pilot posts are seen as sinecures for elderly do-nothings and because Hawkeye is a genial, popular man with a reputation as a bladesman, and puts less work than he could into administrative duties (in consequence, the master piloting logs are indifferently kept). 

Cap’n Dolan Hide is the cheerful, swarthy son of a Lohvian merchant and a veteran bladesman, well off enough that he sails because he wants to do so.  He cons the Windrose, a 70' fast schooner outfitted for the tea trade and noted for being weatherly.  The Windrose sports no visible cannon, but her swivel guns shoot lightning, not bullets.

Gwythar the Knife is Dolan’s first mate, a giant of mortalendic blood. He is a skilled helmsman, but an unbelievable knife thrower, one of the world’s best.  He is festooned with knives, several enchanted and all Very Fine quality.

Vangar and Varko are twin brothers who own the Sea Lord’s Confidence, a 250 ton roundship.  They take turns as captain and helmsman, and it is difficult to tell which is which; they are both equally humorless and taciturn.  The Connie is a once-renowned sailer that was poorly repaired following a grounding, and a good bit of rot has set in. 

Shena of Seahill captains the Black Risslaca, a shallow draft sideboard schooner with four sweeps designed for inshore and reef work.   The Risslaca is a jumpy, persnickety ship requiring an attentive, attuned helmsman, which Shena is.  She won’t do a knowingly illegal act (emphasis on the “knowingly”) such as smuggling or drug running, but she also asks few questions.

The Trefoil Herb:   Neysa is a fairly prosperous elven blood herbalist.  She has two assistants who spend their time compounding preparations in bulk for the quarter’s physicians.  She is painfully aware her husband Lodos happens to be the Commodore of the Brotherhood of Renders (the great pirate cabal); they are separated and on poor terms.

The Sisterhood of Sublime Mercy Orphanage:  This orphanage hosts several dozen children at any given time, and has a sour reputation in the neighborhood.  The Sisterhood apparently believes in hard work for their charges, claiming it will teach them useful trades and a work ethic, and operates a nearby sharpener and brickmaking factory.  They claim (not completely inaccurately) to place children in fosterage on suburban farms and in apprenticeships in the city, and hotly and persistently maintains their innocence of any wrongdoing, while maintaining (also not completely inaccurately) that they teach the children to read, write and cypher.  More sinisterly, however, Mothers Mellindra and Yhantse sell a steady percentage of the better looking or stronger children as slaves to illicit buyers.  They have onsite a half-dozen scum guards (deliberately picking handsome, innocent looking ones) to help keep the children in line and discourage questions. 

Tyraesa Square:  This large public square in the northwest of the quarter has a weathered sandstone fountain so old the features of the person memorialized are no longer discernable; it is jocularly called “Old King Log” after a notoriously inept monarch of three centuries ago.  The wide base of the fountain is the source of public drinking water for the poor.  The square is also a popular venue for minstrel performances and street theater.

Dock Square:  This square is somewhat out of the way, and peopled by the lower-class district residents, the fishing trades, and the down and out.  Outsiders – the Town Watch included – will attract scrutiny, and may be harassed by local youths and wannabe thugs.  There are a number of pushcarts selling various ready-to-eat foods, which is ignored by troopers as long as the thoroughfare isn’t blocked. 

Mariners' Quarter:

(A previous version of this was up on another website, but I thought people might like to see it here: a few useful and occasionally quirky businesses for a hardbitten, somewhat poor seaport waterfront district.  Enjoy!)

The Sea Gate:   This imposing gate is of carved and polished black granite.  Open from an hour before sunsrise (or high tide, whichever comes first), closes at sunsset.  The guards take bribes to open the Gate from known captains swearing that they need to set sail during the night; those not so well known or in ill favor are well-advised to tie up at South Wharves instead.  No tolls are charged; outgoing wagons are tariffed at East Gate, but not at the Custom House proper; this is a long-held and jealously guarded perk of the Old City merchants. The Gate mounts a six-pounder culverin and two swivel guns in each of its two towers, more to keep merchants and dockworkers in line than anything else.

Barracks, Admiralty Guard:  A full company of Royal Marines is stationed at a barracks adjacent to Admiralty House, with two squads on continuous guard.  The Admiralty Guard is a much-prized post awarded only to elite Marines, and they take a great – and arrogant – pride in their posting.  The five-story tall dedicated naval aerodrome is at the southeast corner of the building, which fouls the sightline of the main wall tower just behind and has caused considerable friction between the powerful Admiralty and the Town Watch.   The Navy’s three precious scout airships are stored here for swift communication at sea, although Marshal Korak contemplates moving one to Thevelin.   

The Commandant of the Guard is Lady Danay Mayfern, a legendary ex-ranker knighted by the Crown for numerous deeds.  The (true) rumor is that she is secretly a Deep Grey Shadow warrior.  The Guard is under the nominal command of the Grand Admiral and is not under the Port Commandant’s authority, which has led to much friction in the past; Kyra Danay is a skilled enough politician to keep all sides as tolerably contented as may be. 

North Wall General Store:  Julian Maligor runs this busy corner store built against the city wall (and for which ample monies are paid for the privilege).  He is one of Keva One-Eye’s lieutenants and runs the district’s drug smuggling business for the Thieves’ Guild; two buyers make arrangements with incoming vessels, three distributors broker the smuggled goods, and Julian has two button men who serve as muscle.  Julian himself is short and fat, and lecherous almost beyond measure – he will always find time to take a lady in the backroom to “pay down” a drug debt, and any absences he has from the front during business hours is almost certainly connected with backroom gruntings.  Opium is sold legally; illegal moondust can also be had.

The Woflo Inn:  Caters to the buccaneering and smuggling trades, and thereby watched by the Guard and under the protection of the Thieves Guild.  Funny business is not long tolerated, even if the loyal clientele permitted the same.  The innkeeper is Grace Waflo – the family name is spelled differently – a winsomely pretty redhead in her early twenties who took over the inn from her sister; she is still feeling her way around keeping the itinerant clientele in line, lacking her sister’s awesome powers.  She and her husband Artaz (a lampmaker in the Firewalkers’ District) have two small children, Daisy and Els.  The barkeep is Jurgin, an ex-adventurer with a strong lecherous streak. Notable in the district for the best stews in the Old City.  The inn has ample room for guests, as well as two separate escape tunnels from the basement into the sewers. 

Keva One-Eye, who has the district concession from the Thieves’ Guild, has a backroom set aside for her uses.  Her lieutenants are Jakaesa, who brokers smuggled goods through a cell of buyers, one of longshoremen and one to launder through legitimate businesses; Layco, who runs street crime in the district, with two loan sharks, a fence, two burglars, two pickpockets and three button men; and Julian.  Keva herself has two guards. 

The owner’s older sister, Princess Elaina Waflo Elyanwe, is a elemental wizard of tremendous renown; she married into the Vinarian Imperial Family, served a term as an Intermediate Master, and was one of the great heros of the Battle of Veredar Island in 4506.  She is fanatically devoted to her family and the well-being of the Woflo, and can bring immense resources to bear to protect it.  Her bodyguard Sir Kardo is a famous ex-pirate, and she often travels with an honor guard of Vinarian Imperial Marines. 

Temple of Manannan (St. Taria’s): This small temple of the Sea Lord caters to the fisher folk and downtrodden sailors.  The exterior is of plain wood planks with a granite foundation, topped with a modest whitewashed steeple.  The glass windows are purple with age and unadorned.  A small (but sweet toned) bronze bell tolls for services and at the loss of a ship or a congregant.  There is a modest herb garden with benches set up for meditation, and a long-ago filled cemetery.

Sanctuary:  Scallop shell sconces created from translucent alabaster add to the small passage between the doorway and the chancel.  Wistful paintings of sea scenes border the whitewashed walls of the sanctuary.  The pews are of simple woods (salvaged from derelict ships), although lovingly kept, and the dark blue wool aisle runners are new; space in the sanctuary prohibit the pews from making a complete circle around the altar, as is customary.  Streams of blue and green light inside bathe the nave from a stained glass window set behind the altar.  The altar itself is of plain oak, although it is covered with a beautifully embroidered altar cloth.

The curate, a retired lobsterwoman herself, is Mother Ginevra Harlo.  Her clerical powers are modest, but she is a no-nonsense priestess with a core of flint inside, and works tirelessly for her flock without questions or misgivings about the Sea Lord’s will.   

There are two teenage acolytes, and the three live in modest quarters behind the downstairs parish hall.  The hall itself is oversized, and Mother Ginevra runs a soup kitchen mid-afternoons for down-and-out locals (augmented by castoffs from the area inns, since St. Taria’s is underfunded, save for occasional donations from Princess Elaina), all of whom are known to her.  St. Taria’s is a good place to hire common sailors and fishers, if not of the quality one would get at the Venturers’ Guild.  Available prayers: Minor Healing, Restoration, Bless, Exorcism, Divination.

Tavern, no sign:  Under a tenement block, Camibel and her disabled orcish-blood husband Elerek run this plain but clean tavern for the fishing folk and longshoremen.  Their tavern is unlicensed and illegal, and they are under threat to be shut down.  The Thieves’ Guild has offered to smooth their way for “consideration,” and are ramping up the pressure.

Sign of the Fuming Gate:   Incongruously enough, this is actually the local whale oil and coal seller, Dorinda the White.  The long ago hostel of a monastic order of the Fire God, this building was empty for years before becoming a flophouse, and now taken over by Dorinda, who wanted to expand her business from formerly cramped quarters.  She considers the sign a terribly funny joke, and hasn’t yet realized the consequences of poking fun at a notoriously grim fighting order; their first salvo is that she is under a Curse from an unamused priest.

Brothel, no sign:  Even in the loose Mariners’ District, the brother and sister team of Dachel and Keraera draw a great deal of fire.  Locally born to now-deceased fishermen, they are notorious for doing anything with anybody (or with any prop) in any combination, each other included.  Their sign was torn down and their establishment has been repeatedly vandalized. 

The Compass Rose:  The faded relic of an earlier, more prosperous era, the Rose is the largest public bathhouse in the Mariners’ Quarter.  The exterior is carved sandstone, now weathered and crumbling, the interior of glazed (and chipped) azure and white blue tile.  There is a large warm water communal bath, smaller communal baths for men and women, a steam room, a salt water bath, and two private tubs (a third is damaged and out of commission) for groups of up to four.  There is a 10% chance that any given bath is out of order on any given day.

Cooper:  Domeneka Lekarsi is a dour, skilled cooper, one of the few Mistress Race trolls in the Old City.  Much of her business involves repair work for barrels (her prime location hard up against the Sea Gate as a boost); however, with an eye towards an coin, she also sells watered wine and beer for the dockworkers, drovers and Sea Gate guards, however much illegally.

Winedark Venturers’ Bank:  A modest blue granite building houses this local bank (unconnected with the Venturers’ Guild, and in a lengthy lawsuit over the name).  Winedark is the institution of choice for many of the poorer people of the district.  Drained by the lawsuit, undercapitalized and with a number of risky loans outstanding, the bank is secretly on the verge of failure.  Well-respected "Old" Aleman is still the nominal head of the institution, but his grand-nephew "Young" Aleman and his three cousins operate the bank.  They are increasingly desperate for a quick fix, but fear a bank run if word gets out of its near-insolvency.

Tea Merchant:  Mikoguchi hi Lanta blends and serves out bulk tea to the district’s inns, taverns and general stores, aided by her eight energetic children (all, she boasts, by different fathers).  She will sell retail, but will gouge anyone save for the apothecary Neysa, whom she credits with alchemical beautification potions.  The shop carries Golden Zorca blend tea.

Do we *really* need art in gamebooks?

When we buy a gaming product, we make an investment. They cost a fair bit of money now (especially with core rules, which can run into the hundreds of dollars), and playing a game system means choices that can last decades, involve hundreds of hours of work, attract or drive away fellow gamers and affect the product lines upon which you spend money. Anyone who makes this decision based on the Überkewlness of the cover art is a complete moron. This is like deciding what kind of TV to buy based on how awesomely the manufacturer's carton is painted.

Quite aside from that I've seen more published products – my own included – marred by lousy interior art than enhanced by it, the incredibly busy interior graphics of a lot of products are just plain visually jarring ... between pseudo-medieval fonts, pictorial watermarking, sepia-toned inks.  I'm 54 years old, and visual razzle-dazzle akin to Myspace page layouts just puts me off.

And the ultimate insult is they make me pay a premium for all this crap.

I would seriously respect a major publisher that went back to softbound books, two-color plain covers, no interior art ... and that they would thereby sell their stuff for three-quarters the industry standard.

Sorry, these are books. With words. 95% of the information in these game products are verbal. Using words. This isn't World of Warcraft, and it isn't a console game, where visuals are integral to gameplay and can't be divorced from it. These are printed rules which would convey pretty much the same information if they were 100% graphics- and illustration-free.

But, after all, the "non-verbal" gamers (which in terms of tabletop seems quite an oxymoron to me, but whatever) have had things all their way for quite a few years now. Gamebooks are jammed cover to cover with pretty graphics, full color interior art, lavish borders and all manner of glitz. Just on a lark, I used a converter to strip a couple PDFs down to plain text ... and got as much as a forty percent reduction in page length.

Possibly you're comfortable with paying for a hundred pages of padding in a corebook. I sure as hell am not, and in the industry these days, only one of us is getting what he wants.

Let's take one of my pet peeves, the Serenity RPG.  It uses eight pages, a 20th of its page count, on full-color production stills of the principals of the Firefly crew.  What you learn is that (for instance) the actress Gina Torres (and by inference, the character she plays) is black, the actress Summer Glau isn't (ditto) and the actress Morena Baccarin is dusky skinned and of some other racial stock (more of the same).  Its applicability to gameplay I leave to you to imagine.

Hm, I have a copy of the Star Wars RPG here.  Now each and every page has inch-plus-wide margin graphics which mimic a wristcomp or something of the sort, and represents about a seventh of the available space for text. Want to know how much space that ate up? Fifty-four pages, about.

Now I’ve been told that, for vague and poorly articulated reasons, RPG gamers “need” there to be tons of art in gamebooks.  But strangely enough, the vast number of non-RPG publications in our culture – the ones marketed to grownups, anyway – are devoid of both.  Let's look at the first five books on my bookshelf:

Shanteys of the Seven Seas, by Stan Hugill. No interior illos. The only graphics are the first bars of many of the shanteys, done up in musical notation.

The Koran - Heck, illos are downright impious as far as a Muslim goes.

Collected Verse by Rudyard Kipling. Nope, no artwork here.

The Civil War, by Shelby Foote. There are, occasionally, maps of key Civil War battles.

The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau. A center section of maps.

Shall I keep going? More of the same, and the illustration rate drops dramatically when you get to fiction books. So could someone tell me: why is it that poets, devout religious practitioners, folk musicians, Civil War historians and social scientists can manage perfectly well without a quarter of their books being taken up by pretty pictures ... and it's believed that RPG gamers no longer can?

 

Yet More Persistent Fallacies

In drafting the Gaming Geek Fallacies,  the fundamental reason why I started this blog, I could’ve made that a much longer list.  Granted, I wanted to draw a parallel to the famous Five Geek Social Fallacies list that inspired them.  But these persistent fallacies have been kicking around my blog folder, and I might as well haul them out!

1) If The System Wasn't Written To Meet My Every Prejudice In Every Particular, It's No Good.

Quite aside from that if a game was exactly the way you wanted it to be, you'd be the game designer, and more likely defending it than bitching about it?  If you’re much younger than sixty, you came to adulthood in a world of a hundred TV channels, a zillion dining choices, Walkmans and iPods and all manner of options that ensured you never had to endure popular taste if you didn't want to do so, and you didn't have to work very hard to manage it, either.

The gaming grognards, however, remember a time when the rules were all badly written and opaque, and we had to rewrite them to suit. The degree to which I'm impressed by whining about rules people don't like is closely parallel to my feelings on hearing a grown child claim he can't dress himself or cut his own meat.  They are called "pencils" and "pens," folks.  Use them to X-out or alter those rules you don't like or, alternately, to add things you can't live without.  There's even a whiz-bang name for them: "house rules."  Catchy, ain't it?

2) The New Edition Of Game X Sucks!!! The Bastard Company Ruined It!!!

Something I find even more incomprehensible than the first one. So you don't like nWOD? Yeah, I think it was a dumb idea too. So don't play it. The previous edition works just as well today as it did when it was first published, and RPGs lack a sell-by date; no one is going to force your gaming group at gunpoint to switch. Delete nWOD, insert D&D 4th, GURPS 4th, Hero 5th, etc etc, as appropriate.

Yes, I know there's an intense fetish in this culture to only value the latest and newest of anything, but if you're that much of a mindless sheep, I don't see why you should expect respect for your POV.  I’m heartened by the retro movement in gaming, but bemused as to why people are spending so much time and effort coming up with “retroclones.”  Feel nostalgia for OD&D?  Well ... why not play OD&D?  You’re allowed; really you are.

3) MMORPGs / LARPs / Freeforms / Storygames Suck And Aren't REAL Roleplaying.

RP is RP is RP. Online gaming, freeform, storygames and LARPs are different than tabletop. All these styles have their advantages and disadvantages. I've played several forms, for many years apiece, and no one kind is "better" than the others. I may have opinions on particular games, but there is equally rich RP available in any venue, and equally munchkinesque asshattery in all.

What they are is different.  LARPs and online lack the institutionalized taboos against portraying sexuality, eroticism and evil that pervade tabletop.  Tabletop is much faster than LARPs -- and infinitely faster than MMORPGs -- in creating new things or making rules changes.  In MMORPGs, you don’t have to play with a party, you can game at 4 AM on a weeknight in your pajamas, and GMs aren’t telling you what to do every step of the way.  In LARPs, you can physically interact in a way possible nowhere else, RP can be a great deal more intense and realistic, and you can immerse for days at a time.  In tabletop, you can fine tune your character’s abilities in a way the game systems of other styles can’t match, and setting backgrounds are almost by definition far more detailed and rich.  In MMORPGs, you can interact with hundreds (thousands!) more PCs than in any other form.  And so on.

Really, this is just GGF#4 – My Game Is Great, Your Game Sucks – writ large.  People feel the need to disparage the Not Us game.  For instance, several key players on the gaming board I most frequent have a rabid (and, I feel, irrational) hate on for storygames, to the point that some have accused people who’ve seemed sympathetic to storygames or advocated games that were perceived to have “storygame” elements of having a Secret Storygames Agenda.

Seriously.  I really am not making this up.

(What a “storygames agenda” is I have no idea, but months down the road, I’m still shaking my head.)

4) The Hot New Game Has A Groundbreaking New Way Of Doing Things!

There are just a handful of fundamental elements to a RPG: what a character can do, how to adjudicate him or her doing it, what's the interaction between the character and the world. If a game decides that (for example) randomizing combat resolution is a good thing, there's no fundamental difference between flipping cards, grabbing chits, rolling 3d6, exploding dice pools, whatever. All you're doing is playing around with how the odds are calculated and resolved.

This fallacy also feeds the beast, so to speak, and has the designers of new systems scrambling around to find some way, any way, of distinguishing their system mechanics from all the rest.  This has led to some otherwise good indie RPGs to have some terribly silly key mechanics.

5) If You Want To Play A New Setting, You Have To Design A New Game Around It.

Generally applied to media licenses, I don’t understand this.  Look – I’ve written for media licenses: for Conan, for Middle-Earth, for Scarlet Pimpernel, for DC Comics.  Media licenses work under severe constraints. 

First off, the license holders (even when authors are decades-dead, as with Tolkien and Howard) get awfully sticky about creating new setting detail, however much gamers need those details and the authors never addressed them, and in some cases, competing ownership rights interfere.  The Serenity RPG was licensed from the movie, not the Firefly TV series, and couldn’t mention explicit elements from that series.  The FASA Star Trek game was licensed from the Franz Joseph group that held some independent rights through the Star Trek Technical Manual, but not from Paramount, and couldn’t address many elements from ST:TOS, never mind touch TNG with a ten-foot phaser.

Secondly, they’re generally written with an eye towards getting fans of the work into gaming, and so include a lot of elements and dumbed-down explanations which veteran gamers find unnecessary at best and patronizing at worst. 

Thirdly, the corebook is pretty slender (so as not to bombard those newbies with dozens of pages of combat rules), and much of the rest is taken up with recapitulations that hardcore fans find too scanty and hardcore RPGers find crowd out necessary rules. 

Fourthly, it's an axiom that no matter what you put out, half the fans will hate it with a hot, heavy hate. Either they won't like the system, or they won't like anything that isn't already canon, or they'll bitch that you included elements of the book/show they found lame, or bitch that you left out elements they loved, or they'll whine that you misinterpreted this or that.  Even more than the average situation in #2 above, too many of the base reject anything that doesn't reflect in every particular what they'd have written if they were in charge of the effort.

Fifthly, the licensed properties usually have short shelf lives.  The company running a MMORPG I used to play started a licensed game based on the Hercules and Xena TV shows ... after both series had stopped first run.  It never had many players, there was little scope for advertising, and the company voluntarily relinquished the license when the player base diminished to a trickle.  The Buffy RPG came out just weeks before the series wrapped, and suffered a similar fate.  Great, there were people babbling about it on Internet forums.  Go find a copy in a FLGS now; the company relinquished the license barely four years after it was first published, and it's long out of print.

Finally, the audience just isn't as large as people think it is. We weren't ‡ (say) peddling the Serenity RPG just to gamers. We weren't (say) peddling it just to gamers who like science fiction. We weren't (say) peddling it just to science fiction gamers who happen to be Firefly fans. We weren't (say) peddling it just to science fiction gamers who happen to be Firefly fans and don't mind the Cortex system. We were (say) peddling it to science fiction gamers who happen to be Firefly fans, don't mind the Cortex system and think the game writers did a good job. That is not an easy sell, and that breakdown applies to pretty much any licensed game.

Now compound this with having to design a new game system from scratch, one not only developed to be deliberately distinctive from other systems (because, you know, see #4 above) but less with an eye towards whether the system makes sense or not than towards whether key setting elements are highlighted.

It’s little wonder that only one licensed game – Call of Cthulhu – has ever had a permanent impact on the industry. 

‡ - past tense, because the company surrendered the license in 2011, just five years after publication.

Magic 'R Us

Knobgobbler, who's my most frequent commenter, mentioned in my most recent blog post concerning magic swords that a setting with magical items would have to have heaps of charlatans either pretending that they have powers or peddling fake magic items.  (Heck, it wouldn't even take a setting with ubiquitous magical items.  Isn't Earth's history filled with such charlatans?)

I'm in complete and longstanding agreement.  One of the more offbeat groups in that line is an outfit in the capital city out of which my main group works I informally call "Magic 'R Us."  The description in my binder runs thus:

This cheerful lot of young magicians are in the business of supplying minor enchantments and magical items to locals at substantial discounts to the prices more usually found citywide.  Though none are journeymen, they are the nominal apprentices of San Nath Catalis, a retired Almuensin, and Sana Nirasta val Arcolon, a Fruningen Starlight wizard.  Both are far more interested in counting their profits than interfering with the business or teaching their "apprentices," but despite the College's unhappiness over the situation, they fulfill the letter of the law.  Quality is respectable for what it is (at least no major disasters have yet been recorded), and so far the band has remained quite cohesive.

The College of Mages is the multinational outfit that seeks (with varying degrees of success) to regulate the use of magic.  Their sway in Warwik City is relatively strong, and one of the laws they've successfully seen enacted prohibits anyone from practicing magic for profit who doesn't have a journeyman's license from the College ... that, or who is working under the direction of a journeyman or master, which covers apprentices.   Hence Magic 'R Us, which has franchised out to some villages in the region.  One of the branches PCs have come across is in the village of Athelren, which is halfway on the great highway between Warwik City and the south coast:

The first "branch" of the eponymous outfit, set up by an Athelren native, who goes by "Shadowdove" (she hates her given name, Paline).  She is an Almuensin senior apprentice who felt she was going to wash out on her journeyman trials and fled the city.  Here in her home village, she is what passes for a wizard, and skirts a dangerous line: she has not told anyone she is not a journeyman, and does not operate under the direction of a master.  She has a modest command of Earth (useful locally), Creation (less so) and Sensory (not particularly) magics, and can enchant ... just barely.  Her spell floor is -12.

This outfit really ticks off the College, and my PCs have generally been very down on it.  The most powerful PC wizard in the campaign's history is currently active, and she's a Warwik native who for the past few years has been (respectively) the local Master of Apprentices, and then one of the College's handful of "Intermediate Masters," the College's hit squad and responsible for magical law enforcement.  Elaina has no use whatsoever for Magic 'R Us -- which is comical, because her family business is an inn catering to pirates, and she's pretty laissez faire otherwise -- and has occasionally sought to shut it down.

The Ordinary Magic Sword

Princess Verella and Meldil

I recall a gaming forum discussion on magic swords, and magic items in general, where the sentiment was running against “common” magical items – and against the concept of scaling owned items up in power as the PCs gained experience – and in favor of “unique” and “storied” items.  One person asked:

Certainly there's something very cool about creating a sword or wand or whatever that has a storied history and special unique powers... but do you want EVERY item to be that way? Do you feel like there should never just be a +1 sword?

No.

The game I play has enchantment rules. My gameworld's cities have a number of qualified enchanters, and they make their livings enchanting things. Since the lower end enchantments are by far the easiest and cheapest to make, by the nature of the beast there are going to be a relatively large number of +1 Puissance weapons out there, which take less than a twentieth the time of (say) +2 Puissance, +2 Accuracy, Quick-Draw, Loyal Sword broadswords. Since said +1 Puissance weapon takes 250 mage-days to enchant with my houseruling of GURPS, and the ability to enchant in the first place isn't common among wizards, this isn't anything a lowly PC is going to buy off the rack.

But that being said, I see no reason why an item's "storied history" should have much to do with its OOC system stats. The legendary Dragon Crown of the Emperors of Vallia doesn't become legendary because of its stats; it's legendary because it's been worn by three thousand years' worth of monarchs. No one knows the actual stats of the great warsword Meldil, borne on half a hundred battlefields by the renowned Princess Verella Elyanwe; it's famous because it's wielded by a great hero. Does it actually cleave iron as if it were wood? (Or is it the case, in truth, that the beautiful elven hero-princess has particularly florid and fanciful minstrels composing her tales?)

It wasn’t always this way, and D&D isn’t really to blame.  My first campaign as a player was an Empire of the Petal Throne run in 1978, and we just got flooded with stuff, in tried-and-true Monty Haul fashion. So much so that we players – sick and tired of scenarios being solved with our widgets instead of our wits – got together and agreed to pick just three items apiece to keep, and throw away all of the rest.

How would I change the paradigm?  If I had to do it all over again (unfortunately, the making of relatively simple items is too entrenched in my gameworld), I'd eliminate any spell or ability that analyzed the particulars of a magical item, and make the result of any enchantment unpredictable. The only way to figure out what something did would be empirical. Enchantments become things of mystery only if they're mysterious, and if you can't know – for certain – everything about it. Make it mechanistic, know for a certain fact that the bolts from a Staff of Reaming do 1d+2 crushing damage, that they have a range of 10 hexes, and that the Staff has 11 charges and 15 HT, then it's no more "wonderful" than 50' of hemp rope or five pounds of smoked cod.

Heck, you could even ring in items that people thought were magical, and really weren't.  I did this writeup on another site, and bet some of you could use this as an idea in your own campaigns:

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

One of the most significant finds to come out of the haunted ruins of the city of Telmora, Deathreaper is a giant battlebrand, five and a half feet in length.  Wrought of some black glossy metal and engraved with fell runes of annihilation, the only color on the blade is the well-worn silver wire wrapping the hilt.  Through some eldritch sorcery, it is light as a willow wand in the wielder's hand ... but that is not all.  When waved over the wielder's head, Deathreaper erupts in dark violet flames (which somehow do not burn the wielder), and the runes on the blade sear with stabbing blue radiance.  The howls of dozens of voices split the air, screaming in horror and anguish, eternally damned.  It is said that to die on Deathreaper's point is to have your immortal soul destroyed, sucked into the blade for all time, to join the chorus of the hell-caged and be seared in the unholy flame of the brand.

The warrior-mage Thenestre, who found the sword, is now a feared man.  Standing taller, standing prouder, the power of Deathreaper fills him with its blazing might.  It is said that as long as he carries the sword he is invincible, and that even if he is parted from the blade, it will fly through the air to his defense ... and find his foe.  And drink.

*

*

*

*

*

That's the shtick, anyway.  As a warrior, Thenestre is nothing much.  As a mage, he's a decent weaver of illusions and tolerably good at minor summonings.  As an adventurer, he's quite a con artist.  Reading of the adventures of a legendary champion bearing a hell-forged black soulsucking sword, he wondered whether he could do one better.  "Deathreaper" is, with the help of a dwarven confederate, a few layers of enameled foil over a core of pinewood.  A little engraving took care of the "runes of annihilation" (which came out of the Big Little Book of Wyzardry, 4491 edition), and a couple of enchanted illusions takes care of the lighting and sound effects.  Well, everyone knows that Thenestre was assisting Master Thormor on the dig in the northern part of the Old City ... or at least they believe it when Thenestre tells them that he was.

Thenestre can whip the sword around with the best of them, and light as it is, he makes it look easy.  He bolsters it by summoning "bodies" which he artistically disguises with illusion to have large holes in them and features contorted in horror, claiming that they were rascals who tried to steal from him.  He hasn't had to do more than brandish it since -- many a brave warrior, bold enough against mortal steel, wants no part of a dark destroyer forged in the very Fires of Hell itself!  And now Thenestre is "somebody," a renowned adventurer, someone who doesn't have to buy many of his own drinks, someone who can run up tabs at the tailors and the taverns, someone who gets his share of the women attracted to the Dark Anti-Hero.

Adventure hooks: 

1)  Sooner or later, there'll be some up and coming punk stickjock who wants to prove how bad he is by taking down the "legendary" Thenestre!  And maybe he'll run before the full fury of Deathreaper ... and maybe he won't.

2)  Sooner or later, there'll be some up and coming punk thief who wants to prove how bad he is by stealing the "legendary" Deathreaper!  And maybe he'll go down before the anti-theft illusions Thenestre sets (most nights, when he remembers, when he isn't too drunk, when he's not occupied with the groupie de jour) ... and maybe he won't.

3)  Sooner or later, Master Thormor -- or someone else familiar with the Telmori site -- might come into town and recall Thenestre as a minor assistant who didn't merit anything beyond the antique emerald brooch that was his share of the loot, and three weeks' pay ... certainly no ancient artifact sword.  Of which none were recovered, not in working order, anyway.  (Alternately, a researcher of the period might know, or uncover, that no such weapon is recorded in the annals of the Triolini Empire.)

4)  There are real dark forces in the world.  Forces which covet the power of Deathreaper, and seek to take it for their own.  (They might even hire the party to do it, and might not react well to being told "Oh, yeah, we stole the weapon you wanted, but gosh, it's a fake, here it is.")