16 November 2013

Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT

(January 2022:  Well, people are very interested in this information; this two-part post is responsible for nearly half of the page views for the entire blog.  It's long since gone viral, to the point that some serious researchers have taken notice, and to my enduring wonder, it makes the top page of Google Search.  This warms the cockles of my heart, but listen -- this is the product of many years' research and trying to get it right.  Please feel free to comment below if you don't think I did!)

Medieval demographics and economics have long been an interest of mine.  I minored in the subject in college (seriously), largely because I wanted to become as expert as possible in the field for gaming purposes.  Between a divorce and what’s available on the Internet, I’ve trimmed down my library on the subject to a few dozen books, but I certainly have my opinions.

My opinion is that what you’ve been taught from gaming sources about low-tech cities is almost certainly wrong.

The most influential RPGer on the topic is S. John Ross, whose Medieval Demographics Made Easy article is widely cited and quoted as to what businesses existed in medieval cities and in what numbers.  Now S. John is a smart guy.  We were once on the same GURPS APA together, and we’ve corresponded; I respect the fellow.  But his article has some critical flaws, and I’d like to present this rebuttal both as a rant and for Wednesday’s Stuff.

* For starters, let's take his number on universities: "There will be one University for every 27.3 million people. This should be computed by continent, not by town!" Heck, by 1500 Italy alone had twenty universities which survive to the present day, let alone ephemeral ones in existence back in the medieval era. France, Spain and Germany each had over a dozen in medieval times ... even tiny Scotland (est. population in the Middle Ages, between 500,000 and a million) had three.  I've no idea from where he got that number ... it's bizarrely specific for being so desperately wrong.

* His break point on the population of town vs city is 8,000, but the true figure is around 5,000; if we're going by the legal definition of a city, most cities were chartered in England at between 4,500-5,000 population.  In Europe generally, the numbers and definitions were wildly skewed: in much of Germany and eastern Europe, for instance, the great majority of so-called "Free Cities" had a population of 1,000 or less.

* He asserts that a square mile of land will feed 180 people on medieval tech.  This is, in fact, a hugely variable number.  Under ideal conditions, after the invention of the horse collar and crop rotation, on table-flat completely cleared land, in multi-crop areas like the Nile Delta and northern Italy, presuming the land's at peace, you can manage over twice that.  The presence of forests, orchards, pasture land, hamlets, buildings, roads?  A tidal wave of smallholders tilling just a few acres and not hugely efficiently?  Oxen instead of horses?  Poor soil, swampland or inadequate water?  Cold climes like Scotland or Scandinavia?  Hill country?  Your farmers haven't invented crop rotation, horse collars or heavy ploughs?  (And, oh, let's not discount politics, war, droughts, locust plagues, untimely frosts ...)  If you can manage half that number for much of Europe, you're doing alright, and you'll survive getting less.

(By the bye, there's a conceptual thing you need to get out of your head.  Most cinematic sources, many fictional sources and a whole lot of gaming products depict what I call "vast cities in a sea of empty."  Gandalf rides up to Minas Tirith, Middle-Earth's largest flipping city by a LOT, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Shift the panorama to King's Landing, the capital of a nation the size of India, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Now this nonsense might appeal to directors and set designers, for whom heroic charges against the walls are a lot cleaner to film than house-to-house battles through the suburbs, but why exactly would anyone sane want to import tons upon tons of grain -- never mind the vegetables, which would all rot en route -- from hundreds of miles away in preference to growing it right there?  Seriously.  Cities are at the center of vast webs of agriculture, not lonely bleak outposts, whatever the likes of Jackson, Benioff and Weiss care to depict.)

* The real killer are the totals for businesses, which are way, way, way out of kilter.

See, what Ross -- and many a gamer who doesn’t know any better -- uses for a guide is a single source: the so-called “1292 Parisian tax roll” cited in the end notes of Joseph and Frances Gies’ well-known work, Life In A Medieval City, which purports to give a comprehensive list of the 51 types of business in Paris in that time, and produces some oddities like there being 58 scabbardmakers in Paris in that year.

Yeah, but.

For openers, Paris was a very atypical place.  For most of the medieval period through to the 18th century, it was the most populous city in Europe, the national capital of Europe’s greatest kingdom.  Your average good-sized low-tech city is a tenth the size, much less likely to have baroque luxury trades, and much more likely to be near or on the seacoast and have the nautical trades Paris lacked.

For a second thing, the Gieses heavily truncated that list.  The real list didn’t have 51 entries; it had several hundred.  (As to that, the Gieses made some errors.  The list didn't cite 58 “scabbardmakers,” there were 52. Aside from anything else, in the eyes of a number of medievalists, the Gieses' scholarship has not aged well.) 

For a third, what they were working with was itself an edited list: one a mid-19th century historian named Hercule Géraud edited from the original manuscript.

For a fourth, the accuracy of the list is in dispute.  Géraud lists 116 goldsmiths, more than the combined number of inn- and tavernkeepers, half again as many as there were coopers ... indeed more than any other profession except for barbers, cobblers and leatherworkers.  In the words of medievalist Dr. Norman Pounds, "it is difficult to explain [their] presence, unless we can assume that their market covered much of France."  It's far from the only inexplicable result: only two lawyers?  Two lacemakers?  ONE roofer?  ONE fletcher?  Huh?

Most importantly, it wasn’t what the Gieses thought it was.  Géraud wasn’t attempting to present a comprehensive occupational list.  He was presenting a list of occupations with matching surnames – the French equivalent of “Joe Smith the blacksmith,” “Karen Cooper the cooper,” and suchlike.  If you went by (say) “Bob Traynor the notary,” then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you were a Jew that went by a patronymic ("Robert ben James") – a large percentage of them – then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you went by a placename ("Bob of Quincy") or a byname ("Ravenswing"), then Géraud didn’t include you.

(If that sounds like the 19th-century equivalent of a Wikipedia-style "List of African-American jazz players from Texas," I don't blame you.  The guy researched what he wanted to research, and there must have been some reason which made sense to Géraud as to why he put it together that way.  One wonders whether late 13th century Parisian goldsmiths just weren't in the habit of going by patronymics or placenames, and contemporary lawyers, lacemakers and fletchers were.)

You can see why I wouldn’t trust that list even if I hadn’t stared at it and immediately gawked at the notion that there are twice as many scabbardmakers as blacksmiths -- the fundamental business of the medieval world, and which was underestimated on Ross’ list by a factor of six.  Certain businesses are omitted entirely; potters, for instance, and most of the nautical trades.  (These do appear on Géraud's original, but in startlingly low numbers.  Just twelve sailors?  Seriously?  For a city the size of Paris, bisected by a great river, a thousand involved in the water-carriage trade would be a bewildering underestimate.)  It's hard to look at that list without wondering what the heck the Gieses were thinking presenting that as a credible business list, even as a footnote in an appendix.

Relying on a single source – never mind a single source far out of context – is poor scholarship. For example, I own a 1945 telephone directory for the city of my birth, Boston's immediate southern suburb.  It has listings for only five barbers; by contrast, it has four pages of listings for beauty salons.  Now I'm sure there are those who'd swallow that factoid whole and infer that in a city of 75,000 men wore their hair to their ankles ... or – in an era of close cropped haircuts – it might have been that neighborhood barbers had plenty of walk-up business, didn't do appointments and didn't feel the need for the expense of telephone service.  (Or, for that matter, that a telephone directory wasn't any more intended to be a complete record of every business in the city of Quincy, than Géraud's list of occupational surnames was intended to be a complete record of every business in Paris.  Go figure.)

My own take on the numbers comes from a basket of sources: Medieval Southampton by Colin Platt, Medieval Trade In The Mediterranean World by Lopez and Raymond, the renowned 14th century The Practice of Commerce by Francesco Pegolotti (Evans' translation), Streider's translation of the 14th century Palaelogus by Georgios Pachymeres, the Milanese and Genoese 12th century reductions published some years ago in the Journal of Economic and Business History,  the 13th century Florentine business list I copied from a lovely text in the BPL, The Merchants of Cahors by Denholm-Young, The Medieval City by Norman Pounds (part of the superb Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World published by Greenwood Press, which I strongly recommend), A Day In A Medieval City by Chiara Frugoni, and the magnificent corpus of work of Fernand Braudel.  And since this is rambling on a bit, I’ll save the actual chart for the next post.

09 November 2013

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.

02 November 2013

NPC of the Day: Kardo

I've been at this, as I've mentioned, for a long time.  I can't readily count how many significant NPCs I've created: hundreds, I expect.  I'm minded to present a new one from time to time.  They'll be posted under the GURPS system, but the numbers ought not be too tough to parse out for those of you unfamiliar with the system.

Something in which I believe is what I call the "viewpoint NPC."  Being a player, IMHO, isn't always easy.  You're not really standing in Swordpoint Ravine, looking up at the ruined tower occupied by orcs, ankle deep in the late spring mountain snow.  You're in my living room, balancing dice and your laptop with a plate of pizza and a can of DC.  You're not going to recall, instinctively, that your character has a loop of rope over your shoulder and is carrying a heavy packload.  You're not in a position to perceive, instinctively, that it's getting pretty damn cold, you're above treeline and you've only got two hours of light left.  You may have forgotten that your pal over there (excuse me, your pal's character), in the fall that happened an hour ago game time -- but, in real life, happened at the last gaming session two weeks ago -- has a wrenched shoulder.

I like, therefore, to have a viewpoint NPC.  He or she's almost always a grunt fighter, without unusual or arcane skills, and has a background consonant with the party's theme.  The V-NPC's generally self-effacing, and doesn't take a lead role in much; they're not brains or problem solvers, and don't aspire to be.  I'm pleased if the V-NPC is a bodyguard or sidekick to one of the PCs.  What the V-NPC is for, more than anything else, is to contribute editorial comment of things that I believe would be painfully obvious to adventurers on the ground, and less so to gamers lounging on my living room couch ... and so I don't need to go into third-person omniscient, which I prefer to avoid.  "Sorry, boss, but I don't like it.  Arkis can't put his full weight on his shoulder, it'll be full dark before we'll be more than halfway up that wall, and the wind's picking up something fierce.  Want me to start pitching camp?"

Kardo -- the disreputable fellow lounging above -- is the longest-running V-NPC I've ever had: he's been around a full decade now, the Ally of my original Quincy group's wizard, and following her around from just-out-of-the-academy to being the greatest PC mage of my campaign's history.  He's undergone a lot of changes over the years, but this is more or less what he looked like in 2003:

ST: 12     DX: 13     IQ: 11     HT: 12     Per: 11     Speed: 6.25     Move:  6  

Advantages: Combat Reflexes, High Pain Threshold, Night Vision+4, Rapid Healing+1, Reputation (+2, as badass pirate, among other pirates, wharf rats and lowlifes)

Perks:  Improvised Weapons, Naval Training, Weapon Bond / favorite cutlass

Disadvantages:  Code of Honor (Pirate); MMA/Rheumatism; One Hand; Sense of Duty: the "crew"; Social Stigma: Second-class citizen; Struggling; Stubbornness, Trademark

Languages:  Avanari (is illiterate) 

Skills: Area Knowledge (Warwik City)-12; Area Knowledge (Eastern Avanari coast)-12; Artist (scrimshaw)-10; Boating-13; Brawling-14; Cooper-10; First Aid-11; Gambling-10; Thrown Weapon: Knife-14; Leadership-11; Scrounging-12; Seamanship-14; Shield-14; Shortsword-15; Smuggling-12; Streetwise-12; Weather Sense-12; Singing-12 

Quirks:  "I am a tattoo artist," "Old Salt," Scrimshaw connoisseur

Raised a cooper's son in the stereotypical Small Outlying Village On The Coast, he ran off to sea at an early age.  Many years of vicissitudes aren't pertinent, but he eventually became a pirate, and a successful one.  Unfortunately, he lost his (off-)hand in a foray, and feeling he couldn't keep up any more, retired to the waterfront of the capital city, where he befriended the family of an inn catering to pirates and rogues.  Their elder daughter became a wizard, and he promised her (now-deceased) parents he'd look after her.  He's done that ever since.

Kardo's a stereotypical, sardonic Old Salt Pirate, and social graces aren't his mug of grog.  (He prefers tea to grog, as it happens.)  Even deep into middle age, he's still respected by other pirates and those who know who he is, and he can still bring it in a fight.  He's a sword-and-board fighter, preferring his favorite cutlass above all.  (It does take him a long time to get his shield settled and on, at least a minute unassisted; any sudden fight, and he won't bother.  It's also rigged to accommodate his stump, and he likewise won't bother with an unfamiliar shield.)  If you're in his "crew," so to speak, he's very loyal to you.  If you're not, well ... He's not well off, and doesn't own more than he can carry.  He has some underworld contacts, which he uses when the wizard reminds him of them.

About his oddest quirk is that he fancies himself a tattoo artist, and carries a comprehensive tattoo kit, complete with several colors of inks.  (His tattoo skill, in GURPS terms, is 7 by default, which is quite poor.)  If he has the time or opportunity, he'll tattoo prisoners with insults taken from prepared stencils, which are about as legible as you'd expect.

There you have it.

For those of you unfamiliar with GURPS, a few explanations: that Night Vision level is "pretty decent night vision," as opposed to "sees like a cat."  High Pain Threshold means that he doesn't suffer particularly from shock, and wounds don't slow him down unless he's unconscious.  Rapid Healing gives him big bonuses to health for day-to-day natural recovery.  Weapon Bond gives him +1 for *that* particular cutlass, and no others.  Naval Training gives him surefootedness on a swaying, bloody deck where others would take heavy DX penalties.  Struggling means he's a bit on the impoverished side; in Kardo's particular case, at this stage in his career, he doesn't own more than he can put in his sea bag.  The rheumatism?  Give him a HT daily, bonuses on hot dry days, penalties on cold wet ones.  If he blows it, he's -2 to everything.  Ow.  Also, never mind the picture: just about the first thing Elaina did when she accumulated enough gold to do so was pay to have his hand regenerated.


For further explanation of system stats, check out this link. 

26 October 2013

"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. 

19 October 2013

Top 12 GMing rules

1)  The LARP I was in for many years had a ritualistic Reading Of The Rules at the start of every event.  The very first of these rules was a wise one: we should all be in this to have fun.

If people aren’t, something’s wrong.  Change it.  If I’m not having fun, something’s wrong; change that. If I need to take a break, then I should; it beats burnout. 

2) Be true to (and aware of) yourself. 

I run the game that I run, not the game someone else wants me to run.  I’m ten times better off seeking players who enjoy my style than to compromise my style to please specific players.  Beyond that, I should know what I can handle: how many players I can comfortably run, how frequently I have time to play, how long sessions should go, how much digression and socializing I want.  Not knowing your own limitations ends in trouble.  By the way?  Articulate this to your players.  I've been hugely wrongfooted twice; once, when I brought a serious, gritty assassin into a Top Secret game that turned out to be patterned after Get Smart!, and a Howard character into a game billed as based on Heinlein's Future History that turned out to be Monty Python meets Number of the Beast.  In both cases I scarcely lasted out the first session.  Like most players, there are styles I do and those I don't do, and you're a lot better off alerting me in advance.

3) Be prepared. 

I not only run a sandbox, the PCs can choose to travel to any other city in the kingdom and there’s a book detailing the top ten people in local politics, how many temporal wizards there are, a paragraph or three of a hundred or more shops, what the major temples are, what the minor temples are ... It’s an appalling amount of work, but I can save my brain power to invent details my volumes of notes don’t cover, as well as not get caught short in contradictions ... hey, wasn’t the elderly priestess at St. Viria’s named Fidessa when we came through Seasteadholm in the spring?  I thought you said the Sufontis Market was in the Zhantil District?  And so on.  However ...

4) ... don't overprepare.

The detail I want, as a player, is the detail I'm not only likely to encounter on my own, but detail which I reasonably think might pertain to the job at hand.  I don't need to have an hour of session taken up by the GM droning on, a paragraph apiece, about every crew member on the merchant ship, from the head cleaners on up.  How about spending that time working out the possible responses to what we do in reaction to your plot?  I assure you I'd rather you had a handle on that than the hometowns, marital statuses and off-duty fashion details of all three bosun's mates.

5) Don’t ever, ever railroad.

It is not my job to tell the players what they’re doing.  It’s their job to tell me what they’re doing.  If they’re not interested in my plot, they’re not.  If they make all the right guesses, then they have a walkover and I need to give them something else to do.  Hey, how about a shopping expedition and a night on the town while I resign myself to more prep work for next time?  In the meantime, what is my job is to have as many of the bases covered as is feasible.  A clever party should be able to come up with a dozen ways to get past any problem.  A clever GM should be able to foresee that they will and have a notion as to how to handle each choice.

6) Know your party. 

I've heard from too many GMs who had the rug ripped out from under them by players reminding them that they had certain abilities the GM forgot to take into consideration.  A prepared GM doesn’t forget these things.  I keep copies of all character sheets, and I have a cheat sheet on a clipboard detailing Advantages, Disadvantages, stats, weapons of choice, defense rolls, reaction mods, Perception and Will checks and the like, for each character.

7) Don’t get bogged down. 

If I can’t calculate the modifiers in the haggling session between Lady Sula and the goldsmith (the smith doesn’t give a damn for the aristocracy, Sula’s a babe, they’re finding each other’s accents a bit tough to follow) in an instant, then I should fudge it without hesitation, and if I can’t do that, I’m in the wrong business; there’s nothing more boring than watching the GM flipping through a stack of rulebooks ten times an hour.  That aside, scenes should only take so long.  NPC soliloquies should only take so long. Players should only get so long to meander or do their solo stuff.  Adventurers and plot arcs should only take so long.  Even an epic tale has its sell-by date.  Brevity is the soul of wit.  Keep the pace moving at all costs. (In combat, too. Combat rounds in the game I play are three seconds long. If the player -- who’s been cooling his heels for a couple of minutes anyway -- can’t decide what to do within ten seconds after I call on him, I skip him.  You should too.)

8) Be a good actor and storyteller. 

You play everyone else in the world.  You set all the scenes.  You handle much of the dialogue.  If you can’t act and refuse to learn, you should be refereeing miniatures wargaming instead.  Practice this.  Use body language, posture, different voices and accents.  If you don’t know how, learn.

9) This is a cooperative exercise. 

Something you need to hammer into the players, if need be; however illogical, this is a consensus-driven game which needs to be handled consensually.  A player who designs a character wildly at odds with the others, a player who wants to freelance all the time, a player who doesn’t want to get on board with the milieu or the setting, these are people who need to be told No.  There are RPGs out there for rugged individualists who don’t want to act in lockstep with others; they call them MMORPGs and LARPs.  There's also a role for GMs who can't bring themselves to say "No:" it's called "player."

10) Use no complexity in the game system you can’t readily handle, and avoid anything you don’t really need.

There are few things, short of drunk and disorderly players vomiting on the battlemat, more disruptive to the flow of a game than a lengthy rules debate.  A lot of RPGs out there have “light” versions or a spate of optional rules that honest to God are “optional.”  Don’t let this happy truth slip past you.

11) Know Your Stuff, or Don't Run Campaigns That Require You Do.

I'm an elitist ... more detail on this in another post.  I think it's incumbent on GMs to learn as much as they can about their milieus, and play them as accurately and realistically as practical.  I really don't want to see howling anachronisms, except in genres where it doesn't matter (30s pulp, for instance), or where the GM has an explanation in hand.  (Yes, I recognize you might not give a damn about verisimilitude, but I warned you in the very first post about my philosophy.)

12) Believe in the Rule of Cool. 

If a player does something outrageously cool in combat, let her pull it off. If a player comes up with a really cool idea, reward him. This will almost never go wrong.

12 October 2013

Quickie adventures: Stuff You Can Use

There's an elegant method for putting together a quick adventure precis, invented by a clever chap named Steve Darlington.  It was intended for episodic format campaigns (and was designed for Buffy games, come to that), and to a degree, it helps if you look at this like you were scripting an ep of a TV sitcom.  So, okay.  Use the following format:

Song:  Think of a favorite, evocative song.  Put it right here.  Now think about the song, its lyrics, its mood, and see if based on that inspiration you can fill in the rest ...

Hook:  What would the trailer for the episode portray as a teaser?  This can usually be described in a sentence or two.

Problem:  This is a paragraph which describes, in more detail, the situation the PCs are expected to solve ...

Complications:  ... and the barriers which are in the PCs' path.  This not only includes the Big Bad of the episode adventure, but various other difficulties and any side plots.  Even so, don't spent more than a paragraph.

Resolutions:  How do the PCs solve the problem?

Fun Stuff:  Many adventures work best with a little comedy (or at least lightheartedness); this is where you put it in.  Bumbling NPCs are classic, of course.

Themes:  Pure high-concept; what would your advertising tagline be?

So let me run through an example for you.  I originally did a bunch of eps for my limited-run Firefly campaign based on Moody Blues songs, and here's one ported over to fantasy:

Song: Legend of a Mind (Timothy Leary’s Dead)

Hook:  The village Sensimil in Altania's got the best, I mean the best dreamdrowse anywhere, and a lot of folks like them a good bowl of it to see the vast universes Beyond.  So there your band of smugglers is trading, but the village has a bandit problem ...

Problem: The village elders pitch this not so much the party eradicating the bandits as training the villagers up to do it themselves, and if you help them out there’s an extra couple sacks in it for you.  Now as it happens the village is quite well-off through the trade, and they’ve got a startling amount of military gear: the best of weapons and armor, crossbows, heaps of bolts, and even some war chariots and ballistae.

Complications: Think 1960s commune; the villagers just can’t wrap their heads around violence.  They’re none of them good shots, they think military discipline’s a bit silly, and they’ve all got stab fright.  Intellectually they know what needs doing, but in their guts they shrink from it, and it’ll become pretty apparent pretty quickly that the party’s going to have to hunt down the bandits themselves.  That being said, most of that fancy gear is still in the packing bundles, new and glistening with oil -- and how did they get what’s plainly Fifth Legion arms? -- and needs going over and straightening out.

There are just a dozen bandits, but they’re bushwhackers and are not just going to sit fat and happy for the party to ambush.  They’ve no qualms about retreating to prepared strong points.  Play them exactly as cannily as if they were the party and the villagers were the bad guys ... for instance, all that nifty gear’s in a single storehouse with nothing more than a padlock to keep the kids away.  Moreover, two of their number are ex-locals with a bit more sand than the villagers, and the village headwoman’s grandson is their inside mole (he thinks the bandit leader is dashing and cute).  The bandits’ goal is to cow the village into submission so they can take over.

Resolutions: Whack out the bandits; it’d be more impressive if the villagers do so.  Pray the local government doesn’t find out the weapons and armor, which were hijacked from the Fifth's legionary encampment five years ago and unmistakeably bear its scorpion-and-spear sigil!

Fun Stuff: It is the villagers’ inalienable custom to be stoned at any time of the night or day, and some of them don’t just stop at the raw dreamdrowse, there's a plant wizard in the village who magically refines the damn stuff.   Leave them to their own devices for long enough and they won’t be able to fire an arrow because the colors of the fletchings clash with their hallucinations.  Sitting around in a circle, clasping hands, and chanting mantras while their platoon leader turns a prayer wheel five minutes before a battle is by no means out of character.

Themes: He’ll take you up, he’ll bring you down, he’ll plant your feet back firmly on the ground.

And there you have it.  I ran the villagers as Rastafarians (a subculture unfamiliar to my players), lingo and practices tossed in, and they were damn near ready to burn the place to the ground out of vexation by the end of the adventure.  I loved it.

05 October 2013

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?")

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And there you have them; the Gaming Geek Fallacies.