Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT (Pt II)

1)    Location

Any urban area, whether village, town or city, arises out of the need for trade.  While a small town can coalesce in a prosperous inland farming district or gather around a castle (indeed, skilled labor is necessary for a castle to be built), larger towns or cities locate on navigable rivers or natural harbors.  Just as an example, how many cities in the United States before the railroad era were NOT founded on a navigable waterway?  (Answer below. †)  One of the reasons in colonial America that Boston took off as a major port and Plymouth didn't was that Plymouth's harbor is quite shallow and silts up readily.

Consider also access to building materials, wood for fuel, fresh water, and nearby arable land.  The more negative factors there are that deter growth – the site's on an invasion route, a lack of forests for fuel, mountainous or swampy terrain – there must be counterbalancing benefits that make people want to live there (there’s a large gold mine, the location is unusually defensible, the kingdom’s northern border army needs a base, it's the birthplace of the Goddess of Winter and a pilgrimage site) and/or mitigating factors (less need for fuel because the town's on the equator, the local lichen is magically nutritious, the river going through is the only decent water source within 500 miles).  Another reason Boston took off and Plymouth didn't was that the soil of Plymouth's latifundia was sandy and not hugely fertile, and Boston's wasn't.

You’re also not going to get a town of any size far in the outback, away from trade routes or transportation infrastructure, no matter the benefits.  When all is said and done, the main reason people live in towns -- dirty, smelly, crowded, verminous, disease-ridden, dangerous places at medieval tech -- is to find work.  If work isn't to be had, folks aren't going to stick around.  If there are no resources and no trade, a ruler would have to be mad (and filthy rich) to subsidize a city out in the middle of nowhere, for no good reason whatsoever.  It's expensive enough, and hard enough on the soldiers, to subsidize a strictly military outpost in a forsaken outback: ask the Romans, the French, the British, or the mid- to late-19th century Americans, for that matter.

If your realm tries anyway to maintain a sizable town away from key natural resources (see below), that means you need an equally-sizable logistics train to support it.  This is easily disruptible by the realm's enemies.  (This, of course, can form the basis for plots.)

2)     Resources

A town of a thousand people will consume roughly twenty bushels of grain, around 800 gallons of wine, tea or beer, about three cattle, and about a hundred smaller livestock ... daily.  Throw in the vast amounts of vegetables common to the low-tech peasant diet, fruit, cooking oil, herbs ... Coming back to water.  A human needs about two liters of fresh water a day (or liquid equivalent) in order to survive, more to offset strenuous activity or high temperatures.  Cooking and washing use up a good deal more.  The various industries of a large medieval town or city uses roughly ten times that much fresh water per capita – for tanners, laundries, fullers, foundries, smiths, numerous others.  

(Never mind agriculture.  It takes four tons of water to grow enough cotton for a pair of trousers.  The amount of water livestock sucks up as a percentage of their food value is far more than grain or vegetables need.)

You’ll have to have market squares to hawk that food.  That means wagonloads of food and drink (the twenty-five bushels of grain alone takes up not quite two wagons) each and every day, and if your roads are impassible in winter, you need many more wagons coming through before then.  Storage?  Well ... if you keep your civic food stores dry, protected from vermin, and secure, they’ll keep two to four years without magic.  Maybe.  Say, does your gamesystem have a food preservation enchantment?  Because without that, food goes bad fast.  You don't have refrigerators, so the tomato that gets picked or the fish that gets caught needs to be eaten today.  By tomorrow it'll be iffy, and the day thereafter it'll be compost.  Those vegetables and fish -- obviously -- are NOT coming from the next province over.  They're coming from 5-10 miles away at the outside ... or, well, before they get to market, they become compost.

Also consider the stability of the countryside.  If you have continual plagues, invasions, bandit hordes and wars trucking through your lands, you’re not going to have prosperous cities, because there won’t be enough peasants left to grow enough food to feed them, nor enough traders surviving the gauntlet to provide raw materials and needful goods at economically feasible prices.  (That thousand-person town will need a minimum of five square miles of dedicated farmland, exclusive of the aforementioned peasant farmers needed to grow that food ... presuming the soil is good and the land is well watered and flat, there are no droughts, famines or civil disruptions, that the farmers employ sound agricultural practices, and that the harvest isn't whisked away to support a far-off royal capital or the realm's own marauding army.  For anyone who knows anything about medieval life -- or, indeed, low-tech agricultural travails generally -- that is a very tall order, and most medieval towns were food-importers.) You’ll also need a surplus enough to support non-productive elements, such as religious centers, universities, the aforementioned army or the bureaucracy of a capitol city.

3)    Trades

The absolute basic tradesmen without which a village doesn’t exist are a smith and a miller.  Next in importance (not necessarily in that order) comes potters, carpenters, weavers, leatherworkers, masons, coopers, and at least one tavern/alehouse. 

A small town will have multiples of the more important trades, and specialization will start to occur: extra blacksmiths turn into farriers, silversmiths and armorers; weavers into tailors, dyers and fullers; leatherworkers into saddlers and cobblers; carpenters into coopers, cartwrights, cabinet and furniture makers.  Specialized businesses appear: scribe/notaries, brokers, herbalists, shipwrights, healers, various food occupations such as brewers, bakers and butchers.  

(Psst: this doesn't mean that a bog-standard carpenter has no idea how to fashion a new wheel for a wagon, or that the country smith can't figure out how to make a broadsword.  They're just not specialists, may well not have access to specialist tools or the best possible materials, and aren't particularly practiced at making swords or shaping wheels.  Those goods may well be "Cheap", in GURPS terms: something that doesn't work as well as a specialist's creation, which will malfunction more often and break more readily.)

As a town gets larger, more specialization will be the rule.  Some towns concentrate on particular trades – the center of a wool-producing district will have a preponderance of cloth manufacturing trades (as much as two-thirds of all merchants), as well as wool merchants and factors for outside trade.  A grape-producing district will not only need vintners and distillers, but coopers and glassblowers as well.  Two-thirds nautical trades is pretty standard for any port city – chandlers, shipfitters, boatwrights, brokers, warehouses, sail lofts, ropewalks, salters, longshoremen, and the several elements of a fishing industry.  And so on.

Below is a rough outline of what businesses will be found in your population:

Village up to 500 people:

1 church (with one, maybe two clergy, and appropriate acolytes; also possibly lay-led)
1 healer/herbalist/physician (in some cultures, this would be one of the priests)
1 scribe/notary
1 inn/tavern
1 mill
1 smith

2-3 miscellaneous businesses, depending on prevailing local industries.  A seaport village might have a boatwright and a chandler, a farming village might have a tanner, a mountain village might have a mining concern, anyone might have a cartwright – especially if the village is on a highroad.

The village wouldn’t have much in the way of bureaucracy:  the mayor/reeve/headman, who’d be a respected farmer or businessman, and perhaps a single representative from the local overlord or central government.  If the village is on a significant trade route, there may be a tax/toll collector, perhaps a small barracks of a sergeant and three or so soldiers. 

In addition, most other residents will do various jobs – carpentry, pottery, basketweaving, brewing, weaving, masonry – on a part time basis.  There wouldn't be storefronts or colorful shop signs much beloved of Hollywood and Ren Faires – why, when everyone knows what everyone does? – but be more along the lines of "Eh, ma'am, if'n ye want some good jars, Goodwife Adrienne's a dab hand with the pottery.  That there's her cottage, the one wi'the gate missin' a hinge.  The smith promised he'd get t'that next week." 

Neither Goodwife Adrienne nor much of any craftsman the village has will have a plethora of off-the-shelf wares, but this is dependent on the time of year.  Low-tech villagers/farmers spent a lot of time in the winter doing up various crafts for future sale, mostly to itinerant peddlers and merchants coming around when the weather clears. The adventurers swinging by the village in March may well find those good sealed pint pottery jars they forgot to buy before leaving the city.

General merchant?  Not in anything this small.  Small town "general merchants" such as you see on TV shows or in 18-19th century reenactment museums are anachronistic to the medieval period.  Such wares that aren't made locally come from two sources: a local taking orders from his neighbors before taking his cart to the Big City to trade, or traveling peddlers coming through the area from time to time. 

Speaking of itinerant peddlers and merchants ... depending on the area, you might not have a local cobbler -- for instance -- but one riding a circuit.  Fellow's usually in town the first two weeks of May, the locals bring him cured hides, he churns out fitted good quality boots.  Probably would have no problem putting the adventurers on his list, if they didn't mind hanging out.  If the adventurers plod on through any time between June and April, no luck.

Locals also take on minor posts on a part-time basis – a village will have a constable, a handful of aldermen, and other more minor posts: a hayward, a woodward, depending on how stratified your culture is.  The village may have a one-room schoolhouse -- well, the dwelling of the teacher, anyway -- and classes might be taught by the scribe, a priest, or an educated villager.

Town up to 1500 people:

1 bank
3-5 scribes/notaries/lawyers (some working for the others)
2 churches (with 4-5 clergy between them and appropriate acolytes)
3 healer/herbalists/apothecaries
2 butchers
1 baker
1-2 fishers or trappers (depending on location)
1 full scale inn, 2-3 taverns, 1 brothel
3 blacksmiths (one a specialist, such as a farrier), 1 silver/tinsmith
3 cloth shops, one which is likely to be a rug or tapestry maker; 1 tailor
4-5 general merchants, one which is likely to be a specialist (outfitters, say)
2-3 mills
1 large-scale pottery
1-2 masons
1-2 carpenters, 1 cart/wheelwright
1-2 leatherworkers
7-8 miscellaneous businesses

Now we have a prosperous town, and the center of its district.  When the local farmers say "I'm walkin' t' town, be back tomorra," this is where they're headed.  The 500-person village might be in the middle of nowhere.  This town wouldn't have gotten this big if it was.

Other than general merchants and chandlers, they still aren't likely to have much in the way of off-the-shelf wares.  But ... I was struck when visiting the silversmith's shop in Historic Deerfield (replicating a mid-17th century New England frontier town).  It didn't have off-the-shelf either.  What it *did* have was a row of silver and pewter spoons, and a row of pewter plates and bowls.  They were all presentation pieces, done up with various borders, decorations and styles.  Pick a pattern, that's what the silversmith would make up for you.  This is how things were done low-tech.

A number of businesses have a DIY element.  Take a bakery, for instance.  Many a low-tech bakery was less about churning out loaves themselves than in providing oven space for the neighborhood housewives to bring their own loaves for baking, being rather more economical that way.  (This was also a sideline of neighborhood taverns, by the bye.)

This is the point where a small bureaucracy would arise.  The town would have a mayor/reeve, a captain for the local militia and who’d also be responsible for maintenance of any defenses, a tax collector and a dedicated scribe.  The mayor might double as the magistrate, if there wasn't a feudal ruler close to hand.  If a regional center of any sort, the town would attract central government staff – a district governor or noble and his staff, a couple dozen soldiers and officers – and there'd be an appropriate building housing the same: a manor house, a small keep.

For towns of over 1500 people, use the following percentages:

* Bakery: 1 per 750.
* Brewers: 1 per 1500, at a ratio of 3:1 between brewers and distilleries/wineries; obviously variable depending on what booze-producing crops you have.  Inns and taverns often brewed their own tipple.
* Butcher: 1 per 800.
* Carpenters: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between "rough" carpenters and specialty crafts such as wheel/cartwrights, cabinetmakers, coopers and carvers.
* Churches: 1 per 750.
* Clergy: 1 per 200, obviously hugely variable depending on how religious your town is.
* Dyers: 1 per 3000.  This signifies a large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Financial: 1 per 1000, at a ratio of 1:2 between banks and moneychangers/lenders.
* Fishmongers: 1 per 400 (selling fresh) in a port, 1 per 1200 (selling dried or salted) inland.
* Foundries: 1 per 5000.  Again, a large-scale industrial operation.
* General Merchants: 1 per 350, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between “country stores,” salters/spice merchants and brokers/factors/large-scale shippers.
* Inn/Tavern: 1 per 200, at a ratio of 1:5 between inns and taverns.  These neighborhood taverns are not your stereotype Giant Common Room places; a period neighborhood tavern seated about 30 with a bar about the size of a kitchen counter, and the clientele was exclusively from that block. (This aside from that a number of shopkeepers would end the business day by setting out a few stools and a barrel of brew, turning into impromptu barkeeps.)
* Leatherworkers: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between generic leatherworkers and cobblers/saddlers/etc.
* Masons: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:2:4 between sculptors, masons and stonecutters.
* Mills: 1 per 600, at a rough ratio of 3:1 between grist mills and sawmills, fulling mills and the like.
* Potteries: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:4 between glaziers/glassblowers and potteries.
* Scribes: 1 per 150, at a ratio of 1:2:5 between lawyers, notaries and scribes.
* Smith: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 3-4:1 between blacksmiths and silver/tin/goldsmiths/armorers.
* Tanners: 1 per 3500.  Another large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Teachers: 1 per 200, of which 1 in 4-5 are non-teaching scholars and scientists, who might nonetheless do part-time teaching and tutoring to raise some coin.  Small neighborhood schools and academies were far more common in medieval and Renaissance times than many folks imagine, and literacy rates in urban communities were 50% or better above the blue-collar classes.
* Textile trades: 1 per 100, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between weavers/spinners/carders, tailors/carpet/tapestry makers and furriers.  A town of this size probably has at least one large-scale cloth manufactory.
* Universities: These come around one to a city.  Starting at about 10,000 people, you’ll get at least an advanced institute of learning of some sort.  Capitals of any size, as well as major regional cities, will have a full-blown university.

Miscellaneous Shops: 1 per 200.  Possibilities for these:

* Common: stables, brothels, ropemakers, herbalist/apothecaries, barbers, lampmakers, painters, bathhouses, sharpeners, thatchers.

* Less common: bowyers/fletchers, ship’s chandlers, candlemakers, horse trainers, jewelers, outfitters, pawnshops, soapmakers, undertakers, messengers/heralds.

* Rare: gaming houses, perfumers, papermakers, seers, engravers, clockmakers, animal trainers, architects, cartographers, engineers, instrument makers. 

Keep in mind regional trades – for instance, a seaport would have sailmakers, at least one ropewalk, fishdryers, nautical carvers, chandlers, warehouses, specialty ship’s carpenters and smiths, navigators, steersmen, boatmakers, tattoo artists, shipwrights, and if large enough marine underwriters and freight shippers.  A mountain mining town would have specialty manufacturing shops producing mining tools and equipment, sawmills, assayers, alchemists (to produce certain chemicals necessary for mining and assaying certain ores), trappers and the like.

This is the population level where guilds will start to exist; around 4-5 similar businesses is the minimum number to form a sustainable guild.  Those aren’t the only support groups, of course; churches will have at least one sodality (and usually more than that) each.

The market square of a town this size now only sees the local farmers selling vegetables, but itinerant traders peddling just about everything else.  These are often heavily regulated and taxed, and crackdowns from town guilds are frequent.  Entertainers also exist, largely performing in the market, in front of any civic building or church, or available to play in an inn.

Towns and cities of this level have sizable bureaucracies, operating out of a civic hall.  Areas such as tax collection, records, justice and civic defense spawn whole departments.  A seaport would have a harbormaster, his staff, and naval units; any trading town would have an official in charge of weights and measures ... and probably in possession of the "standard" weights and weighbeams!  Formal military companies almost certainly exist. 

4)    Design

Cities aren’t particularly logical – the odds of having a nice grid layout, if you’re mapping it, are poor.  Consider that your city started out as a village.  It’ll have a relatively primitive tangle of streets in the center, haphazardly radiating out of the original village, which will center around the river/harbor/major road running through the middle, or perhaps around a religious center, castle or other fortification.

Planned towns did exist, but it took certain situations: a government seeking to settle an unpeopled area, a feudal lord wanting the profits and trade a town could provide.  Even so, most of them quickly spread organically from its original planned center ... those that survived.  (Many planned towns quickly failed.)  Plans were sometimes imposed upon extant towns and cities by new rulers or by the growing unsuitability of the original town; numerous cities in Europe had "oldtowns" and "newtowns" pressed together.  Another factor would be in the aftermath of a war or a major fire -- the latter being the chief danger to a medieval town -- where entire city blocks and neighborhoods might be redesigned after being razed.

Obviously, waterborne businesses (mills, shipwrights) will cluster around said river.  It was common for a river town to expand to the other bank, which necessitated at least one bridge.  Oftentimes the rich and poor parts of town were differentiated by which bank of the river they were on.

Low-class and odoriferous trades (tanneries, dyers, soapmakers, slaughterhouses) will cluster downwind in the “poor” part of town.  Beyond that, certain trades required a lot of space -- metalworkers, cartwrights, potters, animal trades -- and gravitated to the peripheries where land was more available and cheaper.

As towns grow larger, civic areas and buildings emerge: courts, wells and aqueducts, town halls, theaters, multiple market squares, caravanserais, jails, belltowers, stadia.

Buildings would also grow taller.  As the town got increasingly cramped, the only way to grow was up.  Townhouses gained a second story, and sometimes a third, and a fourth.  Seldom designed to take the load, with oft-mediocre building materials, and where no one had ever heard of building codes, structural collapses were all too frequent.

Psst ... don't forget canals.  Something you see in a lot of maps of low-tech cities that you do not see on maps of RPG cities are canals.  A lot of low-tech cities had a lot of canals.  It is vastly easier to haul large cargoes on water than it is on land -- much less congestion, many fewer horses, much greater carrying capacity.  (Even today, something like 95% of the world's trade by tonnage is water-borne.)  Canals also help the defensibility of a city ... and speaking of which:
 
5)    Defense

If the town is walled -- and unless your town is in a strong, powerful realm with secure borders and no internal threats (not a hallmark of RPG settings), it absolutely will be -- it may have been gotten its walls quite some time before.  If so, chances are the town’s grown beyond the perimeter.  Medieval towns were almost invariably horribly overcrowded, disease-ridden places, and while it took extreme population pressure to abandon the protection of the walls, sooner or later it happened.

Some medieval cities had several separate walls, built haphazardly over centuries, all attempts to maintain some manner of defensible perimeter.  Consider also that such construction is expensive – building a castle in just a few years took so much money few nobles managed it. The local nobles and magnates were generally taxed to pay for improving city defenses, and generally did so grudgingly, intermittently, and often only under duress.  Defenses were also expensive to maintain (it didn't help that they were often poorly built, with mediocre materials, by the aforementioned strongarmed magnates), and it's entirely possible that broad sections of the walls are in disrepair.  Indeed, the reason why so many Roman-era buildings were in ruins or disappeared entirely is that they were often cannibalized for the stone necessary to build or repair walls, in addition to other buildings. 

Beyond that, walls are inconvenient.  They make carrying goods to and fro a pain in the ass, and they're an impediment to growth and renovation.  (This didn't make the magnates any happier about coughing up the gold to build them.)  Wharves, docks, shipyards and mills are going to be on the wrong side of walls.  Gates built in sufficient number to relieve the pressure compromise the defensibility of the place.

Speaking of which, soldiers.  Standing forces, in medieval western Europe, were by our standards astonishingly small.  Take medieval Southampton, one of England's chief ports and the entrepot for the wool and wine trade between England and France in the Middle Ages, with an estimated population within the walls between 2500-2800.  Even after a catastrophic raid by the French in 1338, with the financial support of major nobles the King directed them to provide, the town struggled to maintain a permanent garrison of as much as a hundred soldiers.  Organized civic police forces just did not exist (at the time, Southampton maintained just six night watchmen), and a castle garrison might well be a couple dozen soldiers or less.

6) Personalities

A theme that keeps repeating throughout medieval annals is that towns and cities are firmly in the grasp of an oligarchy.  A small handful of families and personalities dominate local politics, commerce and social life, often for generations.  They own the guilds that matter, public posts are filled by their patronage, civic amusements are graced by their money and presence.  The laws and rules are rigged in their favor, and the culture is nowhere close to being a meritocracy.  Fail to be very, very polite to the Astirians or the Riannels, and suddenly merchants are very slow to take your orders, and the city's bureaucrats are all "out in meetings" when you show up ...

This ethos doesn't sit well with the average gamer, raised in a Western democracy relatively free of corruption and bearing at least the appearance of a meritocracy, and bringing to the gaming table the paradigm that the PCs are the swaggering masters of the earth before whom lesser mortals (read, "NPCs") all kowtow.  And it's okay if that's one of the aspects of medieval life -- along pervasive filth, disease, slavery, racism, fanaticism and sexual abuse -- you don't want to play.  YMMV ("your mileage may vary," code on many a gaming forum for "Whatever works for you is okay, it doesn't bother me if you have different preferences") is one of the more useful aphorisms to keep in mind when doing tabletop RPG setting creation. 

7) Giant Cities

Yes, I know.  A lot of gamers love giant, million-man cities.  A lot of gamewriters love them, too.  They just don't work.  A city of half a million people or more on medieval tech -- a Rome, a Constantinople, a Baghdad, a Chang'an -- requires a continent-spanning empire and awesome transportation infrastructure to survive.  Once the raiders/pirates have free run of things, once the empire falls, those cities collapse overnight.  In the course of just one century, the population of Rome fell twentyfold, and it didn't get back over a million for over 1500 years, until the 1930s.  And why bother?  A city of 10,000 will have several hundred businesses, more than all but the craziest gamers are ever going to create.  

Heck, take medieval England, the land gamewriters and settings creators love to emulate.  Only two cities in England -- London and York -- are known with a certainty to have broken 20,000 residents at any point in the medieval era.  (London topped out at around 50,000.)  Bristol and Norwich topped out at just over 10,000, and even counting the suburbs, Southampton couldn't have had as much as 5000. 

 ✵  ✵  ✵  ✵  ✵  ✵  ✵  ✵  ✵

POSTSCRIPT:  A kind reader commented on MDDR Pt I, and made a remark that provoked this postscript: that he'd read Ross' numbers, as many gamers have, but that the numbers didn't work for him.

This is important.  Let's take those 52 scabbardmakers, shall we?  That seems ludicrous, but presuming the number is accurate, there are a few possible explanations.  One is simply that there were a honking lot of swords and daggers in 13th century Paris.  (Not the rapiers and main-gauches most people think of when they think of Parisian swordsmen – those weren't invented for over 200 more years.  We don't actually know what kinds of sword for certain; the earliest known combat manual, the so-called "Tower manuscript," dates from no earlier than 1300.)

So, okay: now what happens if you envision Paris with severe weapon restrictions?

Answer: you probably don't have many scabbardmakers.

And that's the notion to have in mind when assigning numbers.  If you have an illiterate populace, there'll be far fewer booksellers, papermakers and the like.  (The number of scribes and teachers might not change – business still needs to be transacted, and those teachers might be working on rote memorization!)  If there's no native clay, there'll be more basketmakers, more turners and more leatherworkers churning out substitutes, and buildings will be made of wood, not brick.  If the Word of the Gods is that anyone who sails out of sight of land is accursed and damned, a "port" town might have a few coast-hugging vessels for bulk transport and a modest fishing fleet, and that's it.  If half the population of your town are 400-lb rock trolls, you'll need a lot more food coming in to support it.  And so on.

One last factor to keep in mind, not just for demographics but for anyone trying to tell you How Things Were In Medieval Times: we're talking about a few hundred years.  The notion that "medieval" was some monolithic state of being where everything everywhere was exactly the same for 400 years is nonsense.  Poor, chilly, backwards, thinly populated Scotland was a far different place than the rich, densely populated, glittering city-states of Northern Italy (and, as to that, both were far different places than China, India, Persia, Africa, Japan, Mesoamerica ... lands our Eurocentric myopia usually leave out of "medieval" equations).  The 11th century was a far different time than the 14th.

Heck, think of our own era, and how quickly things change.  What kind of businesses exist in our cities, and in what numbers?  In 1954, computers were giant installations that cost millions of dollars and filled large rooms; you could no more obtain them retail than you could walk into Filene's and buy an armored regiment.  In 1984, indy computer stores were popping up all over the place: I bought my first one from a dedicated Atari ST store in Boston.  In 2014, those computer stores are now mostly gone – computers are ubiquitous consumer appliances you can get in your average department store.  I doubt it'll take until 2044 for "personal computers" to be museum pieces, and everyone's using smartphones and tablets ... or their successors.

So – YMMV.

 

POSTSCRIPT II:  If you've read this article before, you might have found it changed.  I first published it over ten years ago.  I've expanded it, tossed in a few more things, tweaked the numbers here and there, cited a book or two I've read in the meantime.  I mention this for a reason: medieval demographics and economics is a still-evolving field.  Our scholarship is better.  Our sources have improved.  New facts, new materials come to light.  Old shibboleths are found wanting and slough away.  The bias of the field in favor of western Europe fades.  Scholars of a previous era, their partisan axegrinding and feuds forgotten, are supplanted by newer ones.

And I keep reading and finding new information myself.  So why not?  Anyone writing a blog does so at least in part out of a healthy ego, but the goal, after all, is to open eyes and make it easier for you to run games.  If I point fingers at others and claim that their numbers aren't good enough, then I need to cowboy up and make my own as good as I can manage.  So drop in on this article if you have a mind, every rare once in a while.  I might have gotten a clue between now and then.

 

† - Indianapolis, and the founders thought the White River was navigable.

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.

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.

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. 

"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. 

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.

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.

GGF #5: “X” Is The Opposite Of Fun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there you have them; the Gaming Geek Fallacies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GGF #3: Magic Changes Society

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

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

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

Life doesn't work that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GGF #2: We Have To Have One Of Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GGF #1: Gunpowder Is Naughty

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

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

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

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

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

Gaming Geek Fallacies

Plymouth is the home of my heart, forever.  It's appropriate to begin with a sunrise!

I've long been a fan of Michael Wilson's brilliant Five Geek Social Fallacies.  They're extremely applicable to tabletop gamers (as, indeed, to most subcultures).

It struck me early on that there are several shibboleths taken as much as unquestioned, unchallenged articles of faith by tabletop gamers as GSF is with those subcultures.  So I wrote up my list of Gaming Geek Fallacies -- really, posting them somewhere permanent was the motivating factor behind me starting up a blog in the first place -- and here they are to get the ball rolling.  Hope you enjoy the ride!

GGF #1: Gunpowder Is Naughty

GGF #2: We Have To Have One Of Everything

GGF #3: Magic Changes Society

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

GGF #5: “X” Is The Opposite Of Fun

A beginning is a very delicate time.

So here I am.  Hoorah.

My name is Bob, and I've been involved with roleplaying games since the 1970s.  I've played them, I've gamemastered them, I've created them, I've playtested them, I've written for them, I've made money off of them, and I've pontificated a great deal about them -- gaming and music are the two enduring hobbies of my adult life.

That pontification bit is what I'm doing here.  I've been active on several gaming forums over a decade and more, and I'm an opinionated fellow.  I'm going to put down my thoughts, and even a solution or three.  Whether anyone cares, that's another matter, but heck, the Internet would never have gotten off the ground if its creators worried about how many people would bother with it.

My blog title comes from the legend of the invisible city of Kitezh, the Russian version of Atlantis or Brigadoon, and is the specific title of the last scene of an opera based on the tale by Rimsky-Korsakov.  From 1981 until around 1989, I was active on the UMass computer system, where there was a primitive chatroom facility called "Confer."  (As geeks will, they couldn't leave standard practice well enough alone, and insisted that it be pronounced COHN-fer.)  The program allowed users to create their own private chatrooms, which could then be made invisible -- and thus open for private invites -- and when I did this, I used this name for my chatroom.  I rather like the notion of reviving it.

I've a couple rules of the road that will color -- directly or otherwise -- everything I'll say.  First off, I don't play D&D.  Haven't played it for over twenty years, haven't GMed it in over thirty.  I'm a GURPS GM.  I'm happy with the system, I've been using it since before it was published, I'm not inclined to change.

Second, I'm a realism bug.  You'll hear more on that down the road, but IMHO, the "It's a game so trying to make it 'realistic' is stupid" crack is moronic BS, and you'll hear my refutation of that down the road.

Getting those out of the way now will save angst later.

I might be invisible here.  But I'm speaking nonetheless.