The Tao of D&D

The map below shows the basins of the Senegal, Gambia and Casamance rivers:

1 hex = 20 miles

The area is commensurate with modern day Senegal, Gambia, the southern edge of Mauritania and western Mali.

This week, I "finished" my pricing table.  That is to say, it isn't as though I won't continue to add things to the table or give it more details, but rather that it is once more game functional.  If I want to find a price for an object in Qarshi, south Uzbekistan, I can once again calculate that price in about a minute forty-five seconds.  Once upon a time, it took less than a minute, but the table is huge now and as such more challenging.

I said a year ago that adding France broke the original table.  This month, in the space of about ten days, I added 110 market cities in Spain and Morocco without hardly a quibble.  That's the trick: we make things more complicated in order to make them simpler.  My world now has 1,066 distinct markets selling 1,519 individual goods and services.  Fun times.  Compare this with my discussion about the system on the wiki.

The pricing table is available on patreon for a $10 donation . . .

. . . aaaaaaaaaand we interrupt this post for a fire in the building.  I was in mid-sentence above and realizing that there was a burning smell and that it was not my imagination.  I checked in the hallway and it smelled like someone had burned something on a stove - but worse, definitely worse.  So I called 911 calmly, then exited the building as I could hear the pumpers coming.

The apartment down the hall had a pot burning on the stove all right - and the apartment was empty.  So, when you think you forgot to turn off the stove before leaving home, yes, that sort of thing happens.

I'm back at my desk now, no harm done.  As I was saying, the pricing table, technological terror that it is, works fully now.  The first part of this won't mean much to the casual reader - it consists of calculating out the distances between markets and then dividing that distance into the unit I use to determine the presence of a given resource or form of manufacturing:

A very small sampling, showing that the base market for this calculation is Barcelona, recently added to my tables (the distance is 1 hex, so that everything made there is divided by itself).

The line of totals (in bold) along the top are then applied to the pricing table itself, thusly:


Once I paste in the generated numbers into the "input references" column, all the costs for all the products on the table (including cost of containers for liquids or composite parts for items) is automatically generated.  The change is instantaneous.

There's then a random number that is rolled to see if the given reference is available today.  If it isn't, then none of the things on the market table will show as available for purchase.  At the moment, the random generator is designed to deny only very rare things, leaving most of the equipment table the players will use intact.

In the long run, however, I can build a personalized determination for each item, based on things like seasonal availability, status of the buyer, familiarity with the town where the item is purchases, special skills in hunting out items, time spent looking for the thing wanted or whatever other framework I'd like to add.

I wanted to point out that those who may not be interested in building a trade system that the numbers in the input column can be changed manually, as well.  Therefore, if the user wanted to increase or decrease any given substance or product, just because, the table will manage that.  This means that a user who only wanted one equipment table for their campaign could play with the file, minutely adjusting things until getting exactly the numbers that fits with their campaign.

I will be adding to the table; there's the random number/availability thing to work on and there's also wages to be added (there's been minimum work on that).  These are things I've wanted to build for a long time but couldn't, largely because the file needed to be better organized and designed.  I've built it now to expand it much further.

Interesting . . . I was just thinking, I gave a class this morning on Decision Making as a DM, and then within about half an hour I had to make a decision whether or not to call the fire department.  Same process, really.  Ain't life great?

Let's just stick to game relevant content today, hm?

Very slowly, with my mapmaking, I am making my way around the northwest bulge of Africa.  This includes the Cape Verde Islands, about 350 miles west of Mauritania and Senegal, a group that I'm sure aren't nearly as well known as the Azores, the Madieras or the Canaries.  This is because the Cape Verde lie in the doldrums and, though tropical, are much more desert-like than other groups in the subtropics.  They're not lush, not especially productive; the population has a very sad history.

1 hex = 20 miles or 32 km

For two centuries, including the time my world takes place, Portuguese slavers would dump slaves from all over Gambia and Guinea on the islands, where they would wait - often starving - before being taken by another ship to Brazil.  There is no 'native' population; the islands were uninhabited prior to the Portuguese use of them. Today, the people are the offspring of multiple backgrounds, many of them tracing their lineage to slaves that escaped and hid in the back mountain country on the various islands.

I haven't decided if that's how I intend to depict them - though I'm leaning in that direction because it would be a tremendous opportunity for a party to seize the islands and right the wrongs being committed there.  If this was the case, then the slave population, being temporary, wouldn't count in the island's population.  In terms of trade, this would leave the remaining European population being industrious, diligent entrepreneurs and artisans.

I do recognize that it's a lot easier to leave real evil behind with a game world.  I wrote a post about that.  Still, there's something to be considered about actual human behaviour and actual human history: unhappiness is a part of fantasy.  The Brothers Grimm certainly understood that; and perhaps there's something in my being Russian, as well.  Cold brutality often figures in Eastern European fantasy - while the West in general has a long, unpleasant history with merchandising misery, as the Cape Verde testifies.

I'd love to run a campaign where a party seizes control of the islands, fights off a Portuguese fleet (perhaps with the help of others) and ultimately establishes a peaceful culture.  But . . . and this is important . . . I believe in the player's agenda.  If they wanted to run a game where they bought one of the islands and used it for the exact reasons the Portuguese used, then I would play that game too.  Not because it's right or wrong, but because no one is being hurt and we're all adult and mature enough to understand the difference between exploring a thought and living it.

The historical masters of those islands lived it and helped create the horror that continues to pollute large parts of Portuguese colonial culture.  I doubt I will ever have players with the stomach to even pretend to live it.  But having the opportunity to make a group with the idea then feel the consequences of their actions, rubbing their noses in it, would be an interesting campaign.  A very interesting campaign.

A much more proactive opportunity, I think, then simply denying adults that chance to explore it.

"In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe decided to study whether or not stress contributes to illness.  They surveyed more than 5,000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had experience with any of a series of 43 life events in the previous two years.  Each event, called a Life Change Unit (LCU), had a different 'weight' for stress.  The more events the patient added up, the higher the score.  The higher the score, and the larger the weight of each event, the more likely the patient was to become ill.

Stress can cause severe health problems and, in extreme cases, can cause death."

In 2010, I wrote a post called Estate du General, which was, I said, trying to get a handle on what the structure and format of a manor house and demesne.

Yesterday, I found pages that includes the statistics behind that post.  It is one of the things I feel was meaningful among all the 'practice' writing that I've chosen to throw out, described in my last post.

What I'd like to do is rewrite that post and add more to it, based both on my old notes and on things that I have learned since, along with my imagination.  While this will mean some repetition, I think that the content will be so much more in depth that none of my gentle readers will care.

Geography & Authority

We'll start with a manor lord that fits D&D.  Our manor lord will be a mage, Ikhnaton, who once did a favour for a royal household and was granted a manse in compensation.  Our mage is a baron.  This manse is 1419 acres in size, or 2.3 square miles, about the size of a neighborhood subdivision or a small town of about 2,500 people.  As before, I'm going to use the same image that I used with the previous post:

Forgive the medieval measurements.  They're appropriate for the time being described.  2.47 acres = 1 hectare

I had a conversation yesterday with a fellow who works as a Canadian customs agent in British Columbia (that's a Canadian province, for those who don't know), where many of the Americans who come across the border there are on their way to Alaska.  We'll call him 'Brad.'  Brad tells me that most of his job, all day, every day, is seizing guns.

Apparently, it is supposed that Canada will say nothing and do nothing if an American wants to keep his (or her, I suppose) full-automatic and semi-automatic firearm - rifles, handguns, machine pistols, ordnance of all sorts - in their trunks, glove boxes and backseats.  The most common excuse?  "Well, I was going to Alaska, so I'm not actually leaving the United States."

Surprisingly, we don't let them.

Brad explained that the moment they come through the gate, they are on Canadian soil; and as such, once the restricted and prohibited guns are found, they become the property of the Canadian government.  That's international law.  So the guns are seized and they are destroyed; they're NOT held and sent back to the owners.  Those guns are gone.

Most don't complain.  Most, Brad tells me, apologize for misunderstanding.  They thought the guns would be all right and they're sorry.  And so they give up their hundreds of dollars of property without any complaints.  The only ones that are a problem, Brad says, are those that have really excessive items, with outstanding heavy magazines and calibers.  Still, with 70 or 80 border guards around, trained to deal with any troubles, there's not much a crazy gun nut can do.  Brad says they've never actually had a violent incident associated with someone who had to give up their guns.

Sauce for the goose.  I continue to argue that the only solution to the problem in America is that the government should go after the guns.  We do.  Most civilized countries do.  When I hear an American (as I did on Real Time with Bill Maher just this morning) say something as idiotic as "There is no gun control law that has ever been proven to reduce gun crime," (Emily Miller is an idiot of the order that should be Trump's VP), I look at my own country.  We've had incidents here.  We don't have them every week.

I understand the reticence of the American government to pass a law to destroy guns.  I don't understand why ordinary, common citizens in America don't simply set up opportunities for large masses of people to get together in huge events and destroy guns en masse, for the good of their country.

Book sales have been off for the last month - didn't expect to make any money on books this month (and I mean 'any').  Then, this morning, I woke up to this:

Damn.  Amazon book sales came through for me.  When I say I'm limping into my end game, I'm not kidding around.  The smallest changes to my fortunes are monolithic.

So, yesterday, while not having internet and feeling my lowest, I set myself to parsing through the paperwork I've been accumulating all my life.  This meant digging through four office crates of material to decide what I need to keep.  This is material that's been carefully preserved in my storeroom, unseen, for nearly eight years.  Here is the result:

This is what 10,000 hours of writing looks like.

It has been a very difficult week, a week full of walls; and today, after writing my post this morning, we ran straight into one.

We had thought we had worked things out with the phone company, but apparently not.  We discovered that our internet was turned off.  It took 7 hours and the sacrifice of our friends to turn it on again.

And unfortunately, we're facing the same thing again in four days, when it will be our electricity.

It is hard to admit to being an utter failure at this age, but this is how I feel just now.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL8h3ri2WN_-IbviBlWtUcQ

Not that anyone wants to talk about this.

In light of such numbers, I have my - very reserved - notions that perhaps television executives have an agenda to make the internet look bad.  How else does one explain this incomprehensibly irrational scene?

Just for fun, I thought I'd post my recent work on my lodging table.  When I published my innkeeper table in 2011, there were six things on this list.  I think this is better:

I'm having great fun expanding the number of herbs and drugs that a character may want to carry in their pouch, just in case:

From the Wiki:

This is how to move a set of encyclopedias.  I could put them into boxes - but the genius of milk crates is that, even as these are laying down or stacked, I can still access them.

Yesterday, when I said I could move on to other things, I'm sorry if the reader got the impression that I meant I was done with ships.

After much consideration, I have decided that the best method for determining the movement of ships during combat, with respect to battles and naval warfare, is to adopt a simultaneous ship movement chart. It is a convenient fact that a ship moving at 1 knot of speed covers a distance of 20 feet in the space of a combat round (see Naval Hex). This means that a ship moving at 5 knots in a round will travel a distance of 5 naval hexes - which will also mean that combatants taking part in combat between ships will find themselves in situations where they may be very close to an enemy at the beginning of a combat round and 80 feet away at the end of that same round.

Where two ships are moving in relationship to one another, turn-based movement such as is found in ordinary D&D combat simply can't represent the orientation of combatants with respect to one another. Therefore, some sort of simultaneous movement is warranted. This will help manage the ranges between combatants in moving ships.

Moreover, it will also help control problems that arise in "real time" with respect to the manner in which rounds are divided up in my game (see Action Points). The captain gives an order - this is one action point in the game. However, following that order requires the use of every action point the crew has thereafter in order to make the ship turn. At the same time, combatants with action points are as bound during ship combat as any other time by the rules regarding the loading and firing of weapons, with additional time-based rules regarding grappling, ungrappling, reloading siege engines and so on.

Therefore, the "simultaneous" movement of the ship cannot be based upon merely the ship's movement, but upon the one-fifth increments of the combat round in which participants are bound by how much they can do in a set amount of time.

Another aspect of combat that must be managed is initiative. Since the movement of ships precludes the convenience of turn-based combat that usually occurs in D&D, where both the party and the enemy's combat movement (which should be happening simultaneously) can be glossed over for the sake of convenience. Such is not the case with ship combat, since the surface of the combat is itself moving (in multiple directions). Whereas boarding battles can still be worked out according to the turn-based system (since the surface isn't moving for the combatants) - for simplicity - outside influences on those battles and missiles fired between combatants have to be staggered through the round. See below for an explanation for this.

None of this describes hiring a crew, however, or what quality the crew will be.  It can be annoying to go through the process of making up individuals for a ship one by one, trying to figure out how a collection of 20 or 30 people determines what a "green" crew is versus a "poor" one.

So, in the interest of making players happy, I suggest these two tables:

Next problem.

I think I've got a fair handle on the effectiveness of crew quality on the turning of ships.  This brings us to the question of how to determine the crew's quality?  How do characters know how qualified their crews are?  It isn't enough to just say that a captain knows what weaknesses and failings the crew might have, because that is provably not true.  Outright mutinies are rare, admittedly, but individual discipline for individual crew disobedience or incompetence is not, nor is it rare that either causes the loss of equipment, time, battles and life.  Often it can be quite innocent: consider the message of this folk song.

At best, we can guess at the quality of a crew and accept that often we have to take those with less than ideal skills/personalities because of circumstances - i.e., not enough of the kind of labour we'd like.

Let's come back around to the database of traits I had proposed last week.  I was screwing around this morning with combinations this morning, starting from a premise that created this table:



Remember from the earlier post, if we set the number 7 on 2d6 as zero, then the best possible result is +5 with boxcars and -5 with snake eyes.  Taking 3d6 to determine our x, y and z axes (regardless of what personality traits those three rolls give us), then we have 46,656 possible combinations that, together, will add up to a number between -15 and 15.  On the table, the numbers show the possible combinations that get a positive or negative result in that range.

It's interesting, but it also means that someone whose first two traits are +4 and +5 can have a trait that's -5 . . . which produces a sum of 4 overall but doesn't make that person a desirable person.  Such a person is potentially capable and cheerful, but they might be intensely dishonest; or they might be a very positive person and be scrupulously honest, yet be hopelessly unqualified at everything.

For the record, I am rethinking the original three traits that I proposed with my first post on this plotting traits' concept.  I think perhaps we can wrap competency and experience together; we can take honesty as a second axis; this then gives room for the person's nature: are they, by and large, positive or negative?  Friendly or taciturn?  Genuinely helpful or self-serving.  A person may easily be completely honest and yet unfriendly; or a person could be very positive and yet profoundly dishonest.  This eliminates the conflicting ideas of a person being experienced and yet unskilled (which happens, but seems 'wrong' at first glance).

What's really wanted are three traits that can't be accounted for in the character's ability stats.  Are intelligent people necessarily capable?  Are charismatic people necessarily friendly?  Are wise people necessarily honest?  I don't think so.  There are familiar associations we make between these things, but it is easy to imagine an educated dishonest person or a hateful, charismatic demagogue, and certainly a smart person who seems to fuck up all the time (personally, I only need a mirror for this last one).

So I reconsidered the organization of the personality traits, to get a better handle on who might hold a given position/role/responsibility in a vocational framework.  Towards this end, I imagined that we might organize these traits as a series of "shells."  The first shell would be occupied by the 1 in 46,656 persons who had +5 on all three axes.  Progressing outwards, each successive shell would include those persons who had a minumum of +4 in each axes, +3 in each, +2 in each and so on (always including those of the smaller shells).  This produced this table:



Note that persons without any negative traits consists of less than 20% of the total population.  This makes it virtually impossible to run any sort of entity without at least a third of your people having negative traits and another third having really bad negative traits - that you have to take on because you can't run a big concern without having to hire a lot of people.  If we consider that 10% of the population being unemployed is a bad thing, from the numbers above we have to consider that more than 10% of the working population are people with a -4 personality in something: either they're incompetent, dishonesty or naturally cruel, vengeful, jealous or greedy (pick the deadly sin).  This is a sobering thought.

We need 30 or 40 sailors to serve aboard our frigate; we don't know the market city where we're hiring our crew because, like most adventurers, we're far from home.  It's a port town and most of the town already has a job.  Those that don't, who are trying to get on as sailors, have probably worked for someone before if they're at least competent enough to know one end of a rope from the other.  Some of those will be looking for work after visiting their poor, dear mother for a month inland, but most of them are going to be people who were turfed when the ship they served aboard reached port.  And now they want to hire on with us.

In the last few posts, I've used the Wooden Ships & Iron Men designations of poor, green and average designations for crew.  It's very important that we don't see "poor" as meaning less experienced or able that "green."  A green crew has an excuse: they haven't shipped out together, not for long anyway, they're young, they haven't had a chance to become experienced.  A poor crew are a bunch of miserable, brooding, unscrupulous malignant and potentially hostile misanthropes, whose miserable speed at turning the ship around has less to do with inability as it does with willful disobedience or apathy.

And these are the sort that will get hired, even if we don't want them.

Thing is, for the interview, they'll trick us into thinking they're merely second-rate and not third-rate hirelings.  We need a table that a) determines how many of these we'll get; b) how likely we'll be able to detect them with our own experience; c) how spells like penetrate disguise or know intent will work in this context; and d) how much will such people of each personality shell will cost.

As yet, I don't have this table.  I'm thinking on it.  I know that morale will figure in the mix . . . and I'm also thinking about practical rules for changing people's personalities and behaviours.

I know that last will seem, well, inappropriate.  But there are some institutions that specialize in making persons see the world in a different light, adapting them to becoming more decent, more reliable, more effective as participants in ventures of every kind.  Some of these institutions fail miserably at it, but it seems to me that evidence of some success means that success is possible.  Therefore, rules ought to exist that will enable us to redirect an individual's cynicism, clumsiness and calumny to make them a more effective hireling.