The Tao of D&D

The new book is taking a great deal of my time, draining it away from the wiki and this blog.  It being Saturday, I'll take some time to explain what's gone on this last week, which has flown by.  I'm 11 days into the book's writing, with 14 pages written ... dense pages, 8x11 in size and ten-point font.  Managing a page a day is comfortable and practical; the time commitment is some 2 to 4 hours each day.  This goes by in a state of flow; a finger snap and it's into my dinner time.  I feel like I've spent the last week being shot out of a cannon.

Ran D&D last night.  The players achieved their goal of plundering the lost Portuguese treasure ship that had escaped with the Portuguese Royal Family in 1580, when Portugal fell to Spain.  This ran over 1,000,000 gold pieces and experience.  Every person in the party went up a level, including the ranger that was 9th and is now 10th, and the druid that was 11th and now 12th.  The players chose not to plunder the whole ship.  Two near TPKs and a whole lot of nasty left, they settled for the first grab and decided they were done with the underwater adventure and ready to return to the above world.  That was the end of our last running.

Last night was all record-keeping and accounting.  Everyone wanted access to the market place (Las Palmas in the Canaries); they had their character stats and sage knowledge to update; they had all the usual questions to ask and plan-making to do.  Nothing was firmly decided, except their intention to return to Europe.  During the evening, the players themselves raised the discussion of "Is it worth it to spend a whole running doing bookkeeping."  The answer was overwhelmingly YES ... followed by admonitions for people who play such shallow games they don't think any approach is needed towards building up the character's livelihood and personal reach.  After all, if we're not going to build anything with the money, what the fuck difference does it make if we're 9th level or 10th?

Today, I'm working on descriptions and pricing for tree nuts.  Then it'll be crops for farming cloth fibres (cotton, hemp, jute, sisal, ramie, etc.) ... then vegetables and tubers.  I need to calculate the cost to hire farmhands and fruit pickers.  Then it's into livestock, with sections on horses, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, followed by fowl, donkeys, mules, elephants and other various creatures.  Then fishes.  This is a long haul, and should take me much of February ... but once the animals are done I'll be in a position to work on complex foodstuffs, since I'll have prices for what's grown or raised on farms.

In the distance after that is cloth and clothing, then wood products, with the concommitant sections on vehicles and ships.  Then stone and building materials, construction rules, followed by chemical products like perfume, paint, lamp oil and what else.  Then, finally, after all that's done, I can sink myself into the horror that is metallurgy and metalwork.  That, then, would be the whole book.

This'll be well over 2,000 products.  The size, at the going rate, is going to be big.  I'm operating on a principle that the final product will cost 50 cents a page.  I'm considering the practicality of drawing a line at 200 pages and calling it "volume 1," if need be.  I really have no idea how big the work is going to be.  I only know that I don't want to hold back.  If I want to use 45 words to describe "gooseberries," then I will.  Many things, much more complex, will need many more words than that.  I want to give it all as much verbiage as it deserves.

One page a day.  I just need to keep myself in a good state of mind, to feel comfortable working and to feel assured that I'm not going to quit, as I have with so many projects.  Those failings haunt me ... as they haunt any writer.  Thankfully, much of the head-and-design work has been done.  Readers who have seen my pricing tables know exactly how big they are, and how many things they include.  Those tables are the crutch I need to hobble my way home.

Okay.  Post done.  To work.

After some consideration, I've decided to temporarily shelve the Character Generation book I've been working on, between other work.  That project has suffered from numerous setbacks, not the least of which has been a growing resistance to "get into it."  That's undoubtedly a very bad attitude on my part ... and yet I've often considered my ability to procrastinate as a sort of gift.  Who knows?  If I'd really dug in, I might be in a position to actually publish the thing in time to get screwed by the new OGL.

A work like this would be very, very different from the material normally ejected by game companies, who are more interested in churning out magic items and servicing the rule of cool.  I have no interest in doing this.  I think it matters to know the real facts about things, such as how much a horse eats, or how long it takes to groom one; or how long does it take to make an arrow, and what woods work best; or how is perfume made; or how is a wagon put together; or what is the best cloth to wear in what sort of weather; or anything else regarding the great mass of human knowledge and how it affects the everyday D&D game.

I'm always hesitant to rush into making announcements, and I always do so far too quickly.  As a result, many of the things I plan ... books, posters, etcetera ... never come to pass, so that the reader is disappointed or left wondering, "Is the bastard ever going to produce that thing?"

I promised to write a positive post about the Goods & Gear splatbook.  I'll try.

Truth is, if you write enough book, you're going to hit on things that will be useful for a game maker.  This is true of a lot of historical documents as well, plus good solid historical textbooks.  For example, the simple, common textbook on the right was highly instrumental in my trade system design, not because it affected the math but because I started to get a grip on the whole of the European economy ~ which provided a background for me, as DM, to imagine how markets worked four centuries later.  This was not the only book I read, obviously.

Sadly for most D&D gamers wandering about on the internet looking for material for their games, they'd rather spend money on a splatbook than read the original text ... partly because the original texts are not light reading.  A splatbook is.  Yet while that lack of density is easier to read, it is also lacking in meaty detail.

The very best I can hope to gain from a splatbook is an attempt to make lists and provide a categorical breakdown of objects or ideas.  For example, Goods & Gear (G&G) has 6 marvelous pages of ship descriptions, details and numbers, describing the length, beam, seaworthiness, time of construction, tonnage and so on.  As a list from which to work, in order to create elaborate descriptions and details for my own ships for the naval combat system I continue to build, it's very helpful.  It gives me ship names.  It gives me a list of details I ought to address.  I should know the draft of vessels and how many decks they have.  I should know how many heavy weapons can be placed and the number of crew a ship should have.  I thank Kenzer for putting the book together, as it is very helpful in that regard.

Where it is not helpful is in the actual research and accuracy of these vessels ~ the numbers are way off, or ridiculous, the crews in particular are excessively too high, there's no consistency in size versus the number of ship hit points ~ and quite often the ships descriptions are, well, wrong.

Gawd knows I've researched ships, fairly continuously for the last 20 years, as I love sea battle games (which is why I own a copy of Wooden Ships & Iron Men, as well as Trireme).  At university I did three papers on Roman, Greek & Far Eastern shipbuilding and sea trade because the subject pulled at me.  And while it is true that numbers for anything having to do with historical shipbuilding are mostly pulled out of a hat (we know virtually nothing about galleys apart from what they looked like), these numbers don't synch with each other.  But ... that's not important.

What matters is having material to build on.  I don't have to take G&G's word on it, I can look up the ships on the internet and get right numbers.  Where G&G doubles both the length and width of the ship, then only doubles the tonnage, because apparently 3-D is a mystery, I can fix those numbers easily enough.  Sorry, if a 60-foot barge carries 20 tons, a 120-foot barge does not carry 50 tons.  And it does not have the same number of hit points.

What matters is that these things can be fixed.  Splatbooks are a signpost outside an abandoned restaurant where the equipment still works.  If we break in with our own food, we can still cook it.

So there is plunderable material throughout.  The Foodstuffs and Meals list includes "brides' finger,"  which I never would have thought to include.  Sadly, many things on the list don't seem to be on the internet.  I don't know if this is because the thing is so obscure it can't be looked up, or if the makers invented it.  Under the clothing list, there's a thing called a "narja"; it sounds like a burka, and on the internet I can find the words linked together; but I can't find a picture of a narja so that I can tell the difference.  A burka is not on the G&G list.

Perhaps they're things in other languages.  I don't know.  That's not helpful.  It IS helpful to be reminded to add a beekeeper's raiment, a semiphore flag, a sounding line, ship charts, boarding hooks, a full sized loom, a shepherd's crook, a tooth wrench, insect netting, a feather mattress, a coffin, a wooden tub, a book stand, finger symbols and hair dye to my equipment lists, which are all things I didn't think of.  There are other things too ~ and I will pour through the lists with a fine-tooth comb until I'm satisfied I've copied what I want.

As a book onto itself, no, I wouldn't recommend it.  I can't imagine lugging this thing from place to place along with other books in case something came up and I had to address this book to find it.  Yet splatbooks can appeal to a wide range of people ~ most of whom get their 500 words of content out of the book and feel easy tossing the rest away.

I've considered going through 2004's Hackmaster Goods & Gear, the Ultimate Adventurer's Guide, on several occasions over the years ... but somehow I always end out forgetting about it, losing track of the online copy.  Inevitably I stumble across it again, as I did a few days ago.  As splatbooks go, it isn't useless.  It's a great deal better than most, but commits a lot of the same sins.  The equipment lists include weights for everything, so that makes it a good resource for my own pricing table.  Hopefully, I can plug a few numbers into that table before I lose track of the book again.

Encouraged by how popular my deconstruction of the 5th Edition Players Handbook has been (which I'll come back to soon enough), I'll dig into this book a little.  The link above provides a full copy; it doesn't hurt to read through these things, even if you do feel some guilt getting something for free that the company obviously needed you to buy.

Getting past the introductions and the writers explaining how books work, we have to wade through a lot of fairly useless information defining important game concepts such as bartering, imaginary coins that are a complete rip-off of any numismatics text-book (which goes on for five pages), the notion that there's such a thing as good craftsmanship as opposed to bad, inflation, taxation, an overview of where trade happens and why, frauds, scams and swindles in the market place and merchant guilds.  All this reads like a "friendly" textbook for grade-sixers, saving the reader the trouble of reading sourcebooks for this material.  Of course, it also pads the 272 page book brilliantly while looking to 12-year-olds that the publishers "know what they're talking about."

On the whole, however, it is pretty hard to put most of this content in practice.  Readers will no doubt declare that it provides "inspiration," which I suppose reminding me that merchant guilds are "very active in politics and matters of state" will do.  But unless I'm old enough to understand politics and matters of state, and HOW merchant guilds do that, which a typical 12 y.o. won't know, it's not actually helpful.  We can dismiss everything thus far as having the same limitation.

It is impossible to make a splat book without repeating the same useless content about weapons and the G&G book does not disappoint.  Now we wade through a long list of hafted weapons, types of hilts, axes and picks, bows and blowguns, ammunition, clubs, daggers and knives, flails and whips, hammers and maces, miscellaneous weapons, polearms and poleaxes, spears and lances, swords ~ and even siege weapons.  All this takes 58 pages, a fifth of the book, to plough through; it's populated by images of weapons groups and long tables detailing the statistics of each weapon.

In 40 years, I have seen this list in books so often I can't begin to remember all the examples.  It was old and tiresome by the time it was added to the Unearthed Arcana back in 1983.  Every game version of D&D feels it needs to do this, pouring long, long lists of weapons onto the pages as though we could hear a truck dumping the weapons out in a bouncing, scattered pile which must be then separated and organized.  The numbers attached to the weapons lacks any real sense; if we were to switch the damage done by this over that, it would be just as meaningful.  Multiple weapons on every table have the same statistics: they all do the same damage, they all have the same weight, they're the same "type" ... but they look different and they have a different price.  I guess that means something.

The weapons list is followed by passages about materials that weapons can be made out of (and to their credit, modifiers for changing the materials that I could actually adapt), then weapon accessories, then a few more odd kinds of weapons, some "giant" weapons, giant ammo ... and then giant missile weapon ranges.  Can't have a splatbook without random rules having a vague, obscure connection to the book's agenda.

This is then followed by 11 pages of repeating all the weapon lists once again, only in a single compiled list this time.  And that accounts for 85 pages of the book - almost a third gone.

Followed by ~ sigh ~ armor.

Armor proceeds for 26 pages and I just don't care.  I just don't.  It's all parts and bits and fifteen ways to make a shield and fuck, it is so derivative I'd have to bang my head on the desk repeatedly just to get through it.  That's not good for an old man like me.

Page 113 starts with Clothing.  We're told what clothes are and why people wear them (this is important stuff), followed by an effort to get players to buy more expensive clothes by creating a rule called "style points."  These give a charisma modifier; every piece of clothing thereafter is assigned a style point, so that the player can add them together to get the maximum bonus, +2.  And while I might steal three or four items from the table on 114, have a careful look at it:


This is not photoshopped.  These are the tables as they appear in the book, side by side.  It must be one of the best examples of splatbook padding I've seen.  The Kenzer Hackmaster book felt compelled to provide a D&D version of their own equipment table, though with the style points and the Hackmaster "Regions" included ... and then the same SP points and weights are copied exactly on both tables.

I appreciate the urge to include "availability," but this metric doesn't work this simply.  If I'm in a part of the world that wears clogs, can you imagine that I would ever have trouble finding them?  Go to a store much only to discover there are no slippers?  Or that "climbing boots" have the same chance of being available everywhere, in a prairie town as likely as a mountain village?  Including numbers like these just means we'll have to ignore them later.

This is enough for now.  The chief benefit of the book is that it is sooooo fastidious about inclusiveness.  It isn't really the "ultimate" book, but it is certainly comprehensive.  And redundant.  Very redundant.