Thursday 13 May 2021

Thoughts on the City-State of the Invincible Overlord (Revised) and the Low Regard for Human Capacities

Are we less intelligent than we were in the 1970s, or do we meet the low expetations we set one another?

Matthew Crawford identifies a trend in modernity to take on a 'low regard for human capacities'. One of the justifications for automation is often that the automated process is better (frequently, but not always, because safer) than the human version. This is readily apparent in the discourse surrounding driverless cars, which always seems to emphasise that human drivers are bad at it, and dangerous. But you see it in a lot of other places as well - a drive (no pun intended) to get machines to do things on our behalf on the basis that they are simply more competent than we are. 

The implication is that this is actually generating a kind of learned helplessness - the more we automate things, the less highly we think of ourselves and our abilities, and the more those abilities atrophy. 

I see this all the time in my day job as an academic. The ability that students and academics alike now have to discover information online has made them a hundred times worse than they used to be at the most basic information-gathering activity of all: reading. We are brilliant at finding resources, deploying the finest automated online tools. But we are terrible at digesting them, because we've got used to just scanning things off a screen while scrolling down, or repeatedly CTRL-Fing for key phrases. We've lost the capacity to read anything which doesn't go out of its way to be readily accessible and fun. 

(The accusation is often made that this problem is overblown, and people have always complained about young people lacking focus, not taking their education seriously, and not being well-read. The answer is that yes, this is true, but the truth of that observation does not falsify the assertion that people are simply now objectively worse than they were at reading than they were in the past. Anybody who doubts this just needs to take a look at old school or university exam papers from the 1970s or 1980s and compare them to those used now.)

But this is probably no more than the observation that, the easier things are made for you, the worse you get at the underlying activity. I have no doubt that the existence of Tinder has made men and women objectively worse at finding and keeping partners, that the existence of TV has made us worse at entertaining ourselves, and that the existence of books has made us worse at memorising information than we were in preliterate times. Japanese friends often tell me that they can now barely write their written language longhand and struggle to remember how to write many of the 2,000 characters one needs to be proficient in the written language; they're used to typing on a computer or mobile phone, which automates the process. 

One is struck instantly by these thoughts as one opens and pages through the City State of the Invincble Overlord. The version I have in my hands at the moment, released in the late '70s, is to the modern eye almost unrelentingly user-unfriendly. There is no introduction of any kind. No effort is made to make the text fun or easy to read. (The first two lines read: "A hereditary monarch and the Senate rule the City State of the Invincible Overlord. There is only a one-third chance per year of a Clanute (Senate) being sumoned by the overlord. The Overlord can overrule any act of the Senate by generally remaining above alignment struggles.") There is no "how to use this book", not even a table of contents. Just a section on 'Background Guidelines', a 'Chronology of the Dragon Kings', a few notes on factions ("BARBARIAN ALTANIS are nomadic tribesmen who roam the lands of their more advanced ancestors. Same as Nomas (Leather Armour) except for every 100 in tribe, 3 Shaman act as sub-commanders..."), and then it's straight into a Key with terse descriptions and one-line rumours. After all this is over, a haphazard collection of tables and mini-rules, presented with stark minimalism:


GENERAL GUIDELINES

Serf work a farm owned by a Noble and can't leave freely (must dice as 'Slave').

Villeins pay a rent to their Lord equal to double tax rate on a fixed basis.

Military: Note that a Sergeant commanding 100 Footmen had little more Social Esteem than the Cavalryment (Horses weren't cheap.)


The long and short of it is that the book looks terrible, is hard to read, and is even harder to fathom out how to use. In terms of how it presents its information (what posh people call, I think, "information design"), it could hardly be less aesthetically or stylitically pleasing, or less easy to use. It is inspiring and fascinating once you make the effort. But making the effort is so hard in comparison to, say, Vornheim or other modern RPG city-sandbox supplement of your choice. 

But it was popular, and people did use it, and many of them will have been adolescents (12 years old being, in my experience, the beginning of the optimal period for liking the contents of the City-State). It may simply be the case that there was literally nothing else around, and the book's popularity is explained by that reason alone. But I hardly think that explanation is sufficient: people in the 1970s were willing and able to spend a lot of time reading difficult stuff and figuring out how to use it. Much more than they are now. And they were also more creative. They were able to make do with less. 

To return us to the original point: are modern audiences less intelligent? Or have they just become habituated to RPG supplements going out of their way to be accessible and usable? And what are the consequences of this? Was the 1970s gamer, having high expectations set for him in terms of his ability to read, digest information, and create his own ideas, objectively better? Those questions are of course unanswerable. What we do know is that one simply could not produce City-State of the Invincible Overlord in its 1977 format these days and find success. 

62 comments:

  1. Very true. Well observed.

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  2. I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine that defends that nowadays rpg's need very concise tables for the clases and giving the class and race traits in the more direct and simplistic form possible because obviously 'the average gamer' is not going to read three or four paragraphs of the class of his PC. This post reminded my of that conversation and I think that, sometimes, we are the ones that purposely try to dumb things to ourselves.

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    1. I think this is true. There is a kind of tyranny of low expectations that permeates society, and RPGs are no different.

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    2. I’m reminded of how Call of Cthulhu changed their rules primarily because they felt people couldn’t wrap their heads around dividing percentile skills by 2 or 5. Now you’re supposed to divide all your skills by 2 and 5 once at the start of play and write down *three* numbers for each skill on your character sheet instead of one, because apparently this inelegant solution is less intimidating. 🙄

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    3. Haha. The depressing thing is that these kinds of changes are almost never based on feedback from users - they're usually the result of a designer going way too far in pre-empting some problem that will never arise.

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    4. @Jason&Jay

      Wholeheartedly disagree. I'm dyslexic, have dysgraphia and have a hard time doing arithmetic quickly. I am 32. There are many folks like me. We all get dismissed and vilified by people like you.

      To address your example specifically, having those three numbers on the Cthulhu sheet helps a lot. It speeds up the mechanical part of the game, letting me focus on maintaining the immersion and playing my character instead of getting flustered/embarrassed for the lack of quick math skills.

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  3. 1. Yes, people have always complained about feckless youth, but the post-industrial, digital status quo is a huge shift in human culture and society. To dismiss modern concerns about modern youth by bringing up past concerns about past youth is foolish.

    2. From I see on the OSR side, it's less a matter of intelligence than laziness. You've got 30somethings pretending it's impossible to run AD&D BTB (even when teens could have done it) and push OSE because it's more "readable" and "organized" than B/X (which was marketed for children).

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    1. This is - generally - my thought. But I may be wrong.

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    2. Yes, laziness, exactly.

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  4. The takeaway from "people have always complained about the youth" shouldn't be "but now we're extra justified in doing so, because we moderns are special". There have always been dramatic, epochal changes in society and status-quos. Despite literally millennial of evidence, we seem convinced that we're living in the most special and consequential of all times. Maybe be are, in the sense that we're the ones that are alive and Socrates et al are dead. Maybe human culture is an exponential curve and now is the most special of times until tomorrow is, and so on. Maybe "consequentiality" is a dumb way to view the development of society.

    Anyway, D&D. As a counterpoint, I'd argue that more accessible and usable content could make it easier to create better ideas, not harder. More dumb people can play D&D too, but a greater range of types of brilliant mind can also get involved - not just the brains who can parse inpenetrable 70s stuff. This is a massive (epochal) generalisation, but making "things" easier and more accessible is how civilisation evolves from hunter-gathering, to agriculture, to industrial, to post-industrial etc.

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    1. There have always been dramatic, epochal changes - you're right. But these have generally taken place over the course of centuries or generations. This is the first one that has happened in the course of 10-20 years. Compare how things are in 2021 to how they were in 2001 (even setting the effects of the pandemic to one side); the texture of life was totally different then. I don't think there is a comparable 20 year period in all of human history.

      But anyway, yours is the positive spin on things. I agree that of course making things easier has its (huge) benefits. Having electricity makes us much less competent at all kind of things we no longer have to do anymore, and that's 99% for the best. But that will not be true of all technological advances that ever occur.

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    2. "I don't think there is a comparable 20 year period in all of human history."

      This is an interesting comment. I always think about people in the early 20th century as the primary examples of that. Going from sailing ships and horse drawn carriages to intercontinental passenger flights (and space travel) in a couple of decades.

      But you're right the 2001-2021 change in the way we interact with others is extraordinary, and maybe that has maximum impact on us as people.

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    3. Yes, I think that while the early 20th century was a period of astonishing advancement, at the level of human interaction little changed (and it was still the case that most human beings had little contact with the advanced technology). In the period 2001-2021 technology has actually started to shape our daily interactions and the way our minds work. And it is so much more pervasive - it isn't just like only the rich have smartphones.

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  5. I think it's worth noting that producing a PDF product is essentially $0, whereas printing a physical product and then trying to sell it can be quite expensive. Many products of that era were edited ruthlessly to reduce page count/print costs.

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    1. You're right. And the authors of City-State were clearly trying to cram as much on every page as possible. This is certainly a factor which shouldn't be overlooked.

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  6. I sold my copy of Invincible Overlord only a few weeks ago. I probably bought it when I was 12. I must have spent hundreds of hours reading through it and poring over the map. The politics and the world-building aspect of it never made any sense to me whatsoever, it was just a big map with lots of buildings to poke around in, see what's in there. I probably ran it once or twice with a single friend playing.

    Yeah, I'd struggle to read something like that today. Perhaps even more than when I was 12.

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    1. Damn, and I was planning to put it at the top of the tree...

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  7. I bought my copy back in '78 at the age of 16. I never finished reading it nor tried to integrate it into my campaign. I found it much easier to just make up my own citystate. The ReadyRef sheets were far, far more helpful than trying to parse the CityState campaign. For that matter, the general consensus in Central Indiana at that time was that it was too much work to make it useful. There was one DM who grokked it and another who tried hard to use it. But there were around four or five including myself who gave up on it. Frankly I think the biggest thing going for it was the complete and utter lack of competition. If it had been better edited and/or laid out better, I think it would've seen much more use.

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    1. There are some cool little tables in there. I like the 'Special Encounters' one a lot, with its 'town crier' rumours.

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  8. My friends and I owed and used CSIO as children (12/13 yr olds) and adventured in that city. Moreover, we used it as a template to create our own cities and towns- not as extensive but we did it.

    We were not highly intelligent, but we were adaptive. CISO had more than we needed, and we used what made sense at the time. Changed things we didnt like, then again the D&D we played was our version of the game - our rulings. So we changed alot of stuff.

    It worked well and that is what was there at that time. Today, I believe that yeah it would be a hard sell. It lacks the art and polish of new products and it leaves alot to the imagination of the GM and players - many blanks to fill in. Then there are charts and rolls that to some may seem tedious or extraneous.

    I guess it depends on what you and your players are looking for. I am thinking about buying it again because so much work has been done for the GM upfront, but with enough fill the the blanks to customize without destroying. Yes 80 percent of the building may never be explored, but heck if they ever were - I got something to use.

    I like making things up as we go, but its nice to have backup.

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    1. It really inspired me to want to do something along similar lines - the ambition of keying an entire city (albeit not completely) is really quite something.

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  9. This might just be selection bias, but my impression of the people I play old-fashioned D&D with is that most of us are busy professionals. I think difficult texts can be fun if you have plenty of time to puzzle them out but if the goal is to get something on the table without to much away-from-the-table fuss, information design real helps.

    I see that as a significant driver towards older systems rather than just running 5e. Prep is faster and the pace of adventures moves quicker.

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    1. I think you're right - I certainly no longer have the patience to learn complicated rules. But then again busy professionals are also often the people who are most used to scanning emails and slacks and whatnot and forgetting how to do proper, deep reading.

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    2. I think you're right on the money about busy professionalism reinforcing shallow reading.

      The recent obsession with information design in games really caters to that proclivity. To be honest, I am grateful for it. I am the exact audience being served by the trend.

      At this point if I'm going to invest time in a close read of a text, it's not going to be an RPG book.

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    3. You're preaching to the choir there, but then again it's very rare that an RPG book nowadays even remotely interests me. If the setting or concept were truly compelling, I might take the time to read it properly.

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  10. "There is no introduction of any kind. [...] There is no "how to use this book" " ...wait, are you telling me people actually read those? Any time I open an RPG product, my first thought always is "ok, so where does this REALLY begin?", because the first 3-10 pages are always bogged down with useless trivialities that don't help me with using the product at all.

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    1. I agree that this is often the case. But CSIO is almost perversely lacking in any guidance on how to use it. There isn't even a table of contents. I'm not complaining - it's just an observation.

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    2. You are missing a crucial point of cognitive patterns that many people are missing and have been missing: Wargames. I started wargaming age 11 before RPGing (12), and by that fact alone I never had any problem parsing information from 1e or JG sources.

      ALSO: As some people here have already alluded to: it's not the kids, it's the adults who stopped reading. THAT is the Epochal change, but not irreversible. Book shaming should be a thing:-)

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  11. What I find most interesting here are the counterarguments. I would like desperately to your points NOT being the case, because it would give me hope for my children, their friends, and our collective future.

    I prefer optimism.

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    1. I'm quite pessimistic. I think WALL-E seems increasingly plausible, in spirit if not in detail.

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  12. I have noticed that my acquaintances now read far, FAR fewer books (if any) than in past decades. Regardless of the topic of conversation, most of my acquaintances limit themselves to trawling through the internet, skimming through articles or (worse) videos. But books? I get an empty stare when I ask, "Have you read such-and-so book?", a look that seems to say, "Why in the world would I ever read a book?"

    Consequently, deep conversations with just about any of my acquaintances on just about any topic is impossible.

    The future depicted in Frank Herbert's Dune can't get here fast enough for me.

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    1. Yeah, I'm the same. It's astonishing to me that even among supposedly intelligent people the subject of conversation is so often "Have you been watching [x]?"

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    2. I made a very deliberate attempt in 2012 to focus on reading books. I'd noticed how much Twitter and Facebook had decimated my attention span, and decided to do something to counter that. I read about 60 books that year, and although I lapsed for a couple of years afterwards, I'm back to reading around a book a week.

      Ironically I really struggle with watching TV & film as I... don't have the attention span for it. I don't know what's so different about reading a book, but I find it far easier to immerse myself in a book for hours than I do too stare at a screen for 30 minutes.

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    3. I've noticed I have the same problem. I think it's something to do with the ability to change channels. I find it really hard to avoid my hand straying to the remote.

      Alone in a quiet room with a book and you only have the option of reading.

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  13. Yeah it's the eternal lament - my wife's an academic too and she says the same thing but I don't know. For the City-State I think part of it is that they were just inventing the form and a little more organization at the front end was just to come and a bit more organization probably wouldn't detract. The content, though, is amazing and is worth poring through unlike a lot of later stuff which is either too focused, too wordy, or bowdlerized. You can always find something interesting when you open it (a little like the 1E DMG).

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    1. I completely agree with that latter observation. It's packed full of ideas. And almost gleefully un-PC.

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  14. I'm always hesitant about any pronouncements regarding 'kids nowadays'. Partly because I remember how lazy and dumb I was.
    What remains true is that people will seek out and figure out the stuff that interests them... and remain ignorant about the stuff that doesn't.
    Those older games were not going to draw in people who wanted pretty pictures, hated math or needed precise/concise instructions... but now there are games and tools that cover a wider variance of preferences. Prettier games and no-math games and minimal-rules games. It's a good thing... even if I still get more fun/inspiration while panning the gold out of something 'difficult' like CSIO.

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    1. I get it - I was lazy and dumb too. But that doesn't mean new technologies haven't made us universally worse at doing certain things.

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    2. But incredibly better at doing other things.

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    3. Nobody is disputing that!

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  15. For me, the important sentence was "12 years old being, in my experience, the beginning of the optimal period for liking the contents of the City-State".

    I think children and teens don't need as much information design as their older peers. I've been told once that social media that tries to market itself for children makes the user interface obtuse on purpose so that "no one with a job will bother joining it". Younger audiences have the time to read unintuitive books, they probably didn't read as many so larger parts of it seem novel and interesting to them, and (in my very limited experience) younger players are easier to awe.

    Maybe this isn't so much about the past versus the present, and more about shifting audience. I'm willing to bet Vornheim was written to readers both older and more experienced than the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, and that comes with different expectations and wants from the book

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    1. There is certainly something to that. I believe Snapchat took that approach.

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  16. Oh, weak and stupid modern people! And stupider with every generation! If only we could go back to the days of hunting and gathering, before houses and agriculture and law codes and well-laid-out RPG supplements made us soft, unable to fend for ourselves even at play. Why should we bother to play, when we are just such unintelligent players, and literally less creative than people fifty years ago, as you suggest?

    Or is this just advance warning that your next RPG publication is going to be deliberately hard to use, but it's for our own good, and to prove that you are as creative as... Bob Bledsaw? ;)

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    1. Thanks for your contribution, Dr. Pangloss.

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  17. Perhaps since man is mortal, each generation becomes weaker than the previous one. Once, our muscular ancestors broke the spines of saber-toothed tigers, and we roasted the flesh of mammoths for our fit and deadly womenfolk. Now we're mumbling, neurotic mice scurrying from one pointless task to another, bullied by weaklings in ill-fitting uniforms, obsessed with comfort and terrorized not by tigers but by invisible spores smaller than a speck of dust. Or perhaps not.

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    1. Or perhaps there's an excluded middle somewhere.

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  18. Huh... I'll defer to your judgement on the youths of today (the few I have much interaction with are almost certainly outliers for various reasons).

    I like me some good "information design" because I'm an adult and I really can't blow the entire weekend dredging through a document I don't know is going to return on that investment. But that's me being a middle-aged fart. ;)

    That said, I don't see much good ergonomics in most RPG products. What I do see is a lot of evidence that the authors were paid by the word. I suspect that was not the case with the folks who put the "City State of the Mad Overlord" together.

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    1. I don't want to complain about "the youth of today" because nothing is their fault - they get let down by the tyranny of low expectations.

      On being paid by the word, yeah, absolutely.

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  19. The trouble you've identified isn't so much "laziness" on the part of modern youth, but on an educational system that now neglects teaching kids the fundamentals, including challenging them to succeed or fail at something. Failure is no longer an option because of a misguided desire to spare hurt feelings or avoid creating a sense of unworthiness or inequality. That's (mostly) a bad thing because, as humans, we will often be unworthy or unequal to a task (even if that task is reading a book). As a result, traditional methods of education are no longer taught, and those skills (and the desire to use them) have largely eroded in newer generations.

    On the optimistic side, computers and the Internet have fundamentally changed the human requirements for organizing information (mostly) for the better. Simple, straightforward language, visual/design cues, and images are all essential elements of how modern audiences prefer to digest information. We have even returned to iconography as a primary method of communicating huge volumes of information, much like the Egyptians used hieroglyphics. As a result, we can process information much faster than in previous generations, without the need for pages of dense text.

    The Internet has also allowed us to develop distributed learning skills previous generations could not have imagined. As an individual, I can learn to cook, fix a car, build a deck, visualize the Battle of Alesia, or play an RPG game without leaving my chair, much less having to go to a specialized trade school, take a college course, accept an internship, or *gasp* read a book. That's (mostly) a good thing.

    I loved CSIO as a teen in the 80s, and I spent many hours poring over its minutiae. If I purchased a similar product today, I would likely toss it away as useless. :)

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    1. Yes, you're right about that element of the modern educational system, but I think a big part of that problem is that modern teachers have also become slapdash and lazy. Pushing children and teaching them properly is difficult, and a lot of teachers lack the motivation to do it. So they let pupils coast. This extends all the way through to university.

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  20. I was 14 in late 1978 when City State of the Invincible Overlord (original, so digest-sized booklets 1 thick and 1 slim plus another slim for Thunderhold) became our jam, both as a central location for thieving chaotic campaigns and home base for more "good" parties searching out "evil" in the greater Wilderlands . I had read Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by then and probably the Elric stories. So my idea is the minimalist Judges Guild stuff permitted a ref to layer their own overarching saga that developed over time.

    All the bits are there: Black Lotus assassins, Thieves and other Guilds, sewers, strange parks and businesses, sociology-economic stratification, political class, constables, laws & punishments, temple to strange gods, plus a “god” scifi laser cannon on the roof of the Cryptic Citadel. And right next door was ghoul-infested graveyard, the goblin reservation, and across the Conquerors River Dearthwood and the Wild Orcs of the Purple Claw.

    Besides heading directly into Dearthwood (typically a big mistake), adventurers could follow the Estuary of Roglaroon up to Modron (and then perhaps overland to Tegel Manor, although many campaigns worked back from Tegel to City State), or take Rorystone Road north to Thunderhold (we put most of the T$R giants series modules in the mountains around Thunderhold). All this opened up the greater Wilderlands campaigns until you reached pirates on coasts to the east, a waning World Emperor’s city state to the west, and iced lands beyond a frozen sea north.

    City State and the Wilderlands aren’t really an “adventure” in the sense of the players being expected to do anything in particular or accomplish any preordained task. The way we ran them is to just drop characters in and roll with it. With an open-minded ref willing to construct (and abandon) details whenever needed, story kind of built itself. From those first campaigns back in ‘78 I had actually in 3 years of D&D (8th to 10th grade) like 4 generations from a line of paladins that started from my very first Holmes Basic fighter PC. Of course in those early days, especially 8th and 9th grade, we gamed like all the time. And by 10th grade (79-80, age 15) when we gamed, we gamed high on weed all the time. So, who really knows how fucked-up obsessive gaming we were ? No chaperons. So more intelligent or more brain-damaged...

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    1. We use to game high on weed all the time as well, although there was also a period of time when we used to play D&D every lunch hour at school, basically every day. Talk about momentum.

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  21. I'm sure there are many reasons we see the disconnect from years ago to today. I'm sure not all of the reasons are accidental. But some appear to be that when we use invention to replace effort rather than supplement it, we inevitably get worse at what the machines do for us. Likewise, in an age of visual everything, print, as Egon pointed out, is dead. Or at least in an age of Twitter, anything more than three sentences is approached in the same way people fifty years ago would have approached a dissertation. I've actually heard people complain about blog posts being long winded when they were less than a couple hundred words. And it isn't just social media. My sons are in college, and I'm stunned at what they're asked to read. Their intro to Western History textbooks, for example, covered all of ancient Greece and Rome in two chapters. The same course I took packed Greece and Rome into 7 chapters worth of information. Same level of education. I'm sure there are those who will insist we've improved on so many levels, and in some cases that is true. I'll forever be grateful that I live on this side of the invention of toilet paper. But as we watch things developing nowadays, it does make you wonder about the long term costs of these big leaps forward.

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    1. Yes, I think there's an important distinction between technological advancements that disincentivise learning skills (Twitter, TV) and those that just eliminate something bad (toilet paper, penicillin, light bulbs). Nobody is going to argue that it's a shame we now have antibiotics because it means our immune systems are less robust. But it won't be true of all advancements that the good outweighs the bad.

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  22. What also doesn't help is the general overabundance of things to do, buy & distract yourself with, in combination with the cult of speed. There's pressure to do a lot of things quickly, so you can do more. And that from an early age. This leads to a certain shallowness, not just on the part of the person processing, but also on the design side. Kickstarter games are a good example. Lots of glitzy components aimed at seducing you into an impulse buy, but often too easy, with weak rules design and little replay value. And so many of them!

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    1. Yes, there is such a cornucopia of entertainment available to us that there is rarely much incentive to really sit down and take the effort to make the most of a purchase. When you were only able to afford a few CDs or cassettes a month, you would make damn sure you gave the records every opportunity to grow on you. Now, with Spotify, a piece of music has literally seconds to impress.

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    2. I've often found that the tyranny of choice leaves me helpless. I can't even muster the energy to launch Netflix any more, because I know that if I do, I will spend 30 minutes unable to choose, and will eventually abandon it without watching anything. Or if I do watch something, I'll fret that I chose the wrong thing.

      Life was a lot simpler when we had 3 channels & no video recorder 😁

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    3. True. These days the only time I really watch TV is to watch something totally trashy like Can't Pay...We'll Take it Away or Homes Under the Hammer, for that very reason. Put on Netflix and I feel pressure to choose something of quality, which results in 30 minutes of analysis paralysis and eventual frustration. (Or just watching Friends.)

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    4. I thought I was the only one!!!

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  23. With the tapering off of the Flynn Effect, and continuing declines in genotypic IQ, people do indeed seem to be getting less intelligent... although pace Ed Dutton, I don't think dysgenics can possibly explain the huge decline in reading ability in just the last 40 years. >:)

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  24. Re using CSIO, my problem with it has always been that there's no 'safe space' from which to set out on adventure, & to retreat to once the adventure is done. For me this really gets in the way of the standard Gygax/Arneson D&D dynamic. The CSIO as presented looks more like an adventure site than a habitable city; it reminds me a lot of the '80s Fighting Fantasy gamebook adventures City of Thieves & Khare: Cityport of Traps, which I suspect were inspired by it. In those the hero starts somewhere safe and delves into the hostile city on a quest. But CSIO expects you to live in the city and find adventures from rumours, from wandering, and from random encounters - more like living in Castle Greyhawk or Blackmoor Dungeon than living in the safe town base and delving the dungeon. So, how do the PCs ever catch their breath?

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