Dice Rolling and the Creation of Time

YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT. We all know this. But what is even truer is that one cannot have time records, or even time at all, IF DICE ARE NOT ROLLED. Let me explain.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace posited the existence of an 'intelligence' which was capable of knowing the precise location and momentum of every single particle in the universe at any given moment. To such a being, it would be possible to know both past and future in perfect detail, and indeed concepts such as past, present and future would lose all meaning because it would know them all equally well. This is because, knowing their current positions and trajectories, it could simply work out, with a single formula, where every particle in the universe would be from moment to moment until the end of time, and where they had been at every moment in the past back to the start of existence itself. It would thus in effect know the entirety of time simultaneously - it would have, if you like, a bird's eye view of the entire chronology of everything. How could such a being meaningfully distinguish between present, future or past? 

Later writers called this 'intelligence' a 'demon', which I'm sure you'll agree is far more evocative. (William James had a similar idea, which he called 'the iron block' - the idea being that since everything is in the end just physics, and because everything in existence obeys the laws of physics, everything that ever happens is predetermined because it is all caused by something that has been caused by something else which has been caused by something else, and so on: from the moment of the Big Bang the whole thing - what you had for breakfast today, what you thought about while driving to work, the fact that you are currently reading this sentence - was already predetermined by a long chain of causation and we are just watching it all play out.) And 'Laplace's Demon' is a concept which somehow stuck. It remains highly provocative as a thought experiment to understand and argue about determinism.

It is also, though, an interesting way to think about DMing. A DM is, or can be, a pseudo-Laplace's Demon, in the sense that (if he devoted sufficient time and effort) it is at any given moment possible for him to know where all the moving pieces are in his campaign and where they are going. If the campaign were taking place in a megadungeon, for example, he may very well, at least in theory, know the location of every single monster, item of treasure, piece of scenery, and so forth - and even, if he wants, have a grasp of where they are moving (if anywhere) - at any given point in time. In practice few if any DMs actually know their creation at that level of detail, but it is theoretically possible.

Yet the DM's world is subject to fundamental indeterminacy because of the unpredictability of the dice. Since he can't know the outcomes of dice rolls in advance, he never has the knowledge necessary to be a true Laplace's Demon. He may observe everything, but he cannot also know where it is going (the echo with quuantum mechanics is obvious). 

The DM's world therefore experiences an authentic past, present, and future. And in a sense the act of rolling the dice is what allows this to happen. It is only with the appearance of uncertainty that one can grasp time, and it is dice rolling which actualises uncertainty most purely. (Players can be negotiated with; the dice are final.) It is because the game involves dice rolls that it has a chronology - we know that this is the present because this is when the dice are being rolled, and we do not yet know the future because we have to wait for the results. This allows us to distinguish between present and future and therefore, by implication, the past. It allowos us to have time as such.

It follows that the rolling of dice is a metaphysical act. It is the fundamental ontological condition of campaign time. Yes, as some of you will be no doubt thinking, the actions of the players bring uncertainty in themselves, to a degree. But it is not genuine uncertainty without the rolling of dice, because without the rolling of dice what happens is ultimately decided by DM fiat, and DM fiat in the end simply reflects his own understanding or vision of his own world. DM fiat is the world of Laplace's Demon, where everything is simply caused by everything else. Dice rolling makes things uncertain for everyone, and it is therefore in the dice roll that time is brought into existence in a D&D world.

You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept, then, but you can also a fortiori not have a meaningful campaign if you are not rolling dice. It is the rolling of dice that gives the campaign any form at all. 

Postscript: I am not sure what the precise implications of this are for Amber Diceless - the domain of Laplace's Demonic DM - and similar as playable games, but it is worth elucidating the point a little further in this regard. The point about Amber Diceless and its genre is that since it is DM fiat which determines what happens, it may have the appearance to the players of uncertainty. But for the DM nothing is uncertain because he can identify what has happend in the past, and what is happening now, and therefore has a fair idea what will happen in future. It is true that he does not know what a given player will do at any given moment, but he has complete say over what the consequences will be. Can he then meaningfully be said to be in a position of uncertainty? 

Best Books of 2025

By tradition, December is marked on the 25th by Christmas Day, on the 24th by Christmas Eve, on the 26th by Boxing Day, on the 31st by New Year's Eve, and by somewhere-around-now, the posting of a list of the best five fantasy/SF-adjacent books I read in the previous twelve months.

This year I found myself reading a lot less than usual. Imbued with an inextinguishable and undiminishable exhaustion deep in my bones brought on by work, parenthood, and the passage and weight of time, not to mention stupefied by the vast quantities of beer and fine spirits that I constantly guzzle for every second of the day, I am barely able to manage two or three pages of any given book each night before sinking into a drooling, snoring, nightmare-filled slumber punctuated by toilet breaks and the incessant barking of the neighbour's vast throng of anxious terriers and spaniels. 

However! I did manage to get through about twenty to thirty books, of which the top five (queue the CCS version of 'Whole Lotta Love' for background music and Mark Goodier for the readout, please) were:

5. The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis. I read this (after having read it myself long ago, in my distant youth) to my eldest daughter and thought it one of the better Narniad stories - not as good as The Lion... or Voyage... but better than the rest, which can be a bit haphazard and weakly plotted. From my Goodreads review:

This is one of the more complete of the 'Chronicles'. It all resolves itself a little too easily and neatly at the end - there's very little sense that any of the 'good guys' is in any real danger - but the individual arcs for each of the characters are all nicely executed and the interplay between them has real charm.

4. The Spire by William Golding. I went on a bit of a William Golding bender this year and blasted my way through most of his oeuvre (The Inheritors is his best, along with Lord of the Flies, but I did not read either of them this year). The Spire is a relentless, beautiful and confusing masterpiece about a lunatic visionary trying to construct a too-big spire for a cathedral with predictable results. From my Goodreads review: 

An equally bizarre and beautiful book that trades on an odd mixture of allusions, gaps, and - let's be frank - a bit of over-the-top melodramatic romanticism. It is typically billed as being a fable about prideful folly, but I found as ever that Golding's portrayal of his main character is subtle and humane; he's by no means a villain, and indeed has many qualities to be admired. A great book, full of mystery.

3. Pincher Martin by William Golding. A dark and horrible work that will compel and dismay any reader. Ostensibly about a man shipwrecked and marooned on a desolate rock somewhere in the North Atlantic, and his struggles to survive, all is not as it appears. From my Goodreads review: 

Golding was a genius and a visionary and each of his books is a little miracle of inspiration - something no other author could have imagined, let alone written, and written so well. This is a modernist masterpiece: a depiction of the individual wrestling with the fact of his own existence - and easily the equal of anything written by Conrad, Bellow, Melville, or Greene.

2. The Day it Rained Forever by Ray Bradbury. I believe I have read almost all of Bradbury's short fiction, now - there is just one collection waiting on my shelf to finish off. There is something addictive about his writing, and this book (and another volume of his short stories) certainly bucked the trend in respect of me nodding off while reading. From my Goodreads review: 

As with all Bradbury collections there is a hit-and-miss element to these stories; the straight SF ones are nice ideas that are not fully realised, and there is some sheer flim-flam and dreadful schmaltz. But the average quality is high and there are some real peaches. I loved the almost Ligottian aspect present in 'The Little Mice' and 'The Scent of Sarsaparilla', the creepiness of 'Fever Dream', the twistedness of 'The Town Where No One Got Off', and the Carver-esque 'The Headpiece' and 'The Marriage Mender'. The best two stories, 'The Sunset Harp' and 'And the Rock Cried Out', are towards the end - both are moving examples of the best that well-executed short fiction can achieve.

1. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Bradley has what one might these days call a 'complicated legacy'. But separating the art from the artist, this is simply a Great Fantasy Novel, complete with capitalisation. It is a riveting read that I highly recommend, and I almost entirely endorse Asimov's own endorsement of the book as the best modern retelling of the Arthurian myth (I would put it second by a shade to TH White). No Goodreads review, though, as I've only just finished it.

State of the Yoonian, December 2025

I was asked by a reader for an update on all of my various publishing projects. I am nothing if not response to my readers' every last whims and fancies. So here it is.

• First, I have now more or less completed fulfilling the Yoon-Suin 2nd edition Kickstarter, now also on general sale. (Note, there are only roughly 25 copies left from the initial 2,500 book print run. There will not likely be another.) I still have to do some podcasts promised to the highest level backers of that KS, to come in the new year, but apart from a few tiny little snags to untangle with some individual customers the project is otherwise done.
• The next thing to do is get The Great North Kickstarter ready to go in roughly March-April. All the text and art for The Great North has been completed. It only needs to go through layout. Since I now have a good set up for printing and distribution and a better understanding of logistics and costs, I know that I can fulfil this one more easily and cheaply in terms of shipping than previous projects. I am very much looking forward to this as I am immensely proud of the contents of this book. 
• After that I would like to begin work in earnest on Behind Gently Smiling Jaws. This has gone through various evolutions and is now a fully-fledged campaign setting in which the action takes place long after the Crocodilian Apocalypse has remade the world.
• There are four other projects I have been turning over in my mind and which I may choose to do alongside or instead of BGSJ:
• The Paladin Project, which tries to apply OSR principles on the basis that the PCs are unselfconsciously the good guys
• Writing a fantasy gamebook
• The Pre-Apocalypse world, set in a fantasy version of The Book of Jubilees
• The September Kingdom; where Yoon-Suin is fantasy Tibet, and The Great North is fantasy Northumberland, this would be fantasy Suffolk

This year was extremely tough personally - not in a woe-is-me sort of way, but rather in a crikey-I-really-have-taken-on-too-much sort of way. Happily that is now getting easier and I am looking forward very much to reconnecting with a creative side which has not had sufficient freedom of expression in the last 12 months or so. 

An ongoing, background rumbling problem is my ongoing sense of paranoia that at some point Google will yank the plug on Blogger, and what to do if that happens. 

How the Deteriorating Quality of White Dwarf Battle Reports Undermines Western Civilisation, and What to Do About It

A lot of people are worried that we are approaching the dawning of a post-literate age - one in which it no longer becomes necessary to really read. Claims like this have been being made for a long time and I have my doubts whether we can make bold conclusions about epochal change. But what is for sure is that more and more people are reading less and less, even if it is true that there are still lots of hard core readers out there who still love books. 

Whether one describes ourselves as becoming 'post-literate' is an interesting subject for debate, in other words, but I am more concerned with the empirical observation that not enough people are reading in depth, and particularly reading books. When people don't read very much they don't tend to think deeply. And the only way to really read properly is in the form of a book. Book-reading forms habits of concentrated and focused thinking that are necessary to engage with complicated ideas, and novel-reading especially gives us the ability to think in a concentrated and focused way about both ourselves and other people, such that our theory of mind becomes fully developed and sophisticated.

I was reflecting on all of this recently when leafing through the pages of the latest edition of White Dwarf, which celebrates 50 years since the founding of Games Workshop. I am not a regular White Dwarf reader - I must have bought it twice in the last twenty years. But there was a time in my life when I read it avidly. And since, like I assume a lot of readers, the battle reports were always my favourite features, I quickly found my way to the one in this edition - a 40k battle between the Imperium and Chaos Space Marines.

I was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - and appalled at what I saw. What passes as a battle report is, and I think it is important to use this particular word in this particular context, unreadable. Have a look at these photos I took of some of the relevant pages:

It is not, let me make plain, that everything does not look stunning or that the models are not shown off wonderfully or that the battle report is not slickly put together. And it is not that there are not, strictly speaking, chunks of text on the pages that one could I suppose, quote-unquote, 'read'. It is the extent to which it is almost impossible to understand what is going on because so little effort is made to explain it in text form. The sections which set out the thinking of the two generals in terms of planning and deployment consist of the most threadbare concessions to the concept of thought. This, for example, is the entirety of the rationale set out by the general of the Chaos army in his section of the preamble:

Nothing about set-up, nothing about tactics, not even anything in particular about the units or why he has chosen them. Here, meanwhile, is the section on deployment, where there is ostensibly an objective, 'referee view' account of how the two different armies are set up:

That is the whole thing. What even is that, other than a cursory list simply reciting where various units are placed? Why are they being placed there? What is the reasoning behind all of this? 

And that's to set aside the account of the battle itself, which reads like the most bare-bones horse-racing commentary that one could imagine: brown horse, brown horse, now it's black horse, black horse, grey horse on the outside, grey horse, oh but another brown horse, brown horse...:

Have a look at the side bar. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Oh, and then this happened. BUT LOOK AT THE PHOTOS OF THE MODELS, EACH OF WHICH ONLY INDIVIDUALLY COSTS £38.99 ORDERABLE FROM THE WARHAMMER WEBSITE.

This is not good. This is stupid and insulting to the reader. It reveals a basically pornographic approach to the hobby - phwoar, look at that bolter; phwoar, look at the lascannons on that; phwoar, look at that big, thick, throbbing shadowsword - but, more importantly, it reveals a post-literate one. Yes, there are words that are there to be read, but it is totally unnecessary that you read them. They are superfluous. They can be ignored. They are grey, uninteresting, sidelined, and irrelevant. What matters is what you can see.

Compare this to the battle reports of yore. Through careful and extensive internet searches undertaken over the course of months of deep research (well, okay, I conducted a single Google search) I found that some legendary champion has undertaken an act of sheer heroism and uploaded a load of old battle reports from long lost White Dwarfs of yesteryear and put them in a PDF on 'tinternet. As soon as I got it my eye was immediately drawn to a Warhammer battle report that has always stuck in my mind called, The Battle of Skull River, from Issue 170 (in 1994). 

Note the way in which each general lays out in some detail a plan, a rationale for unit selection, and an idea about deployment and tactics:

And note how the battle report plays out, with a proper textual narrative providing an exciting prose account of what is happening, combined with commentary:

Note the different emphasis. Yes, there are images showing off the models. But this does not come at the cost of actually being able to work out what is happening on the basis that an actual battle is taking place. And note above all the use of maps which allow you to, at any point, work out easily where the different units are and what they are doing so as to gain a proper bird's eye view of proceedings - the use of visual aids to add to the interpretation and clarity of the text, rather than the complete domination of the former at the expense of the latter. (There isn't a single map in the 2025 battle report outlined above. Not one!)

This is a battle report, in short, which treats the hobby as something that is not just Nice Expensive Models to Gaze Adoringly At, but something that one should think about, engage with, and interact with as an intelligent agent. It is a battle report which assumes its readers have a modicum of intelligence and that they are able of digesting information over the course of a page of text rather than in a series of fancy images. It is a battle report for the age when people were expected to be literate.

It is a truism that as people age they get it into their heads that matters are deteriorating in some sense in comparison to the good old days. But this does not mean that they are always necessarily wrong. In this case, I am right. People are reading less, and they are becoming stupider. And this will have bad consequences that extend beyond even the confines of the Games Workshop hobby.

What are we to do about this? It starts at home. Read more. Watch screens less. Encourage your children to read more and restrict their access to screens. Stop being lazy. Set the tone in your personal life: what you do with your time is important, and you can spend your time well, or badly. Time watching screens is time spent badly; time reading books is time spent well. Your mind is important and you should protect and cultivate it. This does not mean that you are not allowed any hobby or leisure time or that you should live like a Spartan; it means that if you have a hobby pursue it in such a way that it makes you better as a person rather than worse. It is in your hands to make a small difference to the culture by acting out a different set of values - so get on and do it.