I've just finished reading Azincourt, the latest from Bernard Cornwell. It's an account of Henry V's Agincourt campaign from the perspective of one of the archers who took part, and a riproaring read which begins with murder in a small English village and climaxes in the famous battle, where around 6,000 English and Welsh archers and men-at-arms destroyed a French army of 20-30,000. I read it in a single day; by no means is it great art, but there's no writer quite like Bernard Cornwell for sheer barnstorming excitement and great fight scenes. (Without a doubt, when it comes to describing a battle from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, he's the best there is.) It's heartily recommended.
Naturally enough, since (at a conservative estimate) 70% of the book involves people killing each other, it got me thinking about combat. In particular, it got me thinking about medieval combat and the one-minute-combat round, as well as conceptions of combat in pre-3e D&D generally; probably this is because there has been a bit of discussion about the matter here and here in recent weeks so it's been lurking around in the back of my mind. To cut a long story short, I've always known in a theoretical sense that combat rounds in AD&D last a minute, and even paid attention to the passages in the 2nd edition PHB which say things like:
During a one-minute combat round, each character is assumed to block many attempted attacks and see many of his own attacks blocked. In normal combat, characters parry all the time--there's no need to single out each parry.
and:
When making an attack, a character is likely to close with his opponent, circle for an opening, feint here, jab there, block a thrust, leap back, and perhaps finally make a telling blow. A spellcaster may fumble for his components, dodge an attacker, mentally review the steps of the spell, intone the spell, and then move to safety when it is all done. It has already been shown what drinking a potion might entail. All of these things might happen in a bit less than a minute or a bit more, but the standard is one minute and one action to the round.
But in practice, I've found that what tends to happen in older D&D games goes something like this:
Hector: I attack the troll. [Rolls dice]
DM: You cut the troll with your falchion, roll for damage.
Hector: Yay. [Rolls dice]
DM: [Rolls dice] The troll whacks you with his fist for 8 points of damage.
Hector: I attack him again. [Rolls dice]
DM: Your swing misses by an inch. [Rolls dice] The troll sinks his teeth into your face for 6 points of damage.
Admittedly a boring example, but you get the point: The idea of combat being a one-minute round of thrills and spills during the course of which people may or may not be injured and spells may or may not be cast goes out of the window, and is replaced by a hyper-detailed blow-by-blow account which might as well be second-by-second rather than minute-by-minute.
The thing is, an abstract combat round of one minute is difficult to envisage if all it involves is lots of dodging, parrying, feinting and fencing. That might simulate swordfighting duels from old films like those between Erroll Flynn and Basil Rathbone, or Tony Curtis and Ross Martin, but it doesn't seem to sit very well with the reality of messy, brutal melee. How do we conceptualise or envisage one minute of balls-to-the-wall violence in which participants might very well end up suffering trivial or no injury?
It's all about the armour. As one of the commenters in the Grognardia entry notes, "It's important to keep in mind that people wore the stuff because it worked." And work it did. In Azincourt, Cornwell describes how 5,000 or so French armoured men-at-arms were able to slog their way across 300 yards of open ground through knee-deep mud while enduring a hail of literally tens of thousands of arrows; even at close range a shot from a longbow could not penetrate the thick steel of a breast plate or greave. Nor was a sword or spear likely to - only a lucky or particularly well-aimed blow could cause injury, otherwise the worst that might happen would be the victim being knocked off his feet. Indeed, according to Cromwell (and Keegan) the vast majority of casualties in battles like Agincourt were execution-style killings of prone opponents: A man-at-arms would be knocked over in the melee, flounder in the mud, and then be disposed of either by a knife through the eyeslits in his visor, or by having his head bashed in with a poleaxe. The poleaxe was one of the few weapons which had a decent chance of cracking half-way serious armour.
An AD&D combat round, then, is actually like to involve lots of 'hits' that just don't cause injury. Even the lighter 'adventurer' armours such as chain mail or boiled leather were capable of turning a sword or spear blade, and in the cramped conditions in which most AD&D fights take place it's much more credible to imagine blows being landed but not causing injury than endless dodging, feinting and parrying.
The problem, as I've often thought, is that the 'to hit' roll is a misnomer which leads to unnecessary confusion. The rules would have been better served by called it the 'potential to cause damage' roll instead; a successful roll does not mean that you have hit so much as it means that you have been lucky or skilled enough to hit well, and a failed roll does not mean that you haven't hit - only that you haven't caused injury. 'Potential to cause damage' is an unwieldy term, but a much more accurate one than currently exists.
Due to another of Zach's recent entries, I came across this old rpgsite thread, which was the result of a Best/Worst RPG ever survey carried out on those forums. There are various ranking permutations worked out in the first post, but the most persuasive interpretation of the votes (number of 'best' votes - number of 'worst' votes) resulted in the following "bottom ten" table, number 1 being the worst game of all time:
1. AD&D 2e
2. Star Wars d20
3. Rifts (Palladium)
4. FATAL/Powers and Perils
6. Aftermath
7. Immortal: The Invisible War
8. AD&D 2e Player's Option/Living Steel
10. Fuzion
Do you notice anything odd about that? I do. Namely, AD&D 2e patently isn't the worst RPG ever. It really isn't. You might not agree that it is the best (and although it is my favourite, even I don't think of it as the best), or even that it is very good, but come on... the worst? How do we account for this abnormality?
Mostly, it is to do with the fact that 2e was the most played version of the game, and it thus draws the most ire from the people who dislike D&D generally; it is likely to be the version they are most familiar with. That's unfair, but understandable. However, some of the negativity must also be put it down to the the tendency among a sizeable portion of old schoolers, bemoaned in a recent thread at dragonsfoot, to what essentially boils down to Intellectual Perversity (as opposed to the sexual kind). That is, irrational hatred on the part of 1e AD&D fans for a game which is 99% similar to their favourite. Intellectual Perversity of grognards, how do I love thee, let me count the ways:
1. 2e AD&D went hand in hand with ill treatment of Gary Gygax, therefore it is bad. Intellectually perverse because it isn't the set of rules' fault, nor Zeb Cook's, that Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR, and lingering distaste over that episode is no rational reason for disliking the game.
2. 2e AD&D threw out some treasured eccentricities of 1e, therefore it is bad. Intellectually perverse because those treasured eccentricities added nothing to the game. Disorganised and incoherent rules are not a good thing. The assassin class never made any sense.
3. 2e AD&D is written in a simplistic style of English which anybody can understand, therefore it is condescending and infantile. Intellectually perverse because game rules are instructions and instructions should always be clear.
4. 2e AD&D got rid of the words 'devil' and 'demon' and replaced them with 'baatezu' and 'tanar'ri', therefore it was cowtowing to the moral majority and demonstrating cowardice. Intellectually perverse because it's a purely cosmetic change.
5. 2e AD&D was moralistic and high-handed, which is never good. Intellectually perverse because nothing within the ruleset prevents graverobbing, murder, genocide, or playing a chaotic evil character as the player desires.
These in and of themselves are perfectly acceptable reasons (however irrational) for disliking 2e or preferring 1e. But they hardly qualify as reasons to believe it the worst game ever, given that the two editions are so similar.
The root cause of this grognard hatred is, I believe, snootiness. 1e came first, and moreover was written more or less for adults. 2e was a jonny-come-lately with aspirations to appeal equally to both adults and older children. That sort of thing bothers people of a certain disposition, who fancy themselves mature and intelligent and above childish pursuits, and thus the edition war was born. Personally I prefer certain aspects of 2e to 1e, but I like the older edition and would never vote it the worst rpg ever, or even call it a bad one.
[For the Blog Carnival on religion.]
On a heap of boulders at the base of a cliff in the forest lives Govgim Dahl, a silent, mournful, solitary being whose one true wish is that he would just be left alone. Unfortunately, the world has never shown the intention of doing any such thing, and he has been dogged for all the eons of his existence by unwanted attention from the forest's other inhabitants.
Govgim is a Galeb Duhr among Galeb Duhr; none of his people are as solitary, stubborn, shy or phlegmatic as he. Like them he loathes company and especially cannot bear humans, with their shrill voices and endless chatter. The only sounds he can tolerate are his own deep sonorous humming, and the occasional cracking of rocks weathered by wind or ice.
However, Govgim is a singular Galeb Duhr in one crucial respect: He is unable to travel through stone. This has been the case for as long as he can remember, and he suspects he was born that way - an unfortunate defect that he has come to view as his own particular curse. This one failing means that he has to endure the attentions of the local humans without means of escape; he is too slow to run away, and some basic bedrock of decency within him prevents their casual slaying.
The humans visit him almost every day. The worst occasions are the feast days, when they bother him from morning to night with bonfires and singing, but most mornings and evenings he has to endure a visit from their idiotic priests. He can no longer remember how or why the foolish creatures came to worship him; the very fact that he has forgotten indicates that they have been doing it for thousands of years. He suffers through their ministrations as best he can, by remaining as utterly still and silent as the rocks around him until they become bored and leave him be. Though over time their faithful worship has given him great power, he would much prefer to set it aside in return for a silent life. But release has never been granted to him.
Govgim Dahl
Govgim is a demigod, and so has certain powers described in Legends & Lore. These include 70% magical resistance, base saving throws of '4' in all categories, omniscience within a mile radius, and granted abilities. However, he cannot teleport and has no avatars. He retains the ability to speak, though he never uses it.
He has the standard Galeb Duhr abilities, with the following exceptions:
Armour Class: -4
Hit Dice: 14
Damage/Attack: 6-36/6-36
He cannot cast the passwall spell, but he has all the other magical powers of one of his kind.
Govgim rarely, if ever, displays aggression, but nor does he enjoy communicating. He can sometimes be induced to converse through the gift of a jewel not less than 500gp in value, and he knows the location of lodes of gold in nearby hills.
Govgim's worshipers are ignorant folk who believe that their god protects them from earthquakes and landslides. He does no such thing, and in fact in his darker moments rather wishes that such events would occur. If ever they do - which happens from time to time - the worshipers offer human sacrifices to appease him; generally these are captive travelers passing through the forest, who they capture with lassos or nets. Otherwise they are unremittingly hostile and seek to protect their god through violence. They are deeply inbred, and many of them bear minor mutations such as additional fingers, crossed eyes, or webbed feet.
Cultists of Govgim
Treasure: J, N, Q
No. Appearing: 20-200
Armour Class: 10 to 6 (roll a d4 and armour accordingly)
Hit Dice: 1-6 hp
THAC0: 20
Damage/Attack: 1d6 (Spear, club or handaxe); or Lasso or Net
Morale: Steady (11-12)
XP: 15
For every twenty cultists encountered there will be a cleric with 3HD who casts spells as a 3rd level cleric and has the best armour. If there are fifty cultists or more, there will be an additional cleric with 5HD who casts spells as a 5th level cleric.
If adventurers come across the Cult of Govgim, roll a d6. On a roll of 1-2 there has recently been a landslide, and the cult are searching for human sacrifices. On a roll of 3-6 there have been no natural disasters in recent memory and the cultists are after simple murder.
It's all Zach's fault. Putting up a link to 300 RPG related text files culled from BBSs during the 80s and 90s. Almost all of these are 'relevant to my interests', coming as they did during the era at which TSR was at its zenith, and I just can't stop browsing. Some of the files are brilliant, some of them are weird, some of them ridiculous; all but a tiny minority are wonderful.
A few favourites:
1 - The curiously entitled Complete Guide to AD&D Alchohol for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (is that a tautology? It's definitely something) by some forgotten genius by the name of Reid Bluebaugh. Alchohol is the great love of my life after food, sex and D&D (okay, and the missus), so I'm especially interested in supplements which contain chapters on Popular and Strange Alchohols Amongst The Worlds, When the Still Explodes, and Getting to Know Your Booze, as well as monsters such as the Giant Alchohol Ant and magic items like the Ring of Wine Changing. Whatever Mr. Bluebaugh is doing now, I wish it had been him who'd designed 4e.
2 - A short file describing a magic item called the Bag o' Wondrous Items, which produces everything from 10' poles to star trek phasers to baskets of radishes to randomly generated golems.
3 - A probably-broken but undoubtedly cool new class of Dwarf mages called the Dwarnoi, who can turn stone creatures like a cleric can the undead.
4 - 'How to Join the Center for Monster Control'; rules on becoming a member of a secret society of...monster controllers. A mere 500sp entrance fee is required - along with a go-ahead from the 'board of magocratics'.
5 - A kind of manifesto for Cyberpunk games called Cyberpunk: The Rules. I'm particularly intrigued by rule number 9: "Crossbreeding produces mutation". Not so much a rule as a... motto?
6 - Rules on the Grenade weapon proficiency for 2e AD&D.
7 - An especially necessary supplement, given the proclivities of certain members of the hobby: The (more or less) Complete Guide to Hygeine for Fantasy Role Playing Games. First chapter: When Do Adventurers Go To The Bathroom? This one has Mr. Reid Bluebaugh's fingerprints all over it, but the author isn't credited.
8 - Literally dozens, if not hundreds, of new spells.
9 - First in a series of Netbooks of Plots, containing such gems as Help the local good, but dying, wizard to attain lichdom and You are assigned to protect a person, but don't let them know you're protecting them.
10 - A miscellany of stuff for a certain gonzo AD&D setting, called (of course), The Rhyme of the Ancient Spelljammer. New items include The Pangalactic Gargleblaster (there's that Reid Bluebaugh again) and the Dispel Magic Grenade; new monsters include the Holomath (which appears "as a very large balloon or ball, with a mouth-like opening in front", floating around in wildspace, and can blow out a cloud of gas for awful effects).
For no real reason other than a desire to wallow in self-regard: My Top Five Characters Ever. Of all the characters I've played, they are the ones I remember with the greatest fondness.
Zone, the Shark Totem Shaman, from a Shadowrun campaign circa 1996-7. Zone was a native Hawaiian who had been savagely beaten pre-game and left permanently hobbled. (I used the bonus points from this flaw to buy heinous mechanical advantages, needless to say.) He had a tattoo of a hammerhead shark emblazoned across his back (cheesy as hell, but hey, I was only 15) and a great penchant for blasting people with lightning bolts. During his illustrious career he managed to, among other things, kill a vampire by severing its head with a power-axe, learn how to pilot a miniature submarine, blast two other player characters into oblivion in separate incidents, carry on an affair with a crimelord's wife, and eventually open his very own shark sanctuary with his ill-gotten gains.
'Twas Brillig, the Half-Elf Bard, from an AD&D campaign in the mid 90's, when I was in a deliberately quirky phase of my life. (I really did find that name amusing: what an irritating teenager I must have been.) 'Twas Brillig, who started off as a kind of comic relief character, ended up as one of the longest-lived and higest-ranking D&D characters I've ever come up with; I think he eventually reached level 14 or thereabouts. Most of his life was spent in Athas (the Darksun world) where he eventually became a kind of Gith overlord, with his own tribe of bodyguards to protect him from his Thri-kreen enemies.
Biscuit, the Minotaur Street Samurai, from another Shadowrun game. Biscuit was a Basque Separatist and demolitions expert who is now chiefly remembered for the sheer number of occasions on which he blew up either himself or another runner. He also, if I recall, had a dwarf sidekick named Yosemite Sam. (I believe this character also came from my mid-90s smart-alec quirky phase.)
Gorky, the Dwarf Fighter, from one of my forays into D&D 3e in the early 2000s. Gorky was an almost psychotically xenophobic creature, whose innate suspicion of any non-dwarf was only outdone by a monumental sense of his own greatness. He was probably the most fun to play character that I can remember - his unshakeable self-belief led him into all kinds of impossible situations, like trying with his battleaxe to chop down an oak tree full of crossbow-wielding kobold snipers, or leaping over pits full of poisoned spikes and falling in. But he always survived.
Maria Correia, the Solo, from a more serious Cyberpunk 2020 game. She was an ex-revolutionary who had been fighting with the Shining Path in Peru before abandoning Marxist ideals and becoming a mercenary. Over the course of the campaign she gradually gave up the pursuit of money and went back to being a Maoist again. I believe she is one of only two female characters I've ever played - and no, I didn't do a female voice.
What are yours?
[I was going to begin a series about demigods, but after reading posts at Jeff's gameblog and Sword & Shield, I felt inspired to scrawl something about linguistics and role playing settings.]
I'm a professional translator, so I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about languages (obviously Japanese and English in the main, as they are the languages I work with, but I have a general interest in linguistics). One thing I've noticed is just how different languages can be, especially those from unrelated language families - and I don't mean different in the naive sense that English doesn't sound much like Chinese. What I'm talking about is how languages that have evolved in completely different cultural surroundings to each other have also evolved highly different modes of expression.
An example: Japanese, like most aspects of Japanese culture, is highly minimalist, especially in its most casual forms. Consider the English expression: "How have you been?". The equivalent Japanese expression is simply "Saikin do?", literally translated as "Lately how?". (Sometimes this is abbreviated to simply, "Do?", or "How?".) Similarly, when two Japanese friends meet, they'll typically ask each other, simply, "Genki?" ("Healthy?") rather than the comparatively flowery English "How are you?" (three words to accomplish what the Japanese manage with one).
Another example: one of the most common utterances in Japanese is the phrase yoroshiku onegaishimasu (or variations thereof). Non-Japanese speakers visiting the country come to recognise those words because you can hear them everywhere. It is often translated in phrasebooks and the like as "Nice to meet you" or "How do you do?", but in fact it means no such thing - literally translated it goes something like "Please behave well". It is rendered "Nice to meet you" in phrasebooks because it is often uttered when two people first meet, but it is also used in a whole variety of other situations - at the end of letters, when making a request, when complaining, when asking for something, when signing something, essentially whenever a polite turn of phrase is considered necessary. That English simply has no equivalent phrase hints at a huge cultural difference; English speakers presumably do not and never have felt it necessary to exhort each other to "Behave well", whereas for the Japanese it is so common that it has evolved to ubiquity. Why this should be is a question for the armchair anthropologist, and beyond my capability to answer, but that a big difference in our cultural foundations exists is indisputable.
Another example: Japanese colours are different to English ones; aoi, which describes the colour we know of as blue, is also used by the Japanese to refer to the colour of fresh grass, green apples, and the green on traffic lights. Do Japanese and English speakers see colours in different ways? Who can say?
All this is a roundabout way of saying, languages which have been separated by many thousands of years of evolution are not just different in terms of the way the words sound; they are also based around fundamentally different cultural interpretations of the world.
Now, take that thought, and try transferring it to two cultures that don't just belong to two very slightly different types of human being; try transferring it to two cultures that belong to different species. Imagine the difficulty in understanding a dwarven worldview for a human - the huge matrix of assumptions, expressions and ideas which just aren't shared. It's difficult enough for an English speaker to learn Japanese and vice versa; how much more amplified would that be for a human being trying to speak a language of dwarfs? (Let alone orcs, giants, dragons...) It would not involve merely learning a new grammar and vocabulary. It would also require huge mental effort to come to grips with such an exotic way of viewing the world. Wittgenstein famously remarked that if a lion could talk, we could not understand him - the same must surely also be true of a goblin, Klingon or troll.
Would it spoil players' fun to tell them that, no, they can't communicate with other races/species except perhaps through sign language and monosyllables? I'm not sure, but I'd like to try it.
One of my favourite D&D tropes is the idea that if an individual being gains a group of worshipers, it can attain divinity. This makes religion a very chaotic, ad hoc, and above all tangible thing; unlike in the monotheistic religions of our world where Gods stand aloof, D&D powers' fate is inextricably bound up in the fortunes and vagaries of their followers. It also means the interplay between believer and deity is balanced, with neither having the ultimate power; okay, so High Blierophlat the God of Death can squish any follower he so chooses, but if he does that too often he'll eventually find his disciples running off to some more amiable deity like Jethro the Gardener. Unless of course he's willing to offer some serious compensating benefits.
This approach allows for a much more localised, cultish and fertile religious climate, something akin to how I imagine a trawl through pagan Europe would have been: each group of villages has its own local deity, each cave its shrine to the mountain spirit, each river its sprite, and each boulder its guardian - the major difference being that in a D&D world, those things are real, which is infinitely better. The local village deity really will provide summer rains - if the populace are willing to sacrifice a first born. The mountain spirit will kill travellers with an avalanche unless he is properly placated. The river sprite needs just a few more believers before she can attain demi-goddess hood. The boulder is really a galeb duhr who has had divinity thrust upon him by unwanted worship; all he wishes is that his devoted disciples would just leave him be.
A long while ago I wrote a little entry about a crayfish demigod living in a lake, which I think encompasses what I mean quite nicely. I'll be doing a little series of similar articles this week, in celebration of this month's blogger carnival.
Something horrible has happened to me. Something strange and terrifying. A powerful, atavistic urge that I can feel throbbing through the marrow of my bones and pulsating in the root of my brain-stem has taken control of my psyche; it is a deep primal need that knows only one way to be quenched. Yes, I want to re-read the Dragonlance books.
I put it down to being a sucker for a good quest. Part of being a fantasy literature snob is that I am no longer supposed to have any time for anything so prosaic, but at the core of all fantasy literature snobs is an adolescent dreamer trying to get out - and occasionally I have to let mine out to revel in some good old fashioned questing. This time, I'm going to let him feast on the 'goodness' (ahem) that is Tanis and co's jaunt across Krynn.
One shouldn't underestimate the weird power that Dragonlance exerted over fantasy roleplaying games in general and D&D in particular, especially when I first started playing. Everybody in the gaming groups I was involved in had read both 'canon' trilogies, and were intimately familiar with their characters and plots. We created poor carbon copies of Tanis, Cameron, Raistlin and Tas for our games. We fantasised about everliving and everyouthful elven maidens with delicate features and plunging cleavages. We envisaged huge armies of dragonriders clashing in the sky. And we desperately wanted to emulate such things in our games.
More than that, we wanted to emulate the sweeping, world-changing plot arc. For us, killing things and taking their stuff just didn't cut it; nor did tomb-plundering and exploration. No - what we wanted was meaning. We wanted to trek across continents on a grand mission to resurrect forgotten gods. We wanted to smite evil and restore balance to the universe. We wanted to bring back magic to the world. Of course this desire sprung from deeper wells than just Dragonlance, but Weiss and Hickman have to take the lion's share of the blame.
The thing was, in the final analysis what we were never able to introduce into our games was a sensible plot. Although grand questing was what we wanted, our gaming pretty much always devolved into murder, looting and mayhem of the bleakest kind - purposeless death and killing, and the hoarding of vast wealth for no reason other than pure avarice. It was all deeply unsatisfactory when compared to the wonderful purity of vision which the Dragonlance Chronicles afforded; the series was like the Platonic ideal form of what a D&D adventuring party and a D&D campaign should be, impossible to attain but always just within reach - tempting us.
I've grown up now of course, and think I prefer the down and dirty misery of proper D&D. But the adolescent dreamer still has to get his time out in the exercise yard every now and again. There's no conclusion to this rather rambling entry other than that.
So that break was longer than it was supposed to be. As my friend recently put it, after a long haul flight you get really bad 'bone ache' (I'm not sure if that's a technical term) that makes your whole body feel as if it's been hit several times with a padded mallet. It's drained my will to blog.
But it got me thinking: jet lag is something that human beings simply weren't built to cope with. Sudden changes of time zone are beyond our ken in biological terms - at no point in our evolutionary history did we ever encounter them or anything like them. So now that we do come across them, they throw our bodies out of joint. (This is similar, of course, to the tendency that evolutionary psychologists often remark upon for human beings to behave in ways that make no sense in our current environment, but on reflection are well suited to small bands of hunter gatherer simian beasts.)
This has me thinking about the kind of tropes that we find in fantasy rpgs. Teleportation is the obvious line of comparison. But what about the other magical phenomena we come across: healing, resurrection, flight and telekinesis? Would these have psycho-physiological effects above and beyond their actual ones?
