Alignment is Allegiance

Musing about alignment in D&D today, I had a realization.  The very word explains its purpose - who are you aligned with?  When the world is dark, do you stand with good King Osric, or with the forces of chaos?

Once you take this into an environment with plenty of moral gray - in other words, just about every poignant decision in the story - it's just the wrong tool for the job.  Alignment is not about morality, it's about allegiance.

In an urban political campaign, 'good' and 'evil' could be usefully replaced with more relevant alignments, like "Royalist" or "Republican".  It's not about what you should do, but who you're doing it for.

Arms Race

Morgan stopped by with a tip about weapons tonight.

"Dad, don't go into battle with a sword that works against your armor.  Your enemies can copy your sword.  Then you get to battle and it's like, da de dah, I'm fine - and everybody's dead, no winner."

"Uh, okay. .. What do you take to battle if your enemies have the same armor you do?"

"Better armor.  (Duh.)"

Brighter than White

Today I came across a really interesting demonstration of how the brain perceives light and color.

In this piece by Deviant Art's algenpfleger, we look directly into the sun, which overpowers the silhouettes of the two figures.

Look at the sun directly:



("Commander's Authority" image copyright Wizards of the Coast.)

I laughed at myself when I realized I was actually squinting! Were you?

My brain was telling me that there was so much light flooding at me from the sun that I should try to cut it down by closing my eyes a little - then, perhaps, I'd be able to make out more details of the hands and jewellery.

Of course, RBG monitors can't display anything brighter than 100% white, it's all an illusion, as is plainly seen when the image is cropped in half.

The blindingly bright whiteness of the sun is no brighter or whiter than the grubby, printer-paper white of my blog.

You All Meet In A Tavern

Troll in the Corner has a post with five ideas for how to avoid the old cliché of the party meeting up in a tavern for their first adventure.

The Assumption

What's fascinating about all of these is the assumption that the party meets for the first time right as they take up the call to adventure. This assumption so ingrained in D&D culture that it's taken for granted - and yet, narratively, it's so awkward that it practically begs for cliché. With all these people meeting for the first time, a meeting place of strangers is an obvious choice.

So why is this type of start so common? It's baked into the rules of D&D, that's why! Not explicitly, of course, but here's what I mean:

1. D&D encourages individual character-making

To break away from the cliché, you need to have a party premise. The entourage, say, of a wealthy Venetian merchant having a mid-life crisis decides he's going to hire a group of mercenaries to raid Alexandria for the relics of St. Mark and bring them back to Venice. He goes along as expedition captain, leading a mix of fresh recruits and seasoned veterans of wars with Genoa.

But D&D markets adventurer career paths directly to players. Players invest emotionally in working their way up to Duellist or Underdark Assassin long before a particular adventure has been minted, and they're able to do so even if this makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the adventure.

Perhaps it's a maritime campaign in a sea monster-haunted archipelago. You might expect the adventurers to become tanned, salt-stained sailors - but nope! As long as you collect your XP, you can advance along your wish fulfillment career path, utterly untarnished by your actual experiences.

This kind of zero-cooperation concept building is a powerful tool for hooking casual players, or players not really mature enough (or simply not interested in) collaborating creatively. "I'll follow the plot, but keep your hands off my character!"

Of course you can have a party concept, but this runs subtly against the grain; players will need to give up tantalizing options in order to make it happen.

2. D&D encourages niche coverage

With D&D's niche protection, playing a party built around everyone being a mercenary fighter is a sure-fire way of getting your asses handed to you, just as surely as a whole party made of clerics. Parties that cover off all the combat roles are harder to explain, and are self-consciously meta-game tropes. "We need a tank."

Of course you can have a themed party that's missing certain niche roles by design, but this runs against the grain - the DM has to be very mindful of the impact of certain types of encounter, like invisible creatures or a wave of undead, that will be devastating for a party not designed to handle them.

3. The Weirdness of Levels

D&D's nearly linear power advancement makes a wide mix of adventuring levels problematic. Fifth-level fighters are vastly more effective than first-level fighters, so much so that encounters which barely challenge the veterans can be extremely risky for the greener soldiers, who have little to contribute besides serving as a distraction.

This puts tremendous pressure on the party to start out at the same or similar experience levels. Our hypothetical Venetian party, with its wealthy non-combatant leading a group of fifth and second-level fighters, is decidedly unstable in D&D.

Of course, you can do this if the DM is clever enough always to challenge the party appropriately, with mixed-level encounters - or by disengaging from the mechanics to one degree or other (e.g. not using the battle mat for combat, for example). But this takes effort and skill.

4. Missing Social Conflict

Why are the mercenaries following the merchant at all? In D&D, the only meaningful force that constrains players is the threat of injury. Social pressures, particularly between player characters, are non-existent.

Unarmed in this area, the expedition leader is irrelevant. Other than a few gold coins, at a game mechanical level he has nothing meaningful to contribute whatsoever. Who would want to play this character?

Of course, you can play out stories like this in D&D, it's just that they happen without any mechanical support. This can be satisfying, though for a story that focuses on social conflict, mechanics are interesting for the same reasons that combat mechanics are fun.

But free-form social conflict (over, say, the leadership of the party, or the choice of strategy the party takes) carries a few important risks. With no mechanical reason to back down from an argument, in-character argument either escalates to in-character disruption (PC-on-PC violence, or someone storming out of the party) or gets resolved at the player level.

A very collaborative group, all on the same page, may be able to role-play the debate amicably, with one player choosing to have his character 'be convinced'. More often than not, however, the debate rages on interminably, someone gives in reluctantly because of player-level tension: the winning player being more stubborn, persuasive, intimidating, or enjoys a more of the group's support.

In Conclusion

D&D invites players to make a "balanced party" out of thematically unrelated character concepts, all of the same experience level, without meaningful intra-party tension. The leaderless, informally egalitarian troupe of murderhobos is a natural consequence!

Does the Universe Exist?

Here's a thought that boggles my brain from time to time - what if the universe didn't exist. I'm not talking about stuff, like chairs and people and planets. That's a little unusual, but it's not so hard to imagine a universe that's got nothing in it, an infinite void. But that's not what I'm talking about. What if the void didn't exist either? Not only was there nothing, there was nowhere for it to be.

This hurts my head for a while, but then it starts to seem plausible. Unperturbed nothingness seems pretty elegant. Why should there be physical laws at all, let alone arbitrary arrangements of matter and energy? Why does the universe exist at all?

Does it?

Let's assume that physicists eventually come up with a complete description of the universe, a theory of everything. (Not a theory of "everything", including waltzes and parakeets, but a complete description of the root level of reality, the 'building blocks' as it were.)

What's the difference between this set of rules and the actual universe? What gives life to the rules and makes the world they describe real, or is the mere possibility of a universe just as real?

To quote Stephen Hawking:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

What if it's nothing?

Okay, I admit this sounds totally bonkers, but consider the following thought experiment:

Let's assume for the moment that (1) you're a materialist, and you believe that cognition, self-awareness, intelligence, etc. are the output of computations (say) of the human brain.

Let's further assume that (2) we eventually develop artificial intelligence, maybe in a giant Game of Life, maybe some other way.

Unlike a robot brain, the AI we create isn't wired up to perceive the outside world, only events in its own simulated world - in essence, we've created a simulated universe (which may follow different laws than our own). So there's a society of simulated beings all chatting away with one another, or whatever they're doing. These aren't video game characters, mere sprites, these are rich, thinking beings that - when wired up to our world - behave just as richly as humans (though their thought processes and mental architecture might be very different), that just happen to be experiencing a completely virtual world.

Are these beings having a real experience, like we do? It would seem so, following from (1).

If you're still with me, here's where it gets weird. Is their experience somehow reliant on us running the simulation? Does it matter?

At first, it seems so. After all, if we never run the simulation, no experience for them, right?

Consider: if we pause the simulation, wait five minutes, and restart it, they'd never know. All their brains would freeze, along with everything in their little simulated universe, and be restarted, and they'd be none the wiser. In fact, if it's deterministic (like Conway's Game of Life) we could even rewind it a little and replay it. They're still motoring on like nothing had happened. These disturbances don't affect them at all.

In fact, run it backwards for a few years, turn it off, and when we get to the year 2076, start it over from the beginning. They still have no idea.

So it seems to me that the experience of these simulated beings is only loosely connected - if at all - to how and when we run the simulator.

Does it matter if we run it at all? If so, how?

If it doesn't matter if we ever run it, does it matter if we even invent it?

If not, it seems that a whole realm of existence and experience is 'out there', without us lending any energy to it whatsoever.

Back to us. If indeed we can find a simple theory of everything, maybe it's utterly unnecessary for anything to breathe fire into them. Perhaps all of experience is just the interaction between ephemeral possibilities of actuality. The universe doesn't really exist at all!

Fiasco with Adults

Had my first game of Fiasco with adults - my relatives. None of them are role-players, but they're all actors (I'm the odd one out there) and they're quite spontaneous.

The characterizations were hilarious, especially from my sister-in-law (a professional actress), and for family at least, unexpected risque: webcams hidden in tanning beds and the resulting porn was a central element.

The setup was a little confusing to them, mechanically, and there was a lot of uncertainty about what it all meant, but it was neat to see people starting to get inspired and leaning forward as the details started to click together.

In hindsight, we could have gone over some conventions of the genre, as we shied away from the outrageous and produced a sort of soap opera. Both in terms of pacing and general content, it felt a bit like Twin Peaks without the surrealism. Our characters were far too sensible!

A number of scenes focused on trying to get others to agree to do something, rather than plunging forward with screwball schemes (getting promises for goods rather than breaking in and taking them ourselves). As a result, 'bad result' resolutions didn't move the story enough ("he says no") rather than snowball the fiasco ("he catches you in the act"). A couple of scenes were spent essentially revisiting conflicts ("Hey, why haven't you done that thing you said you'd do yet?"). This really put the brakes on the central Need, as even modest plot advances were undone.

By the time I twigged to this we were well into act two, and it was revealed to all when we got the aftermath results which were way more brutal than the tone we'd set. (The worst that had happened to a character in play was being charged with a crime.)

We were exhausted and out of ideas by the very end, but the aftermath montage was really fun, perhaps because it was so clear just how much license we all had to set scenes (decades later). We went die by die and I found it once again unexpectedly poignant. My character's last die was a white one, where I got to move back to the town decades later to find that nobody remembered me (some victory!)

Can't wait to play again!

Fiasco with Kids

As I hadn't managed to get my relatives together to play Fiasco yet, I figured I'd give it a whirl with my kids, and it was surprisingly fun and accessible to them, despite their young ages (5 and 8).

Creating the character relationships went very smoothly - rather than having them browse the playset lists, we just took turns rolling and took what we got. (Although I did edit out the untoward objects and the needs about getting laid!)

By the time we were done, Leah (5) was a veterinary surgeon (Dr. Daisy), locked in a rivalry with Morgan's character, Dr. Eggnog. (A certain gonzo element creeps in with kids!) My character, Burt Cummings was a vet school wash-out, having left when bowel problems made it impossible for him to afford tuition. Now, he's getting illegal surgeries done via Dr. Daisy (professional/client relationship). Our location was (of course) the Animal Care Clinic on Center Road.

We kept the scenes super short and punchy, so the whole game was done in less than an hour.

My girls play 'pretend' all the time, and what's neat about it is the constant out of character negotiation they do about their roles and the upcoming events. As a result, Fiasco's scene framing seemed very natural for them, and they rolled easily with whatever Resolves were handed to them.

After the end of Act One, we rolled two Twists, "Dangerous Animal (Perhaps Metaphorical) Gets Loose" and "Ugly Struggle Ends in Death". The former we played literally; Dr. Eggnog accidentally releases a rabid dog while hunting through the vet clinic for some dirt on Dr. Daisy; later Burt runs into it and gets hurt. I then showed up at Dr. Eggnog's place with a shotgun, looking for revenge (long story) and Eggnog ends up biting it, which Morgan was totally into.

We still had a few scenes left, so we followed the game's advice and played Eggnog's last scene as a flashback - Burt and Eggnog back in vet school, just chatting. There was no real conflict, but I found the juxtaposition between their mortal struggle and their earlier friendship surprisingly poignant.

Fiasco is a very lean game, and the mechanics are a lot simpler than the rules make them out to be, somehow - there's so much advice about how to apply them that the learning curve looks steeper than it is, partly because the rules are spread out through the fairly long text. The summaries are handy, but only as memory-joggers - "do some dice math". The whole game (playsets aside) could probably be printed on three pages, with all the advice following.

All in all, it was slightly too involved for Leah, whose interest waned when there were about three scenes left but Morgan said she'd play again without hesitation. Fun!