Posts Tagged 'Tavis
On Dwimmermount, And Failure
Categories: Becoming a Better Roleplayer and Dwimmermount
Tags: dwimmermount, life, Tavis, theory
Stop me if you've heard this one before, maybe in the comments to this post about Gygax, Arneson, and a music video. My mom was a little girl when Hawaii became a state. She's about the age of D&D's original gangsters, and the vogue for Hawaiian shirts and hula hoops affected her the way Tractics did them. The world wasn't changed by my mom's lifelong devotion to hula dancing, but it did mean my childhood was surrounded by the paraphernalia of a hobby most people left behind decades ago.
In 2000, her halao, a hula group made up of dancers who commuted between Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio (for non-Texans, this is a whole lot of six-mile hexes) to practice together, was the first in the continental-US-other-than-California to be invited to the Merrie Monarch festival. This would be hula's equivalent of Gen Con, if Indy had this big contest we all cared about so much that just being allowed to enter was a big deal.
A women's group competing in the Merrie Monarch festival. We had all these kinds of cowrie shell necklaces and coconut shell bras around the house when I was a kid.
The day my mom was getting ready to go on stage – braiding all those grass skirts takes a long time – the rest of my family, my fiancee, and I went swimming at a black sand beach on the big island. After a while the rest of us went in to build sand castles while my dad looked for coral with a snorkel. At one point we looked up and wondered if he was swimming a little far from shore; when we looked again a minute later he had drowned. My brother and I swam out to try to rescue him, but our attempts at CPR failed.
Kehena Beach can be seen in the background of this shot. Most of the folks who helped with the rescue weren't wearing any clothes.
Like many gamers I grew up devoted to science fiction, especially everything Robert A. Heinlein ever wrote, and I was strongly influenced by its cult of competence. Years later, in a class on SF, Chip Delany identified this as one of the genre's fixed ideas – the delusion that an exceptional person should be able to do everything exceptionally well, whether it's to skin a squirrel with your boot or fix a gourmet meal or repel an alien invasion – but it was gospel to me as a kid. I never built a bomb shelter using rolls of toilet paper as radiation filters the way Heinlein told me to in Expanded Universe, but I did lots of other stuff, from taking karate lessons to getting certified as an emergency medical technician, for the time when my training might mean the difference between life or death. When the time came, I failed.
One failure followed another. The Ph.D towards which I'd invested five years of my time and a bunch of other people's money stalled and eventually sputtered out, a long painful process of disappointment for my mentor, my friends, and others who'd counted on me to deliver my thesis. For a long time I felt like a loser, hiding myself away in shame to avoid evidence of how I'd let people down or fantasizing about grandiose ways I could re-establish myself as an exceptional person. Eventually I got over the idea that I deserved to have life suck forever; the decision to get myself into therapy was a key step, but that and its interesting relationship to what we do in roleplaying sessions is for another post.
This one is about Dwimmermount. If you supported its Kickstarter, or if you're reasonably attuned to an online community that contains folks who did, you'll have heard that the project is in some trouble. As the person at Autarch who's been the public face for the Dwimmermount crowdfunding effort, I'm doing all I can to make sure that what it promised is delivered – although, since James has both the funding and the copyright that are required to release his work, I'm not in the best position to do so. Autarch is still looking for solutions, but everyone's best efforts can never banish the possibility of failure.
I can't talk about what's going on with Dwimmermount author James Maliszewski and how it relates to the project's problems – mostly because he's not telling me, and the desire to respect his privacy covers what's left – but here's what I can say from my experience following my father's death.
There are worse things in the world than a delayed Kickstarter or a pre-ordered gaming product that fails to ship. People have to take responsibility for their actions, sure, but the reality is that life contains some tragic fucking shit and the only thing that makes it bearable is our compassion for one another.
Sometimes failure is a way to realize you're on the wrong path. I'd been going nowhere as a grad student long before my dad died, and although this isn't the way I would have chosen to get there, I'm now happier than most of the people I know who continued down the track I got jolted out of.
You have to fail if you're going to learn from your mistakes. The biggest thing I had to overcome was the feeling that I was a failure, and since that's all I'd ever be there was no point in trying. The flip side of this is the science-fiction fantasy that I should be good at everything, meaning the best way to evade the sneaking suspicion that this wasn't so was to avoid doing anything at which I might fail. Either way, I was shutting myself off from the opportunity to see that you win some, you lose some, and meanwhile it's fun to play the game.
Autarch is a new company, and we're still making rookie mistakes. Going into the Dwimmermount project, I felt like Autarch's success with the Adventurer Conqueror King Kickstarter, and the failure of mine for the Arneson Memorial Gameday, had given us considerable expertise. I see now that those those were relatively smooth hits or misses. We've learned a lot more from a project that's been rocky and whose fate remains uncertain; we won't again put ourselves in a position where we're holding the bag and have left ourselves so little control over the outcome. Although I still think there's a valuable role for crowdfunding to act as the testing ground and collaborative inspiration for projects early in their development cycle, the Kickstarter currently on Autarch's drawing board, Domains at War, will have a basically finished draft ready to give to backers as soon as they pledge and will explicitly be seeking funds just to illustrate, print, and ship a thing that already exists.
Kickstarter is a new thing under the sun too. Without being privy to their process, the fact that they are growing successfully means they must be learning from their mistakes. I'd like to think that the requirements for project creators to discuss risks to backers, which have been put in place since we launched Dwimmermount, might have helped us avoid another serious mistake in not being transparent from the start about Autarch's contract with James and the ways it could go wrong. But hindsight is misleading, and there are still many ways that Dwimmermount could come out right.
To bring this back to gaming and pay the Joesky tax, roleplaying lets you make mistakes and learn from the consequences in a safe space. I've written before about my frustration with party optimization in 4E, where I felt like no feasible amount of play time would give me enough observations to statistically distinguish successful group strategies from sub-par ones. Tim Harford's fascinating Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure shows that it's not just statistics that can be make it hard to recognize when you've made a mistake (this being an obvious prerequisite to learning from it). Some of the unconscious biases he points out are kind of a benefit for roleplaying: the tendency to retrospectively cast our bad decisions as good ones can make the story of a gang of insanely greedy, stupid, merciless cowards trying to bullshit their way to a wholly undeserved victory seem a little less undeserved.
But the fear of failure is what drives these attempts to airbrush away one's mistakes, and it makes for bad gaming. Fudging the dice robs us of the ability to learn. The wisely titled Play Unsafe presents techniques like holding ideas lightly (because they might be wrong) and not planning in advance (because no amount of worrying will never eliminate the possibility of rolling a natural 1) that I think are at the heart of the old-school approach. Best of all, they're things you can try out and see if they work for you right away, no statistical analysis necessary.
Orc Stomp
Tags: ACKS, conventions, life, Tavis
Orc Stomp is a 5K fun run being held twice at this year's Gen Con – once on Thursday at 8 am, and once on Friday at 6 am. I didn't get it together in time to register, but will be doing it anyways on Thursday morning. If there's room, I'll join in with generic tickets; if not, I'll cheer on the official runners and then do the route myself once they wrap up.
Click for the Orc Stomp page on Facebook!
I'm currently training to run an entire 5K without walking, which hasn't happened yet. Yesterday's combined walk/run time gives me an ACKS movement rate of 76 feet per round, which falls woefully short of the 120′ I should be able to do as an unencumbered human. However that pace is an average of my speed over 228 rounds. ACKS assumes I can only run at 120′ for a number of my rounds equal to Constitution x 2, after which I will become exhausted and have to walk at 40'/round for the next 60 rounds until I can run again. Somewhere in there is a way to calculate my Constitution score, which vanity and/or laziness compels me to put off until my time improves a little.
I heard about the 5K at last year's con from Rich Rogers, who I'd gotten to know online when he interviewed me for the Canon Puncture podcast and then met in person when he stopped by for the continuous Adventurer Conqueror King demo game. I'd been finding that doing things like running up the hotel steps was helping me stay alert during said extravaganza, so I was excited to commit to something longer and more structured at this year's convention. Rich interviewed me recently for This Just In… From Gen Con – you can hear the results here – and hooked me up with some 5K guides from Active.com that helped me get started. Rich is going to be running on both Thursday and Friday morning, and it would not surprise me if he will also be running to and from each of the far-flung This Just In reports he's got scheduled throughout the con.
Also planning to run on Thursday are Andrew Pascal and James Sprattley, two-thirds of the team behind the forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary. At least one of them is training to do a marathon, so they are probably fully capable of discussing the project during the run. (I'm still at the stage where I'm breathing too hard to talk, against the advice of those running guides.)
Other less-strenuous opportunities to learn about what promises to be a truly excellent documentary (and meet third member of the team Anthony Savini, who plans to sleep in on Thursday) will be the Filmmakers Meet & Greet on Friday at 10 am, and the panel devoted to their documentary on Friday at 4. Following a ten-minute preview of their footage, I'll be moderating the panel discussion. Since this is scheduled immediately after the Kickstarter panel I'm on, getting from one to the other will provide me with another opportunity for running!
The Insane and Ambitious LotFP Campaign and I
Tags: ACKS, crowd-funding, life, LotFP, Tavis
Folks who have been following the LotFP Grand Adventure crowdfunding campaign closely will have noticed that, at one point, the Mule's own Charlatan and I were slated to do one of the 19 adventures it will be funding, with illustrations by Ryan Browning. This post is to explain why I withdrew our project with the greatest regrets. In tomorrow's post I'll suggest some reasons why everyone who cares about the stuff we care about should indeed be following the Grand Adventure campaign closely.
The way that this all got started is that, back in March, James Raggi posted on G+:
My brain is exploding. ToC's Bookhounds of London + ACKS mercantile system + XRP's Silk Road detail + Warhammer's Death on the Reik = Something, yes?
Like a mad scientist, Raggi seems to be perpetually fizzing over with the ferment of mash-ups like this. Note that he is unafraid to throw volatile elements in the mix. Expeditious Retreat Press (XRP)'s A Magical Medieval Society: Silk Road, although eminently useful for all fantasy and historical gaming, is a d20 supplement from the era when 3E was "The Edition That Shall Not Be Named" among the dfootians. And Trail of Cthulu (ToC) is a big favorite of the story-gamers I know in the nerdNYC community. But of course James scoffs at the idea that the OSR should be a firewall that protects us from contamination by TESTSNBN or Forge swine; he takes things that are awesome as he finds 'em. His getting Bookhounds of London author Ken Hite to do a LotFP adventure is a supremely awesome achievement that, for me, is one of the fruits of the OSR having won and a demonstration of what you can make happen with an insanely ambitious crowdfunding campaign.
So when I emailed Raggi with a vague affirmation of his G+ post – "yeah let's make that mash-up happen!" – he came back with both a crazy way to achieve that, involving nineteen simulaneous IndieGoGo campaigns, and a tasty proposal for what it should look like:
You do a supplement updating the economics stuff from ACKS into the Early Modern Age – taking into account regular sea lane shipping, trading companies and the monopolies they secure (and the piracy they attract), the great risk/reward of exploration, colonies, realms that are ruled by parliaments or noble lineage but the age of small-time conquest/rulership is over, etc.
He gave me the go-ahead to add Charlatan as a collaborator, since I would never venture into the sea-lanes without his Saltbox expertise, and Ryan as artist because he can draw the inside of my mind better than I can see it. We started talking it over, and all manner of ideas started to flow. Some of the concrete results were the title "Register of the Deeps" and a concept for the cover:
Original sketch for the Register of the Deeps cover, by Ryan Browning.
Unfortunately, in the middle of this creative ferment, a development in my personal life arose that forced me to re-evaluate my ability to deliver "Register of the Deeps" by the deadline I'd agreed to. It's nothing worthy of a Lifetime special, or even an after-school one. It won't mean my departure from gaming, or even prevent me from working with Charlatan and Ryan to finish Register and release it via a different route at some future date, but it did make me feel I couldn't promise to have it in time for the LotFP campaign backers with the right degree of certainty.
Lots of people are saying that crowd-funding is changing the face of the gaming industry for the better. If you'll be at Gen Con on Friday at 3pm, you'll see me among 'em. The key ingredient here is trust. When people back a project, they're expressing their faith that it will come to pass. For the Kickstarter miracle to work, this faith has to be well-placed. I thought it better to withdraw from the LotFP adventures campaign than to run the risk of breaking faith with people who'd put up money expecting to have "Register of the Deeps" when I said they would.
Kickstarter may be a new thing under the sun, but gaming history offers plenty of tragic examples of what can go wrong with taking money now for a product later, whether via pre-orders (the Wormy compilation, Sinister Adventures) or a subscription model (Adventure Games Publications). To his great credit, James Raggi was totally understanding about my situation & the reasoning behind my (difficult) decision. He made good on his promise to find replacements who were bigger stars than the originally booked talent, and seeing the quality of the people who are filling the void makes me feel a little better. Nevertheless I'll always regret having gotten folks, especially Charlatan and Ryan, excited and then yanking the football; also having come this close to saying I shared a stage with the lead singer from GWAR, metaphorically at least.
Next to come: why the LotFP Grand Adventure crowd-funding campaign matters.
Dwimmermount Kickstarter is… Schrödinger's Cat?
By tavisallison 1 Comment
Tags: dwimmermount, kids, life, Tavis
So maybe you have been following the Dwimmermount announcements and noticed that the Kickstarter was supposed to launch this afternoon. But then it got to be evening here on the East Coast, and where was it? The answer here is that Autarch can seem pretty polished due to the excellent production staff whose day jobs make the Escapist look so good. However, it is still a small enough company that it can be seriously bollixed by a single fourth-grader who loses his backpack in a way no one can find it. (Where was it? In his classroom, not really lost at all, which is why it was so hard for me to find it.)
It is a poor craftsman who fails to account for this kind of thing, and that would be me. In my day job before we can apply for funding we have to go through a whole series of internal review processes. Because I am a procrastinator and the people I work for are emergency medicine physicians and thus adrenaline-junkies, we like to stress out and do everything at the last minute, but the internal deadlines mean we do this well before the time it is really due. Without those review steps, I gave myself the luxury of cutting things so close that a couple of hours of running around doing Backpack Quest created a problem.
OK, but then James posted that we were delayed! This is because when I finally got it ready to submit, it turned out that Kickstarter had instituted a new internal review process after all. In some ways I was glad for this – one of my "lessons learned" was to get it ready and then announce when it will go live, since these deadlines are all self-imposed. But at my day job, the internal review process takes ten business days, and now that Kickstarter's funding awarded is catching up with federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, it made sense to me that was the kind of review they would perform. So I wrote to James and was sheepishly like uhh I have a good idea for an Open Friday post…
But then within just a few hours – even though it was well after end of business out here – Kickstarter got back to us with the green light to launch the project! Normally this is a great moment of champagne-popping rather than frantic confusion, but the good news here is:
yes we are live and the response has been tremendous, thanks for believing in this project despite the confusion!
when there is a snafu you have some evidence that we will try to get out in front of it ASAP and let you know what's going on
James now has the distinction of having the most briefly delayed most-anticipated-delayed-gaming-product ever
Please accept my apologies for the unnecessary excitement!
strahd gangbang
By James Nostack 31 Comments
Tags: combat, D&D, emergent behaviors, Tavis
Neisseria, the Medusa navigator by Scott LeMien
With the help of my Medusa navigator, I crashed the spaceship into to the mouth of the enormous ghost-robot that hovered over Swamp Town, and we disembarked to rob the spoiled teenage were-tiger picnickers…
Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.
we killed strahd, you missed it
Well actually, it looks like Beedo's gang did it too, but they had more people involved.
In our game of I6: Ravenloft, the four remaining PC's had found all these curiously specific items of Strahd-slaying, but the best weapon was, of course, a mule to the face.
Our Normal Magic-User negotiated with Strahd to return a painting of the vampire's little girlfriend–and threw a mule (from a robe of many things) through the painting right as Strahd was examining it. "A mule to the face would at least be distracting," so our Kryptonian Assassin got a backstab with the Sun Sword. I ended up facing the vampire lord for a round or two of single combat, and then Sensible Half-Orc blasted him with a mystic amulet or something.
The Ravenloft module was entertainingly and ably run by "Naked Sam" on the Red Box site, and it was a nice change of pace. I think the four players that night all agreed that while we had a fun time, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e was a laughably pretentious game with little to recommend it over LBB, B/X, or BECMI. I practically cried reading the "Gaining Experience Levels" section on page 86 of the Dungeon Masters Guide.
Forget Strahd: somebody needs to run a stake through Gary Gygax for sucking blood out of gamers with that nonsense. Ugh.
the necromancer is dead, so what else is new?
A couple days later, I swung by Tavis's game, where we had the aforementioned Medusa-navigated spaceship crashing into the ghost-colossus to rob teenage lycanthropes having a picnic on pickled robo-dwarf. You know: Tavis's game.
we are here for the picnic (art by Jedo)
One of our off-screen enemies, going back to the days when I was a regular player, was a necromancer named Ashur-Ram, who keeps Wraiths and Spectres imprisoned inside crystal phials which he throws as grenades. We never have enough priests to turn back these level-draining undead, so we usually gave Ashur-Ram a lot of latitude.
But it turns out he was on board the ghost-colossus when we smashed into it. This precipitated a panic when long-serving members of the party realized the danger we were in, especially after Ashur-Ram's Dragon killed all of our meat-shields. "Quick," said the other party members, "the necromancer appears willing to pay us to leave him alone! We want to leave him alone! We want to get paid! Let's take the offer!"
Now, it may be my -2 Wisdom modifier talking, or the fact that I was playing a brand-spanking-new character in contrast to guys who had invested for 40 sessions in their toon. But when you have an insanely wealthy necromancer by the throat and you outnumber him 8:1, and he's already spent some of his best spells, you strangle that fool. And so for once I exploited our consensus-driven process by refusing to give in until everyone else got sick of arguing with me.
We killed the necromancer, who had filled us with dread for like 30 sessions, in like 3 rounds. Nobody took damage except for one guy who got drained two levels and who had been staunchly opposed to fighting this guy. (Sorry, dude.) But we are now even more ridiculously wealthy than we had been, and I'm sure fixing the level-drain will be fairly easy.
Plus I think some dude got it on with a Sphinx.
big bad encounter design in old-skool D&D
Both of these episodes are related.
What surprised me about the big fight with Strahd is that there was, in fact, no big fight with Strahd. We encountered him three times, and it was no biggie each time:
Our scout teleported away without any lasting harm thanks to a magic item
Our Assassin decapitated him with a single attack (no lasting harm to Strahd)
Mule to the face! And then super-death.
Before we got to Strahd the last time, we fought a Nightmare. The Nightmare put up a better fight.
My impression of this fight, and the hit on Ashur-Ram the necromancer, is that the Many versus One fight is really hard to get right in D&D. Either the adversary is going to be way out of your league, in which case you need to run like hell, or it's a plausible foe at your level in which case the group of you will crush it easily.
Furthermore, in order to be taken seriously as a fictional adversary in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, you need to cast spells–which means that you can't get punched in the face even once if you want to cast, but now there are like 4-8 people surrounding you.
The Nightmare alluded to above was pretty much Many versus One (there were some Hellhound minion-types), but the Nightmare had the advantage of an insanely low Armor Class (like -4 or -5) plus an aura of nausea that made it even harder to hit. As a result, the Nightmare could afford to stick around for a while and dish out damage. I realized after leaping onto its back to attempt to tame it that it could run away to some Hell-Plane any time it wished and simply ditch me there, so in trying to avoid its weaker attack I accidentally opened up its special killer move.
But Strahd, and the poor Necromancer, didn't have great defenses (anti-magic would have worked as well) or an infallible yet deadly escape plan. Run like hell.
So how do you make the Many versus One fight work?
My advice would be: you don't. Give the Boss Bad Guy a retinue of henchmen, maybe appropriate to the Charisma score, and have them follow the Boss around at all times. (Works for world leaders!) And failing that, no enemy of any brains will stick around to fight on someone else's terms: if you're caught at a disadvantage–like, say, eight adventurers crash a spaceship into your bunker and polymorph your Dragon into a flounder–then you retreat, regroup, and get revenge at a time of your choosing. As someone said at the end of the Necromancer caper, by the time the adventurers reach your throne room, you've already lost.
Extremely intelligent NPC's should probably auto-fail their morale checks in such circumstances, and should think twice before attempting to negotiate with murder hobo's for safe passage.
But eventually that confrontation is gonna happen, at which point your Boss NPC has to do several things very quickly:
Protect against melee combatants blitzing you
Knock out enemy casters
Cancel any on-going status effects the party's got going
Take out as many targets of opportunity as possible
It's hard to say which of those four is the most urgent, though taking care of #1 early hopefully will buy you some time. My thought is that debuffs can wait a bit since players may try to keep tossing them on as the fight progresses. You probably shouldn't waste time buffing yourself, because (a) it takes up time that you need to spend taking care of other things, and (b) the players will just hit you with a dispel anyway.
One helpful trick, though it is sort of unfair: design your throne room in a way that takes care of at least one of these problems for you: maybe you get to drive around in an armor-plated Pope-Mobile or your throne levitates 20 feet off the ground so melee guys can't reach you. Or there's 3 feet of sucking mud all over the place which basically cancels out any haste spell, or a constant rain of cinders that inflicts steady damage so casters can't rely on getting a spell off.
Relatedly: divert attention with a MacGuffin, hostage, dead-man switch, or some other strategic necessity so that the players can't get away with killing you immediately. The problem here is that your distraction probably won't keep everybody occupied, and things will likely escalate into a very non-standard combat encounter, which favors the players' hive-mind.
I'm uncertain as to the best timing of summoning help, such as from demons or conjuration spells. It's good to have somebody running around taking the heat off you, but they're mainly just meat-shields. (I think we summoned 8 Goblins to help us fight the Nightmare. All they did was get in the way, though we did propose a variation on our beloved Baby Armor, namely Goblin Sponge Armor, to ablate the vampire's attacks. Alas they faded from view before we could get our armorer on the case.) Summoning help costs at least one round, and it's probably only going to buy you two at best, unless the enemy absolutely must put down your helper. Bringing two Wraiths into the fight sure didn't help the Necromancer.
(Related question: why is Animate Dead such a high-level spell?)
My short prescription would be something like slow (surprisingly, does not exist in the B/X version of the game!), confusion, growth of plants, or wall of ice to keep attackers at bay, followed by (say) hold person, darkness, silence, or feeblemind on enemy casters. Cause Fear is a nice spell for either purpose, though it only affects one target. I also like casting a charm person on a Cleric: it not only saves you from a melee attacker, it also steals the players' buffs for your own use. My general thought is that while invisibility is a pretty good spell, it's a pain in the neck to run because you're always sweating whether your next action will blow it.
Any other thoughts on the Many versus One spellcaster thing? What am I missing?