Min-maxing Isn't a Problem, Except When It Is

I just watched this video discussing the topic 'D&D Min-Max-ers Are Valid' featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan and Jasmine Bhullar. There's less discussion of the topic than I hoped, though I disliked their treatment of the topic less than I expected. Still, I think they manage to miss the point in a very juicy topic of discussion, and since I had strong opinions on the matter I have come to inflict them upon you all. 

I must confess: I am a min-maxer. And I have a problem with min-maxing. 

Does that not make sense? Read on.

Hello, Byzantine

Before I played TTRPGs, I played videogames, including a lot of CRPGs and single-player games. I was, and remain, a compulsive save-scummer. When I played Baldur's Gate, or Thief: The Metal Age, or Morrowind, or Hitman: Blood Money, I would be constantly saving, taking an action, failing, and trying again until I could get it exactly right. 

It was not fun, but I did it anyway. 

In our neck of the woods, it's not unusual to complain about the tyranny of fun, the notion that bowing to the dictates of short-term enjoyment makes long-term satisfaction very, very difficult to cultivate in a campaign. This is a related problem, I think. The satisfaction of finally getting past that one guard in the most difficult and obvious way possible after a dozen tries is short-lived, and by committing myself to that I cut myself off from many other, much more enjoyable, approaches. How many cool assassination options did I miss in Hitman, how many side paths and schemes did I miss in Thief, because I wanted to bulldoze through the game in a straight line?

It's worse in RPGs. I recently went back to Baldur's Gate to try out an evil playthrough. The first time I played it (very recently, I assure you) the first dungeon I found was actually the Ulcaster Academy. On this playthrough I decided to make a beeline for it. I was fine until I found the vampire wolf, and realized I didn't exactly have a whole lot of magic weapons that could damage it. So I save-scummed. I tried a couple dozen different times to set the fireball just right, give the rare magic weapons to the right characters and make sure nobody died. It took me a while to remember I had a dragon sorcerer and a storm cleric whose special abilities could take it down. By that point I had failed many, many times. 

That experience was not strictly unenjoyable. I had some fun trying (and failing) to kill it with a fireball trap. But there was more frustration that satisfaction. I would like you to imagine the same thing playing out at a table, the players bulldozing into an encounter with a creature they cannot normally beat, and demanding a do-over each time someone dies until they can get the perfect outcome. If I had players like that I would quit GMing. 

By contrast, I wrote recently here about my first time playing Ultima Underworld this past year. I went in completely blind. Others might find the experience detailed there to be undesirable, but it was a blast for me. I was immersed and engaged. I was afraid and surprised. I died a miserable death, and loved it. 

The bottom line here is that many of the best experiences in gaming (video or analog) happen under conditions of sub-optimal play. Part of this is because sub-optimal play leaves space for learning and optimization, which are often enjoyable, but also because it creates room for improvisation and unexpected situations. 

Back to TTRPGs. 

I think games are at their most boring when they're optimized. This can be related to the creation of a meta (my best friend in high school was a relentless optimizer who tried to get me into TF2, MtG, and Realm of the Mad God by bashing my head with the meta first, no dice, many such cases), but just as often it's smaller bits of optimization like a character creation system that have a few, clear peaks. 

Unlike videogames or card games, TTRPGs seem uniquely situated to prevent the dominance of meta or super-optimized tactics thanks to the GM's freedom to create new challenges and issue rulings. That's why I don't regard D&D monsters like the ear piercer as something bad. These are the footprints of an ever-evolving cat and mouse game between player and GM, but one which neither side is trying to 'win.' The GM could 'win' that fight in an instant using infinite Tiamats, but it would be totally worthless, because the enjoyment is in playing the game and the goal is to keep it going. Without GM freedom, the players could 'win' by finding the local optima and crushing whatever 'level appropriate' encounters got in their way, but that too would be hollow because there would no longer be the sense of risk, surprise, and unpredictability which made it fun. Just endless CR-balanced encounters at regular intervals allowing for rest, stretching into infinity. Perhaps we must imagine Sisyphus happy, but I think players and GMs would concur with the Greeks that this would be a curse. 

But this is perhaps too harsh a treatment of optimization. It is an activity in which many people engage with enjoyment. And it should be clear that optimization and min-maxing are not quite the same behavior. Mulligan and Bhullar offer some pat responses to the issue, but it remains that min-maxing is a behavior which occurs and which many people evidently have a problem. I think they missed the subtler point, which is that min-maxing and roleplay are antagonistic to one another. This does not mean that a single player can't do both, or that a campaign cannot include both (examples to the contrary abound), but rather, that they are different activities. When one is min-maxing, one is not roleplaying. 

They come from a culture of play which takes for granted that D&D (5th, pretty much exclusively) is a storytelling game. This is not an opinion I share, but it remains that many people run story-centered games using it and show no signs of stopping. It should still be clear under these premises that when min-maxing occurs, storytelling does not occur. 

But we should not take this for granted. 

One doesn’t often find discussions of min-maxing in games of Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia. This is in part because there’s not much to optimize in either, and in Paranoia the character creation process invites other players to screw up your character and make them a gormless idiot. But it’s also partly because optimization wouldn’t contribute much to either game. Cthulhu characters are created to die or go insane, that’s the payoff, it’s fun. Being the only gormless idiot in a party would be tiresome, but a whole group of them is hilarious and fits perfectly with the game’s comedy dystopia. 

We might also consider Vampire: The Masquerade. I ran a one-shot of V5 earlier this year for my regular group, mixed results, but spent a while reading through optimizer threads about the earlier editions. Apparently the original Vampire: The Masquerade was broken in terms of character power right out of the box, with Celerity being by far the most potent physical discipline and Dominate, well, dominating pretty much everything. I get the feeling that this wasn't much of a problem during the original game's development, given that it's explicitly aimed at being a story game (before that term got more closely codified). If one is playing a game of undead ennui, I can see the horrendous balancing not coming into play much; the issue arises when people come to the game with the assumptions of tactical play and that the system exists to be optimized. Lesson: don't bolt a complex and badly balanced character creation system onto your story game. 

Early D&D is arguably in the same boat as CoC and Paranoia. Stats are random and hard to change, classes don’t give you much power, spell selection is limited and semi-random, a lot of power comes from magic items whose acquisition is uncertain, etc. 

Discussion of min-maxing really kicks off with AD&D 2nd edition: it’s no surprise that this is the edition which opened up point-based class customization, kits, and player-facing splatbooks, but also the one which enshrined the attitude that D&D is a storytelling game into the rulebooks. Two commercial interests, one to sell to players, especially optimizers and completionists, by expanding options for character creation, and the other to sell modules that could be commissioned and put out with a minimum of play testing (such as the Dragonlance modules, which began earlier under 1e but certainly reached the height of their influence in 2e, explicitly story-centered and horrendously railroaded products indistinguishable from the novels which they were adapted from/into) collided to create a play environment in which mechanics and world/narrative are at odds. 

This is the major complaint. The issue is not, as Mulligan and Bhullar seem to think, that novice GMs have difficulty challenging powerful characters, but that when I am recruiting players I have to deal with people who ask me if I know about the 'coffeelock' (this seriously happened, I blacklisted the guy there and then). Is it not right to respond to such things with wailing and gnashing of teeth?

To be clear, the problem is not that min-maxers seek to optimize, but that they view the game mechanically first and as a world second. My job as a GM is first and foremost to present a world in which my players can act. The rules are an aid to that end. I would rather have players who understand this, and recognize that disjoints and exploits in the rules are the result of mortal error, not the nature of the fantasy world. 

The problem of min-maxing is twofold. First, there are players who engage with the game primarily on the basis of system optimization. Second, the world of the game is one in which this optimization leads to dissonant outcomes. 

For examples of games which both allow optimization and have a world consonant with it, we might consider superhero games. I shall neglect to expand on this point. 

To ground this a bit more in the text, Bhullar makes reference to the 5th edition paladin/warlock multiclass, which is widely understood to be very powerful. It is taken for granted that this is an example of min-maxing, rather than one driven by roleplay. It is not impossible for this to be a roleplay-driven decision: I can easily imagine a paladin who loses their faith and turns to the patronage of some other being. But I would assume that this was not the case. 

Does this matter? Only insomuch as character classes are something other than bundles of mechanics. If paladins are only martial characters who can cast some spells and do big damage against some creatures, and warlocks are only short-rest based casters, nothing objectionable occurs. But hopefully, a GM and their player would want these things to mean more than that. This is a fantasy roleplaying game, and perhaps the paladin class exists to facilitate the fantasy of being an oathbound knight and the warlock exists to facilitate the fantasy of being a magician bound by a pact. Both of these are excellent fantasy archetypes. It would not even be difficult to combine them. Perhaps the paladin's oath and the warlock's pact are guaranteed by the same being, who grants its servant gifts from different 'packages' as needed. Perhaps this is a fallen paladin in a world where paladin powers cannot be revoked who seeks a new benefactor. But this would be unique to a given table, and this runs contrary to the assumptions of this culture of play: because a GM who grounds this choice in flavor might, say, require a quest to obtain the favor of the patron, or may even declare that in their world, this would not make sense and hence is off limits. I can just imagine the fire, fury, and r/rpghorrorstories posts that would result. 

Matt Colville has made a version of this point before, so I will reiterate it only briefly. The game design choice to separate character creation options from the flavor of the game is one which I would characterize as a failure to make mechanics and roleplay consonant. The result is a game in which the two are effectively independent, and thus a game which is not 'about' anything in particular. I have great sympathy for the GMs who complain of min-maxers, though they may not understand the root of their complaint. 

An example: I've run a short Legend of the 5 Rings 4th edition campaign a couple of times now. This is a game which comes with a detailed default setting and character options which are firmly grounded within it. If I were running that game instead, and a player wished to, say, take a dip in another clan's school for a powerful synergy, my response as a GM would be immediate and clear: this does not make sense. I might permit a player to effectively betray their clan and court another to learn their techniques, which would take quite a lot of time and effort and have serious ramifications for the campaign. If they wanted to keep learning their original clan's techniques, they might have to seek out a teacher and bribe or blackmail them, or find one in exile, if one such even exists. I suspect very few players would object to my placing these obstacles in the path of the player's optimized character, since it is clear within the norms of L5R that these mechanical decisions are closely linked both to flavor and to the character's place in the world. It is one in which mechanics and roleplay are consonant.

That is the sort of game I like to run, and I think it's the sort of game many other people would like to run, if they knew it existed. To dismiss complaints of min-maxing without seriously considering their origins does a great disservice.

Thoughts on AD&D Currency

I've been rereading the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. It's full of inspiration for the world I'm building, as readers of the blog will know, and it's great for long and lonely trips. So much of the series, especially in the first book, revolves around money: Kvothe's near-constant struggle with poverty winds up making the setting's currencies very memorable and relevant. When a gold mark shows up in the second book, you feel the elation. I started wondering about that series various currency systems, and comparing them to AD&D's coins. The decimal system of the trapezoidal Cealdish currency, the iron drab, copper jot, silver talent and gold mark, the various pennies and half pennies, the partial Vintish coin, all of it adds some neat texture to the setting, with efforts to make currency legible and efforts to deviate from it both filling in the world. 

Source

Then there's the AD&D, which doesn't specify currencies by names, but settles on a gold-based system, described in the 1e Player's Handbook as follows:

The basic unit of exchange is the gold piece (g.p. hereafter). There are coins of lesser and greater value, and these are shown on the table below. It is also common to use gems of various sorts and values as coin.

            10 copper pieces (c.p.) = 1 silver piece 

            20 silver pieces (s.p.) = 1 g.p.

            2 electrum pieces (e.p.) = 1 g.p.

            1 platinum piece (p.p.) = 5 g.p.

Thus:

            200 c.p. = 20 s.p. = 2 e.p. = 1 g.p. = 1/5 p.p.

One gold piece is two electrum pieces, of which each is ten silver pieces, of which is ten copper pieces, and a platinum piece is five gold. I'm not wholly surprised that this got deprecated in favor of an entirely decimal based system later on. I'm not sure when, definitely by 5th edition, probably by third. 

I'd been accustomed to thinking of electrum as the odd one out. After all, the other coins used are single metals, while electrum is a natural alloy of gold and silver. It makes sense that it should lie between those two in worth, and it always sounded to me like something weird and ancient, a remnant of times long gone, a currency out of favor in the contemporary setting which could be more readily found in ancient tombs. 

But now thinking about it, I realized that the weird steps of AD&D's money actually makes perfect sense... if we're not on the gold standard. 

Source

Imagine instead an electrum standard. By excluding gold, we have ten copper to a silver, ten silver to an electrum, and ten electrum to a platinum. Perfectly decimal! Electrum fits perfectly, it's gold that's a strange addition! It seems obvious now, though I haven't seen it pointed out before, even in Anthony Huso's treatment of the subject. Maybe this was just obvious to everyone else? Maybe it was explained in some Greyhawk sourcebook? Looking it up now, apparently the Greyhawk books featured iron drabs, as well as bronze zees and brass bits, very likely Rothfuss' inspiration. Also, I had to do a double take when I found this page, which had five silver to an electrum. For a moment I thought I had been mistaken about the currency, but the PHB bears me out. It looks like D&D's currency must have undergone more than one change since 1e. That said, the page does describe electrum and platinum as coins not in regular circulation, more often found in tombs. That fits the exchange rates given there, which make it look like ep and pp are parts of another currency smashed into the copper/silver/gold trio. 

In any case, this has immediate implications for the implied setting of AD&D 1e. Copper, silver, electrum and platinum all fit together perfectly in a decimal pattern. Gold breaks the symmetry. It feels like an imposition, a foreign coin forced from without. At the same time, the player characters not only use, but think in gold: everything is converted into gold before leveling up. Silver is precious but tarnishes, platinum is hard to tell from silver at a distance. Gold is immediately recognizable, neither rusts nor tarnishes. It's synonymous with wealth. 

Assuming you even use AD&D's currency for your game, what this means for your game is up to you. I'm not exactly sure what it means for mine, but I can sketch some outlines. In this part of the world, silver and copper are the coins of the day for almost everyone. One is hard-pressed to find gold, and when it is found, it is mixed in with silver. Pure gold coinage never takes off, what pure gold exists instead being worked into jewelry and ornamentation. Electrum becomes the 'big coin' used for the storage of large values, high-level commerce and state economics. Someone finds a platinum mine. It's like silver, but it doesn't tarnish and is usually found chemically uncombined. There's not much of it and it doesn't look as nice as gold, so it probably finds a niche as a semi-representational currency in state vaults. 

If anything, the use of platinum as a very valuable coin might be the least realistic part of all this. Maybe there are very good magical uses for platinum, so mages seek it and its value is recognized that way. That could be a reason for platinum being non-representationally more valuable than gold. 

Source

Then something happens. Maybe trade opens up with a faraway empire, where pure gold is more common. Maybe this region is conquered by that empire. The new rulers want to impose their currency, the locals want to keep theirs. Both currencies wind up being used side by side. Conflicting local exchange rates proliferate. Non-representational currency is debated and tried, sometimes successfully. But premodern societies really like having representational currencies. China managed paper money for a few hundred years, but with difficulty, and absent a really strong central government people want to be able to smelt down their silver without it losing value. Proposals for non-representative metal coins reads to the average person as a roundabout form of currency debasement. Nobody is happy. 

At some point, someone gets extremely tired of all of this, mounts a coup, and imposes financial regularity by force. I think in my own setting this happened under the rule of Starlis the Potentate about a century prior. A tyrant, but his financial policy stuck around, and nobody is confident enough to go meddling with that again. The representativity of the various metal coins and their exchange rates varies, but the system is stable enough (and maybe the punishments for melting down currency are strong enough) that people use the coins. Of course, this still has to be normalized to the financial policies of other nations. Gold is the main currency of exchange internationally, and having the local gold worth the same as gold elsewhere is the best way to avoid massive headaches with currency exchanges, so the local gold coin gets pegged to that and everything else is set around it. As a result, everything is a nice decimal system, except for the fucking gold. 

So in my setting, at least in the core adventuring region, gold is used in the big cosmopolitan port city, the major towns nearby and places up the river that regularly trade with it. The farther you go from these areas, the less people use gold and the more they use silver and electrum. Gold is seen as hoity-toity, electrum is seen as the bumpkin's coin. Little wonder adventurers think in gold and not electrum. 

If the players ever grouse about this, I'll have an obscenely old coot come out of the woodwork to tell the young'uns how good they have it, not having to worry about which of eight types of silver coins they got paid in. 

Source

I'm also tempted, like Anthony Huso has, to move my game onto a silver standard. Silver is a bit more grounded and accessible, still precious and a lot of money (the silver talents in the Name of the Wind go a long way, and historical coinage like the Roman sestertius was silver), while gold becomes an aspirational amount of money, and platinum near-mythical as far as an ordinary person is concerned. Do I just set xp for silver and increase everything twenty-fold? Sounds awkward, but possibly rewarding. I like the flavor of it. But maybe it makes sense that adventurers should be looking for and thinking in terms of gold. 

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If you liked this, be sure to comment below, share it, and follow the blog to see when new posts are up. Until the next time, have an excellent week. 

Old-School Advancement: A Lacanian Approach

Noisms over at the Monsters and Manuals blog has an interesting piece relating the Gene Wolfe book the Wizard Knight to high-level old school play. I wrote a comment in response:

As a hybrid approach, what about planar currencies? It won't have the Wizardknighting effect, but it may lend itself instead to a sword-and-sorcery texture. 

The doughty lord sits in his palace surrounded by the wealth of the ages and feels nothing. Gold has lost its lustre. Until one of his far journeying courtiers / wise soothsayers / demonic servants tells him of the blue crystal roses that grow on the sapphire beaches of the Nightly Shore. The fire in his blood is stoked once more, prepared for a deadlier and more glorious adventure than ever before. 

Maybe this sort of approach can be a buffer between gold-for-xp and wizardknighting. Past nth level, gold no longer gives xp, but each blue crystal rose is 1000xp. A few exist in this world, but to find them in quantity you must travel the planes! There may be many such currencies associated with various planes. Once the PCs are already planar travelers, switch to xp-for-planes or henchman xp. 

The idea of planar currencies is an intriguing one which I may develop more later, but this happened to dislodge another idea when I read the post. But first I have to introduce some rather obscure concepts. 

But I warn you, the crystal rose may be plucked only by a cunning stratagem...

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who in a series of very influential lectures until 1980 examined the role of desire within the Freudian tradition. Many of the ideas and terms he created and developed became part of the core not only of psychoanalysis, but also of other fields such as literary criticism. I don't claim to understand any of it in depth or extent, and I will instead recommend this review of Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacan as a jumping off point. There's just one little concept I want to borrow from that tradition. 

The objet petit a (the partial object, or the partial other) is the thing one desires. At the same time, it can never be acquired. To use a videogame analogy, the objet petit a is not the thing in the quest reward box, it is the quest reward box. When you're doing the quest, desiring the reward, it seems shiny and out of reach. Once you get it, there is a moment of satisfaction, but one quickly grows tired of what one already has. By this time, there is a new quest with a new reward. It's not that the objet petit a is really hard to obtain, it is not a thing which can be obtained at all. The objet petit a which can be grasped is not the true objet petit a. 

There is an exception to this: it can be acquired in a fantasy. 

Within the imaginary space of a fantasy, it is possible to acquire the objet petit a without it losing its appeal. It still appears as something else, but it keeps all the value and shininess it had when you didn't yet have it because... you don't have it. Except in a fantasy. 

That opens up a really weird question about characters in fantasy role-playing games and how their desires interact with those of the players. Can player characters acquire their partial objects?

Insofar as these are parts of a player's fantasy, they should be able to do so. But this is a role-playing fantasy game, the players are taking on the personae of characters in that world. Everyone from the most cantankerous grognard to the most avid storygamer will agree that these characters have desires and goals of their own, not necessarily those of the player. Should these characters, then, not experience the objet petit a? Should they, unlike a pure fantasy, be incapable of entirely satisfying their desires?

This makes some sense to me. When I think of players who have been good roleplayers at my table, and those who have not, it seems like this might be part of the distinction. Keep in mind that 'bad roleplayer' does not necessarily imply a bad player. My little cousin is, at age 8, a bad roleplayer, but still great fun to have at the table. The crucial difference is between players who have processed that their characters have goals and desires of their own, vs players for whom the character is merely a way to play out their fantasies. This behavior is less charming in adults, especially when the player's fantasy is one which runs counter to everyone else's fun. 

This is part of maturing as a player: no longer treating the game (and the player character) as a vehicle for fantasy alone, and instead role-playing a character who themselves has goals, desires, and, subsequently, fantasies. 

I think this may also be a hidden genius to the xp mechanic, which aids this roleplay in a very subtle manner. The character may acquire any number of desired objects in the game world, but they are only ever stepping-stones for the player, means to further advancement. Both player and character desire gold. The player, as in a fantasy, may be satisfied with this, but the character is the world would not be. Thus, the structure of experience points is created to drive the player to act in the same manner as the character. There is always more xp to find, and the player is thus encouraged to consider their character as an entity driven by something other than player fantasy. 

That brings us back around to noisms' idea of changing the xp-granting object at various points in the progression. At some point, gold is no longer enough to fill the slot of objet petit a, and so other desired objects must be found. At first they may still be physical objects, new and fascinating currencies or treasures. But eventually those no longer satisfy, and desire may turn instead to ascension through the plains, or the advancement of hirelings. I'm not especially partial to the idea of character 'arcs' in role-paying games, especially when they're planned ahead, but I am interested in the growth of characters organically. This occurs mechanically by leveling up and acquiring equipment of course, but also by the expansion of character influence, henchmen and hirelings, domain play, the character takes on responsibilities of increasing scope. The ratcatcher looking for gold in a tomb is not the same person once they're leading a small army of loyal followers. Perhaps it makes sense that their desires, mechanically represented by changing sources of xp, should as well. 

It's an interesting concept which could add a lot of texture to a long-term campaign. I'm tempted to build it into my own upcoming campaign now, though I'm not sure how to. Expect more on this subject.

On a First Experience with Ultima Underworld

Out of nowhere, I decided to try out Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. Commonly cited as the predecessor to the Elder Scrolls games, and as one of the great early 3D fantasy games period, I was already halfway sold on it, and it's cheap too, so why not. I got it bundled with Ultima Underworld II for 6 bucks. 

I buy it, install, have to go fiddling with GOG but... it runs! Credit to whoever is maintaining DOSBox that installation was clean and the game ran... well not smoothly, but as smoothly as I expect it ran on computers of its era. On MacOS at that, plenty of modern games can't claim the same (I long ago tried to play Gothic, no dice). 

I boot it up, ooooh! A pixel art cinematic! Gets us efficiently into the shoes of the Avatar and pushes us to search the Stygian Abyss for the damsel Ariel. I make myself a paladin with charm and swordsmanship (named Jethro Tul, same as my first PC in Baldur's Gate) and we're off to the races!

Okay, I'm trapped in a dank, dark dungeon and- wait no, that's a bit faster than I intended, woah, and that does not move me backwards. This does have keyboard movement as default in addition to the Elder Scrolls: Arena-style mouse movement (haven't played Arena myself, just recognize the system) but it's not quite the same setup as most modern games. Take a few moments to accustom myself to the controls and peek through the manual. I'm already nervous about my first steps into the dungeon. I'm reminded of the opening moments of my first playthrough of Daggerfall, and those are great vibes to have. I can't tell what's part of the track and what might be a sound from around the corner. 

Mess with a sack on the ground, read a note, pick up a skull, get some food. Feeling a lot like Legend of Grimrock. I try to open a locked door, maybe this pull chain opens it? No dice, and I'm not trying to bash it down with this measly dagger. If I don't find the key I might try to do it with an axe later. Ah, and I have a map, which I can annotate!? Lovely! Peek around the dungeon, arm myself, kill a rat. I didn't lose a hit point (er, vitality point) to a rat, no sirree. 

Find an pack with a goodbye note, poor sucker. Peek around some more, find a more expansive area with red walls, sneak around the edges with my torch unlit. Looks secure, going t- DEAR LORD- ahem. It's juts a guy. Just a human. Standing in the middle of the room. Friendly fellow this Bragin guy, tells me to beware the green and gray goblins and to seek out the human stronghold whose banner is the ankh, and whose leader is... Caliburn? Caribu? I missed the guy's name, sorry. 

Take a moment to get my bearings and double back, then move on. I'm getting comfortable with these controls, moving cautiously... and I move a bit too fast and fall into a crack in this ramp. No issue, I can climb back up. 

Oh. 

This is not Daggerfall. I cannot simply climb back up. 

Oh well, I must be able to double back somehow. Trudge through water, kill an overgrown centipede, pick up a shield, throw a switch open a doorway, everything's coming up Jethro. Now just gotta GOOD LORD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT! AH, I'M POISONED, DIEDIEDIE!

Is it dead? I don't hear anything or see it anywhere, but neither do I see a bloodstain. Goddamn mass of blood-red wings and teeth. This apple isn't doing much to help the poison either, and I don't have anything resembling an antidote. No two ways about it, just have to keep moving forward. Let's try swimming through here. A bit slow going, but seems fine, is that a frog-NO THAT IS NOT A FROG GODDAMN SATANIC TEETH AND TENTACLES! I have to... oh no. I can't pull out my weapon on water. Gotta swim away, so slowly, so slowly, ow, ow, ow.

Okay, it's gone. And I have exactly one hit point left. And I wound up fleeing in the opposite direction I knew. At least I can check the map while in water. Wow, I've made it a long way. No turning backwards, I'll be easy prey for that tentacle monster. Gotta keep moving forward. Got to. Keep. moving. forward...

I sink in the freezing waters of an underground river. My vision swims, full of skulls with flaming eyes. 

In case it's not clear, this first <1 hour with Stygian Abyss has absolutely sold me on the game. Highly recommended, pick it up if you want a videogame experience that simulates old-school dungeoneering. 

State of the Blog Year 4

This is the 4th anniversary of A Distant Chime! Time really does fly, I hope you're all having another wonderful Christmas Eve, now onto the year's reflections. 

Content

In keeping with the trend from last year, 2022 saw fewer posts than any previous full year. There's a few reasons for this. I've been balancing school with a part time job this year, I've been dedicating more time to running games than writing about them (the L5R game the last few posts were about is ongoing, I just haven't been good at writing up play reports). The biggest difference is that this year I've started a long-term romantic relationship. That said, there are a few posts I recommend reading:

Books for Dungeon Masters: The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker recommends an excellent nonfiction book, whose prose can be a great aid to DMs learning to narrate

Julius Wavestone Keep Killing! is a short adventure I wrote for Bryce Lynch's Wavestone Keep contest, which got a decent review from him, and which I found gratifying

An Alternative Humanity in Vampire: the Masquerade takes Justin Alexander and Yora's criticisms of VtM's Humanity system and proposes an alternative which lends itself to a quite different playstyle. If I run VtM in the future, I'll do it this way

Diagnostics

Blogger tells me that this blog received 60k views this year, more so than any previous year, accounting for a plurality of my all time 150k views. How this occurred in a year when I wrote less often than ever before I'll never know. I suppose this is the strength of a big backlog. Interestingly, the most popular post this year was the Epilogue for my Castle Xyntillan campaign series. 

Presentation

I occasionally share my posts on the OSR discord, but that's about it, but it doesn't seem to have hurt readership too much. 

The Index

Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level posts stretch far away

Away from the Blog

I've been running fewer games online (only a handful this year so far), and more in person. Still, those were fewer games than in previous years, less than twenty, a far cry from the pandemic days when I would regularly run two online games a week. I don't regret this, since that time is going into things I value more highly, but I am feeling the effects of not having a nearby, stable group a lot of the time. Most of the people in my Ptolus game earlier in the year are also in my current L5R game, but I can't rely on them also being around for more than a couple years out. This is both because it's a university group, and because I move around a lot, I don't live in one place for more than a few years at a time, making cultivating a solid group for long-term in-person play difficult. A couple months ago I tried to recapture some of the magic by gathering players I knew from DMing online during the pandemic for an AD&D 1e game, the world for which I've been prepping for a while now, albeit privately rather than on the blog. I managed to make a session work, but some player fallout after the session heavily demoralized me, and speaking with a couple players it's clear that the environment for online play just isn't what it was a couple years ago. My best players are older, married with kids, and during a time when they were laid off or otherwise had more time on their hands, it was possible to dedicate a lot of time to games. But this is less the case now. 

I intend to take a break from DMing online, and from playing online as well (with the exception of participating in Rick Stump's very occasional sessions and PbP) and focus on in person games, even if those campaigns are shorter term and for shifting groups. 

If there's one thing I'm proud of this year, it's that I introduced my little cousin (10 years old!) to old school D&D. I did that last year actually, but when he visited for the summer he was obsessed, and I wound up running some simplified AD&D 1e for him and my girlfriend. They had a delightful time, and I've now set him up with OSE books and Rich Burlew's color-in monster tokens, which he should be getting... oh right about now. He intends to run games for his friends in school, and I for one can't wait to watch that happen. 

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Thus ends another year! I hope you all have an excellent holiday season, spend time with your families, and special thanks again to commenters Sofinho and Spwack!

Emerald Empire Sessions 2 and 3: A Writ of Justice

My Legend of the 5 Rings game continues! Hiruma Saya's player's cousin visited us and I took it upon myself to introduce him to tabletop games as a guest player. 

Characters

Bayushi Nori, Scorpion clan courtier

Suzume Minori, Sparrow clan warrior

Tsuruchi Kenzo, Wasp clan archer

Kitsuki Ayumi, Dragon clan investigator

Hiruma Saya, Crab clan scout

(Absent in session 3) Shiba Imori, Phoenix clan warrior 

(Guest in session 3) Ryuma, Unicorn-born ronin

(NPC) Akodo Torokai, Lion clan shugenja

The Session

The party learned that Kitsu Rin, court diviner of Vigilance Castle, was missing, and resolved to solve this mystery. 

The next morning they spoke with Matsu Hiro at greater length and learned more about the situation. They were granted access to Kitsu Rin's room, and Ayumi's keen eye soon found several clues. The floor had been scoured with lye, but a trace of the pollutant remained: a bloodstain. His desk had a secret compartment, which had recently housed something, but was now empty, and showed no sign of forced entry. Outside the window, on the ground three floors down in some bushes, they spotted something glinting. Akodo Torokai later collected it and confirmed it was an amulet Kitsu Rin frequently wore. 

The party spoke to the various guest samurai, whom Matsu Hiro suspected. They determined that the Scorpion courtier, Yogo Akira, wasn't what he seemed. In fact, he likely wasn't a courtier, and his painting secretly encoded the locations of Lion clan battle camps. 

Isawa Kato, the Phoenix shugenja, accepted Bayushi Nori's challenge to a go game, and won handily, while the rest of the group determined that he was preparing suspicious scrolls. Shiba Imori accepetd Mirumoto Nobara's challenge to a sparring duel, and was defeated, but earned her trust, while the rest of the group learned about the castle's history from Doji Mai: until recently it had been a Crane stronghold, but the Lion clan invaded it, and the Crane samurai within threw themselves from the tower rather than be captured. 

The party also investigated the servants and the steward, Roku. They quickly determined that several of them knew more than they were letting on, and with Matsu Hiro's permission pressed Roku more forcefully. He was extremely confused, but the truth soon came out. A week previous, they had been summoned to Kitsu Rin's room, and saw Matsu Hiro leaving with a bloody blade, Kitsu Rin dying on the floor. He ordered them to clean up the mess and bury the body, and then he took several documents, which Roku presumed got burned. Thereafter they buried the body away from the castle. 

The next day the party took Roku to investigate the burial site with a crew of eta (the lowest caste, responsible for filthy jobs such as touching corpses) and confirmed Kitsu Rin's body was there. They also found that he had inscribed something into his arm using his fingernail, a series of ragged characters which spelled out 'Ko-ra-to'. 

Back at the castle, Akodo Torokai broke the news of the party's investigations to Matsu Hiro. The lord was overcome by grief, and soon afterwards departed for a local monastery for an indeterminate period of time. 

That very day, however, the party received a letter from the nearby North Hub Village, requesting aid on behalf of Otomo Sojin, a prominent courtier of the Imperial clan. They made their way with all due haste, arriving the following afternoon. Just within the town gates they were met by a ronin, Ryuma, hefting a colossal axe in one hand, who was waiting for them and was prepared to guide them to Otomo Sojin. Akodo Torokai separated to announce himself to the local magistrate, and instructed the party to meet Sojin and learn what afflicted him.

They followed to the Gentle Blossom geisha house, where they were expected, and the madam welcomed them all effusively. Within a private and luxurious room they encountered Otomo Sojin... who was not expecting. Only Akodo Torokai's personal seal convinced him they were here to help. Earlier that very day (well after the party got the letter asking for help) he had received a ransom note for his son, Otomo Kokare, who would be returned only when he paid back the debt owed. The note warned against contacting the authorities, lest his son be punished. 

Sojin was distraught and confused, and proved to be entirely unaware of who his son associated with and what he did. The party gathered basic information and were warned not to take this to the local magistrate, a member of the minor Tortoise clan that Sojin demeaned as a near-peasant. Ryuma spoke up to inform the group that a good source of information was the Smiling Tigers yakuza gang, one of two major criminal organizations (along with the Red Foxes gang). He pointedly refused to confess who his employer was. 

The party took him up on this and visited the gang at their headquarters in an abandoned inn. They soon met a gang lieutenant, Adoka, who presented Bayushi Nori with a recognition sign: he was an undercover member of the Scorpion clan backing the Smiling Tigers. The conversation between Adoka and the group, primarily with Kitsuki Ayumi, was tense, as Ayumi didn't want to tip her hand in case the Smiling Tigers were responsible for the kidnapping. Eventually, however, they got a hint that they could find what they needed in the Drunken Phoenix gambling house, which was sponsored by the Red Foxes. Nori spoke with him further alone, and learned that Adoka had been the one to send them a letter asking for help, having caught wind of the plot early and hoping to use the group's help to crush the Smiling Tigers' rivals and gain a monopoly over organized crime in town. Nori did not share this information with the group. 

They investigated the Drunken Phoenix, with Nori gambling (and ultimately winning a few silver bu) while the rest of the party drank at the bar. Hiruma Saya made fast friends with a ronin, Tomoji, who turned out to know Kokare, as the two frequently drank together and gambled at this establishment, in blatant violation of class norms. They plied him with drink until he confessed that he saw Kokare escorted from the Drunken Phoenix two nights before by a pair of burly men, whom he pointed out, likely yakuza belonging to the Red Foxes. 

The party left the gambling house but stuck around the area until the yakuza left, and tailed them to their headquarters nearby, the 'Red Fox Inn.' The party rendezvoused with Akodo Torokai, and in the small hours of the morning made their move: Torokai used an earth spell to let Ayumi float underground and observe the goings-on within, and she located Otomo Kokare tied up in a storage closet within, as well as identifying the dozen-plus yakuza within. The group got into position, and launched their attack. Tsuruchi Kenzo and Bayushi Nori hung back and shot the guards at the front door, shortly backed up in melee by Ryuma and Ayumi. Meanwhile Hiruma Saya and Suzume Minori scaled the walls to the inner courtyard and assaulted the compound from the other side. 

Also, all the melee combatants were cloaked in a spell of magical fire that burned their opponents. 

It was a massacre. They had secured the two main entranced, and with their archers having good lines of sight, their enemies never got a break. Their biggest scare came when the Red Foxes' lieutenant, Yukira, came out to meet Saya and Minori in the courtyard... and cast a blood magic spell on Saya, which enervated her leg. Luckily the two of them were able to slay him swiftly before he could cast more blood magic. 

In short time, only a fraction of the gangsters remained, and survivors surrendered, with Ryuma taking their weapons and purses. Minori and Saya located Kokare and unbound him, though he was in such terrible shape he couldn't even walk. Saya turned Yukira's room upside down until she found the blood sorcery scrolls there... very similar to the ones found at Half-Moon Village a few weeks previous. Minori, meanwhile, found the near-deaf boss of the gang, Boss Churokire, who attempted mightily to bribe her into letting him go, but ultimately went quietly. 

By this time the guard had shown up, and with the order of an Emerald Magistrate, took custody of the yakuza. Kokare was returned home swiftly, and the party was fêted and richly rewarded by Otomo Sojin, who offered each a boon. Ayumi accepted a wardrobe of fine clothing which marked its wearer as one in the good graces of the Otomo family, Minori commissioned a fine sword with the Sparrow clan mon inscribed on the blade, Kenzo and Nori accepted specialized archery equipment, while Saya reserved a future political favor for her boon. They were also weighed down in fine gifts for the wedding they would be attending shortly. 

They were visited by many local samurai who wished to meet the brave magistrates-in-training, debriefed with the local Jade Magistrates regarding their repeated encounters with blood sorcery, and met Ikoma Satoshi, an officer in the Lion army who had taken leave from the front to visit Torokai, his old friend, and took the party out drinking. 

When the week was out, the party was ready to get back on the road to the Dragon lands, where they would attend a wedding between the Otomo and Tamori families. 

Takeaways

TBD

Legend of the 5 Rings Megapost

The Campaign that Wasn't: Curse of the Wednesdays

L5R 4e Primer

Sessions

Emerald Empire: Session 1

Emerald Empire Session 2 and 3: A Writ of Justice

[The remainder of this campaign, while successful, was unfortunately not documented]