D&D!

Woohoo, I'm playing D&D again! Last night we managed to kick off our short term game. It was the first time in, like, 8 weeks nobody was sick or stuck axle-deep in mud. And we mapped out five Fridays in the next two months we can play!

Last night was only a session zero so no dice rolling. We players got aligned on the story, the setting, a group of characters that will go through it, and how we look to have fun doing that together. With the group of players I chose for this game that wasn't too hard. We're all pragmatic players who like telling a story with a set of characters that basically work together instead of trying to break the game, steal from each other, or just being assholes (to other players) for fun.

One thing I liked, and which worked way better than I anticipated, was that the players quickly settled into the pre-generated characters I'd built. I was clear up front that picking a pregen wasn't required; I made them as examples and time-savers vs. creating characters from scratch for this mini-campaign. But I also designed them as good characters, with well thought out skills and interesting bits of backstory. The players not only all picked from my pre-gens but seemed satisfied that they'd gotten their top choice. I'm looking forward to Session One!

Making Wandering Monsters Meaningful

Now that I'm playing D&D again* I feel not-foolish about writing about D&D and similar role-playing games.

One of the blogs I follow is Gnome Stew. It's about roleplaying games, specifically with advice for game masters (GMs). I subscribe, and sometimes I even respond there.

A recent article by one of their veteran writers was about how old habits die hard. It was kind of a grab-bag of thoughts about how things that were common styles of play decades ago and frankly sucked have thankfully changed with the times. One topic the writer mentioned that jumped out at me was wandering monsters.

Wandering monsters are a trope from D&D type games in the 1980s. More than just a trope, they were literally diagrammed in tables in the rulebooks and written into the adventure in numerous prepackaged adventure modules.

What's wrong with wandering monsters? Well, there were just too random. I mean, you're crawling around a dungeon, looking for some kind of goal, and there's all these vagrants who are aimless until they see you and immediately want to kill you. Frankly they were always just there to keep the story moving and the players on their toes. Any lull in the action, anyone not paying attention at the gaming table, and WHAM! random monster walks around the corner and tries to kill you. A thing you might wonder in between such encounters, aside from whether this is a dystopian underground vision of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, is who painstaking builds all these dungeons and abandons them to be filled with vagrant monsters, anyway. 😂

The Gnome Stew article doesn't really present a solution to the problem of the wandering monster trope, other than author seemingly learning how to stop worrying and love the bomb. And that's why that part of the article resonated with me— because I have made wandering monsters actually relevant to my games.

The main thing I do is make wandering monsters not totally random. The monsters are part of the setting or the story. "Setting" monsters are those that come with the territory. You're on a road through a forest miles from a town? There could be a wild dire boar on the road staring you down, or a bear that raids your campsite for food late at night. I plan these encounters to help set the mood for the setting the players are adventuring in. It reminds them there are risks, and consequences of choices, even when they're between Point A and Point B in the story.

"Story" wandering monsters are not-quite-random monsters whose presence is part of the plot. You're hunting for the villain's hideout where a captive is held hostage? Well, the villain isn't just sitting there waiting for you to kick in the door. The villain has guards and scouts. The pair of gnolls and a hyena that try to ambush you on the road? When you gain the upper hand in the fight and they turn to run away, it's not because they're scared. They're in cahoots with the villain and they're running to let him/her/it know you're coming.

The reason I regard these types of encounters as "wandering" monsters is that they're not nailed down in place. I don't mark it on my map as "The bear raids the players' camp here" or "The gnolls' ambush is there." These encounters are wherever they need to be to keep the game engaging for everyone.

10/7 is Israel's 9/11

One week ago Israel was viciously attacked by the terrorist group Hamas, which is also de facto government of the Gaza Strip. Hamas fighters purposefully massacred hundreds of civilians in addition to waging attacks on military targets. Soon thereafter I started seeing the analogy in the news, "10/7 is Israel's 9/11." I was already thinking it myself.

I've also seen some articles where writers highhandedly admonish readers how 10/7 and 9/11 are not alike, because of how al Qaeda was a non-state actor and Hamas is a state actor, or some equally beside-the-point thing like that. There are two big problems with this. First, fuck the finger-wagging man-splaining. Anyone attempting to use asshole style arguments and rub my nose in how smart they are by explaining to me how I've been mistaken the whole time is rarely going to win points with me. Rarely, because it's rarely the case such people are actually right! I will agree with an asshole's point if they are right. But almost invariably assholes are not right, because they are too caught up in their own egos to recognize facts contrary to their prejudices. In this case these finger-waggers are wrong because of problem #2: All analogies fail when you take them too far.

The point of making an analogy is to illustrate how something unfamiliar or simply new, in this case the 10/7 attacks on Israel, is similar in a few keys respects to something much more familiar, like the 9/11 attacks on the US. The key is in a few key respects. An analogy will always— always— break down if you take it too far. The "take it too far" in the case of these contrarian writers is them comparing the different geopolitical positions of Hamas vs. Al Qaeda and arguing that because those two are not the identical the whole comparison is null and void. That's horseshit. Their argument is a logical fallacy (overextending an analogy proves nothing) and an indication of arguing in bad faith.

The point of the analogy between the attacks is not that Hamas and Al Qaeda are the same (except also in some limited regards) but that the impact and consequences of the attacks have, or are likely to have, key similarities. Here are three big similarities I can think of right off the top of my head:

1) The attack killed a huge number of people, proportionately. The 9/11 attacks in the US killed just under 3,000 people, virtually all civilians. The initial death toll in the attacks on Israel was estimated at just over 100 in the hours after the attack. Just that death toll is a comparable loss as the US population in 2001 of 285 million is 30x Israel's population of 9.3 million today. And as the breathtaking scope of the 10/7 attacks became clearer after the first few hours, the death toll increased to over 900. Edit: after several days it was increased to 1,400. That makes 10/7 actually fourteen times as bad as 9/11 in terms of proportionate loss of life.

2) Policy reaction to the attacks will change government and society. The US government implemented sweeping, permanent changes after 9/11. The changes are still all around us in our daily lives. In Israel, this attack is seen as a massive failure of the country's sophisticated and far-reaching intelligence apparatus. What changes in surveillance and security policies will be made? And will this attack ultimately topple the precarious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Israelis are understandably pulling together in this time of war, but at the same time many are openly criticizing the leadership of Netanyahu— who for years has defined his political brand as his ability to keep Israelis safe from attack better than absolutely anyone else.

3) Israel has a rare moment of global support— and may overplay it. Following 9/11 the US had broad international support, including from geopolitical rivals who'd ordinarily condemn US foreign actions, to find and bring to justice the parties responsible. This support backed the invasion of Afghanistan and tolerated, to a certain extent, broad suspicion of Muslim people and Muslim majority countries. The US overplayed its hand, though, in invading Iraq under flimsy pretenses that later proved false— arguably knowingly false— and in violating its own commitments to the international rules of law through actions such as detaining prisoners without charges or trial and using torture. Nevermind that the US's enemies did such things as a matter of course; the US was held by its peers and its own people to a higher standard. Israel faces the same challenge today. This attack was brutal. It violated the rules of war, via its deliberate attack on civilians and taking of hostages. But Israel will lose its moment of international support if it does the same in return. It may seem unfair that it's held to a higher standard, but it's simply a fact that it is. And already its war on Hamas is causing a widespread humanitarian crisis. The 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip have been without power or piped water for several days. Israel is telling 1 million of them to leave ahead of a ground invasion, but where will they go? The borders, including Egypt's border, are all closed.