Accidental duplicate post

Nothing to see here.

[AD&D] Dark Sun: The Order (motivations)

Dragon Kings has a blurb about The Order, a clandestine organization of high-level (21st-30th level) psionicists with three tenets:

They must personally confront heresy according to their roles; they must pursue greater psionic mastery themselves; and they cannot personally use their psionic powers for any purpose that is completely good or evil.

Furthermore, a PC who reaches level 21+ as a psionicist is "marked for death" if he's not neutral-aligned.

Once any creature attains 21st level as a pure psionicist, his mind attracts the Order's attention. Mediators send one or more entrants to investigate the new psionicist and learn his motivations. If the new psionicist is of neutral alignment, they approach him to join the Order as a new entrant. **If his alignment is either good or evil**, or if he refuses to join the Order, he is marked for death.

(Emphasis mine.)

On the one hand, I get it. The Order isn't supposed to get involved. They may perhaps have the power to turn deserts into verdant forests and free everyone on Athas from the tyranny of the templars and sorcerer kings, but they've been designed not to do that. Instead they're a threat for high-level parties.

They're a stabilizing force, not a destabilizing deus ex machina like Elminster.

But if merely being good-aligned (always kind to children, goes out of his way to help poor folks and old folks) or evil-aligned (happily exploits business loopholes, keeps slaves, bribes templars to look the other way while paying employees the absolute minimum he can get away with and overworking his slaves--or maybe even just because he secretly enjoys watching his commercial rivals go out of business and starve!) is enough to make The Order conclude that you're abusing your psionic purity and need to die... that's just stupid. That's the old Aggressively True Neutral druid thing that Dark Sun thankfully did away with w/rt druids. So... how can we fix The Order so that it stays aloof and uninvolved but not in a stupid alignment-driven way?

Steal from Star Trek and/or space opera. Give The Order their own version of The Interdict or The Prime Directive. "Enlightened minds (a.k.a. powerful psis) must not interfere with the development of lesser beings--must not alter the course of history or affect individual lives on a large scale--because natural [Darwinian] selection is vital to the eventual coadunation (psychomaturation) of the collective planetary mind. The penalty for violation is death." It's still kind of pig-headed and stupid and virtually guaranteed to make The Order an antagonist to many PCs, but it's a coherent motivation that you can actually imagine an earnest NPC reluctantly killing for, as opposed to the ridiculous nonsense of "I'm killing you because you are too nice to widows and orphans."

Maybe Mr. NPC is willing to overlook a 21st level psionicist who seeks out buried water sources (for free) to help farmers establish new farms, because that's small potatoes. But if a psionicist--even a "mere" 15th level metapsionicist--sets up shop Empowering items with metapsionics including the Empower, Receptacle, and Convergence powers to achieve a psionic Singularity of sorts (eventually you'll be creating dozens of new Empowered items a day), wow, that could change the course of Athasian history pretty quick, and Mr. The Order NPC should be horrified and act ruthlessly to prevent that "disruption".

Instead of the story about the little elf boy:

One day, an intolerant shopkeeper, no doubt a recent victim of one of the boy's pranks, sought the strongest psionicists in the village to control the adolescent. But the entire village went wide-eyed with panic when the boy dealt back more than he took, even from the greatest masters in Ledopolus. Enraged, the boy turned his youthful anger full-force on the villagers, killing and maiming, lashing out with all the ferocity that fifteen years of scorn had burned into him. Those he didn't kill he enslaved, controlling their minds to do his wicked bidding. 

But within the month, a stranger appeared at the edge of town, a shrouded elf whose brown wrappings indicated loyalty to no tribe. The elf made no sound, yet the half-breed boy sensed him and appeared. Their mental struggle took only an instant. Then the stranger left, leaving behind the shattered village, its newly awakened (and very confused) inhabitants, and the corpse of the evil half-elf boy. Thankful, the villagers sent out their fastest riders to reward the solitary elf, but they never found nor heard from him again. 

Instead, it would be a story about a dwarven mindmaster with the crazy goal of greening the desert. He worked hard all day every day creating figurines and statues which gave uneasy villagers the feeling they might be alive--and the desert began to green, and the statues began to spread, until one day... the brown elf showed up, broke the dwarf's mind and smashed all his statues, and left. The villagers had mixed feelings about this but overall they were glad because nobody knows where this all could have led, and people fear change, especially on Athas where news is so often bad news.

Explanations

E.,

I want to vent a little to you about something, but first let me explain why. President Nelson said something true and overall immensely helpful to me in a recent conference talk, but there's part of it that I have an issue with, and I want to vent about it, and I want to vent about it with you in part with the ulterior motive of proving that just because we don't have the same religious beliefs any more doesn't mean we can't have a conversation about religion that you and I will both enjoy. I think you will "get" my issue with this quote and also why I don't ultimately consider it a big deal, but that it's still worth noting.

The quote is:

"As you think celestial, you will find yourself avoiding anything that robs you of your agency. Any addiction—be it gaming, gambling, debt, drugs, alcohol, anger, pornography, sex, or even food—offends God. Why? Because your obsession becomes your god. You look to it rather than to Him for solace. If you struggle with an addiction, seek the spiritual and professional help you need. Please do not let an obsession rob you of your freedom to follow God's fabulous plan."

Both emphases mine. The bold part I have zero problems with and find immensely helpful. (I've been struggling with a food addiction for years and it's super helpful to have official sanction to think of it as an actual spiritual problem, as opposed to something I consider a spiritual problem but am embarrassed to talk about to anyone else because they won't understand why it matters.)

The underlined part I find unsatisfying and a bit of a cop-out. There's an answer but it's much deeper than that, and if I were talking to Heavenly Father directly he would probably say to me either "There are psychological dynamics in play that result in food addiction doing X to your habits which results in Y or Z" or he would say "It's harmful but you're not at a stage yet where I can explain to you exactly why, except via [analogy]."

I'm not saying President Nelson was wrong to phrase it that way because his job is to talk to the world, not only to Max, and I think the world would generally respond poorly to the kind of explanation Max would benefit from (especially the "you're not at a stage yet where I can explain to you"). But the Holy Ghost says to me at least that the Max-directed explanation exists and would satisfy me.

If I know you, E., I would say you have probably had your own run-ins with explanations that are unsatisfying and a bit of a cop-out. I know how it feels.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Mirror of the Fire Demon

[from another forum]

We once talked... about adventure seeds and my preference for dynamically unstable situations as adventure hooks, instead of status quo. Here's a concrete example:

I'm prepping Mirror of the Fire Demon. It's a good adventure in many ways with lots of mechanically interesting stuff going on: interesting terrain, monsters that hear combat and come out to investigate, at least one really tough fight, and so on.

But the central hook of "there's a megalomaniac gathering a horde of monsters to take over the world, and the wind spirit will tell you how to stop him" leaves me cold.

In particular, I feel that it makes roleplay more difficult than it needs to be. If the adventure is going to be purely hack and slash, "there's an evil warlord with a magic mirror, go take it" would suffice. The existence of hooks can only be to support roleplaying elements such as character motivation or informing interactions with monsters and rival adventuring parties, or aiding suspension of disbelief, and yet the default hook makes me feel like it raises more questions than it answers such as "what exactly has the bad guy done so far with his tens of thousands of troops, and why aren't there more of them at his main headquarters?"

So in the course of prepping this adventure I plan to make the situation more dynamic.

Rather than "this bad guy is gathering an army but hasn't done anything yet and everyone wants to stop him," which is a mission to maintain the status quo, it will work better at my table if it's "this bad dude has been in power for a while, doing terrible things to his subjects, but now for reasons unknown (to you) he's missing! His generals are jockeying for position, it looks like maybe a succession war is brewing, his armies are hunkering down and unsure which internal faction they're going to support... and in the middle of all this, word gets out that his old spymaster has defected and is selling secrets about bad dude's sources of power. Agents of nearby nations are greedily eyeing each other on their way to rendezvous with said spymaster. That's where you come in..."

Now you've got a huge horde which is fearful and somewhat passive, rival agents/adventurers who are greedy, an oracle of sorts (the spymaster) hiding in a cave but with a clear motive to dispense information for a price, and a mystery for future adventuring: what happened to bad dude and is he coming back? BTW the answer is "he got careless in his troop movements and elven armies took the opportunity to ambush him and his company of soldiers, at a high price in blood, but unless someone breaks the mirror he's got Unkillable 3 and will come back angrier than ever."

That helps me roleplay everyone involved, because they've all got clear motivations for what they're doing and not doing. It also tells me to insert more civilians into the wasteland parts of the adventure, to showcase the bad things the bad dude and his armies have been doing, like putting orphans to work as forced labor growing food.

Why I finally switched from Visual Studio to VSCode + Ionide

I've tried out Ionide a few times over the years, but never permanently until now. There are three factors which individually wouldn't be enough to make me reprogram my reflexes for a new IDE:

1.) Font Ligatures. I've started to really appreciate the cognitive benefits of font ligatures, but there's a long-standing bug in Visual Studio that prevents the -> ligature from working. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/846 This was my proximate cause for giving VSCode another try, and VSCode handles it like a champ.

2.) Github Copilot in VS completes whenever you hit Tab, and you can't reconfigure it. Copilot is pretty decent at guessing correct code completions but it's not anywhere close to 100%, and having erroneous code unexpectedly insert itself in the middle of my coding was distracting. In VSCode I set it to complete on Alt-/ instead.

3.) F# Intellisense in VS broke for me about six months ago (https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/issues/14901) and while it's sort of working again now, it's quite slow, on the order of five or six seconds between fixing a type error and having the red squiggles disappear in VS. In VSCode it's approximately instantaneous.

In theory if VS fixed all three of these issues I would switch back, but right now I'm pretty happy about having moved over. There's some learning curve but the end result feels more productive.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

[DFRPG] Making demons demonic

From https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/diabolical/ an interesting anecdote, which may be written specifically for that article or possibly from an RPG sourcebook:

In the wake of these defeats Agrippa was consumed by anger, shame and dread. He feared the armies of Talabheim and Middenheim would arrive at any moment to slaughter him and seize the throne at Nuln. His wits perturbed by panic, he sought out Calidus for advice, who presented to him the most desperate and dangerous of measures. To this Agrippa agreed. Calidus called forth the infernal spirit Achorax and the young emperor entered into a most dreadful bargain with the demon. On Geheimnisnacht the demon would destroy the two older emperors, and thereby Agrippa would be left with an unchallenged claim on the Imperial throne. Yet the demon's price was high: the moonlight of that night would also be the last seen by Agrippa's daughters, who would be condemned to an eternity of torment in the Abyss.

The fatal Geheimnisnacht arrived and Achorax claimed his payment. Yet the demon's work was not done in Nuln. Two days before the night of the Twin Moons, the Emperor Konrad had succumbed to a sudden and mysterious illness and the Middenheim throne had passed to his twelve-year-old son, Arnulf. Achorax held to his bargain and that night tore asunder the two older Emperors: Lothar and the hapless Agrippa.

– Dietmar von Humboldt, A History of Sigmar's People, XVIII.43

To me this shows an interesting way to make demons fearful: by making them know stuff. Just like Dresden Files Outsiders always act together, flawlessly cooperating, maybe a good distinction between Tanar'ri and Baatezu could be that Baatezu share knowledge, maybe even magically, so that if you summon one Baatezu to demand power, it knows that Emperor Conrad is dead as long as any other Baatezu knows. It knows where all the bodies are buried.

That could be an excellent reason to be wary of ever signing a contract with one.

This will probably influence how I run demons and Elder Things in DFRPG. 

What is DFRPG? Summary

"OSR" is a word with many definitions, but DFRPG fits some of them, e.g. it doesn't really have a concept of "balanced encounter difficulty" beyond having the GM eyeball it, and it works very well with the "if you can describe it, you can attempt it" mentality of the OSR including stuff like "I invisibly sneak up and stab it in the eye!"

The biggest difference between DFRPG and GURPS IMO is that GURPS is a setting-agnostic toolkit with lots of rules for making hypothetical powers and abilities and assigning point costs to them, and DFRPG is a D&D-ish game made using GURPS and has a specific set of professions (i.e. classes) with specific powers available to each (e.g. bards can mind control intelligent creatures with music, if they buy that ability). Since I dislike GURPS chargen but like its gameplay rules DFRPG is a good choice for me, especially when it comes to tactical complexity like "what are some nasty things I can do to incautious players with two minotaurs in a maze, and how can I make that experience different from six goblins in a night raid?"

It has terrific balance between wizards and warriors (both are fun and OP, especially when working together, and BTW I'm including bards, clerics, and druids under "wizards" here) and between melee and ranged combat, and coming from 5E that is a breath of fresh air because my 5E players towards the end were mostly wizard X/cleric 1 with a light smattering of Sharpshooter Fighters. It's nice to see some actual melee warriors (Knights and Swashbucklers) having fun at my table now.

Converting D&D adventures to Dungeon Fantasy RPG (Powered By GURPS)

One of the joys of GURPS, in theory, is that you can run anything you can think of in it. One of the joys of running well-designed D&D modules, from AD&D's Against the Giants series to the best of OSR adventures today, is that they are different from stuff you write yourself. They can surprise you and teach you new things. There are some monsters that D&D and DFRPG share in common, like ogres, goblins, dragons, and mariliths/peshkalis, and there are products out there like Nordlond Bestiary which provide quite a lot of others, but what do you do about traps and treasure?

Here are my rules:

1.) For treasure values, divide gold piece amounts by 100 and silver amounts by 10, e.g. if the module says you find 200 gp and 35 silver, you find two gold pieces ($800) and three silver pieces ($60). For jewelry/trade goods/etc. apply this same rule directly to the value of the jewels/etc. using whatever currency the value is given in.

2.) For traps, if it's a known trap type from the DFRPG books like a deadfall or crossbow trap, use whatever is listed there. Otherwise, it's noticed with a Per check; Disarmed with a Traps check; unavoidable unless disarmed; and if it's triggered it is Saved/Evaded with a DX check (or Will check if magical, HT check if poisonous), and does the same damage as listed in the module. Since D&D and DFRPG use HP differently, traps with large damage amounts in D&D (e.g. 5d10 poison) are sometimes intended to be reliably lethal, but that's better represented in DFRPG by making them difficult to avoid. Every time you cut the damage dice in half, rounded up, add a -2 penalty to all detection/disarm/evasion rolls. For example, if an evil lich king's tomb has a poison gas damage trap that does 5d10 poison damage per round for 10 rounds if triggered, in DFRPG you can convert it to a 3d10 toxic damage per second gas trap that is detected by Per-2, disarmed by Traps-2, and does no damage this second if you succeed against HT-2. Or you can halve the damage twice more to get a 1d10 damage per second trap that's detected by Per-6, disarmed by Traps-6, and resisted by HT-6.

3.) In all cases, if these simple defaults feel off to you, tweak them! If you want to convert the gas trap from 1d10 damage to 2d6, detected at Per and disarmed at Traps-6 but with no HT check to avoid the damage, do so. These rules are just a starting point to save you hassle for things you don't have a strong opinion about.

Happy gaming to all!

-B.C.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Ukraine war tactics, artillery

The best argument I've seen for why the US should stay in the Ukraine ear: to use up Russia's ammunition (they have limited industrial capacity to replace it).

https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/13r6kms/demystifying_the_myth_of_russian_artillery_power/

See also 

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/meatgrinder-russian-tactics-second-year-its-invasion-ukraine

Re: Journal (Daily Impressions From Prayer)

Oh, I get it now.

I was thinking about how ready I am for Babylon to be gone and for justice to reign, and I thought of this:

"But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." (Matthew 26, D&C 27, etc.)

It's an expression of eagerness. Apparently Jesus is capable of grand romantic gestures too.

-Max

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Mini-tutorial on GMing different adventure styles

Some of the most common and easiest ways to run an adventure include:

1.) "Dungeon crawls", wherein players explore a hostile environment room-by-room seeking treasure while avoiding or overcoming traps and monsters. The fun in these games comes from a mix of the thrill of discovery and the challenge of staying alive. The simplest possible dungeon crawl is to draw a maze, some monsters in the maze, and some treasure, and then let the players enter the maze while you describe the current room they're in and let them decide where to move and what to do in each room, until they find the treasure and take it out of the maze or die trying. Many DMs got their start as twelve-year-olds running simple dungeon crawls back in the 1970s and 1980s, and it's still a fun way to start DMing! 

2.) "Linear plots": stories with a mostly-fixed plot, but with open character roles and opportunities for customization. These are fairly easy to run as long as players cooperate, a bit like a movie where the players can choose who the heroes are and specifically how they overcome the villains of the story: imagine the Twelve Labors of Heracles, but you don't have to be Heracles the strong man. Instead you can be Belfry, an elf cursed with wanderlust who fights monsters by throwing playing cards with the force of shuriken and sneaking through the shadows. You'll still do the Twelve Labors and come into conflict with the Evil king, but the details of how will be different as Belfry than they were for Heracles. Unlike a dungeon crawl, this type of game is often less about challenge and winning/losing than about seeing HOW this particular hero or group of heroes will succeed, and what unique imprint they will make on the gameworld in the process.

3.) "Mysteries" are a bit like dungeon crawls in that the players move around freely seeking something, but unlike a dungeon crawl players usually don't move from room to room seeking treasure, so much as from "scene" to "scene" looking for clues. They require a bit more skill than dungeon crawls because you need to know where to start and stop scenes and how much to skip over: if players say "we go find the police chief and ask him when and where John Thorn was last seen alive," you have to decide whether to start the next scene on the road to the police station (possibly noticing some interesting clue), in the lobby of the police station looking at a police secretary, or in the middle of conversation with the police chief who's now glaring ferociously over his bushy mustache at the player characters after having just barked an answer to their question at them.

In some ways mysteries are still a little like dungeon crawls, but another difference is that in a dungeon you can usually count on players finding everything eventually, including every non-hidden door to every room in the dungeon, but in a mystery there will be many things players never realize so it's very easy to make the mystery too hard unless you build in multiple paths (clues) to every "place" (conclusion, or scene) that the players need to reach.

4.) "Hexcrawls" are like dungeon crawls on a much bigger scale. Instead of exploring a dungeon looking for monsters and treasure, you're exploring a wilderness looking for towns, dungeons, and other interesting places or events (some of which might be linear plots or dungeoncrawls or mysteries). In a dungeon you're usually careful to always describe the exits from each room so that players always know where to go next if they're not interested in the current room ("out the green door" or "through the tunnel to the south"); in a hexcrawl you describe the contents of the local "hex" (i.e. local terrain within a fixed distance such as 5 miles) and then players choose a direction to go (such as "towards the river" or "northwest").

5.) "Social" adventures focus more on personalities and interactions between them than on locations and physical problems. A social adventure has some resemblance to a mystery in how you might navigate between scenes--DM judgment is required to know how much to skip--but the goals are different. Instead of looking for clues, players might seek out conversation which elicits emotional reactions in themselves or other characters (such as confronting an adulterous parent to demand accountability, or pleading with a friend for forgiveness at your inability to get them out of jail).

As before, social adventures need not be wholly separate from other kinds of adventures--perhaps one section of a hexcrawl might be a "home base" of sorts where social situations happen frequently, and even during a dungeon crawl there might be a hidden dwarf civilization on one level where social gameplay is the primary game mode.

Other gameplay modes are possible, such as running a spelljamming spaceship where hexcrawls through interplanetary space lead to dungeon crawls and linear plots whilst managing social issues among the PCs and NPCs who crew the ship. But these five basic types should get you started: dungeon crawls, linear plots, mysteries, hexcrawls, and social adventures.

Procedures for monster objectives

Inspired by https://mindstorm.blot.im/o-a-r-combat-objectives but different.

Before combat or other conflict can occur, there must be goals. In order for dice rolling to be needed, there must be uncertainty as to whether those goals can be achieved, which is especially likely if those goals are in conflict.

Unlike mindstorm I focus less on the moment of goal achievement than on removal of uncertainty.

Thus: before a potential conflict, both sides secretly write down their objectives and give them to the referee. (If one side is run by the referee they still write down the objectives.) The referee puts the objects in one of three piles: can, cannot, maybe. If nothing is in the maybe pile then players may resolve the scene by reading all objectives and narrating an outcome which satisfies all "can" objectives and no "cannot" objectives, or they may give the objectives to the referee to do. Otherwise, "maybe" objectives must be resolved into "can" or "cannot" objectives through game procedures such as reaction checks or combat. Whenever the referee decides an objective has changed status they will immediately move the objective into the correct pile.

Example encounter:

Dungeon desecrators seek entrance to a royal pyramid via a secret tunnel full of sleeping giant mutant bats. The bats' secret objective is written by the adventure designer: wake up and kill anyone who isn't a bat.

Players write down their objective, and the party druid adds a separate objective, and then the GM looks at all three objectives: 

Bats: wake up and kill anyone who isn't a bat.

Desecrators: sneak through the area without being noticed by any bats

Druid: take control of as many bats as possible to use as minions inside the pyramid.

All three goals conflict to some extent so they all go in the maybe pile. The GM will use whatever procedures are built into the game they are playing (e.g. Stealth rolls in Dungeon Fantasy or D&D 5E; spellcasting or Control Animal rolls for the druid) to resolve uncertainty. If everyone rolls well then the GM will push the bat objective into "cannot" and the other objectives into "can" and then indicate to the players to read them all and narrate an outcome (or push the cards back to him if they prefer to remain 'in character'). If they roll poorly then combat likely begins and the desecrator objective moves to the "cannot" pile.

The written goals serve both as a motivator for the adventure writer or GM to explicitly provide motivations for monsters, and as an audit trail to help players learn more about the game world over the course of play. 

F# probabilities: opposed 3d6 rolls

A handy little F# script for computing odds for Dungeon Fantasy/GURPS, such as the odds of a Slow Stone affecting a dragon:

let distribution3d6 =
    [for x in 1..6 do
        for y in 1..6 do
            for z in 1..6 do
                (x+y+z), (x,y,z)]
let probabilityOfSuccess attackerSkill defenderSkill =
    let mutable n = 0
    let mutable success = 0
    for x,_ in distribution3d6 do
        for y,_ in distribution3d6 do
            n <- n + 1
            let successMargin =
                match attackerSkill - x with
                | n when n >= 0 -> Some n
                | _ -> None
            match defenderSkill - y, successMargin with
            | defenderMargin, Some attackerMargin when attackerMargin > defenderMargin ->
                success <- success + 1
            | _ -> ()
    {| attackerSkill = attackerSkill; defenderSkill = defenderSkill; n = n; success = success; successRatio = (float success/float n) |}
probabilityOfSuccess 15 15

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

RPGs: difficulty and headroom

This may interest you: http://nethack4.org/blog/strategy-headroom.html

The article defines "headroom" as  follows: if the choices a player can make in a particular situation have a wrong answer, that is a sign of low headroom, especially if a different situation would have a different right answer. 

Has some applicability to RPGs (stat roll = low headroom, point buy = high headroom) as well as general difficulty level (5E in general is very high headroom, but so is Master of Magic).

D&D skill checks: negotiation and adjudication

One of 5E's issues is that the canonical loop goes:

1. DM describes situation

2a. Player declares intention and approach

2b. (Optional) DM rolls dice or asks player to do so

3. DM narrates outcome

The problem is that because skills in 5E are partially overlapping, (2b) should really be a dialogue with feedback loops for player suggestions and not just a query for a number result. Example:

1. DM, "As you're having tea with the Goblin King, you suddenly notice Rincewind behind him, stealthily descending the exterior castle wall. The Goblin King might turn around and see him at any moment."

2a. Lady Sarissa: "I turn up the charm to distract the Goblin King. Smiling broadly, flirting, laughing and touching his arm, trying to keep him looking at me and not behind him."

2b. DM: "Roll a Charisma (Deception) check, DC 15."

2c. Lady Sarissa: "I am proficient in Performance. I think that means I am skilled in holding an audience's attention. May I substitute Charisma (Performance)?"

2d. DM: "Actually that works even better. DC 12 in that case."

2e. Lady Sarissa: [rolls] "11!"

3. DM: "Laughing heartily at one of your jokes, the Goblin King accidentally knocks over a glass of water on the table between you. 'Excuse me,' he murmurs, and turns to call the steward to clean it up... which Rincewind right into his field of vision.'

4a. DM: "Rincewind, make an Wisdom (Stealth) check please to see if your ghillie suit camouflage is good enough."

4b. Rincewind: "Can I do Dexterity (Stealth) instead?"

4c. DM: "Not in this case because you're in plain sight. If your camouflage is good enough it's possible to be mistaken for a section of plants, and I'll waive the Dexterity (Stealth) check because all you have to do is hold still, but if your camouflage is faulty then you'll be obviously not a plant."

4d. Rincewind: "I made the ghillie suit with Woodsman's Tools, and Sprocket helped me look for any flaws in it. Can I use his Wisdom with my Woodsman's Tools proficiency?"

4e. DM: [thinks] "Sure."

4f. Rincewind: [rolls] 19.

5. DM: "Sarissa, the Goblin King waves the steward over. The steward wipes up the mess while the Goblin King continues enjoying your company. He doesn't seem to have noticed anything."

Dungeon checklist

Y.A.,

Check this out. 

https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/01/dungeon-checklist.html

-B.C.

Thieves in AD&D: variant rule

Most of the criticisms of the Thief that I've read aren't conceptual, but mechanical: it's not that sneaking and finding traps aren't cool or worthwhile, it's that (O/A)D&D Thieves are *bad* at these things, especially at low level.

Intuition tells me that the root of the problem is using % dice for thief skills, in conjunction with low starting values for all the skills.

I wonder whether a dice pool mechanic might not be a better way to model expertise. Something like the following five Thief skills, each starting at one die (d6):

Camouflage: exist/sneak without your presence being detected

Forgery: create documents, uniforms, etc. that look like the real thing

Hands: delicate manipulations such as pickpocketing, card magic, lockpicking, disarming fine traps

Perceive: notice large traps, hear clues, oppose Camouflage

Savvy: predict NPC actions, detect social manipulators, have already prepared for a given situation.

(Maybe a Climb Walls skill somehow too, or is that just Hands?)

I'm imagining that you get one extra die per level to add to one of these skills, or maybe two at high level. Tools might give you additional dice or subtract dice if they're substandard.

Example usage:

Picking a crude lock jury-rigged out of iron by a goblin blacksmith requires Hands 1:5 (read: at least one 5-6 in your dice pool). A thief who chose to specialize in Hands (2 dice) and has decent tools (no penalty, no bonus) would roll two d6s. If either is 5+ (55% probability) he picks the lock, otherwise that lock is beyond him until the situation changes (such as gaining more Hands skill or consulting a mentor about goblin locks). At 2nd level, he could bump Hands to 3d6 (70% chance of success on the crude lock) or invest in a different skill.

A lock in town might be harder, 2:5. A really impressive tamper-resistant lock might need higher rolls, such as 2:6 or even 3:6.A Hands 3:6 lock is impossible for a novice thief to pick, and tricky even for a master thief with Hands 10d6.

Similarly, forging a simple travel permit within the Hobgoblin Empire might be Forgery 1:5 (easy for anyone who's ever seen one) while access to a classified military location might require Forgery 3:6 documents.

If the PCs get thrown in a jail during a heist, "I've already bribed this guard with money. He's supposed to drop a copy of the key on the floor" might require a Savvy 3:5 check, but if the DM decides that this guard isn't corrupt, and money won't work, he could say "roll Savvy 5:5 instead" and on success, tell the player, "You found that this guard isn't corrupt and won't take money, but he's desperate to find his missing daughter [adventure hook]. You promised to help with that if he helps you. He drops the key on the floor just as you had planned."

I imagine that instead of various races getting +/- 5% to Hide In Shadows, etc., elves might get * or ** to Camouflage while halflings get * to Perceive, where each * means "you can add +1 to a die of your choice". Thus, Camouflage 2d6* might roll 4, 5, which you can use to satisfy Camouflage 1:6 (4, 6) or Camouflage 2:5 (5,5).

I think by boosting the low-level success rate and reorganizing the skills, Thieves would have a unique niche that isn't easily duplicated by a wizard with Knock and Invisibility. Having a Thief in the party would feel less like a tax begrudgingly paid (or ignored in favor of another priest to offset trap damage) and more like a role that brings an actual benefit to the party and is fun playing.

At any rate, this is about what it would take to get *me* to want to play a Thief sometimes.

Easter Sunday

Jesus is alive today, and because of him we will all one day live again after we die. I know that to be true both with my mind and by the witness of the Holy Ghost, and I know that you have the right to know it too, through study and prayer.

Happy Resurrection Day!

-Max

Greek values and the morality of infanticide

From https://wng.org/opinions/protect-the-children-1650019354 ...The rise of Christianity created moral intuitions we now take for granted: Children are uniquely vulnerable, and we must physically protect them and work to preserve their innocence.

Don't take my word for it. The essential text here is When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity by the Norwegian theologian O.M. Bakke. Before Christ, Bakke observes, the ancient Greeks essentially created a societal hierarchy around their notions of "logos" or reason. Free male citizens were said to possess the most capacity for reason. Women and older men had less capacity, and children possessed even less rational capacity. Therefore, they were valued even less.

Indeed, unwanted children were frequently abandoned in the ancient world for trivial reasons, such as the desire to have a son instead of a daughter or in response to political or economic instability. The practice was known as expositio, where infants were simply left outside to die of thirst, exposure, or animal attacks...

Ohhhhh! Suddenly those old Greek myths about babies like Oedipus and Paris being abandoned to wild animals suddenly has a context: the Greeks' moral system didn't consider children to have moral value because babies aren't intellectually impressive! They were wrong of course but no wonder it was a part of their stories.

-Max

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

George Lucas on happiness

I think this is a good definition of joy. "Joy is something you can recall." That matches scriptural usages of "joy".

I've discovered along the way that happiness--you live in two worlds here. Happiness is pleasure, and happiness is joy. You know, it can be either one. You add them up and it sort of falls under the uber category of happiness. Pleasure is short-lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month, and it peaks and then goes down--it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. You know, it's like drugs--you have to keep doing because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether it's shopping, whether you're engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it. On the other hand is joy, and joy is the thing that doesn't go as high as pleasure, in terms of your emotional reaction, but it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall. Pleasure you can't. So the secret is that even though it's not as intense as the pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer, and people who get the pleasure, they keep saying, "Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars..." You'll NEVER relive the moment you got your first car. That's it. That's the highest peak. Yes, you can get three Ferraris and a new Gulfstream Jet, but you have to keep going, and eventually you run out. It doesn't work. So if you're trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you're doomed.

Pleasure's fun. It's great. But you can't keep it going forever. Just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe again it'll come back, and you'll get to do it again.

Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about YOUR pleasure. It's about you. It's a selfish, self-centered emotion that's created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else, and it's a kind of thing that is in its subtlety and lowness much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure, you're doomed. If you pursue joy, you will find everlasting... happiness.

-George Lucas

Source: https://youtu.be/sCP2SGTIz28?t=503

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.