Insight: To Be, or Not To Be

Hey, J., guess what?

I just realized that Hamlet's cryptic "To be or not to be" speech suddenly becomes plain if you think of "be" as an active verb, synonymous with "bide." He's contemplating the risk of rebellion against a king, and trying to persuade himself that the risk is worth it.

To [bide], or not to [bide], that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:

What do you think, makes sense?

-M.

 --

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

What does 'salt that has lost its savor' mean?

I realized recently (within the last few years) that all of these thoughts are connected:

From 3 Nephi 12:

11 And blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake;

12 For ye shall have great joy and be exceedingly glad, for great shall be your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.

13 Verily, verily, I say unto you, I give unto you to be the salt of the earth; but if the salt shall lose its savor wherewith shall the earth be salted? The salt shall be thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men.

14 Verily, verily, I say unto you, I give unto you to be the light of this people. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.

15 Behold, do men light a candle and put it under a bushel? Nay, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light to all that are in the house;

16 Therefore let your light so shine before this people, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

Salt that has lost its savor = those who grow contentious and revile against revilers.

Light that cannot be hid = those who remain peaceful and keep the commandments, "wise as serpents and as harmless as doves." That light CANNOT be hid. Sometimes we talk to youth about "letting your light shine", as a way to say "don't be shy," but the real message here is that "revilings and persecutions from those who speak evil falsely will not prevail--God himself will ensure that your example is like a light that he has put on a candlestick, and will shine brightly to those watching."

THEREFORE, our primary job is not to argue but to lead by example.

44 But behold I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you;

45 That ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good.

 --

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

Calendars

One of many interesting quotes from this Greg Cochran interview: https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521/interview-greg-cochran 

"Coalition warfare has its problems. Let me give you an example. There was a time in which the Russians and the Austrians were working together against Napoleon, and they were supposed to meet at a certain date, at a certain place. The Russians were eleven days late--can you guess why?"
"What, something with the Tsar not feeling like...?"
"Old-style calendar. They had forgotten to synchronize calendars! They didn't change the Gregorian calendar until the Russian revolution... Napoleon didn't have that kind of problem."

-Max

 --

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

On Character Development, Unexpected Kindness, and Suicidal Teens

On the subject of charity and tolerance: one of my favorite episodes of the family comedy American Housewife is Season 4, Episode 14, A Very English Scandal, for its subplot with Oliver. Bear with me as I explain why because this is a moderately long post and the context matters.

In this show, you've got main protagonist Katie, the mom, who in many ways is a terrible human being in order to generate most of the comedy, who is basically Jerry Seinfeld/George Costanza/Elaine Bennett/Roseanne Barr, and Greg, the dad, who is the easygoing history professor and loving-but-not-one-dimensional husband and father, and their three kids, of whom Oliver is the only boy and the Alex P. Keaton of the family: Oliver is arrogant and self-centered and mostly-one-dimensionally obsessed with making good impressions and making money and getting into Harvard to be better off than the family he comes from.

Prior to this episode and due to a ballet injury, Oliver has had to drop out of ballet (which he has been practicing for three years because Harvard has a ballet team which always needs more men) and took up volunteer work with Teen Help Line, because of the available volunteer opportunities it gives the most prestige with Harvard for the least amount of work. As expected, it mostly involves comforting teens from his rich hometown with ridiculous grievances, but in a previous episode, he got one call from a mysterious distressed caller who emoted briefly about how everyone thinks he's Superman, but he's not, and he's not sure he can take it any more, and then hung up.

And this strikes a chord with Oliver, to realize that there's someone in his hometown who is actually suffering, and he and his extremely wealthy best friend Cooper spend time trying to figure out who it is, and go out of their way to befriend the school's nerdy comic pariah who always wears Superman shirts, on the theory that it's probably him. He rebuffs their initial attempts to reach out, so they try even harder and dress up with their own nerdy superhero shirts to join him in the school cafe at lunch, whereupon he rebuffs them hard enough to persuade them that he genuinely doesn't want friends and has never heard of Teen Help Line.
And then they realize from an overheard conversation that it was actually the popular school athlete (and maybe quarterback? I'm not sure) who had called in, and he calls in to Teen Help Line again and Oliver is able to talk him into saying what's on his mind, and it turns out he's stressed because he's gay (and has never said it out loud before). Oliver tries to reassure him that it's not a big deal, but in the process Oliver gives away that not only is Teen Help Line staffed by people from their hometown, but that he actually knows who the guy is (Will something?), and the guy hangs up in a panic, and then later threatens Oliver in person that he better keep his mouth shut or else. Then he posts a fake Instragram account under Oliver's name confessing to the entire school that Oliver is gay.

And that's where this A Very English Scandal begins. In one of the B-plots of this episode, Oliver, selfish Oliver, is a little nervous about going back to school today to see everyone's reaction to "his" post, but has decided that denying it and denouncing the false post would just confirm Will's fears about becoming a social pariah. So he and Cooper just kind of ignore all the people whispering about them, and the comments from Oliver's ex-girlfriend about how that "explains a lot". Will comes by with his friends and makes some rude comments about Oliver's gayness, and one of Will's friends calls him on it, says that what Oliver did took a lot of guts, and that it's none of Will's business and to leave him alone, and then they walk off--and Oliver and Will make eye contact, and Will seems to understand. And at the end of the episode Will posts a confession about faking Oliver's "confession", and that it's actually Will and not Oliver who is gay, and thanking Oliver for showing him that it's okay.

And I think that is a great bit of character development and a great message! See, you don't need to be into superheroes and Superman to want people who are pariahs for being geeks to have the chance to be accepted (if they want to be), and you don't need to think homosexuality is a good thing to want people who have it to be treated well as human beings. (I doubt that Oliver's character thinks it's a problem either--but even people who do think it's a practical problem which often creates moral problems, such as me, can and do believe in kindness towards those who suffer from it.) I just love the way the whole Teen Help Line subplot was handled in this show: it's all about kindness and charity. And it's especially surprising because, well, it's Oliver, a.k.a. Alex P. Keaton, who is actually being kind to someone, without getting anything in return.

Also, the show is hilarious and the characters are just great. (I recommend starting at Season 4, the most recent, for a few episodes and then restarting at Season 1 if you like what you see.)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07YGG7KNQ/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s4  

 --

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

D&D adventure design: Why can't campaigns last to level 20 and beyond?

Known fact: D&D games tend to die out long before PCs reach 20th level, and based on what I've seen and read, too often it's not because the PCs die but because the campaign just ceases to be fun for either the DM or the players. A common observation is that "game balance" stops working before 20th level, but I think the real problem is that people keep trying to apply "game balance" long after PCs have reached a point where managing difficulty should be the players' problem and not the DM's problem. Posit: campaigns fail because players and DMs attempt to run adventures for high-level (roughly 13th-20th level) PCs with the same mentality and techniques that they use for low-level PCs (roughly 3rd-8th), and they don't scale.

From a power perspective, I think it's healthy to view reaching level 11 as basically reaching PC maturity, in a sense: once you get to Tier 3 there's really no threat or adventure that you can't potentially handle, with the help of your fellow PCs and some creative thinking. Level 11 PCs, working together, generally have the tools they need to kill demon lords and flood river-valleys. In general level 11 PCs and level 20 PCs can go on 20th level-style adventures together and both have a chance to survive. The 20th level guys may be worth as much as two level 11 guys put together, sometimes less, sometimes more, but they're all playing in approximately the same ballpark unless the 20th level guys are abusing broken spells like Planar Binding, Simulacrum, True Polymorph etc.--and even then, the 11th level guys can abuse them to some extent as well.

When it comes to adventures, I think it's worth designing them in basically four bands:

Novice Adventures [Levels 1-2]: Everyone is pretty fragile. Face low-level threats like zombies and goblins.

Veteran Adventures [Levels 3-4]: Twice as hard as Novice. Everyone is less fragile, but only moderately more [I]powerful[/I]. You are competent at facing enemies like ghouls and werewolves, but hill giants are still an impressive enemy at this point.

Delta-Force Adventures [Levels 5-10]: At this point you're basically operating as special forces. Much harder than veteran tier. Players begin to have lots of strategic options. Start to face vampires, mind flayers, hobgoblin armies, dragons. Beholders are an impressive and rare threat.

Superhuman Adventures [Levels 11+]: DM takes the kid gloves off, everything is full Combat As War, "encounter balance" ceases to be a concern. At this point you're just dealing with a gameworld, and whatever makes sense to be there in that world. You may face one beholder, or you may face a crashed Tyrant Ship full of dozens of beholders and a whole colony of Stone Giants whose minds they've taken over, and it's up to you to find a way to deal with the consequences. You may face a lone Death Slaad, or an exponentially-multiplying swarm of thousands of Blue Slaads and Red Slaads taking over the southern half of the continent. You may face betrayal from trusted NPCs, you may play enemy factions off against each other, you may have enemies whose existence you aren't even aware of even though they regularly Scry on you and seek ways to return your old defeated nemeses to life. Spell research, founding and running a kingdom, setting up a merchant empire... you can try anything here. There is total freedom but also a total lack of plot armor (although random tables may still imply structure to the chaos--if you are alone for a few weeks doing spell research when a random encounter table yields a wandering Demon Lord who potentially kills you and loots all of your magic items off your body, that random encounter result is still rare, it's just not unfair).

I'm still working on procedures for running Superhuman-level adventures, but I think it does make sense to smoosh them all together, conceptually, because that's the only way your campaign won't stall at high levels: you need to have been playing "at 20th level" all along, and actually reaching 20th level is just a reward for surviving repeated adventures which makes it less likely that you'll die in this week's adventure.

And if players want to stick to Delta-Force adventures with plot armor indefinitely, or even lower, there should be ways for them to signal the DM that they intend to do that, e.g. by remaining low-ranked within certain organizations instead of top-level operatives, or by not venturing into wildspace/Outer Planes/wherever the Superhuman stuff is mostly going on.   
 

 --

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

Gone With the Wind

Keywords: Gone With the Wind, novels into movies, original book, anthropology

Just after the opening credits of Gone with the Wind and before the start of the film proper is a title card that reads as follows (ellipses in the original):

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South . . .

Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow . . .

Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave . . .

Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind . . .

These are four very important sentences, because they're intended to shape the way we view the entire 238-minute movie. Down through the decades, they've continued to serve that function. But those four sentences were not written by Margaret Mitchell, the author of the 1936 novel on which the film was based. They aren't even remotely based on anything in the novel.

...Many people who've seen Selznick's movie but who've never opened Mitchell's novel have acquired the impression that the book is just what Hecht's title-card suggests: a gauzy, romantic take on the pre-war South. In fact, when the novel is mentioned in passing in accounts of the movie, it's often summed up by a statement to precisely this effect. For example, in a 2005 biography of Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the film, Jill Watts, a professor of film studies at csu San Marcos, wrote that "In Mitchell's view, the antebellum South was an era of greatness." In 2004, Matthew Bernstein, a professor of film studies at Emory, described the racial politics of Selznick's movie as "less-than-progressive," while adding that "the film is less offensive than Margaret Mitchell's novel."

Did Watts or Bernstein read Mitchell's novel before they wrote those sentences? I doubt it. Because in the novel Mitchell doesn't depict the pre-war South as "an era of greatness."

The book sounds more interesting than I thought. I don't like sentimental takes on the South but from the article it indeed isn't one.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/9/knights-their-ladies-fair 

-Max 

 --

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

Spaced Learning and Study Techniques

You may have noticed that when you have to actively recall information in response to a question, your brain learns it better. For example, when I'm watching Bones and the scientists are all like, "The hyoid isn't broken! So it can't have been suicide," and I say, "What's a hyoid?" and look it up and discover that it's a bone in the neck near the larynx, then my odds of retaining that information are much, much better than if I just read a list of bones in the neck in some medical textbook, without integrating that knowledge into a specific context.

It also turns out that there are some other psychological effects you can also exploit which enhance your odds of remembering things without increasing the amount of effort you put into it, and so-called "spaced learning" software exists to help you with this.

The idea is that if you're only going to view a given piece of information like a random list of digits ("555-5452") 5 times, your long-term odds of being able to recall that information ("how many fives are in that number?") are low if you view it 5 times in a row right now, but much higher if you view it now, in an hour, tomorrow, next week, and next month. So if you want to efficiently learn things without having to view the same information hundreds of times, you need something that keeps track of your intended learning and shows it to you only when it's time to give your memory a boost.

Here's the theory: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition#spacing-effect 

Here's a very basic tutorial for Anki (a free flashcard program using spaced learning) to show you how easy it is to get started. Essentially you just take screenshots or type in whatever you want to test yourself on, then it shows you the flashcard and shows you the answer when you're ready, and you tell it if you got it right so it knows how long to wait before showing you the same card again. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9GtFLAI2RU 

-Max 
 

 --

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

Traps in Dungeons and Dragons 5E

[from another forum, in response to a question about whether having a Rogue with passive Perception 17 in the party makes it pointless for the DM to have DC 15 traps in a dungeon]

Traps have a perception component and a deduction component.

Perception: "Huh. There aren't any footprints on that brick."
Deduction: "Therefore, a poison arrow probably comes out of that hole when you step there."

There's nothing wrong with automatically giving the rogue the Perception component, and leaving the deduction up to the player. If he or she has a sufficiently high Investigation skill you can give them the deduction component too. "You enter the hall and immediately notice signs of a blowgun trap in front of one of the doors in the hall."

Even then, traps still aren't pointless because they are still dungeon features, e.g. the Rogue can potentially turn traps to his advantage by taunting monsters into them. Also, there will be some traps that can't be easily bypassed even if you know they are there (e.g. Glyph of Warding), and in those cases there's still a decision to make about whether or not to risk the trap in exchange for potential reward.

P.S. Additionally, I rather think passive Perception/Investigation is a bad match for traps because they do tend to make things static and boring: there shouldn't be THAT much difference between Perception 14 and Perception 15. Therefore I would recommend also allowing active Perception and Investigation rolls for anyone who is actively searching for signs of traps in a particular place, and if they ask for the specific thing ("are there any bricks without footprints?") I would give that fact to the player automatically without a roll.

In other words, the rather high DC 15 is just to notice signs of a trap automatically, without effort, as something you're always doing in the back of your brain. This justifies using even higher DCs for traps that are actually well-hidden and hard to spot even if you're looking for them, like noticing contact poison on a doorknob by the way it glistens (could easily be DC 25 = unnoticeable to a normal person without special training who isn't looking specifically for it).
 
 --

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

On the Good Friday COVID-19 fast

I've long had a complicated relationship with fasting. For the longest time, from a religious perspective, I couldn't figure out what it was for or why Heavenly Father would care if you fasted prior to praying. In some ways it felt kind of like a temper tantrum--like holding your breath until you get what you want.

Ironically, the insights I needed came from the secular side of things, especially Dr. Jason Fung's writings on the role insulin and associated hormones play in the metabolic process. I found that fasting, especially extended fasting on the order of two days or more, does seem to quiet the body's urges and increase mental focus and clarity. (For example, my scores on speed reading and associated mental tests go up while fasting and down after eating, consistent with medical research, and probably with your own lived experiences with post-Thanksgiving torpor.)

Understanding the actual physical benefits of fasting puts at least part of the spiritual aspect of fasting into plain and sensible perspective.

I will be fasting as much as possible this week in preparation for this Friday's fast. I invite you to do so too, and to spend as much time in calm reflection/meditation/thoughtfulness/mindfulness as you can, including mindfulness of other people who are suffering, and seek ways to help. And if you choose to consult with God--whatever your religion, and even if don't believe He's really there or if He's listening to you--I believe that having your body in a fasted state will maximize your chances of perceiving and recognizing the quiet suggestions of the Holy Ghost to your spirit.

My best wishes to you all.

-Max

 --

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

Writing Practice

Write a short story. The second sentence of the story must be, "And then the murders started."

I used to have a lot of friends. And then the murders started.

Don't get me wrong. Nobody ever blamed me, or thought I was responsible. It's just that after a certain point, you start to acquire a "reputation", and a lot of the people you thought were your friends just don't want to deal with it. It's simpler for them to close their eyes and avoid you.

For example, I used to hang out with this guy named Diggy. We were playing soccer, just like we used to do back in first grade, and I was goalie, and our team was ahead for once with twenty seconds left on the clock, but then Diggy gets the ball and he's driving right for me, right? And he fakes left and I buy it and dive in the wrong direction, and the goal is totally open and he kicks the ball... and a fat man's body falls out of a passing airliner and *splats* right on top of the ball, creating a huge mess and winning the game for my team.

Don't worry by the way, the guy was already dead before he fell out. Apparently it was some kind of insurance scheme. The guy's deadbeat brother worked for an airline and thought a plane's landing gear wheelwell would make a good hiding spot for the body. Don't ask--I never do any more.

After that Diggy never played another game of soccer with me. At first he made excuses and pretended to be busy, and then he started pretending not to see me when we passed each other in the halls.

On the other hand, you can tell who your true friends are because they stick with you. Take Elaine, for instance. Not only is she my best friend, but she's also helped me bury more bodies than I can count. It's true that most of them were just roadkill animals, which I also seem to attract, but the severed head we found in the cabin on our 6th grade field trip was definitely human and it was really gross, but she just helped me deal with it and didn't make it all weird or anything. I'd learned by that point not to literally _bury_ any bodies because the police get all upset if you disturb a crime scene, so we just moved the head outside and closed the door so we couldn't smell it as much.

Murders are the things that seem to bother people the most, but there's actually all kinds of weird stuff that happens. I sometimes wonder if these things happen to other people too and they just don't talk about it because they're embarrassed or something. Like that time last Tuesday when I was biking home from school and I found this map marked with a buried treasure X, and I followed the map and found an old treehouse in the woods and two twenty-dollar bills and a rusty old iron dagger with a skull carved on the crosspiece. And then as I was heading home, this raggedy bearded guy runs out of the woods, holds a gun on me, and steals the bike and the iron dagger and rides off. So I walked home. I guess I didn't mind that much--it was a pink girlie bike anyway.

When I got home, my mom said, "How was your day, Vladimir?"

"Fine, Mom," I said. "I got an A on my calculus test, and I made forty bucks adventuring." I went to my room and that's where I found the message from the Mouse King.

"No! More. Spiders! -M.K." read the tiny gold letters on red velvet.

[That's as much as I've got so far. -Max]  

 --

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

The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat

Dr. Nehama Aschenasy, a Hebrew scholar, said that in Hebrew the word which is translated as beguiled in the Bible does not mean "tricked" or "deceived" as we commonly think. Rather, the Hebrew word is a rare verb that indicates an intense multilevel experience evoking great emotional, psychological, and/or spiritual trauma.

Ref: http://www.womeninthescriptures.com/2013/08/what-does-it-mean-that-eve-was-beguiled.html    

Aha! Apparently "beguile" is not an ideal translation. From now on when I read Eve's statement, I'm going to just think of it as "The serpent [complex verb]ed me, and I did eat." She's not making an excuse, she's just stating the facts.

-Max

--

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

Movie review: Disney Star Wars #3, Rise of Skywalker

I watched Rise of Skywalker and it was glorious! I have so much to say. It started off slow--I had fallen asleep twice by the time Rey blew up the transport, once for a few seconds and once for quite a bit longer. But then the movie really hit its stride, and every two minutes, like clockwork, it began showing me new ways to be logically, physically, narratively, dramatically, emotionally, or tactically ludicrous. It was glorious, like a movie script written and directed by a middle schooler who hasn't yet learned to "show, don't tell" (i.e. use acting instead of exposition) but that WASN'T THE END OF IT! There was another hour of glorious nonsense to go, and by the end of it I had changed my mind: this wasn't a movie script written by a middle schooler. It was halfway between a movie script written by a third grader, and the incoherent stream-of-consciousness insanity my subconscious spews at me when I'm asleep.

Storm troopers dressed like nuns? Old man Lando hitting on the female version of Finn? Luke and Leia looking like a married couple, no Han in sight? Faceless hordes of Sith death cults? Three COMPLETELY DIFFERENT evil master plan climaxes from Emperor Palpatine in the same scene, none of them so much as acknowledging the previous climax? Kylo Ren going completely mute for the last third of the movie for no apparent reason?

The weirdness is transcendent.

It. Was. Amazing.

This may be the worst movie I've ever seen. Yes, worse than Last Jedi, worse than Thor, *maybe* even worse than Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence. Maybe. I'm not sure. They both left me incredulous with laughter every few minutes, but I think Rise of Skywalker did it more frequently, and for more total minutes.

-Max

Linguistic oddity

Quoting from the play:

Sweeney Todd: [in anguish] Fifteen years sweating in a living hell on a trumped up charge! Fifteen years of dreaming that, perhaps, I might come home to a loving wife and child… [grimly] Let them quake in their boots – Judge Turpin and the Beadle, for their hour has come.

"Trumped-up" means "concocted with intent to deceive; deliberately done or created to make someone appear to be guilty of a crime." Future writers could be forgiven for mistaking it for a reference to the fact-free 2019 impeachment, but it's really much older, and yet still amazingly apt. Is that wild or what? I wouldn't be surprised if some people accidentally started capitalizing the saying, "Trumped-up charge." 

-Max

 
 --

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

Recognizing Revelation

Context: when Abraham was 75 years old, the Lord promised him that he would have a great posterity, and this promise was repeated several times over the years. "This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir." When he was 85 years old, he still had no children. It appears that Abraham and Sarah took it upon themselves to do everything they could to make the Lord's promise come true, via a surrogate mother:

"And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai... And Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram."

But it turned out the Lord had something else in mind. Four years later when Abraham was 90 years old, the Lord gave Abraham the name of his future son Isaac, and ten years after that when he was 100 years old Isaac was born.

Open question: when Abraham and Sarah made Ishmael happen, were they wrong to do so? Did it show lack of faith in the Lord's promises?

My opinion: maybe or maybe not--I don't know what the Spirit said previously to Abraham's heart or in what detail. I don't think the Lord was angry with Abraham for doing as much as he could, but I am also not prepared to say that the Spirit wouldn't have told Abraham in advance that the Lord really, truly, literally meant it when He promised Abraham and Sarah a posterity. Sometimes it's hard for people to believe in things that aren't going to happen until 25 years in the future, but the Lord knows the end from the beginning.

How can you distinguish your own hopes and feelings from the Lord's promises? Only by the spirit of revelation. Yes, I realize that's a somewhat circular answer. To put it differently, "recognizing revelation requires reflection, prayer and practice." It's like learning to use your sense of smell: you know when it's working because it works, but it can't be described fully in terms of words or things you can see.

Ask me in 25 or 100 or 6000 years how things turned out with the things that I am not completely 100% sure of right now.

~B.C.

--

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

Ninja

Today I scared a missionary so badly she actually fell over. I was at the church and everybody from Messiah practice had pretty much left, and Sister Baxter and Sister Peng walked out of the chapel and I looked up from my phone and said, "Hey there", and Sister Baxter fell over backwards.

I'm kind of proud of myself--I've never done that before. It made me feel like a ninja even though I'm sure I don't deserve it. :-)

-Max

 --

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

Type classes in F#!

[Excitement]
Not only do I now know what a functor is (from a category theory standpoint) and roughly how they relate to Haskell type classes, but I ALSO know how to emulate a functor in F# with SRTPs!!!! What does this mean in practice? It means that I can implement a new data structure with different performance characteristics, like a FastList<T> as well as a RegularList<T>, and yet I can just use one map function for both kinds of lists as well as any other list-like data structures I implement.

What this means in effect: I can now do overloading in F#!

My code is about to shrink significantly! And I will be able to add new data structures fairly freely. My code no longer grows in complexity if I add more data structures. (!!!!!!)

Here's the relevant commit: https://github.com/MaxWilson/ShiningSword/commit/1d4cdbac77983ed808f96489083ccc9ecae0377a

Notice how FastList is now a type, not a module, so I just declare FastList<T> instead of FastList.Data<T>, and instead of having to call FastList.Transform I can just call transform.

Limitations: you need to have enough control over the source code to add the appropriate static members for SRTP to operate against, which in some cases for e.g. built-in lists might require wrapping native types in my own types. And all the types involved need to have roughly the same type signature, so you have to follow certain design patters when adding your new types. But as long as you do that, everything just works.

Thanks to Bartosz Milewski and his book (Category Theory For Programmers) and also to Don Syme and his paper on the history of F#, or I would never have thought to attempt this or understood the results even if I succeeded.

-Max
 --

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

How to make 5E more challenging

[Written as a response to a post asking for ways to keep the challenge level high in a D&D 5E game. -M.]

Aside from the obvious things like beefing up encounter difficulty (more monsters, higher CR) and adding more complex battlefields (more vertical movement like platforms, cliffs, pits, dangling ropes, and vertical tunnels), try adding more uncertainty to the game.

Risk = don't know the outcome but do know the approximate odds
Uncertainty = hidden information, don't even know how much risk there is

It's the difference between opening a door and seeing a Death Knight and three Wraiths, and not knowing if you'll win initiative as you Rage and charge into combat, vs. opening the door and seeing three Githyanki and not being completely sure whether, if you charge into combat, it might actually turn out to be three Wraiths who've been disguised under a Seeming spell by the lich who runs this section of the dungeon, or whether that lich or a Death Knight might be somewhere within earshot waiting to hit the party squishies from behind as soon as the party tanks have charged the wraiths and the party has committed their concentration to other spells.

Even if 60-80% of the time things turn out to be exactly what they look like (yup, they're Githyanki! and there's only three of them), the knowledge that it's possible that things are not as they seem can add fun dramatic tension, especially if there are clues that can let you correctly guess what is real and what isn't.

Also, make good use of secret doors, maps, riddles, magic items, and other affordances that can let players make things easier on themselves if they take advantage of them.

You may set up a dungeon level with a Star Spawn Larval Mage, a Star Spawn Seer, three Star Spawn Hulks, five Star Spawn Manglers, and a whole ton of gibbering Star Spawn Grues (60 or so)... tough fight for an 11th level party if they tackle it head-on, right? But then you scatter the Star Spawns around (weird cultic rituals for the Seer in the main hall, Manglers on patrol looking for intruders, Mage torturing prisoners, Hulks bodyguarding the Mage and Seer, and Grues everywhere, everywhere!) so that it takes at least a couple rounds for reinforcements to arrive once they see the PCs, and you make everyone but the Grues patient and smart enough to break contact and wait for reinforcements (especially Manglers, who are good at hiding) and/or to try to surround PCs, and all those extra restrictions on the Star Spawn make surviving a fight with them tough but maybe doable, like the space Marines in Aliens attacking the Alien hive and barely surviving thanks to Ripley and the APC.

Then you also add six or eight 4'-wide (Small-sized) tunnel shafts connecting this dungeon level to the Duergar dungeon level above and the aquatic shark- and Black Pudding-infested waters below, add a Clay Golem or Shield Guardian trapped in stone in a cavern reachable through one of those tunnels, place a riddle containing a command word for the Clay Golem/Shield Guardian somewhere nearby, and put a map for the tunnels in the Duergar's treasure vault where the PCs can purchase it from the Duergar or loot it after killing all the Duergar, and suddenly it starts looking not only doable but gameable and fun.

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

I finally understand Beetlejuice!

I have always enjoyed Beetlejuice but there's a lot of things about the movie that I never got, things which seemed random, including for example the ending, which always seemed kind of abrupt and random to me (why the big deal about the song?). Until...

...until I watched The Exorcist. Well, okay, until I bought The Exorcist and skimmed through it looking for interesting or scary parts, mostly the very beginning and stuff towards the end. (I was testing a mental technique to use against fear, long story.) I feel like I at least got the sense of the show, and I think Beetlejuice can best be viewed as an answer to The Exorcist and its whole genre.

For example, "Beetlejuice" is kind of a weird title for a movie that isn't really about Beetlejuice, right? It's mostly about Adam and Barbara Maitland and their afterlife, including their interactions with the living family the Deetzes. Beetlejuice himself isn't even really in much of the movie, he's onscreen maybe 15% of the time. I think "Beetlejuice" is a linguistic stand-in which is supposed to remind us of "Beelzebub," a name for evil/the devil, and the theme of the movie is basically:

"What if the supernatural isn't inherently scary after all? What if evil spirits are definitely evil, but in a pervy, used-car salesman kind of way? What if possession isn't scary per se? Being made to dance a musical number might be kind of fun, especially if you can't normally sing or dance! What if there's nothing magic or scary about death and what lies beyond it?"

The character arc of the movie is for the characters (especially Adam, Barbara, and Lydia) to realize this, accept it, and resume living their lives without worrying too much about death.

I think there are other tie-ins to Exorcist-like themes as well, such as the random wedding-proposal from Beetlejuice to Lydia, which in a movie like the Exorcist would be painted as a horrifying act by Beelzebub which co-opts an innocent girl as the Devil's Bride forever, and mortals are helpless to resist, mwahahaha, but in Beetlejuice it's a clownish affair which the characters successfully fight off by playing by the rules and eventually by ramming Beetlejuice with a toy car and then a sand worm. Beetlejuice/the Devil has more powers than the Maitlands have, but ultimately he's just one pervy creep and he can be vanquished.

Also, Juno's line about Beetlejuice being her ex-assistant who's now been fired makes more sense in this context: Juno is a thematic stand-in for God, and Beetlejuice getting fired = Lucifer's fall from heaven.

Anyway, no wonder the ending always seemed abrupt and random to me, and no wonder I always enjoyed the movie anyway! I already bought into that premise from the very beginning. It was preaching to the choir all along, in my case. But now I understand the Exorcist-like viewpoint it was trying to disprove.

-Max

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

Reality and Myth (D&D setting trope)

Observation: the biggest reason why non-spellcasters like Barbarians suffer at high levels is because WotC builds mechanical synergies into the game, and many, many of these synergies are spells, so if you invest 20 levels in Barbarian you are giving up lots of potential spells, including high-level spells like True Polymorph.

Design goal: without removing any of a spellcaster's mechanical power, provide a roleplaying or setting reason why you'd even ever want to be a Barbarian or a non-spellcasting Rogue or whatever.

Solution: Break the campaign setting into Real and Not-Real areas. In Real areas, everything works pretty much in real life. The inside of a building is always smaller than the outside, your reflection is just a reflection and can never reach out and strangle you, black cats crossing your path don't really bring you bad luck, and faerie/vampire folklore is just superstition. None of that stuff is real. This is where PCs' home bases will tend to be, as well as civilization, shopkeepers, and a limited amount of political intrigue--but no dungeons and not very much treasure. Magical monsters cannot come to Real places or they cease to exist.

In Not-Real areas, also called Fable or Myth, all bets are off. Not only do magical creatures appear, and unlikely coincidences like stumbling across an ancient crypt stuffed to the brim with both undead monstrosities and treasure that somehow hasn't already been looted by someone else, but the DM will make your life interesting in other ways as well. Karma can come back to bite you, the inside of a dragon's cave can be far, far larger than its outside, genies can grant wishes, and faerie-tale logic applies.

Here's the catch: using magic breaks reality and transforms Real places into Not-real places, so magic-use is heavily stigmatized. It's not that you can't cast Zone of Truth in a fully-populated city, it's just that doing so turns the city basically uninhabitable by people who aren't prepared to get eaten by Unreal monsters. It's like contaminating the city with nuclear waste. Accordingly, spellcasters (who are always marked by a campaign-specific universally-recognizable physical characteristic, e.g. a brilliant-white lock of hair, and are referred to as Mythmakers) are stigmatized and generally unwelcome in society even if they aren't actually planning on creating any Unreality at the moment. They are dangerous.

There are also outlying Fringe areas, settlements which are mostly Not-Real but where the dwelling places (insides of homes) are Real, so people are safe from monsters in their beds at night but may occasionally have to send for help from adventurers (highly-expert people who are often Mythmakers) to deal with the Mythical problems threatening their livelihood.

Result: if you want more freedom to get involved in politics or society in Real places, pull non-magical heists, have a real job as an important person's bodyguard protecting him from assassins, etc., play a non-Mythmaker character like a Barbarian or a Samurai or a Rogue, or a Ranger who has never cast a spell (and so isn't marked as a Mythmaker yet), and hang out in Reality. If you want to do dungeon crawls and kill monsters, play a Mythmaker and hang out in Fable where everything is Not-Real. Or play a Chaotic Evil Mythmaker who uses illusions and stuff to disguise his nature and just doesn't care about the collateral damage to reality he's causing with his spells. It's all part of the same setting but everyone has a niche. 
 

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

D&D: On the Feeling of Agency

[This was written in response to a Reddit post which claimed the following:

Some examples of what is versus what isn't player agency:

What is good player agency:

Rogue: "I check the chest for traps."

DM: Okay, how are you inspecting it?

Rogue: "I'm gently running my dagger along it, feeling for anything out of the ordinary."

DM: Okay, roll an Investigation check.

Rogue: "20."

DM: "Yeah, you find the poison gas trap hidden on the chest."

Rogue: "Okay, I want to disarm the trap."

DM: Roll a Thieves' Tools check.

Rogue: "15."

DM: "You were unable to disarm the trap."

Rogue: "Okay, but I still want to open the chest."

DM: "You want to open the chest, knowing full well there's a trap?"

Rogue: "Yes."

DM: "Okay, roll a CON saving throw."

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What is not good player agency:

Rogue: "I want to check the chest for traps."

DM: "As you approach the chest, it shoots out deadly poisonous gas and you breathe it in and immediately fall to the ground, gasping for air as you take your final breath and pass into the afterlife."

Rogue: "What the [deleted]"

Notice how for the second example, the Rogue didn't get to control their character at all. The DM didn't ask how they were doing what they were doing, the Rogue didn't get to make a single skill check or play the game. They were simply a character in the DM's story that they wanted dead. No saves, no checks, no damage rolled. Simply dead.  

My response below. -Max] 

While the example isn't terrible, I think the OP does not fully articulate why the interaction is unsatisfying. Here's a definition:

Player Agency (n.): "the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the [virtual] world whose effects relate to the player's intention" -Mateas, 2001

"Agency is an experiential pleasure. As such, it can fade in and out; it can fail altogether. Agency is not automatic, and so simulated environments should be cleverly constructed to help users/players get there." - Steven Dow (2009)

The reason the instant-kill example is so unsatisfying is not because the player doesn't get to roll enough dice, it's because based on the information given, the outcome feels arbitrary and the player feels helpless, as if his decisions didn't matter.

How could you transform example #2 so players gain the feeling of agency? Different methods lead to different feels for your campaign. The OP suggests a skill-centric approach where the DM is careful to make the player's investments in Investigation and Thieves Tool skills matter, as well as investments in feats like Resilient (Con) and Tough. The damage would presumably be carefully-calibrated to not actually kill a high-Con Barbarian (e.g. 5d8 damage, not 20d20), because the OP is clearly trying to highlight a game where resources and build choices matter, so survival-via-sufficient-HP instead of survival-via-Thieves-Tool-Expertise will be a viable strategy.

Another way to build a high-agency campaign is by giving the players lots of information: hints and foreshadowing. Imagine that the players have encountered many corpses of other adventurers who died clutching their throats in front of chests, and maybe solved a riddle or two hinting at how in this place, breath is death, and that only the Necklace of Amun-Ra (which is a Necklace of Adaptation that prevents you from having to breathe) can save you. If the players choose not to enter the Tomb of Amun-Ra to retrieve the necklace but instead try to immediately open up the treasure chest they find outside the Tomb... then when someone dies to the poison gas, that will not feel arbitrary and the player should not feel helpless, even if the poison damage was great enough to kill a medium-sizeed dragon (20d20, DC 22, save for half). The death was clearly a result of the players' decision to be impatient, and the results of being impatient were plausible: increased danger. In a campaign like this one, build choices matter less, and an impatient or foolish player's PC will probably die relatively soon even if he has 18s in every stat, whereas a savvy player's PC might make it all the way to 20th level even with no initial stat higher than 14.

It's important to note that in order for the prior scenario to feel high-agency, the DM has to react appropriately when the PCs go off-script and do something creative. If instead of trying to pick the lock, the PCs try to cut a hole in the chest with an axe, does the DM say "No, you can't" to force them back to the original dilemma? Or does something logical happen: either the trap goes off anyway, or they accidentally ruin some of the treasure inside the chest? Their ability to go off-script (with appropriate consequences) will influence feelings of player agency, even when they choose to stay on-script.

Yet another way to provide agency would be to make moral choices matter: do you risk opening the chest yourself, or do you animate a zombie and make the zombie do it for you? Or make a prisoner of war do it? When you need information that could greatly decrease the risk of danger to you in your treasure-hunting, how far are you willing to go to get it?

Agency is an experiential pleasure, and a given DM has to think carefully about the ways in which he is prepared to offer agency to those players.

More here:

http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2013/10/on-theory-defined-player-agency.html

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