Arcanist Lupus

A frequent remark in Eat God's latest round of playtesting has been that the aggressively random nature of playsets can put the GM on the spot to figure out what's happening at a randomly drawn location when the God-eaters arrive or how two randomly drawn NPCs relate to one another. Our solution, of course, is more Big Stupid Tables.

The table on the left, Location Events, is intended to be used in a roll-twice-and-combine fashion to keep players on their toes; each entry is designed to be broadly compatible with being paired with every other entry, though some pairings may take a bit of thinking to reconcile. The tablet on the right, NPC Connections, is aimed more at one-and-done rolls, both because there may be several pairs of NPCs who need fleshing out and because many of the most fun possibilities tend to be mutually exclusive of one another. In both cases, the final rules text will encourage player participation to help the GM brainstorm what the results mean if there's any doubt.

(As you've no double noticed, we still have about 20/72 slots left to fill if there's anything you'd especially love to see that 's not already on there!)

Plaintext under the cut, as it wouldn't fit in the image's ALT text:

Everybody urgently wishes to leave the location

Fortunately, death saving throws are a lot simpler than the general case of "X of outcome 1 before Y of outcome 2" because (probability of outcome 1 + probability of outcome 2) equals 1; the presence of a "neither" case can throw a monkey into the wrench.

Since there's no "neither" outcome, the number of rolls you can possibly make is bounded; "three successes before three failures", for example, will never exceed five rolls, because after the fifth roll you're guaranteed to have at least three of one outcome or the other. That makes it possible to enumerate every possible sequence of outcomes:

SSS SSFS SFSS FSSS SSFFS SFSFS FSSFS SFFSS FSFSS FFSSS FFSSF FSFSF SFFSF FSSFF SFSFF SSFFF FFSF FSFF SFFF FFF

Let's assume that our S (success) result is rolling a 4 on 1d4, and our F (failure) result is rolling anything else. We can then work out the odds of each case, like so:

SSS = 1/64 = 16/1024 SSFS = 3/256 = 12/1024 SFSS = 3/256 = 12/1024 FSSS = 3/256 = 12/1024 SSFFS = 9/1024 SFSFS = 9/1024 FSSFS = 9/1024 SFFSS = 9/1024 FSFSS = 9/1024 FFSSS = 9/1024 FFSSF = 27/1024 FSFSF = 27/1024 SFFSF = 27/1024 FSSFF = 27/1024 SFSFF = 27/1024 SSFFF = 27/1024 FFSF = 27/256 = 108/1024 FSFF = 27/256 = 108/1024 SFFF = 27/256 = 108/1024 FFF = 27/64 = 432/1024

Adding up our target outcomes, we get 106/1024 odds of three successes before three failures, and 918/1024 odds of three failures before three successes. (If these don't add up to 1, you know you missed a case somewhere.)

Once we've got the symmetrical case (i.e., X successes before X failures), we can deal with asymmetrical cases simply by changing up which rows in the probability tree we've already constructed count as which outcome – we needn't start from scratch. For example, the odds of two successes before three failures moves all the 27/1024 rows in the above table into the "overall success" bucket, and we arrive at 268/1024 odds. Similarly, "three successes before two failures" would flip the 9/1024 rows over to the "overall failure" bucket.

P(k failures before r successes) is given by

where p is the probability of success on a single roll, and the first factor is the binomial coefficient.

(Wikipedia says the negative binomial distribution is the same as the Pascal distribution, but when I took stats a thousand years ago, the Pascal distribution was the special case where r=1.)

Assuming we're talking about two identical dice (i.e., so no goofy tricks like comparing the values of two different-coloured dice, d88 lookup tables, etc.), if I needed that exact distribution, my inclination would be not to overthink it; take the sum of the dice, with result A (1/64) on 2, result B (31/64) on 3–8, result C (31/64) on 10-15, and result D (1/64) on 16. On a sum of exactly 9, use some sort of 50/50 tie-breaker (e.g., a coin flip) to decide between B and C.

Assuming we're talking about two identical dice (i.e., so no goofy tricks like comparing the values of two different-coloured dice, d88 lookup tables, etc.), if I needed that exact distribution, my inclination would be not to overthink it; take the sum of the dice, with result A (1/64) on 2, result B (31/64) on 3–8, result C (31/64) on 10-15, and result D (1/64) on 16. On a sum of exactly 9, use some sort of 50/50 tie-breaker (e.g., a coin flip) to decide between B and C.

Boo fucking hoo

say it’s because it makes the

other kids feel bad

As a trans woman, I really, really, don't appreciate people acting like they know what it was like for me growing up. Like yeah, I realize that your childhood was like that and I'm sorry that you were treated that way. But don't act like that's how it is for everyone.

I was very much seen as one of the guys growing up. I went to "boys nights" with the guys, which typically consisted of very masculine activities, I had gay cis dudes hit on me, I never once was seen as anything other than a dude.

Guys never once mistreated me, or saw me as anything other than a man. Even through University, I was seen as a man to the point where my University friends were shocked when I came out to them as a trans woman.

I was even treated as "one of the safe ones" all through high school by the girls I hung out with. I had an all female friend group that I hung out with and gossiped with, and was allowed to hang out with them in and out of school, because friendship with me never came with the possibility that I was gonna make things weird and try to fuck them. I showed no interest in dating them and treated them like any other person.

They literally called me a "Girl's guy".

And then there's my husband, who hated being a girl, hated femininity, was bullied by girls growing up, never had any friends aside from a few guys in high school, and was never accepted as a girl by girls.

There is not one true way to be Trans any more than there is one true way to be a man, a woman, or non-binary.

"NO, Imi. You aren't a girl."

Sweetheart, back then I thought i was.

"NO"

Which is to say, gender can't be flattened without losing something. It's a social construct. It's a set of traits linked to secondary sex characteristics. It's a spectrum. It's a Potato Head of expression and performance and identity. It's all of those things and none of them and I'm going to shake it shake it shake it shake it until all the weird stereotypes fall out and then I'm going to EAT IT with GLITTER and KETCHUP.

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.

The rules of Dungeons & Dragons are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (Again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)

In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.

(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)

The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.

The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.

A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.

Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)

Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.

Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?

So get to work!

i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.

To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).

The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.

The first tabletop RPG I remember creating that I can confidently put date to* is a little untitled Dungeons & Dragons ripoff I bashed together when I was six years old, or thereabouts. I recall very little about its mechanics, but the playable races included cat people, Mega Man style robots, and really buff genderless aliens who, for reasons I cannot rightly account for, were specifically described as bright orange.

It also involved a bunch of print-and-play cards for items and abilities that I typeset with ASCII borders and ran off on tractor-feed cardstock with my parents' dot-matrix printer; I filled in the illustration boxes by hand using coloured pencils, then dulled my mother's sewing scissors cutting them all out because I wasn't allowed to use a razor. (She was very understanding.) The way I'm bent for RPGs with lots of goofy tactile props appears to be innate.

(Both the original digital files and any printouts vanished decades ago. I sometimes wish I still had a copy, but some things are better to let live in memory – I doubt it was even playable by anyone other than me!)

Boatswain. Well, Dick, we wouldn't go for to hurt any fellow-creature's feelings, but you can't expect a chap with such a name as Dick Deadeye to be a popular character — now can you?

Dick. No.

Boatswain. It's asking too much, ain't it?

Dick. It is. From such a face and form as mine the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination. It is human nature — I am resigned.

[one song later]

Boatswain. Ah, my poor lad, you've climbed too high: our worthy captain's child won't have nothin' to say to a poor chap like you. Will she, lads?

All. No, no.

Dick. No, no, captains' daughters don't marry foremast hands. All. (recoiling from him) Shame! shame!

Boatswain. Dick Deadeye, them sentiments o' yourn are a disgrace to our common natur'.

Ralph. But it's a strange anomaly, that the daughter of a man who hails from the quarter-deck may not love another who lays out on the fore-yard arm. For a man is but a man, whether he hoists his flag at the main-truck or his slacks on the main-deck.

Dick. Ah, it's a queer world!

Does transitioning give her the ability to air-dash?