Saturday, February 10, 2024

D&D is Not the Forgotten Realms


I recently watched the D&D movie, despite having sworn never to see it.  And it's actually a pretty decent movie.  It's got some good laughs and an interesting story.  It entertained me, and so fulfilled its only purpose.

from the original 1980s D&D cartoon
If you knew nothing about D&D, you might still know it's a game that nerds play on a table with pens, paper, dice, tiny statues, and tons and tons of rulebooks.  So you might wonder how a game with pens, paper, dice, statues, and rulebooks could be turned into a movie.  And if you think about it, you might come up with a few obvious ways to do this.

The most obvious is a fantasy-themed Jumanji.  Some kids start playing D&D and get sucked into their own game world and have to battle skeletons and dragons with swords and spells.  There was an early 1980s Saturday morning cartoon based on that premise.  But that isn't what the movie is about.

Another might be something like a dice-rolling Scott Pilgrim, where the characters are governed by the rules of the game world.  They roll dice when they attempt feats, either literally rolling one or the screen displaying a die above each character's head.  When they swing a sword, damage and HP meters show up, then experience points tick up.  There are several popular web comics built on this premise.  But that also isn't what the movie is about.

It's obvious how to make a movie about a videogame like Halo, which has a single-player mode that is effectively an interactive story.  Just make a movie about that story.  But D&D doesn't have a single-player mode.  By default and design, the story is controlled by the players and created as they play.  There is no single story known by all the fans, but thousands of stories only known at individual tables.  So what story can you make a movie about, that will make this distinguishable from a generic fantasy film?  (Remember: you didn't pay that money for the licensing rights to make a generic fantasy)

Closely associated with D&D (both the hobby and brand) is a fictional world called The Forgotten Realms.  This was a campaign setting created by a man named Ed Greenwood and originally published serially as in-world excerpts from the writings of a wizard named Elminster published in Dragon magazine.  This campaign setting became popular, in large part because it was very developed and offered for free.  Any DM could use details from the Forgotten Realms to fill in details of his own world.  Also in large part, the setting expanded on the details of the rules, making cosmic sense of things like the nine-point alignment system or cleric's raise dead spells.

At a certain point, Ed Greenwood sold the rights for Forgotten Realms to TSR for $5000, plus the promise that the rights return to him if they ever stop publishing works set in the world.  It was in effect the dad helping his son pack off for college.  The world he invented had grown, and he wanted to see his world became as great as it could be.  You can hear more of the story at this interview of Ed Greenwood by D&D historian Ben Riggs.

Ever since the rights transferred to TSR, Forgotten Realms became the default campaign setting of D&D.  The other original IP pertaining to D&D was mixed and merged into Forgotten Realms.  The rules will assume Forgotten Realms, and mention people, places, or objects of the Forgotten Realms as examples.  The explanations of cleric abilities in the rulebooks will refer to deities from the Forgotten Realms.  It is always assumed you are playing in the Forgotten Realms, unless you explicitly state otherwise.

The Forgotten Realms gave more than a default setting, it gave cultural touch points for players across groups to talk about.  And for TSR to merchandize.  The Hand of Vecna.  Dri'izt.  Neverwinter.  The Underdark.  Beholders.

This is essentially what the movie is "about."  It's a generic fantasy story, the kind that might have been someone's actual campaign idea, but it is set within the world of Forgotten Realms and mixes in D&D IP.  It is distinguished from a generic fantasy story because the movie gets to call the city Neverwinter, the paladins Harpers, the dragon Themberchaud, the brain monsters Intellect Devourers, and the creepy necromancers Red Wizards of Thay.  Those are all words meaning nothing to a normie, but at once recognizable to someone who has been playing for a while.

Ed Greenwood wanted to see his world grow, and he got to see it rendered in a billion-dollar movie.

What Ed Greenwood did is fantastic.  He thought out a world for his game, he reasoned through things like how the world would influence his game rules, he fleshed out details of a hundred interesting locations for adventures, and gave it all away for the hobby to enjoy.

I love what he did.  That said... I don't really like the Forgotten Realms.  No disrespect to him or his campaign intended.

I got into D&D from oldschool books my dad had purchased in the early 80s, which all predate the purchase of Forgotten Realms.  The implied settings in the early books are Blackmoor and Greyhawk (originally regions on a fantasy wargame map), or else literally the worlds of stories, such as Hyperborea, Lankhmar, Pelucidar, or just King Arthur's Britain.  The worlds I envisioned for the game were always so much less concrete, and less civilized, than the Forgotten Realms.  The notion of every town having a wizard, every cleric capable of miraculous healing, elves living next to hobbits and dwarves in the same village, and a friendly magic weapon store at every corner, just doesn't appeal to me.

Much of that may be from the later commodification of the world for profit, in particular churning out novelizations set in the world.

So when I've read sections of the rules talking about "the planes" and "the gods" and "artifacts of the world", I've always understood (correctly) that those are simply suggestions to help the DM save time.  Those aren't part of the game, unless the DM uses them.  You are free to use Forgotten Realms, but never required to.

But a lot of people don't get that.  The deliberate ambiguity from TSR and later Wizards of the Coast to mingle the setting and the rules doesn't help.  Also the RAW-literalism of people in my generation doesn't help.  To many the hobby, the game, and Ed Greenwood's homebrew setting are all equivalent.

The D&D movie would be better called a Forgotten Realms movie, because that's really what it is.  Arguably the main reason it isn't called that is marketability.  The Forgotten Realms has been so thoroughly merged into the rules by this point, many major fans of the Forgotten Realms wouldn't even know the game world is called that.

I remember a time, when popular D&D channels on youtube would talk about how to plan worlds, build your own pantheon, draw out areas.  But as time went on, things became more narrow.  Today, the popular D&D channels are largely dedicated to explaining the world that exists in the rule book.  I remember seeing one channel with videos named, for instance, "The most powerful god in D&D."  

The most powerful god in D&D is the one your DM says is the most powerful.  Period.

I would personally like if everyone went back to regarding the Forgotten Realms as one available, highly-developed possible game setting, with the default setting of the game becoming a 100mi by 100mi section of largely uninhabited countryside with a few garrisons and a small town to the lower right corner.  In this new default setting, no one knows what magic is, or which gods are real, what the planes are, what happens when you die, how magic works... most people don't even believe that elves exist.  The details of all of this should be filled in by the players (mainly the DM), and if the DM wants to fill them in with content from Forgotten Realms then that is his God-given right as the DM.

The original DMG was essentially a how-to book for designing a world from scratch, with tons of random tables to roll on to help you populate the world with new and interesting encounters.  In these old books, there was no world if you didn't make the world first.

That's what I'd like to see make a return.

Unfortunately, you can't make that into merchandise.  Or into a movie.  And you can't easily code it into a virtual tabletop. So it won't be the direction of the game.  At least not until WOTC tanks it and has to sell off the rights to someone else. 

Sunday, October 29, 2023

Lagfoot Browne

[I originally wrote this as a teenager, as a creative writing assignment in the style of Edgar Allen Poe.  I came across the image below in the thumbnail, which was part of the original inspiration, and decided to post it in time for Halloween.  My teenage self loved purple prose.  I pared the language down to make it legible, while trying to remain true to the original assignment.  Except the phrasing, this is as I wrote it twenty years ago.]
*****

Even from my youth, I had always been plagued by migraines.  The pain built behind my eyes, incapacitating me for hours.  Often it became so unbearable I would vomit.  Light or sound were excruciating.  I had found it best to lock myself alone in my chambers, enclosed in darkness, until the fits subsided.  

Within those dark times, I would often find myself confronted by frightful and fevered visions.  No matter my shouting, the befuddled nurses who attended me always failed to perceive these visions.  The visions varied often, and all so real I aver I could have reached out my hand to touch them, but the vision which most impressed upon me the reality of its presence, is also the one which most often recurred.  I came to know this vision most, and feared its reappearance, however inevitable.  It was, as far as my pain-anguished eyes let me see, a small imp, its skin a blotted red and brown, with eyes that held the very chaos of Hell inside.  It would dance through my bedchamber and with horrid claws shred my books, humming all the while.  The tune was unfamiliar, and yet a constant, and over the years I learnt it well.  

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Positions I Don't Hold: Flat Earth Theory


Part of a series of posts of ideological turing tests.

I had originally intended this post to be first in the series, as an illustration.  Then suddenly the existence of alien life was in the news, so I went with that one.  But I already had this written, so figured I'd post it.

Ideological Turing Test

It is plainly obvious from immediate observation that the world is flat.  This is the position we all start with, and have to be brainwashed out of.  But I need to be clear about exactly what a "flat Earth" means.

Firstly, "flat" doesn't mean smooth like glass -- there are mountains, hills, valleys, etc.  That's quite apparent.  Flat here is more describing the earth's topology, that the Earth does not wrap back around itself.  A flat sheet of paper, and one that has been crinkled or crumpled up, are topologically identical.

Many people think that by a flat Earth we mean that the world is shaped like the Mercator projection map your school teacher used to put up.  Then it's easy to make the argument, flight times from Main to France are much much shorter than flight times from Panama to Senegal.  Whether you measure it in time, in distance, or in fuel expended, it's always more from Panama to Senegal, than Maine to France.  

Obviously this wouldn't make sense if the Earth were shaped like the Mercator projection.  But that doesn't mean the Earth isn't flat.  It just means the Earth isn't shaped like the Mercator projection.

Saturday, September 9, 2023

The necessity of teaching better programming practice to physics PhDs

I am a numerical physicist.  I graduated a little over a year ago, and have since gone through the process of applying and interviewing for jobs.  This topic -- what can I do after I graduate -- has been a concern for me for well over a decade, and I've put a lot of thought into how to make sure I get the most out of my time as a graduate student.

I was fortunate, in that my advisor also had a lot of this in mind and had me use many standard best practices, such as git and building from makefiles, testing code output, and allowed me to work in C++ instead of Fortran.  But not all grad students are this fortunate.

I decided to write out some of my thoughts.  As written, this is directed at advisors, but is obviously applicable to grad students in planning how to do their research.  If you are a student, consider the advice here, and bring it up with your advisor.

Why we must change focus

To put it bluntly, Professor of Physics is no longer a job.

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Shaggydog Theory, part II: George RR Martin really does not want to write A Song of Ice and Fire

Recently I was at the grocery store.  I live in the southeast, and this was some small local grocery store chain that only exists in my state, and largely only has locations in rural areas.  I was buying something late at night, don't remember which, when I ran across this Bargain Bin for books.  They were up to 80% off!

Of course, this isn't much excitement, as grocery stores pretty much exclusively sell crappy books no one would want to read.  The kind of book often reviled as an airplane novel.  The kind of book that still had some sort of purpose in the era before they wired up wifi into the last remaining place on earth where humans couldn't stare at their phones all day, but that now serves basically no purpose.

And this is what I saw inside the bin:

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Positions I Don't Hold: Islam

Part of a series of posts of ideological turing tests.  With the exception of some proper names, I'm going to only use English words.  I know this gives some things away.

Ideological Turing Test: 

The theology of Islam is simple enough for children to understand, but profound enough to be debated by scholars for centuries.  Mankind has simple spiritual needs, and God meets those needs with Islam.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Positions I Don't Hold: Atheism

Part of a series of posts of ideological turing tests.

Ideological Turing Test:

I don't know that no god exists, but I'm certain that the god theists pray to doesn't exist.  It's possible that there might be a "god" in some sense of the word, but not the sort of personal, relatable god who hears and responds to prayer or takes interest in the lives of humans that theists believe in.