Stress Fugue

At the risk of turning this into the social-justice roleplaying blog (it has previously been the religious speculation RPG blog) I am going to discuss some current events.

I promise I will tie the topic to roleplaying , and not just tack it on at the end like I do sometimes.

The Incident
Unless you use the internet solely for porn (and viewing this blog, apparently?) You have probably become aware of the media-circus concerning police brutality and abuse in America. The whole issue has been spun into a racial issue. And the racial dimension has obscured the whole debate in my opinion.

A recent case in this ongoing debacle has occurred rather close to home, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa is a major city in Oklahoma- this means that most Americans have never heard of it, but it has all the sordid urban issues you could hope to find in a city.

On April 2nd, Tulsa sheriffs attempted to arrest Eric Harris for illegally possessing and selling a firearm.
It is legal for private citizens to sell firearms without the buyer submitting to a background check. This is called the "gunshow loophole." Except Eric Harris was a felon, previously convicted of battery of an officer. The specifics of his criminal history are hard to find.

Eric Harris has been referred to as an African American. But frankly, he looks pretty Caucasian to me. Race is a nebulous concept and this is perhaps an example of people interpreting nebulous concepts as suits their agenda.

Eric Harris fled officers and was accidentally shot by Robert Bates, a 73 year old reserve deputy.

uh, need some cheese for that cracker?

 

Robert Bates had made significant donations of weaponry and forensic cameras to the police department, and had definitely lubricated the system by this means. It could be debated that this created a conflict of interest. Bates has been accused of being a pay-to-play cop. His age also invites debate as to whether or not a septuagenarian should be doing anything in law enforcement other than answering phones and making copies.

Body-camera footage of the incident has been released.
Eric Harris was already on the ground, being grappled.
Robert Bates can be heard shouting "taser! taser!" and what follows is a gunshot. Bates can be hear apologizing.
The wound was fatal. Eric Harris is heard clearly saying that he cannot breath. to which a younger officer responds;

"Fuck your breath."

 

The coarse language is telling. It demonstrates a burning contempt, when we should be hearing a more concerned tone. A guy who shouldn't have been shot got shot. In a nominally free society with due process, such callous disregard is damning for a law-enforcement officer. 

 

Then Harris died.

 

Death is not a just reward for disobedience. There is no moral equivalency between the two. If you disagree, well:  May you reap what you sow, you fascist pig.

 

Robert Bates later turned himself in for manslaughter, demonstrating a moral courage which does much to exonerate him in my opinion. 

 

The Problem

What most fascinates me about this scenario are not the issues of social justice, however.

 

What fascinates me is the process by which a CLEET-certified officer can draw, aim and fire a weapon without realizing that it is the wrong damn weapon.

 

Consider all the actions involved in this process:

One would have to move their hand to the wrong weapon, feel the grip as it is grasped, draw the weapon, feel its weight in the hand, aim it - which would presumably involve looking at the weapon, and pull the trigger.

 

Incidentally, the loaded Glock 22c -the standard issue duty weapon in Tulsa weighs over 33 ounces when loaded. A taser weighs about 18 oz and typically has a different style of grip.



 

A different grip, unless we are dealing like something like this. The people who purvey such weapons are exacerbating the situation. This bad idea still weighs the standard 18 oz. however.

 

The practical solution is for LEOs to stop wearing their taser right next to their gun.

 

Anyways, that is a lot of steps necessary ti accidentally fire a weapon. It should be impossible. I have even written elsewhere that it is impossible.

Except it isn't impossible.

It is documented. Officers mistake their firearm for their taser with some frequency. Sometimes they even do so unintentionally.

 

LEOs and combat veterans are quick to point out that this does happen. They mean it as justification, to exculpate themselves from plain, old murder. Fine. That it does.

Except there is a frightening implication here.

By admitting the possibility of weapon switching, they are indirectly admitting that they do not have control their weaponry, but rather that the weaponry can sometimes control them.

 

And that takes us to the heart of the matter:

 

Here we see human nature at work. (Marxists claim there is no such thing as human nature; only conditioning. The Marxists frequently prove to be slaves of their ideology, almost as much as the capitalists.)

 

The relevant feature of human nature we see here is that we are imperfect calculators, especially under stress.

 

In times of crisis, humans tend to forget their training. We mistake our perceptions, or just stand there. Maybe muscle memory from training will kick in. But how good was the training?

 

It doesn't take much experience in combat to realize this, just a little fencing or play-fighting will teach this lesson in a rather gentle manner.

Or just think back to your last minor medical emergency involving yourself or a loved one.

 

Alexis-senpai discusses this in terms of D&D here, where he quotes Siegfried Sassoon to give his readers an idea of just how mad actual combat is.

This is especially true modern combat where things are exploding loudly, almost all threats come from a range, and the things that kill you come in faster than the eye can see.

 

Now imagine yourself in the position or our poor septuagenarian deputy, Robert Bates. Go find the video. It's bad enough just to watch the thing. I imagine that Bates probably hadn't had his heart pumping so fast for maybe a decade. And imagine his desire to be useful. I expect he was fumbling around, not knowing which way to turn, but he got the notion to do something, and Bam.

His training kicked in. I listed the many small actions involved in drawing and firing a weapon. But in most any training regimen, they are all combined into one action.

 

I said above that officers (or rather, people in general) are controlled to an extent by their weaponry. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail and such. But what if it is not the weaponry which controls the person, but also the training to some extent?  I say this is what befell Deputy Bates.

 

Back to game:

In the Unreason post, Mr. Smolensk wrote:

 

     "What DM proposes that players, set to enter combat, will forget that they even have a weapon?  Or that they may, stunned and confused, wander throughout the melee, axe dropped heedlessly upon the ground, until they are cut down or they find themselves hours later, lost, having forgotten where they are?"

 

He makes a good point. Doing something like say; having players to morale checks for their characters might seem to be an awful loss of agency for the player. It might seem to remove the element of choice and the element of Heroic fantasy?

 

But what if that is exactly the way to go about it?

 

Is it asking so much to expect Players to remove themselves just a little bit from their character?

This would only require that the player not view the character as an avatar for personal fulfillment (Really, get a life.) But rather, view themselves as something like the detached daemon of a human factor in an hypothetical scenario.

 

Baldar the low-level Adventurer might choose to into combat, but would he have the conviction or fortitude to follow through with his decision? I see demanding a check for this as no less reasonable than any other Will-save or wisdom check.

 

If we consider roleplaying as "running a scenario" rather than "playing a game," then who cares if Baldar turns tail or momentarily loses his senses? After all, "game" still implies that somebody will win, and this makes room for an element of partiality, of bias.

 

Baldar's failure of morale could lead to much richer possibilities than if he had fought like the player's drone. Imagine the potential for pathos. If we are using roleplaying as a device for storytelling and education, it would only make sense to considerer the character's morale rather than the player's agenda.  

 

I'm thinking about how you calculate a character's morale now. Time to get quantifying the abstract again...

 

In conclusion, stop wearing your taser right next to your gun.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



It's dry around here.

I'm keenly aware that I haven't been posting as much lately.
Up until now, I've been posting a lot of theory and not practice, and opportunities to practice have been rare.
Without practice, I don't get much stimulation to consider theory in turn.

In the Stormtrooper scenario; I am using the D20 system with my 2d10 proposal. So far it has been alright, except for the one guy who dual-wields. dual wielders get the shaft in the d20 system, and need that flat probability curve to roll high enough to even get a hit. the 2d10 system makes this much more difficult, even with AC and Difficulty adjustment.

In the Dungeon Purgatory game, we found that 2 of the party don't even have waterskins in their inventory, and nobody bothered to account for how they were keeping hydrated. Drinking water became one of those things like having bathroom breaks; not of sufficient narrative value to include in game. We are clearly approaching this with varying levels of focus. People's interest seems to be flagging. The structure of the campaign itself deviates from the threat-of-death/experience-to-advance paradigm that works so well in the standard D&D game. And perhaps the novelty only lasts so logn without this formula.

Then, stormtroopers didn't happen this week. The difficulties inherent in getting five adults in the same place at the same time for something upon which their livelihoods do not depend have been manifesting themselves.

So your Crystal Fortress Wizard has been holed-up with his books. I'm in the middle of a few right now;
The most interesting is Fingerprints of the Gods, by my hero, the heterodox archaeologist, Graham Hancock. Fingerprints makes compelling arguments to the existence of lost civilizations- advanced cultures predating Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture. It's great campaign fodder, and I often get the notion that the author is making an effort to not sound like he is writing for game.

I'm still getting through Empire of the Summer Moon. Which I picked up after reading about it on FalseMachine.

I'm well into Children of Dune. Dune stands alone as a narrative, but the sequels are no less interesting.
There is a trope; an archetype of a person who can manifest other identities in him or her self, basically the ability to remember other lives from a first-person perspective. This in a nutshell is the super-power of the Kwisatz Haderach. the First Dune is about the man who attains this state. The subsequent works deal with the consequences of such power.

At the moment, I am reading to a loved-one from a children's book about the Buddha, so this things are all tumbling together. The Buddha is said to have been able to see his past incarnations, and in this way he gained an understanding of the nature of suffering.
I realized over dinner last might , that a similar theme was described in shocking, visceral detail in Gene Wolfe's Book Of the New Sun series.

A lot of people just don't know that science fiction tends to be obsesses with questions which have traditionally been the domain of religious thought. It has been commented that sci-fi protagonists wind up as either Jesus or Adam.
Apparently, they are also the Buddha sometimes. And almost as frequently, it is the future, but people are using swords again for some reason.

Encumbered by Encumbrance

Hey there, dear readers. I realize I haven't posted in a few.
But the magic window has been bringing me evil tidings for the last couple of days, by which I mean the internet has shown a lot of crappy shit going on in the wide world

(The black rhino is now extinct in the wild. Good job humanity. How fucking hard is it to keep a whole species alive? The rhinos were doing just fine for millions of years. Think of how much poaching it took to reduce the population so drastically. Somehow, for some reason, large numbers of people have been motivated to go to Africa, to the Serengeti to kill these animals. African people are starving and dying of disease and ignorance and we can't mobilize the resources to help them. Yet there are sufficient foreign interests and markets to wipe out a whole damn species. How does this even happen?
Also, the grisly murder of Walter Scott in Charleston, SC. Another case of police brutality marked by racial overtone. Hurray America. Walter Scott was unarmed, gunned down like an animal (not even a clean kill, though) Then, a second pig planted a taser on the victim's corpse. Fortunately in this case, the officer was charged with murder and there was no pussyfooting about the issue like in Ferguson or the Trayvon Martin case. Now every officer in Charleston gets to wear a body camera. Progress.
So not only is the world raping Africa, but we re-enact it in our streets. Wherefore this madness? It makes me wonder. Is world-culture is experiencing some massive collective Oedipus Complex? Compelling us to rape our mother-continent?)

Anyways, this sort of thinking had me in a serious funk. So bad that I really didn't feel like writing about games. But a nice evening at home helped get my head straight, and I'm back to working on the problems I have a reasonable chance of solving.
~~~

What do you take with you? What do you leave behind?

This is an important question for many roleplaying adventures.
Practically speaking, it a tactical concern. It is a choice players can make, the consequences of which can be very enriching for gameplay.
If your scenario resembles a backpacking trip into Mordor, then resources and their limitations become quite important. Having the right gear is essential to not only success, but survival. On the other hand, if you carry too much weight you will never get there in the first place.

If a character can provide whatever tool or item they need on whim, they don't have any need to innovate or use problem-solving. It's just not fun. This sort of thing should only be allowed in scenarios where resource management is really not a concern. Think of the difference between creative mode and survival mode in Minecraft: When the resource restriction and things like mortal needs are removed, the point of the game shifts to wild creativity rather than survival.

A person's possessions also have significance to character. In D&D, characters gain a lot of their definition from their equipment and the treasure they accumulate. It defines their appearance, compliments their skillset and shows where the character has been. Magical treasures especially represent not only new abilities for a character, but their past achievements as well.

Uh. Nice log-raft and 3' ladder. Perhaps there should be some limitation on this?

Encumbrance rules are the means of tracking what a character is carrying, and adjudicating how much it restricts their motion.

I will assume that my readers are familiar with how inventory and encumbrance are managed in D&D. The system works in fairly well in general. What I want to do now is look at some different inventory and encumbrance systems from some popular games, to get some perspective on what makes for a good or a bad encumbrance system.

Skyrim is awesome. We love Skyrim. Its beautiful and bleak tundra landscape is a great place to live out our dearest murder-hobo escapist fantasy. Up until the point that we hit out weight-limit and are introduced into an inventory-management nightmare.
The Dragonborn starts out with the ability to carry up to 200 units of weight. This "unit" is undefined and its value shifts mysteriously. Tanning a 1-unit hide results in a piece of leather which weighs 2 units. Very mysterious.
So you go about your adventure. If it's your first playthrough, you may not know what items are and are not important, so you pick up whatever you might think will be useful, then WHAM you've collected over 200 units and you can no longer run. You character goes from total freedom of motion to creeping at a snail's pace. Your adventuring career is on hold until you can drop some weight.
To make matters worse, if you want to develop your characters skill's, you need to collect materials; as much as possible since you get experience for producing items. As a result, you will adventure for maybe an hour until you hit your limit, then have to dump items on your pack-mule NPC, go to town, and craft and sell stuff for another hour of real time. This is not an ideal ratio of game to inventory management.

 

Just shut up and carry my burdens already!

 

To avoid this rigmarole, you would have to build your character and play-style in a very specific way. Perhaps as an unarmed khajit who never picks up anything or completes a quest.

The problem is that Skyrim is trying to have it two ways: Encumbrance limitations make sense for a footloose adventurer in hostile territory. But when your character buys a house in Whiterun and starts gaining most of her experience through smithing and enchanting, it doesn't make sense to punish the player for having a full inventory.
The Skyrim inventory system splits the difference between these two styles, and the result is a set of limitations so arbitrary, you might as well just not have them.

Dragon's Dogma is another recent epic fantasy game. There is a lot to say about Dragon's Dogma. Very early in the game, you have the option of picking up your willowy, nubile girl-cousin in a fireman's carry and throwing her onto a bed. Then she shrugs at you indignantly.
The remainder of the game doesn't quite live up to that standard of richness though, and I lost interest.
Dragon's Dogma also makes the mistake of confusing a highly mobile adventurer-hero with some sort of shopkeeper. Instead of piling on encumbrance all at once after a certain point, Dogma  defines levels of encumbrance, and these levels are noticeably difference in terms of how quickly your character moves and how long they can keep their energy up. This is good.
But your character is still expected to pick up every bit of junk and search every chest if you want to have half decent gear or enough restorative items.
Theoretically, you could use your NPC helpers as pack mules, or assign them to scour the environment for you, but they are utterly useless. Managing inventory in the field is cumbersome and awkward. You have to ADD the OIL to the LAMP and EQUIP the LAMP. This is done in the INVENTORY screen, and not the EQUIPMENT screen. You can view your arms and armor in the INVENTORY screen, but have to flip to the EQUIPMENT screen to change your loadout. Your followers are of course entirely incapable of managing their own inventories. How is that supposed to be enjoyable?
The encumbrance system is particularly punishing if you wear heavy armor, which seems justifiable. Except in real life, people who wear heavy armor don't wear it on a cross-country hike, and they generally had squires and horses to do the inventory management for them.

Mass Effect 3 is actually an example of a good encumbrance system, though it may seem a little obscure for this discussion. While the game is full of colorful items and upgrades, the vast majority of them apply automatically and require no further effort on the part of the player. Shepard is not expected to be a shopkeeper; s/he has sexy secretaries to take care of that shit for him/her.
Armor can be customized, but I found the effect to be mostly cosmetic. Weapons may be upgraded, but the attachments add weight.  In the end, ME3 encumbrance comes down to a simple, elegant and meaningful mechanic:
Carrying more, heavier weapons makes your powers recharge more slowly. All the rest of your crap is back on the Normandy. Don't worry about it. The choice of encumbrance boils down to whether you want to rely more on firepower and ammo, or on your special abilities.

What game designers need to keep in mind is the difference between Equipment and Inventory. The words get used interchangeably, but they carry very different shades of meaning.
Inventory is what you keep in a store, or in a pantry, or in your armory.
Equipment is the things that you are carrying on you; wearing, in your bags, or in your pockets.
Inventory is for crafting, trading and storing. Equipment is what you carry into Mordor.

The rules for encumbrance as written in AD&D and 3E are functional and easy enough, so long as the character sheet is well laid-out. In my experience, players are good about recording their weight-carried with reasonable accuracy. The burden lies on the DM to remember if anyone is encumbered and have it added to the appropriate checks.

But as always, it would be nice to simplify.
Once, I had players draw their inventory on graph paper. A sword took 6 squares, a bow and arrow set took 16, a potion took one. So much area was light-encumbrance, so much more area meant heavy encumbrance.


It was basically a pen-and-paper version of the inventory system from Diablo, or the attache case from Resident Evil 4.
This method didn't get extensive playtesting. But the players who did try it, found it fun and tactile. They enjoyed drawing little pictures of their stuff.


Practically speaking though,
Being encumbered is not a matter of mass and weight, but a matter of volume and placement.

According to D&D rules, you might carry a longbow, arrows, a glaive,  a greatsword, a shield, 50' of rope,  chainmail and a backpack full of potions and the weight would only take you up to light encumbrance.  But anyone who actually attempted this would be tripping over all themselves! They would definitely not be making jump, swim or climb checks.

In military history, a soldier's role in battle was defined by the weapon they were holding in their hands. almost always a weapon-system that requires both hands.
If you had a bow, that made you an archer.
If you had a long spear, you were a pikeman.
If you had a flag, you were a standard-bearer
If you had a shield, you were a shield-man and belonged in a phalanx or shield wall.
You might carry a sidearm; a long dagger, or single-handed weapon or a handgun. That would be a very good idea. But it is nearly impossible to be effective in a combat role if you have the gear for a whole other role strapped on your back!
Camping or dungeoneering gear would have been right out.  Unless setting up camp is your tactical role:

Really, when running game, I find it is more relevant to know the placement of an item than how much it weighs. Because we know players are always trying to get items out in the middle of combat, and that item is almost always in their pack.
Also, what if a character falls or suffers an Area of Effect spell or is targeted by a thief? knowing the location of their gear will do a lot to tell us what happens next.

A Thing to Try:
I am going to include a diagram like this with the character sheet. This will be for Characters to draw and/or point to where their items are being kept, as well as any pockets, pouches, backpacks or weapon holsters. This will be the Equipment sheet, representing the things a character is carrying on their person.

Finding a diagram like this that isn't really creepy is kind of hard to do.

 

A character's other possessions, kept at home or elsewhere, will be listed on a separate sheet of paper. This will be the Inventory sheet.

We will forget about weights of items, and find new standards for determining encumbrance. It will be brutally interesting.

Bows and Archery

Since the Armor and Swords posts were an ordeal to put together, I am attacking a slightly narrower topic for this one.

The bow and arrow is one of humanity's most fundamental weapon systems.
Such weapons exploit the elastic properties of certain materials to store potential energy. When the string is released, the potential energy propels an aerodynamic missile at speeds far greater than might be reached by simply throwing the missile. Obviously.
 A bow is not a rugged weapon and does not stand up well to abuse. A bow is more like a instrument for transducing one form of energy into another. In terms of care and maintenance it is more like a guitar than a club.

The origin of the bow is utterly prehistoric.
The Holmegaard bow is the oldest known extant bow; dating to approximately 8000 BCE. Here is a plan for reproducing such a weapon: The odd shape; with the limbs wide near the grip then abruptly tapering towards the end demonstrates that a good deal of thought, experimentation and refinement had already been invested to reach this design.

 from primitivearcher.com

The bow offered an improvement over the atlatl in both missile-speed, range and the ability to aim precisely. Atlatls are better for volley-firing into a mammoth than nailing a rabbit. Also, the motion of drawing and firing a bow is much subtler and more quiet than launching an atlatl. This is advantageous when stalking wild game.

 

 

 

Atlatl in use. A deer is probably going to see you doing all that. Same goes for displacer-beasts.

 

Bows have served as weapons for hunting and warfare for millennia and are the go-to ranged weapon for a fantasy adventurer.

A bow with a draw weight of 40 to 50 pounds is considered sufficient for hunting. Bows for penetrating armor and killing humans tended to be heavier. heavier bows are more powerful and cast arrows with longer, flatter trajectories. The range for a bow truly depends on the proficiency of the user. But Miyamoto Musashi (Musashi Miyamoto?) wrote that bows are ineffective beyond 40 yards.

 

Arrow Anatomy

Arrows consist mainly of a shaft-which could be any material from cane to carbon fiber. The arrow is stabilized in flight by the "fletchings" attached to the read end. Most arrows have 3 fletchings, with one of an odd color to indicate how to orient the arrow. The odd fletching faces away from the bow and is aligned at a right-angle to the nock. Often, fletchings will have a slight twist to them. This causes the arrow to spin as it flies; stabilizing it and making it more accurate. The same principle is used in modern rifles. The "nock" is a notch at the tail of the bow which fitss the arrow onto the bowstring.

 

The business end is called a head, and the designs of these heads can vary widely. Bullet-like "field points" are mostly used for target practice. The traditional arrow-shaped head is called a broadhead. The flaring blade of a broadhead is meant to cut organs and bloodvessels as it strikes. They are commonly used in hunting and combat. Armor-piercing heads, sometimes called bodkin-points, had a strong point and a square or triangular cross-section. With a good, straight-on hit, such points could pierce plate armor or wedge through chainmail.

 

Some Japanese arrowheads. The Japanese developed arrowheads into a thing of art-like they tend to do with every little thing. I believe the large Y-shaped ones are meant for slicing the rigging of enemy ships.

 

An arrow must be very finely tuned in order to shoot well. It must be well balanced, and its "spline" must matched to the bow which fires it. This is because of a thing called The Archer's paradox. If an arrow is too stiff for the bow, it will veer off away from the bow-stave. If it is too flexible, it will veer towards the bowstave. In order to fire where it is aimed, the arrow must have the correct amount of flex. Many modern bows circumvent this by arranging the arrow-rest so that it is in line with the string and the target, rather than being off to the side. 

 

Arrow wounds are very nasty

In the 1800s, when firearms and bows were being used concurrently, it became clear that while a gun was more likely to kill you right off, an arrow would take its time. Arrow wounds were extremely difficult to treat. An arrow has to be extracted. Imagine an arrow with broad head snipped  and filed from a piece of tin, and it becomes easy to imagine how it can do more damage coming out than going in. The most notable work on the subject is "Notes on Arrow Wounds," an essay by Dr. Joseph Howland Bill.

Arrows also make great vectors for infection or poison. Though I have yet to meet a DM willing to allow character-death by gangrene. 

 

Types of Bows

Most bows can be placed into one of three categories.

 



The simplest of these is the longbow-aka the stick-bow or the self-bow. When unstrung, these bows have a straight profile. They are the easiest type of bow to manufacture. The Holmegaard and the famous English long-bow fall in this category.

 

More complex is the Recurve.- The name refers to how the limbs flex towards the holder, then away. When unstrung, the bow limbs point forward. This shaping makes the bow store and release energy more efficiently. A recurve bow will have a greater range and missile-speed than a long-bow of the same draw weight. A recurve is more complex to make and requires the ability to steam the wood- or materials and glues strong enough to make the bow of multiple pieces.

 

Compound bows are a modern invention. They more or less require modern materials to work. A compound bow uses a system of pulleys and cams which allows the user to draw a much heavier bow. The cams also flip back as the string is drawn , making it easier to hold the bow in a drawn position for an extended time. A compound bow is frequently more like an arrow-launching machine than a bow.  They are often fitted with sights, silencers, counterweights and special arrow rests to ensure consistent firing.

 

Use in Combat 

Naturally, an archer is at risk when enemy melee combatants are near at hand. You are vulnerable when holding a bow because an enemy combatant can easily run up on you. However, when backed up by allies with shields and melee weapons, an archer can exercise lots of control over the fighting nearby. An archer may not wish to waste arrows on shield-bearers who can cover themselves effectively. But opponents with spears or two-handed weapons are easy pickings. An archer has the option of sniping unaware targets. But he can also use his bow to threaten and manipulate enemies. Consider two opposing lines of shield and spear. One side has the aid of a combat archer. By threatening enemy spear-men, a single archer can easily weaken the enemy line so that it may be pushed back.

 

Bows have been found to be extremely effective when combined with a highly mobile platform. In the Bronze age, this would have been a chariot. Later on, the middle man was eliminated and the archer rode on the horse. Fighting in this manner requires a high degree of training, but was extremely effective. In order to use from horseback, bows had to be relatively short in the limbs. Take this Hungarian horsebow from three rivers archery for instance.

 

Even as late as the 1800s, the mounted archer was more than a match for a gunner, as was evidenced by the warriors of the Comanche nation. This only changed with the invention of the Colt revolver. The revolver had a greater rate of fire than the muzzle-loaders which had preceded it, and its size allowed it to be fired easily from horseback. For more on the Comanche nation and their history, I suggest S.C. Gwynne's "Empire of the Summer Moon." A moderately proficient archer can fire an arrow every 6 to 8 seconds; a rate of fire fare greater than that of an arquebus or Kentucky rifle.

 

Bows have also been found effective in massed battles when fired in a volley-not at a specific target but into a general range where the targets are. It was by this use that the famous English long-bow gained its reputation. The Longbow has a somewhat legendary status. This reputation for power comes from specimens which are true War-Bows, with draw weights of over 100 pounds. The men who wielded such weapons would have been elite professional warriors. The practice of such a heavy weapon deformed the user over time, compressing the bones of the bow-arm.

Crossbows
Crossbows are known to have been mass-produced in China as early as 500BC and probably earlier. They would appear in Greece only shortly after.
The missile which a crossbow fires is properly called a bolt or a quarrel.
A Crossbow requires less training to use than a bow. Aiming with a bow is not an exact science and takes a lot of practice and experience. A Crossbow is more point-and-click, and easier to pick up.
Also, the tension of a crossbow does not need to be physically restrained by the wielder; rather it is mechanically restrained. So a crossbow can be made much stronger than a bow. It is common for a crossbow to require a windlass or special lever just to cock the bow (the bow-part of a crossbow is called a prod.) Even a rather early Greek crossbow is designed to be cocked by the users bodyweight rather than arm strength. Such a bow is known as a gastraphete or "belly-shooter."

In general, crossbows suffer from a low rate of fire, but can be made more powerful than a hand bow. The crossbow is also more subtle to fire than a hand bow, requiring less space and a smaller motion to shoot. This gives it much the same advantage over a bow that the bow has over the atlatl.

By the way, the repeating crossbow is really a thing, not just made-up shit.

Such a weapon would be more difficult to aim precisely, and would have to be less powerful than a standard crossbow. but the rate of fire would have made up for these shortcomings in many situations.

In Modern Times
As the bow was disappearing from the battlefield, it experienced a revival as an arm of genteel sport. Archery is still used in hunting in a variety of fashions: Some people use extremely high-tech compound bows, while some are devoted to the purity of primitive archery.
Medieval re-enactment has also provided an avenue for combat archery to be re-discovered and developed. Some people out there are doing incredible things, pushing the boundaries of what can be done with a bow; notably Lars Andersen and a few others who can be found on the internet.

In Game
3E defines bows as Long or Short, and Plain or Composite. The rules allow for "mighty" bows which allow the shooter to use a strength bonus. As usual, the writers at WotC don't seem to know quite what they are talking about. But "composite" bows seem to refer to recurves. Other than that, I don't have much issue with the rules for bows and archery as written. I know, what a shock.

Unless , of course, we wanted to have a realistic playout of arrow-wounding and treatment. But I have never met a DM sado-masochistic  enough for that.



 

 

Banded Maille

 Back in my Armor post, I passingly sniped at the inclusion of "Banded Mail," when Gygax himself said no-one really knew what it was. It was merely a Victorian Neologism.  Yet somehow it wound up in the book with stats assigned,

Even the wikipedia page says that the historicity of banded maille is highly debatable, and it's pretty much only a thing because of D&D.

The descriptions given in the books seems to describe plate armor of overlapping plates riveted together, or something like a Roman Lorica Segmentata.

http://www.legionxxiv.org/loricapage/
















While the D&D usually describes banded maile as a cousin of lamellar or brigandine, the term was originally intended to reference a manner in which some form of mail is depicted in armor of effigy. I believe that these depictions are merely stylizations of your garden variety chaninmail. Charles Henry Ashdown, an Edwardian scholar proposed that these stylizations represented other forms of mail-like armor. He suggests that banded mail was composed of washers arrayed on a ring, or perhaps chain with interwoven leather strips. 
I say this "banded maille" can not have been washers-on-a-strip. Such a layout would have necessitated lots of overlap, making for a lot of unnecessary weight, while still leaving lots of chinks.

But the other thing- about the leather reinforced mail. There might be someting to that. So I gave it a try.

I had a "bishop's mantle" lying around to experiment with. It was not very high quality mail: made of 16 or 14 gauge stainless steel with butted links. Pretty weak stuff.

For Testing purposes, I used the cold steel gladius. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is just about the best commercial sword you can get for under $40 dollars. The blade flares at the center of percussion, making it quite a good chopper. The armor was backed by a treestump. This sort of rigid backing would make the destructive testing harder on the armor than it would usually be.

As you can see, this specimen of mail is pretty weak. Between the hard steel of the sword and the rigid backing of the wood, several links were chopped open.
If we were using a padded or tissue-like backing for this experiment, the mail would not have taken all the brunt of the blow. The idea was to test for how much tougher bandiing made the mail, however informally.

In this same picture, you can see where I banded some leather strips  "across" the grain of the chainmail. You can see the sword-cuts on the leather, but the leather has protected the links and kept them from bursting.

Quarters included for scale.

 In this Patch, I was using paracord. It is not much of an improvement over no re-inforcement at all- but it does make the mail slightly more resistant to penetrative attacks.

It also does a lot to Quieten the mail, and to dull or change the color of the mail. It aslo provides you with an emergency supply of cord. So there are reasons one might want to interlace their mail with cordage.

This layout performed the best: with the strips running with the grain of the Chainmail. ->

All in all- it protects the links and makes the mail even more resistant to cutting. It makes the mail marginally more resistant to penetrative attacks.
It also makes the mail much less jingly. I could feature using waxed leather for the strips-to protect the leather and lubricate the chain. It would also make the chain warmer to wear and mute its appearance.
The leather and cordage would be prone to breaking or severing, but could be easily repaired. 

So yeah. There are reasons you might want to  reinforce chain with leather strips. I can dig it. I am not sure it was common practice in medieval times by any means. But it can be done.

What are you doing in that hauberk, dog! You're not even proficient in chain armors!

Levers to Pull

In the Adventure Learning System Post, I mentioned something about how before starting a game, the players and DM might have a dialogue to settle the "parameters" of the game, and give everyone an idea of what sort of ideas were going to be used and explored.

Here's a list of some basic parameters, or setting-keys which are most commonly fiddled with. This is also for my reference, since in my mind a really good rules-system should be able to accommodate the whole range of setting.

1. Technological Level
What is the level of technology that the Player Characters are familiar with? Will they be interacting with groups of higher or lower technological levels? Is the control of technology central to the happenings of the scenario? Are the consequences of a given technology central to the scenario? Do some player characters have access to a higher or special form of technology?

2. Races and Species
What species may the PCs be? Keep in mind that the available species define much of what is "normal" in the setting. What species or races are alien to the PCs? Is the interaction between the players and an unknown or contentious entity central to the scenario?

3. Magic
Is there magic in the setting, or simply technology? What is the scope of magic? How does it work? What does it require or cost to do magic? Do PCs understand magic, or is it a mysterious force? If the PCs do not command magic, who does? And how does it affect the PCs? Is magic a subtle , mysterious thing, or is it something familiar to the players?

4. Mortality
Are the PCs organisms subject to decay and ultimately death? Is dying a case of Terminus Est or is death somehow mitigated by resurrection or cloning or file-backups? Mitigating the results of death tends to result in Dungeon Purgatory; in which death is no longer a condition of failure, and the condition of failure has to be something else.
Moreover, do the philosophies of the setting have a clear idea of what becomes of a person after death?

5. Scope & Scale
What are the bounds of the scenario? Is it a story about a house or the whole town? Is it merely a dungeon or a whole realm? Will the conflict be between nations or is it a galactic concern? Are we discussing the evens of an afternoon, or an epoch? Who is the "other" in this scenario? Is it orcs, or extraterrestrials, or a next door neighbor?

6. Cosmology
How is the world laid out? Are there alternate realms/dimensions/spirit-worlds which the scenario will touch? Will the world be imitation the cosmology of a particular mythology?

7. Hoi Polloi or Persona Non Grata?
Are the players powerful and respected, or are they mistrusted - perhaps shunned? Is having authority and giving orders part of the play experience? How secure are the players in their authority? Or will the PCs be underlings coping with the whims and orders of their superiors? Perhaps a bit of both? Is gaining power and respect a fundamental element of gameplay?

8. Nomadic or Sedentary?
Are the PCs going to be rootless adventurers? Do they follow opportunity or necessity? Is the vagrant lifestyle easy or sustainable? Or do the PCs have some sort of home or community? How much stake do they have in their community? Do they have friends or wealth, and how secure are these things?

9. How many characters?
How many characters will a player be running?  Most of the time, players are encouraged to run a singly character and invest in that one character? But suppose PCs are more expendable? I have not played in any games where we gleefully rolled up a new character every other session, so I don't know what sort of play experience this would foster. But I'd give it a shot. Also, what if players are allowed to control multiple characters? I have heard of this working well. I think having multiple characters would encourage players to maintain a wider perspective on the game.

10. Business or Pleasure?
Will the PC be serious about what they are doing? Will they be systematic and rigorous? Or are they less professional? This attitude may seem trivial, but it has a big influence on where the players will concentrate their attention in game. Imagine the difference between a squad of soldiers under orders, and the glorified vagrants which comprise the cliché adventurer party. These two groups will play in very different ways with different levels of focus.

I'm sure this is just scratching the surface. There has got to be countless levers to pull at the outset of a game. But these are the sorts of questions I might ask myself when thinking up a new campaign. Right after the big one: Wilderness, Urban  or Dungeon?

Pre-Apocalyptic Wasteland

"Millenarianism" is the belief that the end of the world is imminent; certain to come, and very soon too. The word shares a root with "millennia" and refers to a period of a thousand years. As the year 1000 AD loomed in Medieval Europe, people were sure Jesus would return and the end of days would commence. People were serious about it.
This all seems very quaint now; Very baseless and childish to think that the year 1000 has any peculiar cosmic importance, just because we humans have ten fingers to count with, and our finger-count, taken to the third power seems like a good, round number to us.

Except, maybe this is not so quaint. It's rather familiar actually.
The truth is that the world always seems to be ending. New developments and challenges arise, the older generation gets nostalgia, and it is seems like the end of the world must be about to come. Young people are not much better; we tend to be hungry for answers and explanations, and so desperate for them that we hardly remember to be discriminating.

There was supposed to be some sort of end of the world as we know it when they year changed from 1999 to 2000. All the computers were going to crash because they weren't programmed to handle the date-change. Didn't happen.

And there was that 2012 thing. A lot of people took that seriously.
I personally, find it very painful when some writer or idealist that I would like to respect reveals that they took 2012 seriously. I love you Graham Hancock, but you seem to take 2012 seriously in Fingerprints of the Gods. Now I have to doubt everything I hear from you.

There is a saying it is attributed to various people; usually Sumerian or Babylonian kings, but probably made up in the early 20th C:

A tablet (Assyrian) 2800 B.C. says:
“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book.

People seem to have going on like this since the dawn of civilization-if not before, and it continues to  this day. The news is full of little armageddons: Fukushima, the mass-death of pollinators, the re-emergence of Non-Western powers. Some apocalypses are more widely reported than others. The information age has amplified the apparent number of apocalypses.

I say it's all bullshit. The Armageddon is an escapist fantasy (I know escapist fantasy) and People long for it! But the world and history do not "end."
The ugly truth is that it continues, bearing all the consequences of the present. And that is far more terrifying than a neat ending with a flash-bang and a Revelation.
This is an interview with the late Terence McKenna. He's another one of the thinkers I would like to believe but can't. Nonetheless I do enjoy listening to his leprechauny little voice. Usually he talks more about "the mushroom" and what it can do for the collective consciousness of humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCaK35DQ4uk

If McKenna makes sense to you, you should probably look into getting yourself a Crystal Fortress of your very own.
I find I agree with the general idea point that history is happening faster as the world becomes more complex and highly organized.
But I do not see how that necessitates an "end" of history. The desire to cap off all of history with a neat little Escaton (and it's coming soon too!) strikes me as a sort of comforting fantasy.

Have you guys ever seen Doomsday Preppers? It's on Netflix now. It's a reality show about Americans who are expecting some catastrophe, and have devoted themselves to "prepping."
(Prepping is noted to occur almost exclusively in the developed world. You need to have a highly organized society before people can get too worked up about its potential collapse)

As in most reality TV, there is a heavy dose of schadenfreude involved. A good number of the people on this show are frightening and pitiable at the same time. Others are encouraging and hopeful.
The featured preppers fall into a few broad categories. Since this is supposedly a game-blog, let's call them "Classes"

Prepper Character Classes:

Community Organizer:

These preppers make lots of friends and maintain networks of fellow preppers.  Organizers typically make the same stockpiling and armament preparation as the Hyper Republicans, but are less likely to have bunkers. They might be considered evangelical preppers.

Neo-Primitivist:

"The more you know, the less you need." is the philosophy of these preppers. They do not bother much with stockpiling supplies or weaponry, but expect to survive the coming Armageddon by living off the land and traveling light. This is a difficult path because a modern person cannot easily learn the skills of a hunter-gatherer. And even a proficient hunter-gatherer has a fragile hold on  their livelihood.

Scientist:

Perhaps the most rare of the preppers, they use experimental technology in their survival strategies. they are likely to attempt things like algae-farming, hydrogen generators and self-sustained ecosystems. They are either really weird, or total hippies and tend to ignore the martial aspects of prepping.

Urban Runner:

High on paranoia, low on resources. These guys tend to be young and single, or atleast unencumbered by children, They live in urban areas, which they believe they will have to flee in a crisis.

Hyper-Republican:

These guys have lots of money and paranoia. They tend to be religious and hyper conservative. When the world changes, they don't see the opportunity, just the danger. They tend to be older, having lived through the 80s, they grew up to movies like Red Dawn and are still brain-damaged from the Us Vs. Them mentality of the Cold War. Their primary survival strategy is lots and lots of money. They acquire bunkers, compounds, years of rations, lots of guns and lots of ammo. They use technology but do not understand it like the scientist does. They hoard weaponry, but may or may not have the mentality or experience to use them effectively.

Marauders and Raiders are frequently mentioned as a post-apocalyptic problem. No preppers seem to  think they will become Marauders though. "We Are the Good Guys" the preppers say to themselves. But we know that raiding is something humans just do when they get into big enough groups. Sometimes the raiding is even sanctioned and organized and referred to as "war"
All I'm saying is Get Real. In an apocalypse, some of y'all are going to wind up being raiders. And you might even get to enjoy it too.

 

"I told you, we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week... but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting... by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs...but by a two thirds majority in the case of external affairs."

Have you ever been to a gun show? A Gun Show is an American "cultural event" of which I doubt there is an equivalent anywhere else in the world. A gun show is basically a convention for civilians to buy and sell weaponry and accessories of various descriptions. Some historical, some sporting, some purely offensive. Mostly all overpriced.
I can not easily describe the subtle toxicity of these environments. There is an odd mix of fear, paranoia, pride, bravado and bigotry which suffuses a gun show. You will see plenty of prepper gear  and literature, Confederate pride material, bumper-stickers and t-shirts which warn gleefully proclaim the bearer's eagerness to use deadly force provided with some slight sanction.

Propaganda designed to confirm and encourage paranoia. 

At a gun show, people are afraid of the government, immigrants, terrorism, Moslems. They are afraid of being ripped off, they are afraid of seeming less knowledgeable than the next guy. They are afraid of being attacked, they are afraid of never being attacked; they wish a motherfucker would.
There is a magic of some tacit agreement: An agreement that we will all accept this spectacle as healthy, patriotic fun. We will blithely ignore that weapons are tools of grim purpose, and that we are fascinated by being able to purchase and fondle such items.
A weapon can be a powerful symbol of one's own agency. But what we have here is an obsession with a personal Armageddon.  A personal-pan serving of the Apocalyptic.

 

What makes this frightening is the realization that the people at the gun show are not just like that at the gun show. They carry this benighted mentality around with them Everywhere. They are all over the place, carrying this mentality with them. To prepare for danger is one thing, Because shit does happen. But to obsess over it is a terrible waste of energy.

 

"Apocalypse" is not what you think it is.
In the original context, around the time of Jesus, it meant something like a vision or revelation. It implied that God was revealing mysteries to you. Because the most famous Apocalypse is the book of Revelation, the word has come to be associated with the End of times.
And in this context, having an "apocalypse" was a kind of good thing. There was a fascinating re-assurance in the notion that all would be revealed, all would be set to rights, and God would divide the sheep from the goats.

And to modern people who still bear many of the same anxieties, this sort of Ultimate Sorting is still an appealing notion. I think this explains our continued fascination with Millenarianism. The escapist fantasy of millenarianism is the notion that when the "shit hits the fan," that none of it will get on you and yours. People half hope for the End of the World- hopeful that they will be amongst the sheep and not the goats. I say it's all bullshit and we don't get off so easy.

Oh. Ah, all this relates to D&D. It really does. D&D is all about Apocalypses. It's a basically a vehicle for you and your friends to be a group of amoral raiders in a world without rule. The sheep level up, and the goats roll up new characters.