Math

As the rewrite of the Senex campaign has not progressed far enough to write another deconstruction, I'll be writing about the Juvenis campaign today.  That is, the campaign that is ongoing, though in hiatus the past few weeks (hopefully, that won't last much longer).

I'd like to talk about events that stretched out over a series of posts throughout May and June of 2018, during which time the party investigated the depths of the dungeon under Mimmarudla, discovering that it went far, far deeper than they would ever have dreamed.

On their first venture into the dungeon, they got as far as an immense stone block, at which point they decided to turn back as a party.  The way was clear ahead of them, but as it was determined that they were hungry after their battle, they realized ...

Embla Strand the Assassin: My pack is back with Willa, and most of my food is with our donkeys.

Mikael the Mage: My food went with Valda.

Rob Munro the Druid: I have no food on me. (come to think of it, I've forgotten to buy food...)

I've tailored the lines a bit for the sake of the point, leaving out Mikael's suggestion of turning back, which was affirmed by Rob and then by Engelhart Askjellson the Cleric.

There's no fault on the party's behalf in this situation.  Most dungeons, particularly those that are sold over a counter, can be physically walked through in less than and hour.  Most DMs do not expect players to eat, or suppose that the eating is done "off stage," as they don't want to worry about such trivialities ... but this is will be the point of today's post.  Eating, and other things that involve the dreaded math that DMs and players resent alike, are not trivialities.

For the moment, I'll put math on a shelf and come back to it later.  I'd like to repeat that the party did not make a mistake in not bringing enough food.  When counted among equipment, as it is in my world, food is heavy, it slows down combatants and can, in fact, be a hazard to bring along on an adventure for a number of reasons.  For example, even dried food can attract monsters, just as we are warned not to carry open food in forest or mountain campgrounds because it attracts bears and other dangerous animals.

If I had not brought up the matter of food, however, by pointing out that the party was hungry, they would have continued on into the depths of the caverns without a reason to stop.  And that would be a loss to the immersion of the campaign.

My intention was to create a sequence that would play out something like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, a classic adventure story, but without going so far.  I conceived of a route that would be 17 miles of continuous tunnel, which the party would have to negotiate in order to reach the actual conflict.  I did not want that to be easy ... and I wanted the players to feel the length of the journey, without giving away the game by telling them up front how far they were going to have to trek.

So prior to telling them they were hungry, I had been playing with their perception, to draw the length of the journey out.  I told them they had walked five minutes in game time and that the tunnel continued, then asked if they wanted to continue.  Then I had them walk another five minutes of game time, again without reaching an end to the tunnel, and asked again.

Then I had ten minutes of game time pass, and gave them a good description to provide a sense that they were making progress ... but the end result was the same.  The tunnel continues, do you want to keep going?

Now the party begins to discuss this:

Embla: OK. Let's head back and inform the foreman what we've dealt with.

Engelhart:  But ... the sacrifice chamber?  [alluding to a clue the players have received, that suggests such a thing is in front of them]

Rob: There seems to be a disconnect between the bit of text Mikael deciphered and the tool marks at the switchback path, and the natural aspect of this tunnel. Also, a few things have pointed toward this being a very large cave. I think ther may be something of interest there, but one can always come back another day.

Engelhart: C'mon, let's give it a third leg in, just ten more minutes. I'd hate to go all the way back up when all that was needed was a final push. There's bound to be a sacrifice chamber at a practical, workable distance on in. (Of course, on the way back, we'll *have* to look for a hidden chamber at the base of the ascent)

Rob: Not necessarily if that's the entry way to an underground kingdom ... But 10 more minutes can't hurt.

Embla: Fair enough. Let's press on.

This is gold for a DM.  The party has done no actual walking, they've just had to concur with me twice, but they are starting to feel that some distance has been covered.

It is damned hard in a role-playing game to convey a sense of distance, or effort, or strain.  Players are sitting on comfortable chairs and can willy-nilly declare that they're going to walk a thousand miles before stopping, and the only thing that stops that from happening is some rule that says, You have to sleep, you have to eat, you have to stop and pee.  You can't walk for a thousand miles just because you say so.

The same goes for walking five minutes.  We have to imagine ourselves exploring a cave we find in a nearby wilderness.  Out of curiousity, sure, we jump into a hole, find an interesting tunnel and explore it.  The idea is straight out of Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain knew what he had a hold of.  He had, no doubt, explored a dozen holes around Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up.  He no doubt imagined, long before writing down his thoughts, the chance of encountering cutthroats or river pirates in such caves.  We might ourselves, if we were young enough and climbing into a similar cave.  We would certainly begin to feel our skin crawl a bit after we had travelled for five, then ten, then twenty minutes.  We'd be thinking, what if we slip?  What if we break something and can't climb out?  What if we knock our heads?  Will anyone find us?  Even if you're sure they would, there's something creepy about a cave that just keeps going ... and as a DM, we want to impart that feeling to the party, despite their sitting at our game table.

So we do it incrementally.  We don't say, "The tunnel continues for 17 miles and you find yourselves overlooking blah blah blah."  Omg, how fucking dull is that?  We have to make them feel every part of the journey ... and the deeper in they get, the deeper that feeling has to be.

We don't tell them how deep it is.  And we begin to paint the distance as something that taxes the players by making them pay for it as they go.  And how do we do that?  Math.

I continue to puzzle over the resistance against the use of simple math in game play.  I have trouble with many forms of math, primarily because I haven't used them since my teens and through disuse I've forgotten much.  I couldn't plot a curve with a formula, I have to rely on the internet to calculate volume of any object, I can't manage calculus, physics is utterly beyond me and I couldn't even calculate a mole in chemistry, even though that is one of the easiest things.  Yet most of these things never come up in my RPG; I deal mostly in arithmatic.  Occasionally I need to do a little geometry.  Very rarely I have to invest some time in algebra.  That's it.

Yet voices online speak with great angst and hatred against the use of any math, even the simple subtraction of objects from a stockpile.  The only math I've never heard anyone complain of is the math needed to add new experience to old experience.  Players are always happy to do that.

We are drilled five hours a week for ten months of every year, for 12 years of our lives most of us, not counting the time spent doing homework ... and yet despite the repetition that should at least make us numb to the processes involved, we walk away hating even the scent of math.

All the better.  If players would rather actually walk a twenty mile distance in a day for a LARP experiment rather than do the math necessary to calculate how much food they'll need that day, all the more reason to force players to use math.  Math makes the experience of calculating an investment in the campaign.  If the players want to get to the bottom of this dungeon, and they want to have all the equipment they'll need, and they don't want to die of starvation, then Yes!  Let them do math.  Let the math for food depend on how much equipment they dare to carry, which determines how long it will take them to get from point A to point B, which changes how much food they'll need, which changes how much they'll have to carry, in a terrible circle that all means working their skulls to death doing the math.  I can't make them actually get out of their chairs and carry 73-point-seven pounds of equipment a distance of 17-point-one miles (old-style units because my world occurs before metric will be invented).  If I could, I would know that when they got to the end of their journey, they'd be damned grateful to have succeeded.  A lot more grateful than simply saying, "Okay, we walk the distance, what do we see?"  But if they have to do all this grueling, hateful math to get there, at least we can get some of that sense of accomplishment.  It didn't require much to say we were walking the distance, but gawddamn, figuring out how the math worked was a fucking nightmare.

All the better that it is unpleasant.  Walking great distances is unpleasant.  Starving is unpleasant.  Not having a pan to fry the meat is unpleasant. That's why chairs and piping hot food is so appreciated.  Life is full of unpleasantness.  Learning to appreciate the little things ~ like that the math part of this adventure is finally over, yay! ~ is essential to having a meaningful experience.  There is no yin without a little yang.

For the Juvenis party to get to the bottom of the dungeon, where stuff was happening, took three attempts altogether, two where math was a hurdle to overcome.  The problem was made worse because I did not explain how deep the tunnel was going to be.  Their first time in, they did not even know there would be a tunnel, so it was natural they wouldn't take a lot of food.  Their second time in, they assumed they must be close enough that a little further would reveal the main dungeon, so they did not fill their packs with food.  They soon recogized the problem that every hour walking down meant two hours of food, counting the return trip ... and nearly judged it wrong, with some of the party going on half rations for a short time.  My rules on food consumption added to the difficulty in calculating need (as it was meant to do).

The discussion of what to do began to build up with this post.  I threw in some notes of my own as DM, both in my own capacity and in the mouths of an NPC named Fjall.  It took time for the party to discuss their situation fully, which is always what I want as a DM.  A party deep underground in a strange place shouldn't be able to see a clear solution to a problem, if it is complex enough.  The need to calculate insundries like food, torches, oil, where to sleep, distance and so on puts the party on their heels, forcing a rational, careful parley.  Here are some key statements pulled from the comments field that steadily got the party around to what to do next:

Embla: Stopping and eating seems a good idea. We might also start looking for a place to rest - this ledge is clearly unsuitable, but there might be an acceptable location further on.

Rob: Looks like we may have to come back, and stock way more food and fuel on our next trip (maybe set up camp closer).

Mikael: Maybe forge shead seeking a suitable camping spot, set up camp, and send some people to go get way more food so we can continue from a more suitable location?

Lothar: It's too bad we wouldn't be able to get a donkey down here... Who all has the ability to see without light? In order to conserve our remaining oil I think it would make sense to send those folks to fetch and carry, and leave one with the group here.

Embla: We need to rest - this is not a good place for forced march penalties. Tomorrow, some of us can run back to resupply. I can carry the most and don't need light, so I should be part of the resupply run.

Rob: Well, it all hinges on how long we plan to wander in search of a proper camping place, no? To me 1 or 2 hours are amenable (so 2-4 hours if we count the return trip).

Lothar: I've got some ability in cavernous environments, so it'd make sense for me to scout ahead. I like that plan. Anyone else have some skill to volunteer?

And so on.  I don't want to say that this is "proper adventuring," but if we add in the battles with strange creatures they've already had, the uncertainty of the length of tunnel, the uncanniness of certain clues I've already given, their extensive knowledge of the creatures that built the place, having fought froglings on several occasions already and found them utterly loathsome ... there are many, many factors going on that are not even mentioned in the dialogue.  Yet the players have forgotten nothing. They know as they talk that separating the party could get half of them in a very bad fight.  They know the nearness of the ledge could be a BIG factor in their survival, because I've demonstrated a willingness to have a creature push a player off a ledge before, in other fights they've had.  The party really feels the sense of weirdness here ... so it isn't just a bunch of people quibbling about how much food and torches they have.  It is a party of adventurers legitimately worried that they won't have enough to survive this.

Forcing players to do the math makes this possible.  If we handwave the food, and the number of torches, and the campsite, and the requirements for seeing because we give everyone in the party ultravision goggles, and encumbrance is ignored, and the distance is just a matter of saying words, then what's left?  A tunnel and maybe a monster.  Or just an empty tunnel.  How is that an adventure?

It's believed by most participants of this game that all these extraneous details can be and should be ignored, because they slow game momentum and math sucks.  Everyone wants to have fun.  No one wants to be scribble out numbers like this is math class.  So a situation like the one facing the Juvenis party cannot exist.  It simply cannot.  There would be no reason for anyone in this party to be concerned about anything until a monster turned up.

That is NOT my memory of adventure stories and novels I experienced as a boy.  Laying in supplies, harnessing the horses, fixing a wheel when it was broken, crossing a river and fearing that we'd lose three weeks of food, having to leave a stockpile behind because a horse died, and then facing the dangers of going back to get it, those were nail biting moments for me when I read tales of pioneers daring their way across the continent. Ships hitting rocks and steadily filling with water, inch by inch, while crew fought to pump the water out and bale it, while bringing the ship closer to a port mile by mile before the fight against sinking went against them ... this was the very stuff of adventure.  But to figure these things in a way that doesn't just jerk the party around by having the DM pull it out from a dark place requires math.  It requires giving a fair accounting to the players of what resources they have (ship's hold vs. water pouring in at such an such a rate) to get those same players to feel like they're in control of the situation, and not just waiting to find out if the DM rules that the ship sinks or not.

This too is critical.  If you look at all the scenes surrounding the players moving their way down into the dungeon, at no time do the players feel a lack of control.  They doubt their judgement, yes; they're uncertain if they have enough.  They worry about the distance still left to explore.  But they're not asking me, "Do we have enough? Is it much further?"  They don't need me. They know that, by the rules, I'm not allowed to tell them. They can't know how long the tunnel is until they reach the end of it ... and getting there is as much of an adventure as fighting the monsters at the end of it.

Which is why I rewarded them with treasure, provided by newly made friends, when they managed the ordeal.  On their own.

True enough, I gave them some advice.  They weren't required to take it.  And I allowed some moments of providence to give them a little more than they expected.  In any adventure, we can't just pour bad things on the party.  Sometimes, things should go right.  But they'd have done fine if I hadn't been a bit generous.  I saw that generousity as icing on a cake; and as a bit of treasure in itself, for the party being brave enough to just keep going.

Many parties wouldn't have. They'd have quit as soon as it was plain they would need stockpiles of food.  They'd have quit as soon as the reward wasn't plain.  They'd have overthought themselves into much more danger than was real.  The math would have been just too damn hard.

The party earned that treasure at the end of it.  Not only because they did the math, but because they found the wherewithal to lift themselves up and overcome a very difficult obstacle, one that challenged more than their ability; it challenged their ability to keep going.

I don't listen when participants of this game complain about math.  They really don't understand anything about what makes a gam exciting.

I should add just a few words about joint effort.  Uncertain situations like this, that need to be calculated and structured, build parties as active, supportive teams.  Players able to do the math more easily teach others, encouraging trust.  Figuring out just what needs to be done encourages group problem solving.  And succeeding at it builds long-lasting friendships.  I should say more; but if you don't understand this intuitively by my bringing up the subject, I could throw thousands of words at the subject and get nowhere.  So I shall save that diatribe for some other post on some other day.