One of the first reviews I ever received for a book I had written was for the mini-adventure The Dragon’s Wish, which was published by Fantasy Flight Games during the early D20 boom. The reviewer hated it. He had several reasons for doing so, but his biggest problem was that he felt that the encounters weren’t balanced: The adventure was designed for 9th level characters, but I had them encountering, among other things, a primitive tribe of kobolds (low CR) and a pair of extremely powerful stone golems (high CR).

Now, The Dragon’s Wish was one of my first published works and it was hardly perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But there were two main reactions that I had to the review.

First, I was frustrated because the reviewer had clearly failed to understand what the adventure was about. He had approached it as some sort of hack ‘n slash affair, but the module wasn’t designed with combat in mind. At the beginning of The Dragon’s Wish, the PCs are asked by a dying dragon to take his heart to the ancient draconic burial grounds in the Valley of the Dragons. The rest of the adventure is a travelogue allowing the PCs to see various facets of draconic mythology. The stone golems aren’t meant to be fought: They were powerful gatekeepers who allow the PCs to enter the valley when their task is made known. The kobolds are a primitve tribe who venerate the dragons without truly understanding them. And so forth.

Second, I realized that something fundamental had shifted in the common perception of what constituted proper encounter design in D&D.

Back in the halcyon, nostalgia-tinged days of 1st Edition, nobody would have blinked twice at the idea of including low-level encounters in high-level adventures. For example, in the Bloodstone modules (the original H-series designed for levels 15 thru 100), the designers had no problem including combat encounters with common orcs.

In fact, this was an attitude that persisted more or less all the way through the latter days of 2nd Edition. The Apocalypse Stone was a high-level adventure published to provide a campaign-ending scenario so that groups could reboot fresh with 3rd Edition. But if you flip through it, you discover quite a few encounters that are virtually identical to the types of encounters found in low- or mid-level modules. (There’s harder stuff too, of course.)

MISREADING 3rd EDITION

So what happened in 3rd Edition?

As far as I can tell, everybody misread the rulebook. Here’s what the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide had to say about “Encounters and Challenge Ratings” (pg. 100):

A monster’s Challenge Rating (CR) tells you the level of the party for which the monster is a good challenge. A monster of CR 5 is an appropriate challenge for four 5th-level characters. If the characters are higher level than the monster, they get fewer XP because the monster should be easier to defeat. Likewise, if the party level [….] is lower than the monster’s Challenge Rating, the PCs get a greater reward.

And a little later it answered the question “What’s Challenging?” (pg. 101):

Since every game session probably includes many encounters, you don’t want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period after every fight, and that slows down the game. An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs’ level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources — hit points, spells, magic item uses, etc. This means, on average, that after about four encounters of the party’s level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain their spells. A fifth encounter would probably wipe them out.

And, at that point, everybody apparently stopped reading. Because this was what seeped into the collective wisdom of the gaming community: Every encounter should have an EL equal to the party’s level and the party should have four encounters per day.

I literally can’t understand how this happened, because the very next paragraph read:

The PCs should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with Encounter Levels higher than their party level. As a general rule, if the EL is two lower than the party’s level, the PCs should be able to take on twice as many encounters before having to stop and rest. Two levels below that, and the number of encounters they can cope with doubles again, and so on.

And if that wasn’t clear enough in saying that the PCs should be facing a wide variety of ELs, the very next page had a chart on it that said 30% of the encounters in an adventure should have an EL lower than the PCs’ level; 50% should have an EL equal to the PCs’ level; 15% should have an EL 1 to 4 higher than the PCs’ level; and 5% should have an EL 5+ higher than the PCs’ level.

But all of that was ignored and the completely erroneous “common wisdom” of “four encounters per day with an EL equal to the party’s level” became the meme of the land.

By the time The Forge of Fury was released as part of the original Adventure Path in late 2000, the meme had already taken hold. The Forge of Fury — an adventure for 3rd to 5th level characters — included, as one of its encounters, a CR 10 roper. You’ll note that this encounter follows the guidelines printed in the DMG precisely. It didn’t matter. The fanboys howled from one side of the Internet to the other about this horrible and unbalanced encounter. And why were they howling? Because encounters should always have an EL equal to the average level of the PCs.

WotC never made that “mistake” again.

REAPING WHAT YOU SOW

The most virulent form of the meme was rarely followed in its strictest form. But the general meme of “an encounter should almost always have an EL equal to the party’s level” sunk pretty deeply into the collective consciousness.

But there are consequences for designing encounters like that:

(1) The average resolution time for any combat encounter increases (because a more challenging opponent takes longer to overcome).

(2) The PCs are more likely to suffer grievous injury during any one encounter, which means they’re more likely to adopt cautious styles of gameplay. This leads to the 15-minute adventuring day becoming more common, along with all the problems that creates.

(3) These factors result in fewer encounters during each game session, which means that it becomes much more difficult and/or tedious to run the classic mega-dungeons and other combat-oriented styles of play.

(4) The utility of any given monster is significantly reduced because the range of levels in which you can build “appropriate” encounters using the creature is narrowed.

I used to play D&D with my friends during lunch hour, and in these short sessions we would still routinely get through 3 or 4 combat encounters. But with 3rd Edition people were routinely reporting relatively simple encounters taking hours to resolve.

A lot of people blame the system for that. But, in my experience, it’s all about the encounter design.

DESIGNING BETTER ENCOUNTERS

When I looked at the design of classic modules from the ’70s and ’80s, I discovered that most of the encounters in those modules would actually equate to an EL at least 2-5 levels lower than the party. And when I duplicated that encounter design in 3rd Edition, combat predictably speeded up.

With that in mind, here are my tips for designing encounters:

(1) Design most encounters around an EL 2 to 4 lower than the party’s level.

(2) Don’t be afraid of large mobs (10+ creatures) with a total EL equal to the PCs’ level. The common design wisdom is that these creatures are “too easy” for the PCs. This is true if you’re thinking in terms of the “common wisdom” that sprang up around misreading the DMG, but in practice these types of encounters work just fine if you’re looking for fast encounters and lots of them.

(3) Encounters with an EL equal to the PCs’ level should be used sparingly. They should be thought of as “major encounters” — the memorable set pieces of the adventure. It actually won’t take very long before the expectations of your players’ have been re-aligned and these encounters leave them thinking, “Wow! That was a tough encounter!”

(4) And that means you get even more bang for your buck when you roll out the very rare EL+2 or EL+4 encounter.

Basically what you’re doing is creating a wider dynamic range for your encounter design.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

FLEXIBLE DESIGN: I like to design large complexes of opponents who will interact with each other and react, as a group, to the presence of the PCs. And this works a lot better if I can take two encounters and add them together without ending up with something that will completely devastate the party. If the PCs are level 5 and the goblin warband is only EL 3, then it become much easier to have the goblins call on a second warband to reinforce them: If the PCs prevent the reinforcements from showing up, they have two standard encounters. If they don’t, then they have one harder encounter.

EXPERIENCE POINTS: The designers of 3rd Edition increased the pace at which XP was accumulated and levels were gained. I understand and even support the reasons behind this change, but I personally found the result to be simply too fast for my taste. For example, I tend to run long 8-12 hour sessions, and the pace of 3rd Edition experience usually meant that the PCs were leveling up once per session. This meant that the power level of the campaign shifted very rapidly (making it difficult to tell coherent stories). It also meant that the players never really had a chance to get comfortable with their characters (they had barely learned one set of abilities before being given new ones).

I now play with halved XP rewards and have had good results with that. But, really, that’s just a matter of personal taste.

However, with that being said, using the encounter design recommended here, you’ll find that your players will be overcoming many more combat encounters in the course of an average session. And even though the EL of each encounter will be lower, this will still generally result in accelerating the already accelerated pace of XP accrual. Whether you’ll need to adjust the XP award accordingly will depend on your personal tastes.

A PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT: If your group has already grown accustomed to the “typical” design of 3rd Edition encounters, it may take some time before your expectations have adjusted to the new system. The typical encounter will feel easier to you… and that’s okay. It is easier.

But you should also be aware that some of the secondary effects will also take awhile to sink in for your players. If you’ve been playing with “typical” 3rd Edition encounters, then your players have probably learned to take a very cautious approach — every encounter has been potentially deadly and, therefore, every encounter has been carefully analyzed and handled.

So for the first couple of sessions, for example, you may only see a slight increase in the pace of gameplay. But once your players internalize the change and loosen up, you’ll see that pace increase again.

Pay attention to your own expectations, too: You might find yourself getting a little frustrated with the fact that your villains are missing the PCs more than they’re hitting them. There’s a sense that a lot of us develop that says “if hit points aren’t being lost, then nothing happened”. This isn’t actually true. And, in fact, if the PCs aren’t losing hit points the more stuff will happen.

DIFFERENT TOOLS FOR DIFFERENT JOBS: The exact balance of combat encounters you choose will depend largely on the type of adventure you’re designing. For example, if you’re designing an intrigue-laced adventure in which the only combat encounter is likely to be the big show-down at the end… well, that single encounter should probably be a doozy. If you want to encourage a loose, rapid-fire style of play with the players feeling like major heroes… well, crank up the number of low-EL encounters.

If there’s one message to take away from this essay it’s that variety is the spice of encounter design. By extending the dynamic range of encounters, you’re expanding the variety of the encounters you can (and should) design.

I’ve gotten tired of explaining why supply-side economics — i.e., voodoo economics — don’t actually work. So I’ve decided to write up a quick-and-dirty version that I can just link to as necessary. This is not meant to be a definitive statement on the subject. It’s not even an air-tight argument of the principles being espoused. It’s just me pointing at some pretty fundamental absurdities in voodoo economics and saying, “Hey! Look! Have you even thought about this? It doesn’t make any sense!”

(1) Money is a form of power. Power tends to accumulate more power. Thus, in a capitalist society, wealth tends to flow up, not down. The rich tend to become richer and the poor tend to become poorer. Supplying the wealthy with even more money doesn’t cause that money to flow down to the poor — it just accelerates this natural trend. Which is why, every time supply-side economics have been attempted, the divide between the rich and the poor has grown wider.

The argument has been made that a “rising tide raises all ships”, but the reason this disproportionate distribution of wealth is a problem leads us to…

(2) The modus operandi of capitalism is consumer spending. In a capitalist system you have multiple products available, and those products which have the greatest value to the consumer succeed (because they buy them) and those which have less value fail (because they don’t). In a very real sense, capitalism is a democracy in which you vote with your dollars for the products you like best. And although in practice a capitalist system can become flawed in many ways, capitalism has widely proven itself to be the best system for encouraging quality, efficiency, and innovation.

You need an unequal distribution of wealth for this system to work, but when that inequality becomes sufficiently disproportionate the reduced spending power enjoyed by the majority of your consumers results in a less efficient system. Not only are the quality of decisions which emerge from such a system degraded, but the system’s ability to encourage increased value and quality becomes quashed.

This all leads us to the fundamenal problem with supply-side economics…

(3) If you want to stimulate a capitalist economy, you should be giving tax breaks to the poor, not the rich.

The reason for this is the difference between spending and investing. Republicans argue that giving tax cuts to the rich allow them to invest in business. By investing in business, the argument goes, the economy grows and the workers end up benefitting in the long run.

But while investing is an important part of capitalism, it’s the secondary mechanism of the capitalist system. The primary mechanism of a capitalist system is spending.

If you give money to someone and have them invest it, that money may or may not eventually result in economic activity and capitalist success. (Whether it does or not will depend entirely on how the money is invested. If it’s invested in a better, cheaper product that people want, it will stimulate the economy. If it isn’t, then it won’t.)

But if you give the money to someone and have them spend it, that money immediately results in economic activity and capitalist success. This result is guaranteed.

In other words: If you give the money to an investor, you are injecting that money into the economy in an inefficient manner — that money may or may not end up growing a business producing products that consumers want.

If you give that money to a consumer, on the other hand, you are injecting that money almost directly into the economy — that money will automatically end up growing a business producing products that consumers want (because the consumer will spend it on the products that they want).

(4) The name “trickle down economics” is actually truth in advertising. Money in a capitalist system flows reliably from the consumer to the successful business/investor/capitalist. Movement in the opposite direction, however, is not reliable.

Which actually brings us full circle: In capitalism, wealth tends to flow up and trickle down. If you want to stimulate an economy, you want to make the money flow and, thus, encourage better ideas and more valuable products.

And that means tax cuts for the poor and the middle-class, not the rich.

THE OTHER FALLACY

Of course, this conclusion simply opens the door to the larger question of when such tax cuts are appropriate. The other fallacy of voodoo economics is the claim that lowering taxes will always result in sufficient economic growth to raise overall tax revenues. This is self-evidently not true for several reasons:

(1) If you reduce the tax rate to 0%, it doesn’t matter how much economic growth you enjoy as a result: You still won’t end up with increased tax revenues (since you’re not collecting any).

(2) Even if you replace “no taxes” with “infinitesimal taxes”, the conclusion is still palpably absurd. If you have an average tax rate of 30% and you lower that to an average tax rate of 1%, you’re claiming that the economy will grow to 30 times its current size entirely as a result of the tax cuts. (That means you can’t count inflation or the normal economic growth that would have occurred even if you hadn’t cut taxes.)

The underlying fallacy here is the belief that the social institutions and infrastructure created by our government have no positive role on economic growth. Common sense alone should tell you that a certain degree of social infrastructure (e.g. law and order), physical infrastructure (e.g. roads), and educational infrastructure (e.g. univeral education) is beneficial to the economy (even if one ignores all the other societal benefits). And even the most cursory analysis of history shows this to be true: Anarchy is not conducive to economic growth.

On the other hand, it is equally trivial to demonstrate that the opposite extreme is equally absurd: The benefits brought by government cannot possibly outweigh the problems caused by an average tax rate of 100%.

The inevitable conclusion is that there is a sweet spot in which both the benefits of low taxes and the benefits of the societal infrastructure provided by our government are maximized.

Or to look at it another way: The problem with both extremist libertarians and communists is that they equally fail to appreciate the sweet spot between anarchic liberty and absolute central control.

Well… that was mediocre.

Okay, here’s some background:

(1) I am quite willing to stand up and defend the prequel trilogy films as being diamonds in rough. I feel that watching those films is roughly equivalent to watching the Special Edition versions of the original trilogy: There are good-to-great films buried in there, but they’ve been ruined by George Lucas’ inability to edit himself. The only difference is that we’ve seen the original versions of the A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi — that makes it (relatively) easy for us to ignore the crap Lucas has shoveled on top of those films. With the prequel trilogy, we’ve never seen the version without the fart jokes.

(2) The original Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series was broadcast on the Cartoon Network. It had a story by George Lucas, but the project was largely spearheaded by Genndy Tartakovsky. This series was single-handedly responsible for rekindling my love of Star Wars. After years of abusive mediocrity, I had literally forgotten how much I loved this universe. After watching Clone Wars, I tracked down high quality versions of the original versions of the original trilogy and, watching them, I realized just how much I still loved these films and how much damage George Lucas had inflicted on his own creation.

(3) I wasn’t alone. The Clone Wars series was so popular it got extended for a second series. And when that was a success, Lucas decided to turn it into a full-blown TV series. The animation was “upgraded” from 2D cell art to 3D CGI, and then Lucas felt that was going so well that he took the first several episodes and packaged them into a feature film for theatrical release.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line Genndy Tartakovsky didn’t make the cut. (He’s apparently working on the sequel to The Dark Crystal, a fact which fills me with glee.) The loss of Tartakovsky is unfortunate because, frankly, Star Wars: The Clone Wars doesn’t capture the same magic as its progenitor. (Note the difference between Star Wars: Clone Wars and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Thanks for the crystal-clear titles.)

Basically, here’s the run-down:

(1) Visually, the animation style is surprisingly effective and often incredibly beautiful.

(2) Unfortunately, from a cinematic standpoint, the directing and visual storytelling just doesn’t cut it. There are lots of battles, for example, but none of them are particularly compelling or memorable.

(3) But certainly part of the problem the director has is that the script just isn’t that interesting. The story never manages to make me care about what’s going on (which is largely because nobody in the movie seems to care all that much), the dialogue is cliche-ridden, and the whole thing is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies. Plus, while there’s often a lot of sound and fury, the author doesn’t find anything particularly unique to do with it. So in the battles, for example, there are lots of lasers being fired and lightsabers being swung around… but it’s just visual noise. Very pretty visual noise, but still utterly forgettable.

(4) Perhaps most disappointingly, the characters are largely flat (with one exception which I’ll note below). The only reason I even vaguely care about any of them is because of their previous appearances in other films. The argument could certainly be made that it would be difficult to do anything meaningful with characters who’s stories have already been told from beginning to end in the original six movies, but I can literally point directly at Tartakovsky’s work in the original animated series as an example of how you can always find fresh dramatic material.

(5) The pacing of the film is also very poor. But that leads me to a larger point, which is that this material was not originally intended to be a single feature film… and I think it shows. Amidala, for example, doesn’t show up until the third act of the film, and then plays an almost deus ex machina role in wrapping up the plot.

I suspect that if I had been watching this as three episodes of a television series, my reaction might have been more positive. (So I’m probably going to give the TV series a shot when it premieres.)

(6) It’s almost as if Lucas intentionally tries to find something incredibly stupid to put into his films. In this case, it’s Jabba the Hutt’s flamingly homosexual uncle. I just… I wish I was making that up.

(7) On the other hand, the one thing I did like was Anakin’s padawan, Ahsoka. Her initial introduction left me skeptical, but she rapidly grew on me despite the weak and repetitive nature of the script. She’s the one character that the film, on its own merits, makes me care about. And I’m mildly interested to see if the series can develop the serious dramatic potential in the relationship between Anakin and Ahsoka.

I’ve seen a few people trying to defend the weaknesses of this movie by saying that it’s “aimed at kids”.

Well, even if we ignore the PG rating of the film: So what? There is a difference between “aimed at kids” and “stupid”.

When I was a kid I could tell the difference between the stuff that I actually liked and the stuff that was created by some adult trying to patronize me. I don’t think I was alone. And I reject out of hand the flawed logic that “it’s OK that it’s bad because it’s just for kids”.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars isn’t a mediocre movie because it’s aimed at young teens. It’s a mediocre movie because it’s a mediocre movie.

Recently, for a project I’m intermittently working on, I’ve been reading a lot of primary feminist theory. Since my thoughts on such matters have been getting regularly stimulated by this reading, it means you’re going to have to put up with me sharing some of them… particularly the ones which little bearing on my project and, thus, have no other outlet.

So let’s start with Freud’s concept of penis envy. Boiling it down to its most basic form, Freud’s theory goes something like: At some point during puberty, girls figure out that they don’t have penises and boys do. The girl, discovering this, becomes jealous that the boy has a penis and she doesn’t.

This is stupid enough — since it implicitly assumes that a vagina is the mere absence of a penis — but Freud isn’t done yet: Because the girl wants a penis, she naturally wants her father’s penis. This translates into a sexual desire for her father. And since this sexual desire for her father is forbidden, she defensively shifts her sexual desire from her father to men in general.

Freud had issues. This much is clear.

(Please note, I am not making this up. It should also be noted that, since a vagina is not the mere absence of a penis, it would make just as much sense — using Freud’s logic — to say that men are possessed of “vagina envy”.)

Which brings me to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan makes a pretty much indisputable argument that Freud’s theory is abject bullshit: If a woman in Victorian Europe envied a penis, she did so only insofar as it represented the social justice and opportunity which was automatically afforded to men and denied to her.

In other words, Freud was a product of his time… and a sex-obsessed one at that.

However, insofar as Freud was describing in sex-obsessed and metaphoric terms a legitimate psychological facet of women in Victorian Europe — i.e., their envy of the social opportunities men possessed and they lacked — there can be valuable insight gleaned from Freud’s theory.

Because, in point of fact, Freud still isn’t done: Penis envy persists after the woman matures into a socially acceptable sexual love for men who are not her father. (I feel silly just typing that.) A woman eventually satisfies that penis envy by having a son, and thus coming into possession of a penis of her own. (I feel even sillier typing that.)

Okay, let’s strip away Freud’s sex-obsessed silliness. Metaphors aside, what the heck is he talking about?

Friedan makes the very compelling argument that, when a woman finds her own growth as an individual cut off by social injustice, she will attempt to find other outlets through which she can express herself.  And one of these outlets is through her own children: Unable to live her own life fully, the mother tries to find fulfillment through the accomplishments of her children.

In truth, we can strip the words “woman” and “mother” out of the preceding paragraph entirely: It remains equally true for all human beings. And certainly we are all familiar with both fathers and mothers trying to make their children live out their own thwarted dreams.

This is bad enough in itself, but Friedan makes the wider point that — in post-war America — the oppression of woman had reached a point in which the common housewife was becoming literally infantilized. (Her argument is lengthy, well-documented, and, frankly, horrifying to my modern eyes, even though I was already largely familiar with the societal injustices she was describing.)

In that environment, the natural impulse for women to try to live out their thwarted dreams through their children becomes even more severely damaging to the child’s psyche: The dreams and goals of the mother, having become infantilized, arrest the child’s ability to mature into an adult. The result can be grossly summarized as a “momma’s boy”.

Which brings me to the relatively random thought I wanted to share with you: I wonder how much of this emergent social phenomena in the late 1940’s, 1950’s, and early 1960’s — as revealed in painstaking detail by Friedan — resulted in both the creation and popular resonance of Psycho. In Psycho, Norman Bates is so literally trapped in an infantilized state as an extension of his mother’s will that he becomes her to some very real extent. When a woman becomes desirable to him — a symbol of sexuality and potential maturity which would break his pyschotic connection with his mother — he kills her.

To what extent did Psycho grow out of the deep social discontent that Friedan documents in The Feminine Mystique? And to what extent did audiences, experiencing that social discontent in their own lives — whether they recognized it for what it was or not — find the traumas of their own lives writ into the tragedy of the film?

Of course, on the other hand, the film can also be read as subconsciously supporting the darker side of the culture which gave it birth: Norman’s victim is portrayed, however briefly, as a successful and independent woman pursuing a career outside of the house… a direct threat to the feminine mystique of a woman finding her complete fulfillment in the duties of wife and mother. Having posed that threat to “proper womanhood”, she is violently “put in her place” by the male killer.

Did those supporting the malfunctioning society of the 1950s find as much satisfaction in the film as those who were consciously or unconsciously rebelling against it?

I thought I’d written this on here before, but apparently I was just imagining that. In regards to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

I would like to thank George Lucas for making the Star Wars prequels. Without the valuable training I have gleaned from those films, I would have found it much more difficult to ignore all the ridiculous foibles of this film and enjoy it as much as I did.

The trick, you see, lies in being able to instantly assess that something is both incredibly lame and completely irrelevant to the film. You then jettison that information instantaneously and go back to enjoying the rest of the film (which is rather good).

Michelangelo is quoted as saying, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

I have a theory about George Lucas: He’s like Michelangelo. Except he’s gotten lazy and he doesn’t bother carving away all of the marble necessary to reveal the angel. The portions of the angel that you can see are still pretty awesome, but there’s all this other marble — the absurdities, the bathroom humor, the extraneous nonsense — getting in the way.

And, as I say, the Star Wars prequels trained me pretty well in the “fine art” of ignoring all that excess marble Lucas leaves lying around. So Lucas throws in some stupid scene with Shia LaBeouf swinging around like Tarzan and leading a tribe of monkeys, and I promptly reach into my brain, grab that idiocy, throw it away, and pretend as if the film existed without that scene (or the many other scenes like it).

And I’m happier for it.

Of course, the film itself is still flawed. But at least this way I can enjoy — in a somewhat marred fashion — the angel that could have been.

So, long story short vis-a-vis Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: A decent enough flick. I was hoping that Spielberg would be more successful in reining in Lucas’ excesses, but despite that it’s enjoyable enough. I mean, it’s not even close to being a Raiders of the Lost Ark or an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it’s fun enough.