Geek Gab

Bob Seger Could Write Like a King

Bob Seger’s song Turn the Page is about a singer on the road with his band. Reading the three verses, you notice how incredibly specific is to the time, place, and profession of a rock musician on the road in a bus in the early 70s.

On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha
You can listen to the engine moanin’ out his one note song
You can think about the woman or the girl you knew the night before
But your thoughts will soon be wanderin’ the way they always do
When you’re ridin’ sixteen hours and there’s nothin’ there to do
And you don’t feel much like ridin’, you just wish the trip was through

I can’t tell you how beautiful and precise these words are without taking a lot more space than I have here. And maybe you wouldn’t get why unless you’ve tried bitterly hard to write something evocative, precise, and beautiful.

They’re sublime with their clarity and linguistic lyricism. They illuminate what an engine sounds like, what the singer thinks about, an allusion to what he did last night, and the emptiness of miles of passing road that never ends.

And it’s so compact and concise. Not a single wasted word. His language, entirely apart from the music and the performance, SINGS.

Verse 2: Precision in time and place and situation.

Well, you walk into a restaurant all strung out from the road
And you feel the eyes upon you as you’re shakin’ off the cold

People stare because you’re a star, and they all know who you are. And their eyes track you. “Do you know who that IS?”

You pretend it doesn’t bother you but you just want to explode
Most times you can’t hear ’em talk, other times you can
All the same old clichés, “Is it woman, is it man?”

It’s 1972 (the album was “In 1972,” came out in 1973) and men wearing long hair is strange. “Heh, is that even a man?”

And you always seem outnumbered so you don’t dare make a stand

How do you face down a crowd of rednecks who outnumber you 15 or 10 to 1?

You want to write well, write with DETAILS. Specific, precisely chosen, illuminating, no more than necessary details that put the audience in the place, time, situation, and mindset of the character.

Verse 3 – What it feels like to be onstage in ?? Words

Out there in the spotlight you’re a million miles away
Every ounce of energy you try to give away
As the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play

Ever wanted to know what it’s like to play a Rock concert at the bottom of a tour? Bob Seger just told you in 26 words. That’s brevity.

Later in the evening as you lie awake in bed
With the echoes from the amplifiers ringin’ in your head
You smoke the day’s last cigarette, rememberin’ what she said

The woman or girl he knew the night before, when he’s alone in bed, what she said comes back to him. On the road, in an empty hotel room 16 hours east of Omaha.

Bob Seger, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Art and God; God in Art

The author (right) is wrong. Stories aren’t about “saying” anything at all. They’re about how you make people feel. The descriptions, events, and characters evoke emotions in the people reading/hearing them.

When a small child is in the path of a huge and rampaging beast, we react emotionally.

When a courageous man suffers unjustly, we react.

When a beautiful, innocent woman is captured by a brute, we react.

And when justice is done, when good triumphs against insuperable odds, when faith is rewarded, when hope is proven true, we react.

Writing is but the vessel, the means of conveyance. Art speaks to us on levels we are not fully aware of, and it influences us in ways we don’t even perceive.

And yeah, stories are told in words, written in words, and in most movies the characters speak words. But the words are mere tools to communicate the spirit of the thing.

A spirit of rebelliousness, hopelessness, vice, lust, greed. A spirit of peace, hope, love, courage, virtue. A spirit of noble struggle against the inevitable, of accepting one’s wyrd or fate, of accepting one’s limits and fighting to maximize one’s strengths.

Even when people are TRYING to communicate ideas and even succeeding, those ideas are mere vessels to communicate emotions. A spirit of resentment against their home country, or at capitalism, at generosity, the government, communism, men, women. Or of love and pride in their country, or of empathy for their fellow man, of nobility, of greatness.

All stories evoke emotions and all art is spiritual. And great and beautiful art evokes awe, which connects us directly to the infinite and divine.

The most effective art speaks to our spirit, our soul. In great art is God, and nothing is more stirring than that.

Mörk Borg Mechanic Design: Difficulty Ratings in TTRPGs

This post is a game design post, a post about the fit and finish of a game, about those last touches that moves a game from good to great or even superlative. It’s not suggesting a House Rule for people to adopt in their own Mörk Borg game, for reasons I’ll go into a little down the page, but looking at how the designers of the game could have made the Difficulty Rating descriptions (chart right, click to embiggen) work better with the mechanics (also right).

For those who don’t know, Mörk Borg is a dark fantasy TTRPG set in a world that is gonna die, and right soon. Like in a few months to a year.

The planet has been partially eaten, reality is warping, and the prophecies say the sun is going to go out and fire will consume the land. (Also, all kids under 7 years, 7 days will one day in the future die and come back as zombies, which I have to tell you, SO much fun.)

The basic game mechanic is that you roll a d20, add your Attribute (-3 to +3, at the beginning of the game), and compare to the Difficulty Rating to determine success. When I first looked at the DR chart, I immediately glommed onto a few problems, not with the mechanics but with how the mechanics meshed with the descriptions.

DR 6 (“so simple people laugh at you for failing”) means the most genius human in the world has a chance of looking like a buffoon 10% of the time in their area of expertise. This seems incredibly high.

Normal (DR 12) means Average people (+0) fail 55% of the time. Anything you fail at more often than not is not a normal task.

DR 18 (“He didn’t do that. I saw him do that, but he couldn’t have done that.”) for an average bloke, is possible 15% of the time. For a Hapless Harry, -2, it’s still possible 5% of the time, and he’s almost omni-incompetent. And for the elite (+3), it’s possible 30% of the time. None of these match the description of something pretty much impossible.

To make the mechanics match the descriptions, you can either change the descriptions, or change the Difficulty Ratings. I went with adjusting the numbers, because that actually involves both.

Here’s how the numbers need to be changed: The lowest DR needs to be lower. The “Normal” DR needs to be lower. And the highest DR needs to be much higher. Here’s what I came up with:

Difficulty Ratings (DR)

5 – so simple people laugh at you for failing
7 – routine but some chance of failure
9 – pretty simple but not simple enough to not roll
11 – normal
13 – demanding
15 – difficult
17 – really hard
19 – intimidating
21 – formidable
23 – should not be possible

Lower Bottom: I dropped DR 6 by one point and adjusted the two above it appropriately.

Dropping Normal: I also reduced Normal DR by one point, which put it right in line with the others I had already adjusted. I also reduced everything except 18 by one point.

Higher Highest: I raised 18 to 23.

All the above changes I made so that the odds of success matched the descriptions better. (See “The Odds,” below.) However, this did leave a few holes in the chart.

I inserted new benchmarks at DR 13, 19, and 21. I borrowed the names of the new benchmarks from the Cypher System because they fit with the theme Mörk Borg was going for, and Cypher has an excellent naming scheme.

The Odds

These kinds of paragraphs tend to make people’s eyes glaze over, mine included. I don’t know how to present them so that they’re interesting and fun, so just hold on for the ride.

A DR 5 means that the lowest scum (-3) fails those “so simple people laugh at you for failing” tests with a roll of 7 or below, which happens 35% of the time. Meanwhile +0, average people, only fail them 20% of the time, while the elite of the elite (+3) fail 5% of the time.

All of those odds track. I could have gone with DR 4, but I decided that the +3 crowd should at least have a chance of failing this badly (5%), since—as we’ll see later—they’ll also have a 5% chance at succeeding at the “physics is broken” tasks that were DR 18. DR 5 meant all the DRs should be odd, to match.

DR 11 for “normal” means an average person (+0) succeeds 50% of the time. That seems pretty normal, or what other games often call Average.

DR 23 “should not be possible” (aka “Inconceivable!” or “I can’t believe my lying eyes.”) means the most elite human (+3) only succeeds 5% of the time, and nobody else has even a chance. That seems almost impossible to me.

Though, arguably, given that you can increase an attribute to +6, “nearly actually impossible” could be as high as 25, depending on how literally you want to take the description. This would mean there are things in the world that players can’t accomplish until one of them reaches +5 in the appropriate attribute. Especially in Mörk Borg‘s Dark Fantasy dystopia, having things that can’t be touched until close to the very end, or indeed will get left undone, is actually apt.

Design Not House Rule

The DR chart is woven into all the mechanics of the game, so changing it would require altering the entire game, rewriting the rules from scratch. This is a far more ambitious project than it would seem, especially for a game with a… uh… more selective appeal than other Fantasy TTRPG games.

Which is why this is a critique rather than a suggested House Rule. As a House Rule it isn’t useful, as a critique of game design, it can help future designers learn HOW to think in a larger sense than just this one problem.

As a designer, it’s tempting to come up with a solution and skip to playtesting. What is usually needed first is an analysis of the proposed rule or rule change. You should take a moment and logic test your rule: “Does this make sense in the context of the world I’m describing? Is it worth the hassle? (That is, is the work players and GM’s put in to enact the rule worth the game effects it produces?) Is there a simpler way to achieve the same thing?”

This specific adjustment may seem nit-picky, and most players, DM’s, and designers probably couldn’t care less. Still, if you’re going to have descriptions of mechanics, the dice percentages attendant to them should match. “The toughest armor in the galaxy, made of pure neutronium,” shouldn’t be vulnerable to a knife blow, and “nearly physically impossible” shouldn’t be possible for the worst 9% of humanity.

Mörk Borg is absolutely STUFFED with phenomenal color and mood. This is just one case where not only are most of the descriptions lacking in color, but they don’t match the mechanics. Ideally, I’d replace all the descriptions of Normal and above with colorful ones matching the Death Metal aesthetic of the game, but I’m not getting paid enough to do that.

The Meaning of Christ’s Atonement

I’ve seen Christianity called a “slave’s morality” before, such as in the image to the right. Almost always, such deride the crucifixion as Christ merely “being nailed to a tree,” or in this case, “being nailed to the cross.”

The virtue of Christ’s sacrifice is not just in getting nailed to the cross. If just the physical act had taken place, it would have been in vain, for dead wood and mere iron avails no one.

Christ suffered in Gethsemane and again on the cross an infinite sacrifice for the sins of Man. It was the son of God and his atoning sacrifice, his ultimate sacrifice for all mankind, taking upon himself the burden of all our sins that we might repent and be forgiven—it was this that gave the crucifixion its meaning.

THIS WAS THE CENTRAL EVENT OF HISTORY. All prophets before prophesied of its coming and significance, and all prophets after testified of its occurrence and significance.

Christ could have been executed in any way, and had the same atoning sacrifice occurred, it would have been as monumental an event. Execution for the sins of mankind was the point, not “getting nailed to the cross.”

UNJUST execution (as he was guilty of no crime), SINLESS sacrifice (as he suffered all the consequences for all sins without having committed any), that by paying our debts he would become our creditor, and could grant us the supreme status of being joint inheritors of the glories of Heaven.

In his Father’s house there are many rooms. If it were not so, he would have told us. And through Christ’s sacrifice we could enter with him to dwell in his Father’s house.

Is this a slave’s morality? It is the morality of law and punishment. But also a morality of mercy. Thus, a complete and whole morality, hence perfect. (And perfect means whole and complete.)

But it is a slave’s morality and a master’s morality, a widow’s morality and a husband’s morality, a soldier’s morality and a surgeon’s morality, a king’s morality, a daughter’s morality, a pauper’s morality and a banker’s morality, a farmer’s morality and a carpenter’s morality.

It is a morality for all mankind.

Let Us Speak Peace, Not Vitriol

Sincere condolences to my Catholic brethren on the death of their supreme pontiff yesterday.

May the Holy Spirit rest upon you and bring you peace and comfort. A bit of commentary on the vitriol expressed towards him today:

The anger over sectional differences in this country and the world is magnified by Satan because he delights in contention, which is utterly antithetical to the Spirit and the Pure Love of Christ.

When contention enters our hearts, the Spirit flees, and we are left open to the wiles of the Devil. This nation and world needs more comity, forgiveness, and amity, and less vitriol, contempt, and rancor.

So I reach out to those of you with whom I have doctrinal differences, for we both honor Christ and believe in his promises, and in our joint mission to help the sick, poor, widowed, and sorrowing, and to spread the good news of Christ, we can both do good in this world and as Followers of Christ we must not quarrel one with another. This is the injunction he has laid on all his followers.