Alexis Smolensk
My wish in writing this is to avoid being self-important while efficiently explaining my retrospectives, record, practices and work since 2008, as a dungeon master and designer of content specifically for dungeons and dragons. I'm writing this because my blog Tao of D&D has now reached a length where it has become impossible to "know me" by starting at the beginning and reading up to the present... simply because the blog now has more than 4,100 posts, representing opinions about D&D that likely reach into the realm of three or four million words; about the equivalent of forty-five 300 page plus Forgotten Realms novels.
Contents
Thus I hope to provide a map for new readers, casual readers and even long-time readers a map with which to know me. For this, I'd like to provide a chronological foundation first, from my beginnings as a player and a DM before the establishment of my blog, my ideals of worldbuilding reaching back into the 1980s and then the overall progress of my blog these last eighteen years. From there, the next step would be the construction of my present world and it's maps, complimented by a discussion of my 1,500+ wiki page, featuring houserules and worldbuilding; and finally, a discussion of written books and other projects to date. I would hope these things can be covered in large strokes, enabling a comprehension of my gaming philosophy, designs and intentions for the future.
Personal Background
Beginnings
I began playing D&D in 1979, at the same time that I entered high school, first participating in a very ordinary sort of D&D game run by Shane Kraft, based on the White Box Set. AD&D became available in my city just three months later, whereupon everyone I knew dropped the old books and ran toward the new system; I asked for and got copies of the Dungeon Masters Guide, the Players Handbook and the Monster Manual for Christmas of '79. Within a few months, I began running my first campaign, which was something of a disaster.
In those first few years before 1984, I ran my second game world, which worked a little better. I also began to play in campaigns run by others my own age, college students and adults, wherever I could get a game, because in those days it was fairly easy to play three or four times a week in different campaigns. I was introduced to Rolemaster, Empire of the Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery... and to other non-fantasy games like Top Secret, Traveller and Gamma World. D&D remained my preferred system. I played in a round robin with a number of other DMs, where we'd each run progressively on Fridays; but as other DMs lost interest or the will to design their games, I found myself running every Friday night by default. Within four years of my introduction to the game, virtually every other DM I'd ever known had stepped down, so that I found myself the only reliable dungeon master, with as many players as I could want. I was a rare commodity.
With the summer of 1984, two major changes took place in my gaming. The first of these was design, which I shall come to after; the other had to do with the growing community in Calgary between 1984 and 1986. One of my players was closely connected to a fellow by the name of Rob Gordon, who was the primary organiser of the city wide game con of those years; I was asked to participate as a DM, to run tournaments, which I willingly did. I should not say so, but I was told at the time by many that I was "the best DM they'd ever known." Given what I've learned since, and what I must have been able to do then, I put that down to a small field of participants (the cons pulled numbers in the low hundreds) and an easy bar to clear. Nonetheless, I grew dissatisfied with the cultural footprint of the game that I could see. Casual players, which counted as nearly everyone at such events, saw D&D as "wish fulfillment." This idealism drastically deviated from the games I wanted to run, so that I became unenamoured with the people and with the events themselves; thus I "quit" public life and turned my back on "community D&D" for the next twenty years.
The Dark Years
Between the winter of early 1984 until late 1993, I ran a single campaign with reliable consistent players, many of which I'd known since high school, until their lives took them to other parts of the world and into relationships, so that the game folded. Thereafter, for the next nine years, I did not run D&D at all. I was married in 1986 and had a daughter in 1988; in September of 1994, in the space of four weeks, my partner Michelle's multiple schlerosis declined from remission into a full-onset, so that she became a quadrapelegic. Thereafter it would be kind to describe my life as merely a raging sea; by 1997, the last consequences had come to pass and for a time, while I wrested myself out of depression and loss and anxiety, my daughter went to live with her grandparents.
Because of this period, I was never introduced to 3rd Edition; I never had anything to do with OGL. I did non stumble across GNS Theory until the concept was six years old... and demonstrably garbage. I was out of the loop.
Return to Gaming
In 2003, my daughter and my second partner Tamara prevailed upon me to run them in D&D; others who knew my daughter joined and I began a campaign that ran continuously from that time until 2015, then intermittently up until 2023. New tools emerged; I had been more or less working on a D&D game world since the mid-1990s. I'd obtained a Pentium-III in '96, which I worked into the grave, to be replaced afterwards by a series of computers and the use of the internet. Through my gaming in the 2000s, I slowly moved away from pencil-and-paper gaming, creating more and more content on publisher and excel, while printing booklets for my players to use to keep up with my house-rules. I stumbled across blogging in 2004, tried a personal-content blog in 2006 and then began "Tao of D&D" in 2008. Steadily but surely I dropped every analog game characteristic except physical dice, which I still prefer to animated generation.
Early D&D Mechanics
The D&D Setting
The other big change that occurred in 1984 was a realisation that the real world of Earth provided far better material for game play than anything I could create from scratch. This wasn't an desire to create a "simulation" of the real world, that I've often been accused of doing, but rather an embrace of the simple fact that earth does not only have wide general maps of its continents, but maps of parts down to a scale of 1:10,000, which I could, if I wished, either purchase or copy from the map rooms of my university — which I did in the days before there was such a thing as the internet or GoogleEarth. Thus it was in 1984 that my players found that I could provide a contour map of Vienna or Odessa with an exactitude that put any product created by TSR to shame. At the same time, I could find pictures of mountains and landscapes, in-depth historical backgrounds, regional costume, art, treasures, numismatics... and everything ready made for instant application to my game world. With this superpower, I obliterated the stumbling, blind player who could not conceive of what a fictional town looked like, in exchange for players feeling like they were standing on the real bank of the real Danube in the summer, without any difficulty of explanation or description. Simulation was immaterial to the benefit this provided for immersion.
This began my running of the real world in my campaigns that continues to this day. All I needed to do was include the presence of magic, monsters, large tracts of the world that were occupied by peoples other than humans, adding adjustments to history and social logic as necessary. All these changes again obliterate any sense that I'm running a "simulated" Earth; but, it must be said, for many, this distinction is beyond their grasp.
Houserule Making
Having been raised from childhood by parents who did not hesitate to change the rules of boardgames when they failed to satisfy, by the age of 12 I was wholly comfortable with redesigned rules for Scrabble, Stock Ticker, Monopoly, Life, Careers, plus all the variations on card games that my parents had learned themselves as children, many of which occur in sources like Hoyle, reaching back more than a hundred years. Long before I'd ever heard of D&D, I was adjusting rules for the war games I'd begun playing in Junior High, like Panzerblitz, Squad Leader, RISK of course, Car Wars and so on. Rules in a game had never been sacrosanct in my upbringing, so when faced with the rules of D&D, and players dissatisfied with those rules, I did not hesitate to change them.
In the first five years of my D&D game, I tested concepts like alignment, player-vs-player, weapon speeds, damage against large opponents, armour class adjustments, hit location, paying fees to level and so on. When I failed to find any benefit for game play in these concepts, I dropped them, receiving nothing but support from players who appreciated how freedom from these concepts permitted greater agency on their part while drastically simplifying elements of game play, especially combat. In 1984, following a series of conversations with players about how to fix the combat system, we — my players and I — hit upon "stun rules," which smashed the old combat system of initiatives into pieces that ceased to be recognisable, while spectacularly improving my players experience of combat. I would argue that this was the first and perhaps the most beneficial game redesign I ever imposed. The rule reorganises a combat's tempo, threat, movement and control, turning the battle into a sort of escalating fragility, where the deterioration of hit points matter and a single decisive blow can change the trajectory of an outcome.
Trade System
In and around 1987, I imagined some sort of mathematically based construction that would ensure that the cost of things throughout the game world would differ logically from place to place. It would mean that the price of something such as wine would be low in a place like Spain or Italy, but increasingly more expensive as one travelled north. It would mean that furs in the far north could be bought cheap and transported into the south for real money. I began designing such a system immediately... and failed for 17 years to solve the conundrums of movement, supply, demand, origin and establishing costs that did not escalate into irrationality. I tortured the players of my 1980/90s campaign with experiments; I continued to work on the problem during the dark times; and I did not solve it until 2004. At present my game setting runs upon this system.
This is more or less where my game was prior to the release of 2nd Edition. Large scale changes to setting and combat, a few smaller house rules that hadn't reached fruition yet, patient players who were enjoying that their game experience stretched from southern Russia to Portugal, the west coast of Africa, the Barbados and Ireland. Characters gave birth to children, spending enough down time in travelling from one part of the world to the next that those children grew up in some cases and became characters themselves. It was a far-ranging, unusual game that existed in a vacuum, since no one knew about it at the time except my players.
Pre-blog Mapmaking
I had been using paper maps, particularly atlasses for years. When the internet happened, I went looking for a universal world map on a scale that would be useful for my game, even before I had begun playing it again. By 2001, I felt sure that eventually, I would find players, when I wanted to work hard enough; in the meantime, I sought to "get ready for them" by trying to build a substantive system.
Thus, in 2001, I came across the Expedia travel site, which did provide a world-wide map of everywhere. Shown is a bit of detritus that I was able to find in my junk files. This was obviously insufficient, but the internet was decided lacking at the time and I did not have access to a viable scanner. The problems are obvious; I could not control which cities appeared, I could not adjust the borders, I could not change the colouring, I could not reasonably add my own labelling and so on. I began to conceive that if I wanted a map that I could create feasibly in a program (I had been trained on Publisher throughout the 1990s when working as a freelance and commissioned small city journalist), it would have to be created from scratch. That would have to be the only way.
In 2003, I stumbled across a website called "fallingrain.com", which provided coordinates for localities around the world. Unfortunately, the site was deliberately built so as not to be downloadable, at least not with any tools that I had at the time. So calmly, patiently, copying 10,000 figures a day, I manually went through the entire list of localities and saved them on excel, creating sortable, searchable database from which I could plot a hex map of the world prior to the creation of GoogleEarth. Curiously, I did this work by coming into my job a half-hour early every day and then just cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting. Where there is a will, there is a way. Thus it was that by September of 2004, I had created a better alternative.
This is the first part of my game world that I mapped. Done in publisher, I could adjust the colours of the hexes to denote elevation (or anything else), draw trade routes in red for my aforementioned trade system, specify which actual cities, towns and places existed int he world, add details if I wished, while retaining absolute and solitary control over the content. Those who later would suggest my doing this work onto GoogleEarth fail to remember that the enshittification of such systems by outside sources could easily destroy decades of my work in a fingersnap. That is no way upon which to structure a reliable, self-contained project.
The structure shown integrates multiple layers of game-relevant information at once: terrain and elevation by colour, rivers, settlement hierarchy and regional naming. Later, this style of map would become a structural foundation for later concepts that will be addressed later in this document. Steadily I added to the shown map of Voronezh, adding the world section by section, dividing it into sheets that each accounted for hundreds of thousands of square miles each, reaching from the edge of the explored Arctic as far southwest as Gambia and as far east as Siam. Then, in 2017, after having mapped the whole western half of China, somehow — I'll never know how — I deleted months of work. Since then, I lost my appetite for making 20-mile maps.
The Tao of D&D
I encountered the community again in 2006/07 on blogs, and frankly could not believe what I was seeing. Characters had become "heroes," character-creation a mess of min-maxing, the landscape a series of purposeless edition wars, flooded with the nonsense of GNS and, as far as I could tell, a company that seemed unable to control it's own product. Stupidly, in deciding to blog inside of this mess, I vastly underestimated how hard-wired the true believers had become. I should have started a quiet little blog talking about game design, maps and the substance of the above; instead, I went at it like a pitbull, which had always been my nature. The result was the polarisation of most persons against me; the collection of a few supporters; and occasionally those who assumed that because I was spouting what was to them "nonsense," I was a rube just waiting to be exploited.
Searching for a name for the blog, I did think that I would be explaining my way of playing; "way" was "tao" in Chinese and it sounded like a suitably philosophical name, and memorable. The choice walked me straight into those carping about anyone daring to suggest that there was "one true way" to play D&D (which I have never contended), and those who decided that because I happened to use a Chinese word that also refers to the religion Taoism, obviously this meant I was a Taoist. Ah, the flak I got for not being one. My first post, on May 28, 2008, described my first session as a player; my fifth post would later become infamous as the "mustard post." Together, these established my premise of what D&D was really about.
By August I was writing on my back after knee surgery, because I'd had an inspiration about hit points while waiting to have my quadraceps tendon put back together, which became this rule set. In September I wrote, "You're Not a Fucking Hero," that cemented the conflict between myself and those indulging in "no effort D&D," which I think was the death knell of my D&D reputation. From there on, it was just me doubling down again and again, so that no matter what value I might ever add to the blog, I was always going to be "that guy" telling people "how to play." Yes, mistakes were made.
Since, it's been a conflict raging in my own conscience. On the one hand, those were things that some readers took hard because they challenged their right to play a game in the way they loved. On the other, these were things I truly believed then, and still believe now. None of the, oh, thousands of things I've read trying to argue or explain or justify or rationalise or detail the logic of player characters playing their fantasies in a game that is supposed to suspend its rules so this happens has changed my mind. And there are far more arguing that point of view than mine. In fact, I don't think there's anyone arguing mine.
My game experiences, outlined above, prior to my starting a blog, describe D&D experiences filled with intense loyalty to my game world by players who only quit because they were forced to by circumstance; playing a long-term game that was nuanced and rich in structure and style; by much praise; by houserules that greatly improved play; and within a culture where most everyone else struggling to be a DM failed at it. The culture in which I write in now, the one opposed to me, has trouble getting a campaign to last three games; they have trouble agreeing on any rules; they argue endlessly if rules are even necessary; and they cannot seem to explain their points of view at all, outside an assertion that they "feel" the game is this or that. I don't relate to these people. And when I sit down to write a blog post, I have no idea how to write one that will appeal to them, because nothing in fact seems to appeal. They are far, far more concerned with what a game doesn't do, versus what it does. Those few able to hold a thought in their minds imagine creating some game structure or rule that I remember having designed and either abandoned or actually physically created forty years ago. I can't relate to their points of view. Other than to flat out lie to them, to tell them what they want to hear, I have nothing that's "popular" to say.
For this reason, in keeping with the point of this discourse, there is nothing special to be learned about me or my beliefs from my blog. It plays, essentially, to the choir. The last six posts will clarify whether or not the reader cares to read more. There is no reason to go back to the beginning and read it all. That won't tell what I believe now or who I am, because I'm no longer the writer I was 18 years ago. Going back more than two years is a waste of time.
Experimentation
Understanding, then, that the blog is too large, too old and too historically layered to serve as a straightforward path to "knowing me," the best use of the blog has been its use in a series of thought experiments. My best achievements are those that have been proof-tested through experimental language on the blog first and then structured rationally in the Authentic Wiki, where this narrative appears. Discussions of mapmaking and how I was doing it steadily culminated in various posts, featuring images like the one shown, where my process was described step by step, transforming a group of blank pink hexes into a usable map: How It's Done (2009).
Showing how, starting with any basic map from any fantasy genre, it's possible to build a trade system that does not depend upon the Earth's distribution of goods and services: Let's Try It From The Beginning Again (2010); Making a Distance Table (2016); Building an Index Table (2016).
Starting from the concept of World Plotting (2013), leading to the structuring of Improvements (2019) and then eventually into Inventing Village Blocks (2022) and ultimately the structures of hammers, coins and food.
Thinking aloud about Changes in Experience (2009) leads to a rule that solves the problem.
Dissatisfaction about Secondary Skills (2008) leads to a weird design on randomly determining a character's history without the need of a backstory with posts like Intelligence Redux (2010)... which leads inevitably to an entire system (still undone) of the character background generator, which seems to bother everyone except those people who actually play in my game world.
The same discussion about secondary skills for characters suggests the idea of Player Sages (2009), then the importation of "sage abilities" for all the classes (2014), followed by Deeper and Deeper (2014), that ultimately explodes into a total rebuild of all character game abilities in the campaign.
The blog is a workshop. The finished product is on the wiki.
