Spherical Goblins in a Vacuum

There is a known bug in the human psyche, called the “quantifiability fallacy” or sometimes the “metrical fallacy”: we overestimate the importance of things that can be measured. The easier they are to measure, the more important we assume they are. And because the easily-measured metrics are the easiest things to test for and to brag about, their perceived importance just reinforces itself over time.

This problem crops up in how we handle just about everything: health care, corporate finance, sports, governance, even our military strategies and priorities. Everywhere you go and everything you do, people want to see numbers, numbers, numbers. Hard numbers, big numbers. This kind of thinking pervades pretty much every important aspect of modern life, but perhaps none as important as the fine art of pretending to be an Elf Bard rifling through the pockets of dead kobolds for spare change.

Yes, friends. For today’s Thing of the Day, you get a blog post about the dungeons and the dragons. This will actually be the first installment in a semi-regular feature, an ad hoc column I am calling “Spherical Goblins”, short for “Spherical Goblins in a Vacuum”. Some people who stand at the right nerdy intersection might understand that title immediately, as will people who pay attention to my twitter ramblings.

For everyone else, this post will explain it.

There is a joke—a whole species of them—about physicists solving some problem like doubling a dairy farm’s milk production, but then revealing that their solution only works “for spherical cows in a vacuum”. This references the fact that physicists often simplify the problems they’re dealing with by making assumptions that eliminate complications.

This brings me to the nature of what is often called “theorycrafting” in D&D, as it currently exists, as it applies to min-maxing or character optimization.

The concept of min-maxing is not a new one. You make a character who is only deficient in ways you can ignore and work around or just don’t care about, and strongest where it will have the most impact, or where it’s most important to you.

Min-maxing works best in games that let you gain more power in one area by taking a weakness in another, which are mostly freeform point-based games. It’s a form of metagaming (playing the game of gaming the game system itself, essentially) and it’s not terrible, in moderation and in and of itself.

Even at its worst—especially at its worst—it relies on assumptions like “I can ignore this area and focus on that one because the first area won’t come up.”

If you mess with those assumptions, the whole thing falls apart. A good DM can work with min-maxing to keep its effectiveness to a reasonable level. Of course, a good DM will also let players who just want to be awesome be awesome, also at a reasonable level. You very rarely want to actually match the players meta for meta, though that’s a subject for another column.

So min-maxing, in and of itself, is fine.

The current breed of “theorycrafting” that often surrounds it, though, is another story.

I talked at the top about the metrical fallacy: if we can measure it, it matters. Characters in D&D, particularly in any 21st century edition, can do all kinds of fabulous and fascinating things: talk to animals, change their appearance, create illusions, communicate telepathically, and… of course… they can kill things like goblins.

So, if you have a Gnome Ranger who can talk to small animals, produce minor illusions, and has a variety of survival skills and nature spells, and who can kill goblins with a magic mark and bow attack and a Human Warlock who can communicate telepathically and bring people to their knees with a word and change their appearance at will and who can kill goblins with a curse and a blast of eldritch power, and you have to compare which one is better, how do you do it?

It’s hard to put a value on most of their respective abilities, much less compare them to each other. The one thing they can both do is kill goblins, and as luck would have it, their ability to do so is already reduced to raw numbers! We can figure out their damage output adjusted for hit rate to get their damage per round, and settle the question once and for all of who is better at killing goblins.

At that point, you might feel like we’re one step closer to being able to compare them, or that we know who is better at one thing in one situation… but for those who are invested in creating a character who is objectively the best, that’s the whole comparison. When you know who does the most damage, you have your answer.

I mean, you can get more complicated, and many do. You can drag in how much damage each character can themselves avoid, mitigate, or heal in order to figure out who will stay alive the longest while killing goblins, but that’s still just a facet of how good they are at goblin-killing.

So that’s the goblins. Why are they spherical and in a vacuum?

Our theoretical goblins are spherical in the sense that we assume everything about them is simple. None of them are using unusual tactics or equipment, or exhibiting unusual behavior. Every turn they behave in a straightforward fashion that conforms exactly to whatever our game theorists think they should do.

And they are in a vacuum in the sense that we assume there is nothing interesting about the environment or situation in which they are fought. There is no terrain or ambient condition or external event that has any impact on anything.

The reason we keep to these assumptions is that if we don’t, it becomes harder to make the comparison between characters. If the battlefield is hard to navigate, the Warlock’s ability to teleport might give them an advantage over characters who can’t. If the battle is happening at a long distance, the range of the bow vs. the blast matters. If the goblins are riding mounts and using hit and run tactics, the question might become who is better at controlling them and pinning them down.

Given a certain set of circumstances, we can decide which set of abilities is more valuable in that circumstances. But we can’t compare their overall objective value without knowing not only which one is more valuable in each and every possible circumstance, but how much more valuable, and how likely that scenario is.

It is impossible to do so, which means it is infinitely hard to measure the objective value of anything other than direct killing (or not-being-killed) power.

And, that stubborn, blinkered thinking fallaciously insist that things that are hard to measure don’t matter as much as things that are easy to measure.

So the only thing that really matters is how good a character is at killing spherical goblins in a vacuum.

It doesn’t matter how clever a character is, unless that cleverness comes with damage dice attached. It doesn’t matter how charming they are, or how much many fantastical magical things they can do… except for the ones that do damage. Anything about a character that isn’t the thing that kills the most goblins the fastest in ideal circumstances is just stuff, just fluff… nothing that counts, nothing to concern yourself with, nothing to worry about.

This is the kind of thinking that I abhor, and that I think is toxic and corrosive to the hobby when it’s treated not as fun thought experiments but is handed down to the new and unsure as the way the game is supposed to be played, the way it must be played. In this semi-recurring blog feature, I’m going to be directly countering this kind of thinking with advice to both DMs and players about other ways to approach character creation, the game rules, and running games.

Sometimes I’ll be taking on the fallacious credos and sacred cows that are promulgated by the spherical goblin theorists. Other times I’ll take a more positive approach, offering good advice without any particular point to refute. In either case I’ll be sharing the wisdom of someone who has been playing D&D since the 1980s across multiple editions and through multiple media.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

STATUS: Wednesday, January 6th

Lo, the prophecy has been fulfilled. I was awake this morning at my target time and sitting here at my desk at 10. Just like the past couple days, I sat down with a burning idea for a blog post, so I started that before flipping open a new tab to write my status post in order to get one up during the actual morning.

I had a dream last weekend… lots of dreams running together, but in one of them, Jack was having a conversation with my mother. I assume I dreamed this because we’re all going to see each other next week. But in this dream, one of the things that happened was my mother told Jack that I’m a better writer than I am a company. And it seemed extremely profound in the dream, as things often do, but more impressively, it still seemed profound to me when I woke up, and an hour later when I was completely awake.

Back in 2014, I made the decision to try to deliberately build my brand. After years of not having a strong “official web presence”, I registered the domain Blue Author Productions and used a service to build a site. I put that name on my Patreon to signify that it wasn’t just sponsorship of one story but everything I might create and produce.

It seemed like the right move. Everyone talks about the importance of Building Your Brand, something I’ve never really bothered with because my brand was myself. But surely I could do better than that. I needed to. Growing One’s Brand is how one expands, right? And it seemed to work well for a while. I had the site. I could put everything I do up there in one central place and refer people to it.

But… it wasn’t a great site for blogging, and I kept trying to blog there and then gave up and re-started my own WordPress blog, and after that, my focus on the Blue Author Productions website slipped away bit by bit. I had actually forgotten it existed until it renewed itself last spring.

I’m going to wait until I get back from Late Family Christmas to actually do anything about it, but I think I’m going to deactivate the site and redirect the URL to here after making a decent info page on this blog.

Because I am a better writer than I am a company. My brand is myself, but it’s a one-way relationship, not an equivalency. My brand is me, but I am not a brand.

Dream wisdom from my mother.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. Slept disjointedly last night, but evidently soundly enough.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

The STOP Syndrome

Writing and posting a chapter of Tales of MU after months of floundering under feelings of across-the-board inadequacy was a bit of a relief and a weight off my shoulders, but weirdly, writing and posting an introductory post about my theories of pretending to be a cavalier that contained nothing I haven’t said on Twitter or D&D forums before was a huge relief and a huge weight off my shoulders.

I went to bed last night feeling supremely confident, light, airy, high on life, and like I could do anything I set my mind to. And also weird, because… WTF? How did such a small, simple thing make me feel so good? I mean, I’m not unfamiliar with the sensation of being pleased with a job well-done, but this was more than that.

In the end, I think it is the fact that it’s a small and simple thing… one that I’ve wanted to do for ages, but didn’t feel capable or worthy of. I had fallen prey to the kind of thinking I’m constantly refuting for others, which we might call the Special Type Of Person syndrome, or STOP syndrome for short.

STOP syndrome is the belief that not just anyone can sit down and do ______ or go out and do ______, that it takes a Special Type Of Person to do that. I can hold forth about D&D because anyone can have opinions, but I can’t sit down and actually write a blog about it in any kind of formal capacity because I am, in some inherent sense, not a D&D blogger. That kind of thing.

The thing is, probably 90% of the people reading this, if they’re reading this in the right frame of mind will look at that, roll their eyes, and go, “Well, that’s ridiculous. It’s not like there’s an accreditation course for writing about pretend dwarves.” And the same 90% of the people reading this, if they’re reading it in another frame of mind, will look at that and go, “Oh, someone has a name for that.”

“I’d like to draw, but I’m not an artist.”

“I’ve always wanted to write fanfic, but I’m not really a writer.”

And so on.

STOP syndrome is not something you necessarily think in so many words, but more often, something you instinctively feel with such depth of feeling that you know it to be true. It’s basically a subset of impostor syndrome, one that, well, stops us from even trying to do a thing in the first place.

The antidote to STOP syndrome may be what I call the Doodle Theory of Doing Art, which is basically that the world is enriched when people doodle, or do whatever the version of “doodling” is for something else. Sing in the shower, whether you’re a singer or not. Doodle on napkins, whether you’re an artist or not. Make up stories, whether you’re an author or not. Nobody is perfect when they start out, and few people are recognizably good, that takes practice… but more than that, a lot of what makes something good is subjective, and even more than that, you don’t have to be good at something for it to be worth doing.

Kids scribble with crayons and sing at the top of their lungs and make up jokes and stories that make no sense because it’s fun to do so, because it’s fun to express themselves and it’s an emotional release and it is rewarding on a distinct and profound level.

It’s a very bad day when I have to convince myself that I am an author, but there are things that I have periodically *known* I’m not (an RPG designer, an anthology editor, etc) at exactly the moments when it was most crushing to feel that. Not just anyone can do those things, it takes a Special Type Of Person to do so…

I think this is another area of life where our focus on “self-esteem” as a society hurts us. “You can do anything you put your mind to because you’re special.” sounds like such a positive message. When we tell a child this, we think we’re telling them two great things: they can do anything they want, and they’re special. But the conjunction there isn’t “and”, it’s “because”. We’re actually telling them something that is contingent, conditional: as long as you’re special, you can do whatever you want. Even if we don’t spell out the “because” and just say, “You can do anything you put your mind to. You’re special.”… the human mind is good at finding connections, even when they’re not meant to be there.

So what we take away from these childhood message is this: there are special people who get to do whatever they want, so you’d better pray you’re one of them.

You can occasionally succeed in making someone feel special, but it is a difficult task to impart someone with the sure and certain knowledge that they are special, in a way that will stand up to the seemingly overwhelming evidence that is their own up-close knowledge of their own shortcomings and the many contrary messages that likely inundate society around them.

This is not even getting into how unevenly society distributes the “you are special, you can do anything” messages. We all get the message that special people can do everything, but some among us get told, in varying degrees and to various ways, that this affirmatively does not include them.

The principles that are varyingly called self-empathy, self-forgiveness, and self-compassion might be the antidote to the deficits of self-esteem, as instead of insisting against all the evidence of our fears and doubts that we are special, they tell us that we don’t have to be. Often, embracing this gives us the space to find the things we like best about ourselves. Recognizing that we are allowed to fail gives us the space to try, which might lead to success.

But ultimately, I think it’s important to know that effort and expression are both worthy endeavors in and of themselves.

The type of person it takes to do a thing is the person who is willing to do it.

That’s all.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.