2000 cp? Lazy Stupid Jerk! Radiocarbon will Make You Less Lazy and Stupid!

From Spawn at Lunch:

I read a bunch of important stuff over on RPGNet about how 2000cp is anti-imagination and the sign of a lazy DM and it stole your grandma's car and crashed it into a pet store killing dozens of fuzzy little kittens and bunnies. God Damn that 2000cp! A couple of folks mentioned that in fact, you might use 2000cp in a module as a guideline for determining the treasure, in which case you might roll dice to figure a specific and random amount. I was really thrown for a loop by that idea -- so mind-shattering was it -- but I gradually recovered. Basically you're using 2000 as a mean of the distribution and you figure out some die combo to vary it around the mean (or assume the 2000 is the product of a similar operation, e.g., d4x1000, and then add some other probability distribution to that). Now obviously this is just as lazy, but more sinister because it cloaks its laziness in action and "randomness". Ideally you'd want to trace the history of each copper piece from when it was minted to when it arrived in the ratshit pile to explain why there are exactly 598cp in the pile. Of course we all want this from D&D, but we won't get it, not from JMal and not from nobody.

(There should be a Kickstarter for a supplement that describes the unique history of each one of 598cp in a box. Volume 2: The Saga of 3912ep in a Sack. Written by George R.R. Martin.)

The problem with the randomizing business is that the mechanic behind it can often be guessed at because of certain a priori knowledge: the 6 standard dice have discrete known ranges, typically are not mixed, and have symmetrical distributions (if not Gaussian ones). As more and more piles of treasure are found, eventually the shape of the overall distribution will emerge, showing the DM's random mechanic, and then everyone will see what a lazy sack of shit he or she is. This is essentially a form of Monte Carlo sampling that the players are doing. In fact players use a version of this during, e.g., combat to figure out a monster's HD, damage die for unconventional attacks, and so forth.

What you want is to draw the underlying distribution from a non-normal, non-symmetrical set of probabilities so that no matter how long they spend in your megadungeon, players will never be able to intuit the underlying random mechanics for laying copper pieces around. "How do I do that?", you ask? Fuck, you Lazy Stupid DM! Do I have to explain everything to you? Ugh!

A relatively easy way is to treat your value like a radiocarbon measurement (conventional age, BP), assign some sort of uncertainty to it (+/- 40 is common, but whatever), and then calibrate it against the atmospheric 14C curve (IntCal09, for example). The relationship of actual years to radiocarbon years is not one-to-one, so the measurement is transformed by the curve into a typically non-normal distribution. Here's an example using OxCal:

Now taking the weighted mean of that distribution following Telford et al. 2004 (always a dangerous shorthand) we can now say there are 1953 ratshit befouled copper pieces in the room, and everyone's lovin' your megadungeon all of a sudden. Of course, this only gets you so far, since the curve transforms the data the same way each time.

No problem. Instead of using the R_Date command (for a radiocarbon date), use R _Simulate. This is an interesting exercise in both phenomenology and probability. You have it simulate a radiocarbon age for a sample of calendar age X (which will be your number of copper pieces) assuming a certain measurement error (again, we'll say 40) depending on what type of AMS device you've got. This then incorporates both the gaussian measurement error and the weirdness of the curve, and does it differently every time you run it. Your laziness, stupidity, lack of imagination, and absence of any reason to live are all now well shrouded in the swirling mists of the carbon cycle:

There you go. Now you'll have who-knows-how-many unique piles of coins: 2038cp, 2080cp, 2042cp... the possibilities are endless. If you change the measurement error, a new world of treasure opens up. Try the Marine curve or the Southern Hemisphere curve! Rejoice, for you have now added real flavor and texture to your megadungeon. Next time we'll sample from deeper within the mass of data to ensure the DM's logic is so far abstracted from the shitpile as to be impossible to guess at.

Geeking out at 14C CON

Transmitting from UNESCO HQ, Spawn sez:

I've never been to a gaming con before, but I arrived in Paris Sunday morning for what turns out to be my heaven-on-earth geek-a-thon conference: The International Radiocarbon Conference. I'm heading to OSRCon in August with Carter, and I expect there will be some parallels between the last couple of days and what I'll experience there. I mean like on a human-being social level.

To wit: There is a radiocarbon community. It's fair to call it a community since it's actually surprisingly small (or the group that can get to a conference is fairly small), and everyone is connected to everyone else at least tangentially through collaboration, training, lineages of technical expertise, and so on. Very much like the OSR blogosphere, I realized that I know folks and am known to others through scientific publications (analogous to blogs and maybe some especially noteworthy posts). You get a sense of people from their writing, analysis, and occasional email correspondence, and you build up an image and identity for that person without ever meeting them. But you don't really know them.

When I arrived yesterday I saw my session organizer, who I first learned of while she was doing her brilliant dissertation because she cited an early article of mine (which made me think she must be pretty solid, obviously), who was chatting with someone else whose article I reviewed last year ... both having been students of a hero of mine that I ran into again later in the day. And then we all started geeking out on radiocarbon stuff, freshwater reservoir corrections (the veritable 1e weapon speed tables of radiocarbon dating), marine offsets, carbon cycling ... and that was the most serious fucking geek-out I've had about that stuff I've ever had IN PERSON. And suddenly you realize you're not alone in whatever lonely little corner of the blogosphere lab you're doing your work in: There are others just like me! And it's the only the first 15 minutes of the conference!!!!! AARAGAGARAJHHH!

And they're happy to meet me! They've read my posts articles, and thought this one was great. And then some of the big old school names are here and all the old school radiocarbon people call each other out in the middle of their talks to joke or point to some useful unpublished data that one has (like a great d30 mechanic for resolving mass demon-summoning combat that they need to finally work up into a post), or remind each other of how the ion-source from LLNL ended up in Denmark. And chuckles abound. I chuckle too. These are world-class mother fuckers doing the best radiocarbon science there is, and they're the full range of surly, awkward, earnest, smelly, well-dressed, sharp, sarcastic, or polite geeks that you find in any such rarefied environment, and they're having fun. Happy to see each other again.

And there are subtle factional rivalries that ostensibly center on differences in technical protocols, but in fact probably can be traced to some difference over a sciencey or social thing that few people remember from the late 1980s. But the intellectual offspring are subtly influenced in their interactions because of that history. Can some of them overcome this and bridge the gap? Forget the past? Or is it time to mount an all out offensive to eradicate their ridiculous pretreatment protocols once and for all? And which side am I on, having just galloped in from the wastelands of North America, a veritable John Carter of radiocarbon, but now with a renewed sense of purpose and a wholly unknown and desirous magical protocol?

It's the chemistry version of the Edition Wars, basically. At any rate, that's enough obliquery.

So: I've wondered whether blogospherics and other distanced interactions aren't usually enough to make an effective community. They aren't on their own, I think. But as with close scientific collaboration at a distance, when you DO get to meet those folks, then you have laid some groundwork for starting to talk and joke, share stories, getting some serious work done, and for reinvigorating your joy and excitement about your own work/hobby/obsession. Camaraderie, essentially. There's no real substitute for the game (of Science, of D&D, or the D&D of Science or the Science of D&D) shared with other people.

So keep enjoying your cons, in whatever form they manifest, my friends.

Material Components and Radiocarbon Dating

The Spawn of Endra takes a lunchbreak:

There are lots of rules or subsystems or optional McDealios in D&D that might make the game more realistic or increase verisimilitude. Many of those seem kind of cool to me at first glance and then they seem irritating. Many of the mechanics in 1e AD&D fit that bill, which is why I really am a B/X/LL fan at heart. I've noticed that the ones that really get me nowadays are ones where I have some real life experience with the situations they try to account for. So mechanics like "How much damage does a party take in 100 degree F weather?", "Or with no water?" or foraging rules that only include hunting and not gathering plant foods ... or how long does it take to clear a ruin in a jungle ... fuck it. Doing fieldwork I live that shit, and introducing it to the game world in any detail causes me physical and psychic pain.

Material components for spells also sort of irk me, and part of that may be because in my labwork deailing with radiocarbon dating I also have material component requirements. So why do I need that in my game? You see, we use materials of known age as standards when we process charcoal, bone, shells, whatever, so you can account for the 14C background, and to see how well your processing methods work. There's like a sort of alchemists/wizard's council that runs periodic lab intercomparisons and vets data (the IntCal working group). They control the selection and distribution of some of the materials we all use as standards. Actually there's probably some Druids on the council since several of the wood standards (TIRI-B, FIRI-D, FIRI-F) are shavings of a ~5000 BP Irish oak. The super old wood you need to check the background (called a 'blank', colloquially) is >70ka old and comes from a buried log jam on the Olympic Peninsula in WA. All of these come from finite actual pieces of fossil wood, so getting your tiny little vial of it can be difficult. Folks don't want to share.

For bone it's even worse, since most bones are smaller than trees, so sharing this stuff among 10 or 20 labs is less realistic. So for these I've spent a lot of time trying to find good material of different ages, begging for the buried permafrost whale bone to use as a background, trading it for 2000 BP bison tibia I have, exchanging a bit of AD 1880 cow bone from a privy for a Middle Holocene fur seal femur. We have a cabinet full small bits of this stuff that we have to have to run radiocarbon dates. This, plus a bunch of other less unique stuff like silver wire, copper oxide powder, clear fused quartz tubes, acids, bases, hyper-purified water are all the material components of radiocarbon dating. And getting it all and keeping up the networks with other labs so we always have what we need is a sort of constant underlying concern in my work. So the idea of maintaining a supply of bat guano in-game so I can cast fireball is just a bit too close to my real life to be fun.

On the other hand, when we hear someone is going up into the arctic we put in requests for chunks of old wood and mammoth toes, so I can see the possibility of lots of cool hooks for adventures. Maybe I'll ponder that some more.