The compounded interruption of basic services
The West Wing said it very succinctly:
“The costliest, most damaging, disruptions occur when something we take for granted stops working.”
We depend on the mundane and everyday aspects of life to function seamlessly at least most of the time in order to be able to cope with the occasional extraordinary disruption or Act Of God. Modern technology and social infrastructure are so complicated, interlinked and interwoven, that the occasional minor disruption generates ripple effects that are felt throughout the entire system.
Our computer systems, to anyone who has any sort of education in the history and development of them, are miraculous ballets of synchronized dancing electrons. The ultimate in icebergs, far more than 9-tenths lie below the surface, hidden from view – it’s more like 9999 ten-thousandths – at least until something begins to go wrong. For some reason, this subject has been occupying a lot of my thoughts lately. Along with things like “Why Me?”, “What Now?”, and “Okay, a new problem to solve. Life would be dull without the challenge – but I could really do with a bit of ‘Dull’ in my life right now.”
The compounding of multiple problems, such as the challenges I face at the moment, are a relevant issue to RPGs in four ways.
The First Point Of Relevance: Campaign Mastery itself
First, and most obviously, there’s the disruption to this blog / online magazine. I’m reasonably convinced that I, and the combination of Johnn and I previously, have made a contribution to the hobby, and have still more to give. The number of new series that I have launched over the last few weeks are indicative that I’m nowhere near played-out yet. The disruption being felt because of the difficulties currently being experienced threatens the stability of regular twice-a-week servings of gaming insight that Campaign Mastery delivers, so that’s a primary consequence – the splash of the stone hitting the pond, if you will. The immediate ripples of that impact will be felt by every reader we have. Sometimes they won’t even be aware of the impact – if it means that an article, that might have been exactly what they needed, at exactly the time they needed it, does not get written and published.
I was planning a shake-up in how I organize the ongoing writing of series to ensure that none of these ne series – nor any of the old ones that are not yet complete – end up forgotten, abandoned, or incomplete, but those plans were still in the early stages of development – and have had to be set aside for a while, because other matters have been occupying my time. So that’s at least one ripple.
Any hint of irregularity tends to scare off advertisers, which are essential if the site is to remain at least revenue-neutral, so the problem itself makes it harder to recover from the problem: that’s one heck of a ripple, and one that compounds other problems as well – so it can be said to be generating secondary ripples in at least my life, and placing the stability of Campaign Mastery under still more strain – which affects every reader we have, in some degree – whether that’s great or small.
Then, too, I’ve been somewhat neglectful of the business side of the operation for some time – I have only so much physical capacity, and publishing an article that’s up to my self-imposed standards twice every week has consumed all of it, and at times, more. I was hopeful of at least and at last making a start on those issues in the New Year – but those ambitions may have to be set aside (again) in favor of trying to resolve more urgent problems. Another ripple.
And of course, there’s the disruption in my thought processes. I’m not as sharp as I used to be – starting to feel the ravages of time, I guess, having marked my 50th Birthday much earlier this year – and such disruptions become progressively harder to cope with. You notice it in little ways – mostly, in not being as flexible and able to to react quickly as you used to be – and evolve strategies for coping, often without noticing. Which is all fine when it comes to small disruptions and surprises, but makes catastrophes and disasters of any scale that little bit harder to cope with.
In a nutshell: anything that affects my life, affects my capacity to continue writing Campaign Mastery – and that affects every reader we have, or might have in the future.
A minor aside to bring up a point that some blog writers might not have realized: The momentum of success. The better the articles that you write, the more audience you attract (I’m very proud of, and grateful for, the readership that Campaign Mastery has attracted). The more audience you attract, the greater the statistical probability that whatever you write – provided that it’s up to the same standards that you used to attract that reader in the first place – will be exactly the right thing at the right time for someone. Reliability and quality of content bring success, it’s that simple – the trick is always to maintain both, together with regularly being at least interesting or relevant to each reader you might have.
I take each unsubscription as a failure – it means that I haven’t written enough of whatever that person was looking for. Again, some failures are inevitable – the standard they expected, or the focus, may not be what you’re aiming to deliver. You can’t please all the people, all the time.
But each one also is justification for some soul-searching on the part of the site owner / author / editor. Every new reader carries a responsibility to do your best to deliver something to them that is worth the time and effort of their reading it. Just a little food for thought.
The Second Point Of Relevance: Game Worlds
It must always be considered that to a certain extent, every RPG attempts to simulate a “virtual” society, and a “virtual” ecology, and a “virtual” environment. To keep the difficulty of this task within practical limits, we necessarily simplify the simulation, and take various shortcuts:
- We may start from the basis of an existing third party game setting, so that a lot of the work has already been done for us;
- We don’t try and do it all at once, starting small and adding to the simulation incrementally, a little with each adventure, each game session;
- We do our best to “wall off” those parts that have not yet been developed, hopefully unobtrusively;
- We draw inspiration and ideas from elsewhere, especially when we’re stuck;
- We routinely simplify and abstract complex systems like weather and climate and social interaction. There’s a continual battle between accuracy of simulation and functionality of abstraction.
There are undoubtedly more entries that could be added to this list, but that’s enough to make the point.
How many of us have thought about how that society could be disrupted, or would be disrupted by the consequences of some relatively trivial failure?
It’s human nature to appreciate the importance of our own roles in society more than those who don’t occupy that role. That is what makes the saying “walk a mile in the other person’s shoes” so insightful. When we feel undervalued and under-rewarded, it’s also human nature to demand attention. Inevitably, someone is always going to be pushing or pulling at the wrong social lever for what seem like perfectly valid and justifiable reasons. Of course, if such disruptions occur when there is not a heightened demand for the services being disrupted, they won’t have as much leverage, and these inequities are not felt as keenly; so it’s inevitable that this pushing and prodding will always happen at the worst possible time. It doesn’t take much for this practice to become systemic and entrenched; one labor union demands a pay rise, and gets it, so others demand it also. Each time the union succeeds in getting what they have demanded – even if it’s effectively through extortion – it strengthens the case of the next. Wages go up, so the costs of whoever pays those wages go up, so the price they demand for their goods and services has to rise to pay for it, so the cost of living for every other member of society rises, giving everyone a case for their own wage increase. Eventually, everyone is back to the parity relative to everyone else, ensuring that the basic stability of society remains intact. That’s the real meaning of inflation. The system breaks down, at least a little when one group receives a disproportionate increase – either too large or too small – becoming more fragile.
Then, too, it at the time of peak demand that providers of any given service are stretched most thin; the demands leave them tired, even exhausted, and tired people make mistakes.
It follows that the time of greatest demand for a particular service is also the time when that service is most likely to be disrupted. This is easily simulated with a simple die roll whenever a service is required, and most GMs handle this without a second thought. If there is a fire, they roll dice to determine how long it takes the fire department to respond, and they automatically increase the demand for such services during the hot months within the game world.
Where a lot of GMs fall down on the job is in considering the secondary impacts of the reason for the demand, and the ripple effects of the increased demand or incidental disruption of the satisfaction of the services in question.
Example: It’s the hot season, so the fire department is overworked and slower to respond, and less able to respond effectively. Because of the heat, people run air conditioners far more than they do at other times of the year. This puts an increased load on the electricity supply, so you get more electrical failures and disruptions in summer than in winter – or you would, if the electricity suppliers weren’t aware of the fact and prepared accordingly. For those who maintain the electricity grid, Spring is the season of peak demand, because they are rushing around trying to ensure that everything is ready for the peak demands of summer. Overloaded electrical systems are more prone to fail, sometimes causing fires – further boosting the demand for fire department services, but that’s a minor feedback mechanism. More importantly, electricity suppliers have to ration out the available electricity when demand exceeds capacity – and industry generally uses a lot more electricity than domestic consumption. A small cut to industry supplies is more than enough, usually, to cope with the increased domestic demand (heat wave conditions are another matter). So manufacturing capacity is more often impacted by periods of peak demand – the evening hours in particular. During the day, more people are at work than are at home, so the domestic demand is relatively low – lower, in fact, than anytime except very late at night when most people have gone to bed. It follows that the most efficient time for manufacturing use of electricity, the time when the greatest supply is available, is the late-night shift. But that costs, because there is often a penalty rate applied to night-work – so the cost of manufacturing rises if the manufacturer takes advantage of the increased electrical supply, and it may rise if they don’t, because they can’t run their machines at full efficiency. The impact then becomes a question of manufacturing capacity and profit margin vs. demand – meeting demand often means cutting into profit margins, or raising prices. But raising prices reduces demand while increasing capacity to meet demand – so this is a delicate balancing act, one in which getting it even a little bit wrong leaves the manufacturer vulnerable to a loss of market share to a competitor. If it’s human nature to make mistakes, eventually every manufacture will increase prices too much or too little, will cut or boost production too much or too little. If they are lucky, this will be spotted in time and corrected; but it’s all too easy to enter a death-spiral of catastrophic unprofitability, and before you know it, an old and trusted brand vanishes from the supermarket shelves. This is bad enough in a competitive environment, where there is a rival to pick up the slack in supply, but what of those cases where one manufacturer has so much market share that they hold, effectively, a monopoly? What of those cases where the product is considered essential? And, finally, consider the position of a rival, if there was one – who finds the demand for his products suddenly skyrocketing? How much additional manufacturing capacity do they need to provide, and what will it cost? That’s why, when a brand vanishes from the shelves, its rivals often have to increase their prices – to fund an expansion in capacity to meet the new demand levels. In theory, this will enable them to lower costs, increasing profit margins as the capital investment is repaid, permitting the higher price to be stable for a long time to come – long enough for inflation to catch up with it. But it’s easy to grow accustomed to a higher profit margin… Of course, with the product of their labor in demand, this is also the “perfect” time for the factory workers to demand an increase in pay (eating into those higher profit margins before the capital investment is repaid, and disrupting an already-fragile supply).
That’s a long string of dominos, but what it adds up to is that domestic electrical consumption dictates – in part – the cost and availability of products. The manufacturer who most closely aligns his production schedule with the available resources, after factoring in biasing factors will be more profitable and hence more viable. And it’s an awful lot for any abstract simulation to take into account. In relatively trivial cases like this, it has no real impact on the verisimilitude of the game world; both players and GM simply assume that if the connection is not obvious, it’s not important enough to factor in.
When the case is not so trivial, the impact can be more severe, and yet just as hard to model. Consider the effect of a failure of electricity supplies – even a temporary one – on food storage. We’ve all had to throw food away (or better yet, give it away) after a blackout because we can’t consume it before it spoils. But that implies that we have to replace it when the electricity comes back on – so a blackout often leads to a local surge in demand for perishables, emptying supermarket shelves of the affected products. Now contemplate for a moment the effects of a more widespread failure, one that affects the supply to an industrial-scale freezer. That’s why most such have their own generators, something the typical suburban home doesn’t possess – but in a worst-case scenario, where the generator fails, it can be enough to close a business for good.
Or, more critical again, consider the power supply to a hospital or nursing home. Once again, they will usually have their own generators for such emergencies – and if those generators fail, lives are put at risk, and society would count itself lucky if none of those risks actually resulted in deaths.
A solution
It’s often said that problems come in threes, and while I’m not aware of any statistical analysis that backs up the maxim, it provides a great shortcut to making catastrophes and disruptions more “real” in an RPG. Whatever the problem is, it counts as one of the three; that means that concurrent with that problem there should be two other emergencies. If they can flow logically from the first, so much the better; but society is so interlinked, and the simulation is so incapable of containing every possible connection, that you can get away without an obvious link. People will simply assume that there is one, or that it’s coincidence – because coincidences do happen.
An Example: There’s an emergency of some sort at a nuclear power station. That’s problem number one. The nature of the problem compels the authorities to commence an evacuation of the local vicinity; but that can’t be kept secret, there’s a panic, and before too long, the highways are jammed. That’s problem number two. Problem number three: brownouts encourage looters. Or perhaps there’s enough capacity that there is no need for brownouts, and an emergency generator starts a fire at somewhere – a hospital? Perhaps a factory, where they make something that gives off toxic gasses when it burns? That sounds like a typical emergency situation in a superhero campaign – and nary a villain in sight. Or is there? What caused the problem at the power station? Or maybe a supervillain is trapped on the freeway and beginning to lose it at his inability to escape? or maybe a villain turns up to help – a temporary suspension of hostilities? There are a lot of different directions in which you could take this situation, but they are all interesting, and they all feel “real”.
Of course, that example’s not very relevant to a fantasy game. So here’s another: There’s an attempted assassination of the ruler of the city. That’s problem number 1. The city is sealed until the assassins are found and captured; this traps a wizard whose grand creation, a proto-dragon, is about to hatch; since this magic is forbidden by someone – a guild, the church, the law, whatever – while he needed the resources of the city to complete his creation, he wanted to be a long way away before it came to anyone’s notice. Now, his proto-dragon is about to hatch and fast-mature in the docks region – that’s problem number two. Problem number three could be a firestorm initiated by the proto-dragon (perhaps through contact with someone smuggling alcohol), or it could be someone trying to take advantage of the fact that the City Watch are all busy searching for the Assassins and not guarding the treasury, or perhaps the proto-dragon hatches in the sewers (where the mage was hiding), blocking them with rubble and debris, or perhaps this is all happening in a city under enemy control at the same time as the PCs are attempting to scout it out, threatening to disrupt their mission. Or perhaps a panicked crowd, already nervous because the watch is asking questions in a very determined manner, and because of the rumors of the assassination, will panic and become a mob, or overrun the market district setting fire to a silk weaver (silk gives off cyanide when it burns, I believe). Whatever you choose, lots of merriment is assured!
The Third Point Of Relevance: Rules for technology
The computers in original Traveller were laughable at any time other than when the game was published. A piece of hardware the size of a biggish room which could handle – at most – six functions at a time?
The pace of computer hardware development has continually outstripped attempts to forecast it. This failure is second only to the complete and utter failure to predict the impact that it would have on society, and the shape it would have. The history of the personal computer, in particular, is one of finding a solution to impossible problems that then becomes a compromise or a bottleneck to the next generation of hardware. It’s frankly a miracle, and a testament to the ingenuity of many hundreds of engineers and software developers that they work as well as they do. To put it into perspective: Any Windows-XP capable computer is on a par with, if not superior to, the original Cray Supercomputer, in most if not all vital respects.
One of their great strengths is that no two are exactly the same. No-one else on the planet is likely to have the particular hardware and software requirements that I do, or to have selected the same solutions to those problems, or to have their system settings exactly the same as I do. No matter how identical two computers might be from the time they are delivered by a bespoke supplier, as soon as a user starts configuring it to his particular needs, it begins to become unique. Every piece of software installed adds to the number of points of distinction.
The current trend in computers is away from the infinitely-customizable desktop option to a more one-size-fits-all – which means, in the eyes of a lot of people, that it tries to be a master of all things and is inherently compromised in all of them. The results might – arguably – be considered more user-friendly, or more easily-supported; I can believe the latter, I don’t believe the former. But they are equally inconvenient for everyone. I think I’ve mentioned in passing before that I hate push technology, I hate software that decides to update itself and alters what it does and how it does it; when it comes to my computer, I’m a control freak. I want reliability, and beyond that, leave me alone!
Pity the poor RPG designer who has to accommodate into his rules systems the capabilities of computers. Performance has changed so exponentially that it’s almost impossible to do so with anything approaching game balance or realism. I know – I’ve tried.
Of course, my players will tell anyone who cares to listen that I’m handicapped when it comes to doing so – I know too much about the subject, and have a tendency to incorporate too much of that knowledge into what should be an abstract collection of game mechanics for anything approaching playability.
I once created a set of rules for computers that more-or-less accurately modeled the limitations of every model from the Vic-20 to a modern networked server farm and into the future. It was 38 pages long and completely unplayable – though it made perfect sense in each particular. If you wanted to over-clock the CPU, these rules covered it. If you wanted to hack into Midwestern Power And Light, these rules covered the process – and the difficulties that you would face, and the likelyhood of detection. More importantly, if you wanted a computer to run an office block, or a starship, or whatever, it correctly simulated that. It even had rules for writing your own software!
One of the most important sections within those rules dealt with the domino effects of failures in some minor part of the system. You see, there are three kinds of failures within a computer system:
- Catastrophic,
- Incremental, and
- Impairing.
A catastrophic failure means that the machine dies suddenly and completely. I’ve had a hard disk fail catastrophically; I’ve had several power supplies go bang; I’ve had a motherboard burn out, and a CPU fry. Until the problem is resolved, these failures turn the machine into an expensive doorstop.
Less severe are Incremental failures. These are problems which start minor and just keep getting worse and worse. These are rarely hardware related, though they can be; I’ve had one hard disk that would only work when the temperature was below a certain temperature, and another that would only work above a certain temperature, for example. I’ve had a graphics card that worked fine until it overheated, corrupting the display completely; the only solution was to turn the computer off and let it cool down. I’ve had a printer that only worked when the winds were blowing in the right direction, or so it seemed; at other times, it might get part-way through a print job and just freeze up, or it might not start at all. I’ve had a modem that only worked when the humidity wasn’t too high. Electrical failures in something as complex as a computer system can be extremely subtle, and are attributable to a component that is slowly drifting out of its tolerance range. But, more commonly, this is an operating system problem – you have a systems crash caused by anything from the phase of the moon on down, which corrupts part of the system files, which makes it more likely that you will experience a subsequent computer crash. These are most often repaired by reinstalling the operating system – which is a colossal pain in the neck, but better than the alternative. In my Windows 98 days, I became so proficient at it that I could completely rebuild my operating system in an hour or two, including reinstalling all the key pieces of software.
Is it possible that Operating System corruption is responsible for my current woes? Entirely. It might be a coincidence, but the troubles all started with a failed update to Adobe Acrobat; I was forced to use system restore to get the machine functional again. And then discovered that all sorts of services had failed to start properly. I solved the immediate problem, but it’s possible that some long-term damage was done somewhere, which has started me down a slippery slope.
If the Windows installation CD could see the hard disk on which Windows was installed, I would probably have reinstalled it by now in an attempt to cure my headaches. It can’t. When I installed my old disk drives, with all my old data, into the current computer, I may have altered the configuration of the hardware; I simply don’t remember now. But I have discovered that windows can read that CD from within windows itself – so drastic action may yet be attempted. But if it doesn’t work, I’m up the creek without a paddle, at least until I have some alternative solution on the horizon.
The third type of failure is one where some component or piece of software fails catastrophically without completely ruining the system. I’ve had a CD-ROM shatter explosively, destroying the drive – but doing no damage to the rest of the system (this was a week before Mythbusters ‘proved’ this would never happen. Oh, well). I’ve had hard disks fail that weren’t critical to the system’s operation. I’ve had monitors burn out – but as soon as another was plugged in, everything worked fine.
These days, most RPGs seem to expect that computers will work flawlessly, if operated correctly. On the premise that computers performing a critical function are under greater load when executing that function, once again we have a situation in which a catastrophic failure – even only a momentary one – is more likely to happen at the worst possible time – I always check when the PCs are relying on a computer to do something vital. And I always have some novel and interesting failure mode in mind for the next failure. I’d tell you what the next one that I have in mind for my PCs in the Zenith-3 campaign is, but then I couldn’t use it – and it’s too much fun to waste!
I’m still searching for a set of computer rules that will be sufficiently abstract to be playable and yet sufficiently respectful of the limitations of the technology, especially when applied to historical models, to be reasonably accurate. I had the glimmerings of a possible approach way back in 2004, but I’ve never had the chance to properly develop it. It was for this reason that I was particularly interested in the computer/hacking rules when I was offered a guest article from one of the developers of the Interface Zero 2.0 RPG as a means of promoting their Kickstarter campaign, which was more wildly successful than I think anyone expected, falling just a few hundred dollars short of their ultimate stretch goal.
Of course, the same is true of almost any form of advanced technology, most of which have computer support anyway. The modern car has more processing power devoted to its Electronic Fuel Injection system than was on the Apollo spacecraft. So does a typical pocket calculator – even one that only has the basic numeric functions. The next time your PCs rely on a piece of technology, contemplate the chances that it might fail them, and if so, in which of the three modes. It might be good for nothing more than heightening the drama of the moment, or it might be significant in its own right as a plot development.
The Final Point Of Relevance: Game Rules in general
Of course, if we’re talking about complex systems and the ways in which they can fail, we have to at least spare a thought or two for probably the most complex system involved in an RPG: the rules themselves. These are just as prone to failure as any other complex system, and like the electricity grid, more prone to experiencing a failure when placed under the greatest stress. Critical moments, when life or death, or success or failure, hang in the balance. These errors can be minor, sometimes not even noticed; or they can be degenerative, like introducing an ad-hoc ruling that comes back to bite the GM months or years later, and all they can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time; or they can be catastrophic, such as when a situation arises that the rules don’t deal with at all, or that they deal with – like my computer rules – in completely unplayable fashion.
When this happens – and we will all experience it at some point – remember that the objective is for everyone to have fun. Everything else should be sacrificed to this end, if necessary.
If the GM is in possession of key relevant facts that the players can’t be told for the sake of that overriding principle – no other reason is sufficient for keeping those facts secret under the circumstances of catastrophic rules failure – then he may have to make a ruling according to his own best judgment. That’s his job as the GM. The rest of the time, in the event of catastrophic rules failure, consult the players. The complete failure of the game is no fun for anyone. And if in doubt, let the players succeed at whatever they were trying to do – if the alternative is cataclysmic game failure.
We all like to push the boundaries of the rules – that’s where the most fun is there to be had. Whenever you adjudicate a rules question, consider for a moment the possibility that the decision you are about to make could lead to a failure of the rules system. Anticipate it and don’t be taken by surprise.
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June 26th, 2015 at 1:33 am
[…] The compounded interruption of basic services […]