All right. This is gonna be long, but this is my blog, and I hear that you’re allowed to post long blog posts to your blog, if you feel like doing that.
I’m a woman. I’ve also been playing D&D for ten years now.
I am, actually, specifically, one of those women who Can’t Do Math - I was failed by the education system, fell behind, never caught up, and was left with a panic response to the thought of interacting with any expression that has numbers and letters where I couldn’t immediately see what all of the numbers and letters were doing. The first time I took algebra one, I developed such a strong panic response that it wrapped around to the immediate need to go to sleep, like my brain had come up with a brilliant defense mechanism that left me with something akin to situational narcolepsy. (I did, actually, fall asleep in class several times, which had never happened to me before.) I retook the class the next year. I spent a lot of that year in tears, with a teacher who specifically refused to answer questions that weren’t more specific than “I don’t get it” or “I have no idea what any of those symbols mean or what we’re doing with them”.
Most of the people in the replies are snarking about how it is, actually, the opposite of progressive to claim that women, PoC, and LGBT+ people can’t handle the incredibly basic math involved in initiative. The people in the replies are all right. Initiative is easy - mostly adding a one digit number to a two-digit number (maybe a couple more one-digit numbers if you’re doing something very fancy or playing an older edition), and then ordering everyone’s numbers from greatest to least. It’s never fenced me out. A four-year-old could handle it. Seriously - I’m running Pathfinder games for my roommates’ four-year-old, right now, and she handles all of her combat math herself.
But that’s an easy, level-one analysis of the problem going on here. So instead of rehashing that, let me raise another issue for consideration:
Most of the math recovery that I’ve done since high school has been in the context of D&D. Not with initiative or the basic combat rules, which, again, the D&D players here already know are mostly first or second grade math. The math recovery I’ve done has involved looking at the places where the rules lack math, either because they decided to simplify it away for the sake of streamlining play (a valid choice!) or because they never expected anyone to need rules for whatever incredibly off-the-wall puzzle solution or self-directed money-and-power scheme you’ve come up with.
I’d get to thinking about how my character would really behave, if I really believed that they had all of the options in the world open to them, and I’d realize that actually, making good decisions and determining their consequences, with all of the power available to a high-level character (and particularly a high-level caster), very frequently involves some high-school level math. In order to keep the math to the elementary-school level that appears in the actual rules, you almost have to actively avoid it, or fail to consider it one of the possible tools you have in your world-building or character-building tool kit.
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The first time I played D&D, I was a high school student. My party was, incidentally, all female, apart from one girl’s boyfriend and the GM, who was the father of three of the players. We actually started out playing first edition AD&D, which I am almost tempted to recommend to beginners, just on the grounds that if you start there you will appreciate virtually every other edition of D&D you end up playing by comparison. I might have given up myself before I started, except that one of the players in the first game I ever spectated was a seven-year-old girl, and I was not about to claim that I couldn’t do something that a seven-year-old was handling just fine.
One of my most vivid memories of this group is the time we were on a massive zigzagging staircase - like one of those paths they have at the Grand Canyon, that zigzag back and forth down the cliff face so that anyone can reach the bottom without advanced rock-climbing. We saw a bunch of monsters coming for us from the ground below, and we weren’t sure whether they had climb speeds, but we didn’t super want to wait to find out. The ranger pulled out her bow to attack them before they could get to us.
“Now, wait a moment,” says the GM. “Can your arrows actually reach that far?”
“Well, they’re only, like, sixty feet away.”
“No, it’s more than that, because you have to think about height in addition to horizontal distance.”
“Yeah, but that’s, like, complicated?”
“Is it? Most of you are taking geometry right now, don’t you know how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle?”
There were some groans. Math was hard. But we did know how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle. We got out some scrap paper and puzzled over it for a couple minutes, volunteering the height of the cliff and the distance of the monsters and deciding that we could ignore the slight slope caused by the zigzagging stairways. We got a number back and compared it to the bow’s range per the rules. We determined that we could hit the monsters without a range penalty.
We killed the monsters. This wasn’t the real victory that day.
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If you know what I’m talking about when I say that high-school level math comes up all the time in this game when you’re aware that you can use it, you can skip this next (long) section and not feel that you’ve missed much. But if you want some examples to back that up, here are some concrete anecdotes from my current Pathfinder game.
The inspiration for my current Pathfinder character happened when my friend, @lethriloth, pointed out that according to the rules found in the Pathfinder Advanced Player Guide, a first-level witch can provide much more healing in a large population center than a much more powerful cleric. The cleric’s channeling ability is limited to a certain number of times per day, while a witch with the Healing hex can heal an almost arbitrary number of people per day - about as many people as she can touch, though she can only heal each of them once a day. This makes the witch a worse healer within the party - since she can only heal each party member once in a given day - but much more powerful in a population center. It means that a witch can easily meet the healing needs of thousands of commoners, even if all of them are accidentally cutting themselves slicing bagels every single day.
It was the sort of thing I’d never really stopped to think about.
I rolled up a witch with a hemophiliac infant son and a grudge against the concept that babies sometimes die. Later on, after giving the GM ( @theunitofcaring) a headache trying to figure out how much healing could be sold at what price in what size of town, we determined that this power wasn’t actually all we’d thought it would be, because Pathfinder settlements with clerics shouldn’t be bottlenecked on injury-healing at all. Sure, they can only channel energy a few times a day, but channeling hits everyone in an area, not a specific number of people total. Do a little math about how many people you can fit within that area, especially with multi-leveled architecture designed around this very common power, and you quickly realize that a single first-level cleric can also meet the injury-healing needs of a pretty large settlement (especially since people who aren’t dungeon-delving do not, in fact, injure themselves every day).
But I was hooked on the concept. I turned my attention to diseases. Pathfinder Clerics can’t cast Remove Disease until level five, and even then, they can only do it once or twice a day (and at low levels, with most diseases, it only works about half the time). Do some math around people’s income levels, and yeah, it’s easy to see that that’s not going to be affordable for a huge portion of the population, not unless there are a lot more fifth-level clerics than we’d been envisioning (and not unless they got paid much less than the rules suggest for spellcasting). Since Golarion sure doesn’t look like it has vaccines, this is a huge problem that someone needs to be working on. We dug up some Herb Witch archetype rules from an obscure (but canon) source, modified them to be less combat-focused, and determined that my witch could instead explore the nonmagical and therefore understudied arts of medicine.
The math in our Pathfinder game didn’t stop at stuff that now strikes me as simple. When my character wanted some apprentices, I decided that my witch (who had recently come into possession of a magic item that let her use Detect Thoughts as many times a day as she wanted) was going to go around to all of the orphanages she could access in all of the settlements she could teleport to, then detect thoughts on everyone to look for the smartest orphans available - the ones who she expected to be most capable of learning from her insights about herbalism and the nonmagical nature of disease. But instead of just asking the GM to hand me some bright NPCs, I wanted to know what we could expect the stats of the smartest orphans in the region to actually be, and then roll based on the correct probabilities.
I had only the vaguest idea of how to set up this problem on my own. If you gave it to me in a math class, I would panic. But it was my problem, and I was going to solve it. I asked some of my programmer friends to walk me through the math I’d need in order to determine what the INT scores of the smartest children in this a large assortment of orphans would be, based on real-world standard deviations (we were assuming that the stats you get by rolling up characters are intended specifically for adventurers). Once we had the probabilities of various outcomes, we rolled dice and determined which settlements had really smart orphans in them, and how smart the smartest orphans were. Was our method entirely perfect? Absolutely not. But I felt like I had earned those apprentice and their abilities. I knew that I’d come as close as I could to being sure that they belonged in this world, in this place.
A few months ago, in a completely unrelated incident, our characters were faced with a big magical artifact that was stuck to the ground. Quite possibly it and the floor had all been carved from the same block of stone long ago. The thing had some terrifying magical siphoning abilities, and we had reason to believe that interacting with it was bad news, but we couldn’t just leave it for the baddies to take control of instead. The solution we came up with was batshit, but it worked.
Our party has a summoner, and the summoner has the ability to make her magic partner cat really, really big and really, really strong. We determined the total amount of weight that Danger Kitty could lift, if we hit him with every strength and size buff we could find in the rulebooks. We looked up the likely density of the rock that made up the artifact, and then determined the volume, and based on that, the weight of the whole structure. We actually did this twice - first for both the artifact and the entire semi-sphere of stone floor that was within range of the magic-siphoning effect, because we wanted to use Stone Shape to separate it from the rest of the floor, and then for just the artifact itself, when we realized that the first shape was too heavy. We drew pictures and divided them into little cubes.
We ended up getting the artifact separated from the floor by chiseling it out with an adamantine greatsword we bought for the purpose. We affixed some Immovable Rods to the artifact with some Sovereign Glue, just to be sure that the cat could lift it without having to suffer any possible ill effects from touching the artifact itself.
The cat lifted the artifact and allowed us to plane shift it out to a safe location. Our GM made some very frustrated noises about our nonstandard method of interaction with this puzzle. We were beaming.
About a month ago, I talked my GM into letting my witch have the hex Regenerative Sinew. It basically works the same way as the Healing hex, except that it heals ability damage rather than injuries, and is therefore useful for treating diseases, which can’t be helped with normal healing.
We redid all of that math about how many people my witch could touch and use a standard action on in one day. The GM added various notes about how the logistics involved in getting a lot of sick people through a small space are actually really hard, and she shouldn’t be able to actually meet her full theoretical potential. I accepted this, and then convinced her that since the witch’s ability to deliver touch spells and hexes through her familiar doesn’t appear to have a range limit, I could technically heal people in one settlement while my dog (and his babysitter, one of those aforementioned apprentices) healed people a hundred miles away, effectively nearly doubling our efficiency.
I made a lot of money, after doing a lot of math (and some historical research) about how many very sick people we could expect to be in each settlement, plus how much they were probably willing and able to pay for treatment. The GM was sort of horrified, but could hardly complain about my character motivations, having set our game in a theocracy run by the god of trade and economics. I also got to let my character angst about having a moral obligation to work every waking hour of every single day, because she was the only person in the setting who could do this, and every day she took off meant she was letting people die, although she didn’t yet have the data to determine how many people she would be killing. Not everyone is into that kind of heavy stuff, and that’s fine, but I am, and the numbers are really helping me out here.
Two weeks ago, my GM let me buy an island to turn into a hospital complex, partly as a way of offloading my excess cash so that I don’t make encounter balance impossible. I measured the size of the island on a tiny little canon map that was partially obscured by text, and converted it into a guesstimated number of acres or square feet to work with.
I spent several hours researching construction prices in the 1790s so that I could ballpark the cost of developing the island the way I wanted it. You find some example buildings that you can find the price of construction for (not easy, so I have no idea whether my numbers are really standard), and you determine their square footage. You look up some battle maps for buildings you’d like to have on your island, then determine their square footage. You convert your dollars-per-square-foot number to gold pieces, using the wages of carpenters or masons or whatever in the relevant year and the wages in gold pieces that people get using the profession skill. The number you get out is a little bullshit, because a lot of steps along this entire process are guesstimates (for example, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense to apply American 1790s wages to 1790s fantasy Egypt), but you get much better numbers than “I don’t know, a lot”.
Making the plans for the hospital was one of the last things we did (right before haring off towards fantasy China in search of the secrets of smallpox inoculation). This is because our party took the last couple weeks off so that our GM and the player who gave me the witch idea could get married. They’re both women. Actually, like my first D&D group, the whole party is women, with the exception of one male player who joined the group by being someone’s boyfriend. (The someone was me. He was my boyfriend. Date me to gain access to this sort of ridiculous campaign, if you’re into that.)
I will, again, readily admit the fact that none of this is how you’re “supposed” to play D&D. The rules do not expect you to do complicated geometry or math involving the density of jade. You’re not supposed to do anything that at any point involves the words “standard deviation”, and you’re not supposed to look up death records for 1600s London. I’m not sure the rules even have suggestions for determining the price of a house.
You absolutely don’t have to do any of this to play D&D. But we do it because it lets us move beyond what the base game expects of us. We do it because this is one of the primary reasons why you play a TTRPG instead of a video game - because when you run the system, you don’t have to let it tell you what you can and can’t do. You can follow the logical implications of where things lead, and not be stopped by whether the creators of the game or the GM thought of your solution.
Being willing and able to do math about stuff makes the setting and the story richer, just like poking around the edges of the governments and the geopolitics and the social attitudes about how different fantasy countries view marriage and dating. Every time we do it, fascinating stuff keeps falling out. The results surprise us, and in doing so, they open up new questions and new ways of playing.
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When I’m not playing D&D, I’m an after-school tutor, and not the kind who teaches high school honors kids to polish the last couple digits of their SAT scores. I work at a school that is more than ninety percent Black. The people who hired me and who run the school are Black. My direct supervisor is Hopi, and grew up on an Indian reservation. I’m not, like, an expert. But it’s important work that someone - a lot of people, actually - has to do, and I’m willing and able to do it.
A few weeks ago, right at the end of the school year, I was helping a fourth grader do his math homework. We had a word problem that went something like this:
Alex would like to buy cookies for every student in his class. There are thirty-three students in his class. The cookies come in packs of six, and each pack costs two dollars. If Alex has eleven dollars, can he buy cookies for everyone in his class?
We must have spent twenty minutes on this one problem. The whole thing was like pulling teeth. I’m really impressed with the kid for not just giving up on it and waiting for me to give him the answer. But as hard as he was trying, he could only very occasionally think about how the numbers actually related to each other. Again and again, he’d pull two numbers out of the problem and suggest a random process to run them through. Maybe we should take six and subtract it from thirty-three? Or maybe we should add six and two? Maybe we could multiply six and eleven?
(Note that having a calculator would be no help at all to him, here. He doesn’t know what processes to run which numbers through.)
I’ve totally been there, although I don’t think I got this lost until about middle school. Usually, I suggest drawing the problem out, but it’s kind of hard to draw out problems involving money. I asked him to imagine himself at the supermarket buying cookies, and how he would determine whether he had enough money, but he couldn’t do it; he didn’t think he would know how to find the prices at a real supermarket, either.
We had to painstakingly walk through every step of the problem, even the ones you wouldn’t think were steps at all. How many cookies does Alex want? How many cookies are in each package? How many packages of cookies does Alex have to buy to get at least the number he wants? How much money does each of those packages cost? How much will all of the packages he needs cost together? Is that more or less than Alex has? You might think that this is really only a few sub-questions, so it couldn’t have taken that long, but most of them weren’t much help; I had to reword them over and over again, and try lots and lots of ways of getting him to relate the numbers to each other. And even after a lot of clarification, he’d often still end up trying to add numbers of dollars and numbers of cookies together.
The kid is not stupid. None of them are stupid. My second week at this job, I started teaching some of the kids chess, at their request, and everyone who asked - including this kid - picked the basics up just fine, to the amazement of their parents and teachers (who mostly didn’t know how to play chess at all, and thought of it as an Extreme Smart Person thing). The kid lacks practice, and confidence, and anyone at home who can help him with his homework. He has a teacher with as many other students to assist as Alex has to give cookies to. But he doesn’t lack innate ability.
When we finished the problem (it was, mercifully, the last one on the sheet), the kid headed over to the computers. My supervisor has a rule that they can only use them to do homework and to play a certain whitelist of educational games. The kids occasionally complain about it, but mostly the whitelist is long enough that the computers are still a popular option.
This particular kid went to a site for comparing the stats of basketball players. I don’t really know enough about basketball to say what exactly he does there. But I do know that whenever my supervisor sees kids on the site, she smiles and says, “Oh, that’s a good one. It’s all just math.”
I suspect that the kid can do math - at least more math than he can do on his homework assignments - when it’s in the context of basketball. This doesn’t mean he’s faking. It means that basketball is for him what D&D is for me, or at least that it has the potential to be.
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I want to be fair to the article that inspired me to write this rant, here. I hesitate to claim that this is a response to it, since the bulk of article is actually about how to adapt and streamline the classic D&D rules to work better with the podcast medium, so that your listeners don’t fall asleep during the combat scenes. And, you know what, valid. I personally am too ADHD to have had much success with listening to podcasts of any sort, but I totally buy that combat pacing is a serious problem for them, and it makes sense to want to experiment with methods that work better for different mediums.
The sentence about people misusing the combat rules as complex gatekeeping puzzles against women, POC, and LGBT+ people is a throwaway line, something totally divorced from the main point. But like most throwaway lines like this that hint at much more complicated positions, it isn’t original to this writer. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard people suggest that an important way to welcome underrepresented populations to the gaming table is to rip out math, crunch, combat, and in some cases the entire concept of rules (making the case for freeform RP).
Having a personal dislike of any of those things is fine, of course. It doesn’t actually matter what method you like to use to pretend to be an elf. If you think freeform text RP is inherently superior - yeah, I’ll admit that it has some big advantages over D&D and its ilk, and I’ve personally had a ton of fun with both. (I actually did freeform RP set in Golarion with my GM before she started running her first Pathfinder game in it.) If you think that rulebooks should never be longer than a couple dozen pages, and that anything longer than that is too much crunch, that makes sense! You’ll probably get to play more systems than I will, since I keep devoting so much time to learning the ins and outs of just a few complicated ones. If you think that doing lots of basic addition and subtraction is easy but not fun, and while we’re at it that roleplaying shouldn’t be about combat and should instead be mostly about murder mysteries or puzzles or romantic drama, then there are lots of systems that facilitate those things, too, and a lot of them are great. If you find yourself deeply apathetic about how your characters are going to transport sufficient water through the desert for a week-long trip - hey, as long as everyone’s on the same page about not caring about any plots that might have resulted from those calculations and the measures taken to address them, then look, more power to you. Roleplaying should be fun, and not a chore. It doesn’t matter which system ends up being your favorite.
But it matters whether people can do math.
I would be lying by omission if I pretended that there weren’t deep, systemic, and significant inequalities with regard to which people end up good at or even adequate at math. Girls are less likely to receive the educational resources they need in this area. Black children are even less likely. This is a problem. But the problem is that we have failed to teach those children to do math, not that we keep using math under circumstances where the use of math is called for.
A person who balks at the math involved in D&D combat - mostly simple addition and subtraction, with occasional multiplication for critical hits - has been truly, deeply, and tragically failed by the education system.
They have been left without a skill that is used to navigate countless areas of day-to-day life, from budgeting their money, to buying food at the grocery store, to paying their babysitter or tipping their server, to doubling unfamiliar recipes. They’re missing the math that I do at my job when a kid gets picked up by their parents, where I determine how many hours the kid was in after school care and then multiply that by our hourly rate per kid.
And you need more math than that to do other things. You need math to accurately judge the COVID risk of various activities. You often need math to come to an accurate understanding of what your best career plans are going to look like, or whether it’s going to be financially worth it to finish a degree. You need math in order to achieve scientific literacy. You need some math skills to have anything resembling a reasonable opinion on the nuts and bolts of lots and lots of government policies. You need math to get a handle on different types of credit and loans, and to understand which ones will sink you and which ones are genuinely are a great idea. And all of the stuff involving money become more important the poorer you are, which is sort of perverse but also just kind of how amounts of things work - you have to manage your resources better when you have less.
People who can’t do math are, as a result, much easier to oppress and take advantage of. Ignorance goes hand in hand with oppression, because ignorance is often manufactured. It is frequently the result of policies that were handed down by the ruling class.
It wasn’t an accident that the Americans of two hundred years ago made it illegal to teach a slave to read. It wasn’t an accident that, for a long time, people felt that to educate a woman was to make her less suitable to be a wife and mother. These policies existed for a reason, and the reason was to keep people down. This is a large part of why we see educational inequalities affecting these groups today (much more so for Black children, whose entire families have often been denied educational equality for centuries, and who still struggle to obtain equal resources today).
Is this getting heavier than what we need to think about when we sit down to play D&D? Maybe so. Honestly, for most people, yeah, almost definitely. But if people are going to insist on thinking about the heavy real-world consequences of their gaming habits instead of just pretending to be elves, then I’m going to insist that they actually think about them.
Can you use the D&D combat rules as a gatekeeping device to keep people you dislike out? Sure, you can do that with most things. Can the rules unintentionally form a barrier for new players, even if you’re not trying to keep anyone out? Sure, if you hand them a character sheet and tell them to fill it out without telling them what any of the boxes are, or expect them to learn all of the core rules overnight with no handholding. D&D is, in fact, a pretty complicated game, which is why the players’ handbooks are always more than a hundred pages long. We’re not playing checkers, here. As an experienced player, if you want to welcome newbies to your table, you’ve gotta learn to break the crunchiness down into manageable bites for people. A little thoughtfulness can go a long way, there.
But if we take it a step further, and ask whether it wouldn’t be more welcoming not to have those rules at all, especially if we find that the rules are more likely to overwhelm some people than others - well, I think we have to ask, then, is that worth it? Would we actually be helping them? Does it combat oppression to comb through your game and simplify down the complicated bits - not because they are not needed or because streamlining will make the game more fun or more fast-paced, but because we think that some oppressed populations can’t handle them?
This isn’t a government form. It isn’t a list of resources for prison inmates. It’s not something that should and must make every effort to be easily accessible to everyone, without any training time. It’s a game. And yes, that means that it’s supposed to be fun. But it also means that it’s in the category of activities that we use to hone our mental skills without fear of the real-life consequences of failure. Chess is a game. Go is a game. And D&D is, I would sincerely argue, not necessarily a lesser one, even if the ways in which it trains us are very different and much more dependent on the individual players and their stories.
Sacrificing the complexity and versatility that some editions of D&D have been capable of, not in an attempt to refine them (and they all need refining; you’ll notice that the genre is much younger than any of the various versions of chess, here), but in an attempt to lower the barriers to entry at any cost, strikes me as - well, I guess the sort of thing that we should expect a company to do in order to maximize profits. I don’t begrudge Wizards for putting out 5th edition, even though it’s missing a lot of things that struck me as important mechanics in earlier versions. And hey, a lot of people seem to like it, which is great. It’s good for people to have fun playing games.
But if people are going to insist on looking at their gaming as something that goes beyond profit or having a good time, that intersects with activism and social justice concerns, then I feel like I should expect a little more thoughtfulness from them on this front. I’m not making fun of them. Same hat, over here. But I must ask: is the most powerful and important element of the game, when we look at it as a tool to make ourselves stronger and potentially even fight oppression, really ensuring that the game is simple enough that anyone can play it without asking for help getting started? Or is it the social, emotional, imaginative, and, yes, logical-mathematical problem-solving skills that the game can be used to strengthen within us, especially when we push it to the limits of its possible complexity?
I am really, really glad that my first D&D party didn’t decide to rip the math or crunch out of it to make it easier for me, even though first edition AD&D is, in hindsight, kind of a pain. As I’ve said, most of the math recovery I’ve done over the course of the last several years has been in the context of D&D and fantasy world building problems, and I genuinely think it’s made me better at not panicking when numbers and letters come out. More than that, it’s made me better at thinking, better at realizing that logical-mathematical problem solving can be one of the tools on my tool belt.
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When I ran into this post on my dash, I was, I shit you not, in the middle of taking a break from writing a series of fourth-grade math problems that were all based on D&D scenarios. Maybe this is a stupid thing to be spending my time on, but I’m doing it anyway. I want to investigate how much power this tool might have. I want to know whether it can be aimed at problems that do, in fact, matter, and whether, like the basketball stats, it can be of some genuine use to someone.
That’s my praxis. If yours is “be considerate of the girls in your party by not making anyone do basic math”, then okay, I do see how you got there.
