Roguelike

Your health dropping to zero is what kills you in the game. If you don't take a smart approach to health, you die.

Here's a few ways you can approach health management:

1. Have very high health. If the most damage any enemy can do is 20 and you have 700 health, nothing is very threatening.

2. Reduce incoming damage so that moderate health is more than enough. If you have 200 health but the most damage any enemy can do to you is 5 damage, nothing is very threatening.

3. Out-heal any incoming damage. If you heal 500 health per turn every turn without fail, you can safely face up to 5 enemies simultaneously that do 100 damage per turn.

4. Never take damage by disabling or killing enemies before they can get in range to hurt you.

5. Never take damage by having summons or allies take the front row between you and the enemy.

6. Make damage entirely irrelevant, with something like a shield that absorbs the entirety of an attack regardless of the amount of damage, or making it so damage can't kill you because your health can't drop below 1.

7. Closely manage and tactically navigate battles to keep the possible damage taken low by using things ranged weapons, stealth, teleportation, speed, and limiting the scope of combat.

There might be other approaches. There's certainly combinations of the above approaches.

To win the game, you need to be able to get one of the above methods, or some combination of them, working well enough to get through every mandatory encounter.

Now, not all games require fighting; those games offer lots of other options. Planescape: Torment, Nethack, and the Fallout series were notable having dialog-based options or other non-combat options to navigate most encounters in the game. But Tales of Maj'eyal requires combat frequently to advance the plot; there's no significant non-combat options to winning, and zero health is what kills you, so you need to manage your health.

There’s other considerations besides health, obviously. But we can use this as a lens to analyze your build and build construction.

V 3. Constructing One's Build, II: Cohesion

Everything we've talked about so far -- multipliers, exponential instead of linear gains, combinations, gamebreakers, sacrifice, etc -- you want to employ all these factors to get cohesion in your build.

The short description of the seven approaches to health listed previously could be --

1. Very high health.
2. High damage reduction.
3. High healing/regeneration.
4. Disable/kill before enemy can threaten.
5. Friendly tank between you and enemy.
6. Make health irrelevant.
7. Tactically manage damage carefully.

I would like to again remind you: We have limited resources. We can't do all of these effectively. Nor would we want to!

Some of these combine very well; others do not.

For instance, #6 -- "Make health irrelevant" -- that obviously combines horrendously poorly with #1 -- "Very high health."

Well, if you had infinite resources, sure, you'd do both. You don't have infinite resources, so you can’t think that way. You need cohesion with your limited resources to be effective and win.

#1 and #3 combine rather well. Regeneration is such that it happens over time, and very few things are aggravating as when you've got a big regeneration effective going and barely die.

Likewise, #4 and #7 are natural great combinations. If you can one-shot kill a really nasty enemy and then immediately teleport off, recover your resources, and do it again, you've got a viable build. Disabling effects do largely the same thing: an archer without much health would do well to have the ability to stop tough melee enemies from closing to hand-to-hand combat range with paralysis, stuns, confusion, etc.

#3 and #5 combo relatively poorly by themselves. Again, if you have a high heal/regeneration rate, you're comfortable soaking up damage at a gradual rate. Summons or allies are all about taking damage for you, and keeping you out of the fray.

Why does this matter? Well, if you can choose between two abilities, one of which is damage reduction and the other is health regeneration rate -- if you're using summons heavily, you probably want damage reduction for when someone does break through past your summons, perhaps with an area attack spell.

The reason this matters is because cohesion means looking at qualitative factors, not just numbers.

If you can get a regeneration effect that's +150 health per turn, or you can get a damage reduction that's -70 damage per turn, which do you choose?

The naive answer is to take the +150 health, because it's a bigger number. Indeed, in some situations, it is the better one. If you have a huge pool of health and the enemies do a very high amount of damage, the +150 regeneration will perform better.

Here's the problem: you can't regenerate above your current health. If you've got 200 health exactly, the +150 per turn means almost a full heal per turn. That's pretty good.

But if there's enemies that do 100 damage per turn, and two of them hit you simultaneously, you die and your regeneration did nothing. In that case, 200 - 100 - 100 = 0, dead. Whereas -70 damage reduction would have meant 200 - 30 - 100 = 70 health left, and you can act or do something.

Again, this isn't some rare tricky situation; this is not some mathematical riddle. Regeneration works after you've taken damage, so you've got to be able to survive the damage for it to be useful.

Thus, regeneration combines well with high health. A build that's looking to avoid damage primarily via method #5 (friendly tank in front of you) that doesn't have high health would often do better with damage reduction, even if it's a lower absolute number.

How do you determine what's important or not, and what's viable or not? Good question...

V 5. Constructing One's Build, III: Weaknesses and Constraints

Before we go any further, this is very important:

Your weaknesses and constraints are just as important to pay attention to as your strengths.

Depending on what year you're reading this, maybe the craze has finally been put to bed, but one of the strangest experiences of my early 20's was the explosion of a quasi-religious mystical idea called "The Secret" which claimed there was something called "The Law of Attraction." Apparently, this "Law of Attraction" meant whatever your thought about would get "vibrated to you by the universe."

The more hardcore adherents of this idea even went as far as to say that, when tragedies happened, it was due to the person who the tragedy happened causing it by their thoughts.

This philosophy preyed on a number of human biases -- when we make a prediction and it comes true, we remember it; when we're mistaken, we tend to forget it.

People of low skill can't tell why things are going wrong -- Dunning and Kreuger proved that; in fact, if you're very bad at something, you're most likely to way overrate yourself, because you're too bad at the task to even know what real skill looks like.

And indeed, there are two useful points out of this quasi-mysticism: sometimes people do cause what they're afraid of. The shoplifter is hoping people don't know notice what he's up to and he walks in an odd way that causes him to stand out, and he's arrested. Likewise, paying attention to what you want in life is a pretty good idea.

I'm not here to bash "The Secret"; it's been done thoroughly, and it's already firmly in retreat culturally. But I think this Secret-like philosophy pervades far too much of human thinking.

“The Secret” would have you avoid thinking about downsides, risks, and negative consequences that could be prevented with some forethought.

I know lots of entrepreneurs and people who build organizations. It’s a hard thing to do. It requires morale. And they look to keep their morale up by focusing on the positive.

That's fine; that's good; that's all well and good... but isn't it worth doing a little contingency planning?

Contingency planning, actually, is one of those things that has made me look much smarter than I really am.

It goes like this:

1. "What could go wrong here?"

2. "What will I do if that happens?"

I know this sounds insane, but most young ambitious Americans I meet simply do not do this.

They go in and say, "I'm going to get the sale! I'm going to close the deal! I'm going to get the job!"

They go all-out for it. It often works. They do out-perform and out-achieve their peers. I’m not saying there’s no merit to this extreme optimism. Yet.

When something does go wrong -- and inevitably, something goes wrong -- they're dumbfounded. The reply sounds like, "That wasn't supposed to happen..."

Sometimes I talk to a young service provider -- say, a web designer -- and I ask, "What are you going to do if the final invoice is paid late?"

The answer is often: "Umm, uhh, I don't know, I hope that doesn't happen. I'll deal with it if it does."

Wrong answer!

You can look much, much, much smarter than you are by thinking these things through in advance.

If you've got some experience, you know there's generally a few ways that invoices get paid late. This isn't all of the list, but here's a short list:

1. General sloppiness and lateness in paying bills. (This is the most common.)

2. The other side having internal problems, like cashflow or a key employee quitting or even something personal like the CEO’s marriage falling apart.

3. Then there's times where there's hidden problems with the work done. This could be within your control (they don't like the colors you chose, but haven't gotten around to telling you) or it could have nothing to do with you (the CEO likes your work, but the head of IT hates it and wants to scuttle the work even though it's already complete).

4. And finally, there's when the other side actually have some evil intent. This is rare in the general business landscape, but sadly too common for young service providers. (Veteran businesspeople that do honest good business eventually settle in with a series of providers they use commonly and regularly, and get a good rapport going. This saves on cost, means mutual trust, means the service provider doesn't need to get up to speed because they already know the goals/parameters of the business... thus, if someone is looking for a new service provider, they're statistically far more likely to be a problematic person. Most buyers are good people, this is true, but all bad buyers are constantly looking for new people to buy from.)

Here's the thing: these four cases of the late invoice are not novel; they apply to almost all service providers that get some sort of paid-on-completion.

Thus, you can think this through beforehand. What days do you remind the client of an invoice to be paid? What's your schedule of email, letter, calling?

Most veteran service providers actually pre-write their communications, so they don't get emotional in the moment. Most young people just hope this stuff doesn't happen, and take the counterproductive "I'll deal with it if it comes up" tack.

You can ask yourself how you deal with all of these scenarios. #1 is handled by a series of communications on a regular schedule. How you handle #2 is an interesting question: when do you compromise, to what extent, how much can you be flexible if at all? #2 is the one that benefits most from foresight.

#3 is also critical, because your language matters a lot if you get pushback. The line, "If you'll review our contract, what you're asking for is out of the scope -- but, you know what? I want to make my clients happy. I can make this change gratis for you, because I want you to be happy. But the final invoice is still due right now -- I think that's very fair, don't you?" And then what do you say if they reply, "Well I don't want to pay you until everything is done and the IT manager is happy and the new colors are in." Perhaps something like, "I understand entirely. I'll work extra here to make you happy -- because I care about all my clients. But my policy, and this applies to everyone, is not to give an extension on paying an invoice. If I did it for you because of this IT manager situation, I'd have to offer it to all of my clients... it's not fair to give different terms at different times; I believe in transparency and keeping my word. So, I can't accept late payment. I can make the changes you asked for -- again, it's off-scope of our contract, I'm doing this because I care about your happiness and success -- but the invoice is due. Can you get paid by Tuesday?"

#4 is also important to at least consider. If the person just says, "We decided not to pay you. Just because we can. Ha hah. Sue us if you want to" -- I've seen this in developing countries; this awfulness happens more often than you'd think. I dated a woman in Beijing was the #2 salesperson in high-end complex multi-million dollar security sales; the Chinese firm she worked for fired her when she had somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 in commissions due to her; her commission was 1% of the sale price. She was effective because she worked really well with technical people and could help design technical requirements well, instead of just giving presentations and hoping people bought. She made them tons of money, but they fired her because "no one is worth that much money; you don't deserve it."

This happened to her the year before she met me. I was aghast when I heard the story, I wanted to go on the warpath. She thought it fruitless, they had a lot of pull in local affairs. She got none of the money, though she did quickly get another excellent job and become a top performer there.

Here's the thing, though: when a single purchaser owes you a lot of money, what will you do if they default on paying you? How about if it's purely out of bad intentions?

She could have seen this coming: they paid her late and pressed her to keep working for three months, making some excuses or other, before they pulled the trigger. The company wasn't insolvent or having problems; they're still in business and the owner is still driving fancy cars and wearing watches that cost more than this woman’s parents spend in half a year out in the provinces. (She supports them.)

I get ticked off just thinking about this, but it's another case of how "I hope that doesn't happen" and "I don't want to cause problems by speaking up" works against you.

After they went six weeks late on paying her commissions, she could have asked senior management if something was seriously wrong. Once she ascertained that it wasn't that, wasn't case #2 of internal problems nor case #3 of her not delivering (she was still doing exceptional, right up until the end), then she could have slowed down from closing deals and giving presentations and networking, and instead invested time in getting to know a top law firm.

I don't know if top Chinese law firms will work on contingency. Even if not, she might have started to set aside a legal budget to send them at least a nasty letter if the worst came to happen. She had another six weeks before they dropped the ax; she could have used that time to go network and perhaps make a connection or two in local government, or maybe even go make a couple connections with journalists if she could find one working on the future of how warehouses and shipping facilities are using technology to increase efficiency and keep goods safe.

She was very focused on positive thinking, closing deals, cooperation, win/win. That's good; that's really good. That's the root of success. Really, it does come first.

But you also need to consider worst-case scenarios. If she'd slowed down from her upside just a bit to protect her downside, she might have warded off the shenanigans entirely. A single high-profile keynote speech or presentation at a trade show with government officials there or even the right university department might have stopped this from happening. If she did have a good relationship with an effective lawyer, she could have gotten into action very quickly after they made their hostilities known -- after a destructive and idiot short-term move like that, she's probably unlikely to get 100% of her commissions... but maybe she could have gotten them to pay out 50% or 70% if she'd had her ducks lined up.

All that requires asking,

1. "What could go wrong here?"

2. "What will I do if that happens?"

V 6. Constructing One's Build, IV: Belgium and Switzerland

Not to beat on the anti-Secret drum too hard, but I do want to leave you with one last case study here.

Wikipedia covers it well enough:

"As Belgium had suffered so much damage in World War I, there was little appetite within the country to involve itself in any potential European conflict. In October 1936, King Leopold III announced that Belgium would remain neutral in the event of another war in Europe. To this end, the Belgian government tried to steer a path away from alliances: leaving the Locarno Treaty, repudiating a defence pact with France signed in 1920 and receiving a guarantee of neutrality from Nazi Germany in 1937.”

The Nazi guarantee was written pretty strongly –

“The German Government considers that the inviolability and integrity of Belgium are common interests of the Western Powers. It confirms its determination that in no circumstances will it impair this inviolability and integrity and that it will at all times respect Belgian territory...”

The outcome?

"The government's policy of neutrality had left Belgium with an outdated and ill-equipped army and air force. Above all, the army possessed only 16 battle tanks between its two cavalry divisions for political reasons as they had been considered too "aggressive" for the army of a neutral power. The air force, hurriedly reorganised into the Territorial Air Defence in May 1940, was taken by surprise and could only field 180 serviceable aircraft out of its total of 234.The military held out against German forces for 18 days..."

Compare Switzerland:

"The Swiss National Redoubt was a defensive plan developed by the Swiss government beginning in the 1880s to respond to foreign invasion. In the opening years of World War II the plan was expanded and refined to deal with a potential German invasion. The German plan, Operation Tannenbaum, was real, but was never carried out. The National Redoubt primarily refers to the fortifications begun in the 1880s that secured the mountainous central part of Switzerland, providing a defended refuge for a retreating Swiss army [...] [and] was planned as a nearly impregnable complex of fortifications that would deny an aggressor passage over or through the Alps by controlling the major passes and the railway tunnels running north-to-south through the region. This strategy was intended to deter an invasion altogether by denying Switzerland's crucial transportation infrastructure to an aggressor."

Did they do a good job with this?

"The National Redoubt fortifications, when compared to contemporary French, Belgian, German or Czech fortifications, were much more extensive and heavily armed than the Maginot Line, the Belgian border fortifications, the Siegfried Line or the Czechoslovak border fortifications. While the Maginot fortifications were typically armed with short-barreled 75mm fortress howitzers or 120mm mortar/howitzers, the Swiss fortifications were armed with 75mm and 120mm guns, upgraded in the 1950s to 105mm and 150mm guns. The Swiss guns were typically casemate-mounted or turret-mounted long guns, not howitzers, and were more akin to naval guns than fortress guns. Because they were typically mounted on inaccessible cliffs or plateaus with an advantage of enfilade over any possible opposing force, they were not exposed to infantry attack or direct artillery fire and could afford to have exposed gun barrels. The French positions, which could be targeted by anti-tank weapons or infantry, avoided any exposed gun tubes."

The result?

"At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Switzerland immediately began to mobilize for a possible invasion. The entire country was fully mobilized in only three days. The Swiss government began to fortify positions throughout the country. In the course of the war, detailed invasion plans were drawn up by the German military command, such as Operation Tannenbaum, but Switzerland was never attacked."

Of course, the Secretists would claim the opposite is true: Switzerland spent a lot of time thinking about war, and wound up peaceful and neutral. Belgium did everything they could to think about neutrality, and wound up occupied by the Nazis.

We can see here our themes --

Cohesion: The Swiss looked to hold the mountains, deny transport, and make it a very expensive attritional guerrilla war if the Axis invaded.

Contingency planning: The Swiss played war games exercises simulating invasions repeatedly. When the blitzkrieg started raging through Western Europe, they were able to mobilize their entire force in three days.

A huge blindspot among young ambitious Americans is not considering downside enough. Be like the Swiss.

Now, let us turn from the seemingly overwhelmingly high stakes of world wars, and back to learning lessons from the infinitely lower stakes of video games.

V 7. Constructing One's Build, V: Diminishing Returns, Weaknesses, and Whither Flame Mastery?

Again, crucially:

You don't have unlimited resources.

Thus, you need to invest wisely and gain multipliers and combinations.

Cohesion is the rule.

But cohesion has a flipside danger if taken too far: diminishing returns.

Let's talk about damage. Let's say you're playing a fantasy game and you've got a character that has an attack you always begin fights with that dazes the enemy with 100% success. Then you've set up a cohesive build where you automatically critical hit an enemy who is dazed and you have huge multipliers when you do a critical hit.

Let’s say you’re choosing equipment for this build. You probably want things that combo and are cohesive with what you’ve chosen.

Thus, you maybe take armor like this:

*Two rings of fiery vengeance: When you critical hit, you deal fire damage equal to the melee damage you dealt.

*Gauntlets of impact: +20% melee damage.

*Boots of the Bold-Hearted: When you critical hit, you instantly do two free attacks up to once per turn.

*Cuirass of the Fallen Ranger: You may critical hit more than once per turn.

*Blue-coral Razor: A good short sword that doubles critical hit damage.

If you're doing 50 damage on a normal attack and a critical hit attack is double damage, then your daze/attack combination with that armor would be --

Turn one: Daze, 50 damage with +20% melee = 60 damage total. Turn two: Automatic critical hit, 100 damage with +20% melee is 120 damage; double critical hit damage is 240; two rings of fiery impact means 480 more fire damage for 720 damage total... which triggers two more attacks, which also critical (they're still dazed), for 720 damage twice more.

Thus, your normal damage rate is 50 per turn... but with this build specialized around critical hits, you do a whopping 2160 damage to a dazed enemy on a single turn.

"Is that really possible? Is a game broken if that's possible?" The answer to the first question is yes; the answer to the second question is no.

Most likely, it took a lot of skill points and specialization to get a Dazing Attack that basically always hits with high accuracy. And then, automatically critically hitting when the target is dazed probably also took some pre-planning and specialization to get.

Normally, a critical hit might only happen 5% or 10% of the time. Getting two free bonus attacks when you critical hit wouldn't be a big deal if those were only +60 damage each; it's the combination with the cuirass (can critical hit more than once) and the auto-critical on a dazed enemy that makes that so lethal.

Let's re-trace the steps of the damage, putting the armor in roughly the order it stacks.

Turn one: Daze attack

*50 base damage + 20% from gauntlets of impact = 60 damage total

Turn two: Melee attack auto-critical hit *50 base damage +20% from gauntlets of impact = 60 damage *Multiplied by two for critical hit = 120 damage *Multiplied by two for coral razor critical = 240 damage *Plus 240 damage for first ring of fiery vengeance = 480 damage *Plus 240 more damage for second ring of fiery vengeance = 720 damage *Boots of the bold-hearted triggers, two more attacks... *...cuirass means you can critical hit again; target still-dazed, another two critical hits... *50 + 20% (gauntlets) multiplied by two (critical bonus) multiplied by two (coral razor) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) = 720 damage *And AGAIN, *50 + 20% (gauntlets) multiplied by two (critical bonus) multiplied by two (coral razor) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) = 720 damage

It's instructive what removing each item costs you in damage. Take those gauntlets away and your equation looks like,

*50 damage multiplied by two (critical bonus, 100 total) multiplied by two (coral razor, 200 total) plus 200 (fiery vengeance) plus 200 (fiery vengeance) = 600 damage

If you only took that cuirass off, you still get those two free attacks, but no criticals on them (and thus no critical bonuses): that would be the first 240 damage as normal, plus a bonus attack at (50 + 20% = 60 total), plus a bonus attack at (50 + 20% = 60 total), for a total of only 360.

Take away the coral razor only, and you lose half your damage. (50 + 20% multiplied by two = 120; fiery damage is then +120, second fiery vengeance +120). 360 damage total.

Take away the boots only and you've got 240 damage.

So you can see how, when you get a great combination running, you can be devastating.

Herein lies the problem, though: what if you've got a mandatory dungeon to clear with ghosts in it, and ghosts can't be critical-hit?

We could call this the Daze/Autocritical build, and you've got the perfect gear to put it together. But look: almost all your equipment is useless if a ghost can't be critical hit.

This is why you need to always be looking for the weaknesses in your build.

The least important item to doing damage for your build against normal enemies are those gauntlets of impact, which are +20% melee damage.

Now note, if a character normally only got a critical hit 5% of the time, +20% melee damage means more damage per turn than an item that means you double damage only when you critical hit. It's the hyper-specialized Dazed/Autocritical build that means those rings of fiery vengeance, that coral razor sword, and boots of the bold-hearted are firing reliably... and then the coup de grace is that cuirass that means those two free attacks also get all the critical multipliers on them. That's why your character, who normally does a base of 50 damage, can do the ridiculously high 2160 damage reliably.

But if you can't critical hit, the whole build is broken. The only useful thing in that whole set of gear are those gauntlets, which were the least important part of the whole thing against normal enemies.

So let's say you've got this build set up, you're level 20, and you've got a series of three dungeons that are normally grueling coming up; you've got to go kill a ice dragon, lightning dragon, and ghost dragon.

All of them have around 4000 health, and all of them can be critical-hit except the ghost dragon.

You're in the last shop before you go hit the dungeons and you've got enough money to buy one artifact cloak.

One of them gives you,

"You do double fire damage."

The other one gives you,

"You do +20 light damage per attack."

You've only got enough money to buy one cloak. Which do you choose?

Well, we don't even need to do much math here. "Light" damage isn't melee damage; it won't combo with anything you're doing.

So in a standard fight, you'll do the normal 2160 on turn two wearing the Cloak of Holy Light, plus an additional +60 damage (+20 on each of the three attacks) for 2220 damage total.

The Cloak of Flame Mastery gives you double fire damage; that combines really well with your fire rings. When you critical, you do 240+240 damage (two rings of fiery vengeance)... followed by two more attacks, each giving you 240+240 fire damage. Thus, your 2160 turn two damage would become 4080 damage if you had the Cloak of Flame Mastery.

Well, that's pretty good. That means a turn two kill on the ice dragon and lightning dragon; it'll make that fight clockwork.

But... what about that ghost dragon? You can't critical it.

Your damage per turn with the Cloak of Flame Mastery does no additional damage; you don't trigger the fiery vengeance effect, because you don't critical.

So you only do 50 damage +20% (gauntlets) for 60 total per turn. That means, with the ghost dragon having 4000 health, assuming it can't heal, you're needing to survive a grueling 67 turn battle.

Meanwhile, if you chose that Cloak of Holy Light you'd do 50 damage +20% (gauntlets) + 20 (cloak) for 80 damage total, taking the battle down to 50 turns.

But wait, aren't ghosts vulnerable to light damage? Maybe they are. Let's check. Oh, yeah, they are. Light does double damage against ghosts and undead.

So it's actually 50 damage +20% (gauntlets) + 40 (cloak vs undead) for 100 damage total, making it a 40 turn battle.

Still very dangerous. Still awful. But starting to look manageable. If you can swap out another couple of your items to get higher melee damage or something that combos with light or against ghosts, you might make that fight winnable.

See, you want cohesion and that Cloak of Holy Light doesn't mesh or combo at all with your core build.

Let's face it, if you've got a Daze/Autocritical build and you're doing 2160 turn two damage and then you see a Cloak of Flame Mastery, you're going to get really excited. That's +1440 damage; that's nuts; it's the perfect item to complete your set.

But it sounds to me like you're already set up perfectly fine to go take out the next two dragons that can be critical hit. It's overkill. You don't need it. Assuming you can still go back and buy the fire cloak later, the right move now might well be to take the Cloak of Holy Light with its piddly +40 damage instead of the beefy +1440 damage.

This is so entirely counterintuitive; yes, it makes sense when I talk it out, but when you walk into the store in this game, the shopkeeper won't say, "Hey, you're doing great damage -- but aren't you already overpowered against stuff you can critical hit? It seems like undead are going to be the bane of your existence, maybe you should pick up something to deal with that...

There's no dialog that'll tell you that. And who the heck is going to go into a store and choose +40 damage instead of +1440 damage?

But again, if you're at the point where you can expect nearly a 100% win rate against the lightning and ice dragons, you might want the fixer for your one critical weakness -- the undead that can't be critical hit.

I can't even begin to stress how counterinuitive this is. In real life and in video games, you won't notice this unless you've really thought about your weaknesses in advance.

A player that does that says to himself, "Okay, if I get the gear I'm looking for on a Daze/Autocritical build, I'm going to shred anything that can be dazed and critically hit... but if an enemy has immunities to daze or critical hits, I'm going to be in serious trouble and be extremely weak and underpowered."

If you know that in advance, you can start looking for items that help you fix and survive those situations. This Daze/Autocritical build is going to shred everything that doesn't have immunity to one of the two parts of its combo, but the majority of inventory is useless if the enemy does have immunity. You need to think that through in advance... +1440 damage is sexy, +20 (+40 against undead) is not sexy... but it might be that tiny bit of light damage that swings the battle to your favor in your most vulnerable situation.

V 8. Constructing One's Build, VI: Buy What You're Missing

In the standard fantasy roguelike game, there's broadly two ways to get new abilities:

1. Train them as part of who your character is, permanently.
2. Buy them in the form of equipment.

The following rule has some many small and medium-sized exceptions to it, but it stands as generally correct:

If there's something you're terrible at, buy it temporarily; avoid training it permanently.

In the previous example, we talked about a character in a fictional game with a "Daze/Autocritical" build -- in this case, that character would have invested permanent training in getting their "Daze Attack" high, and invested ranks to automatically get a critical hit against a dazed enemy.

The build was completed by stacking up items and weapons that have multipliers and great combinations with critical hit damage: with no items at all, the Daze/Autocritical combination would do a single 100 damage critical hit the round after you Daze. With that right equipment mix, you do 2160 damage. That's pretty cool.

But it's not cool when you're up against an enemy that can't be critically hit, thus rendering the majority of your abilities and equipment irrelevant.

We talked about a minor fix to this last time: getting a cloak that does a fixed +20 damage and a +40 damage against undead.

While it's an imperfect solution and you're still looking at a hard fight ahead, the very nice thing about the cloak is that you can take it off.

A lot of players will have their character do "a little of this, and a little of that" to "make them more well-rounded." That's fine if the game you're playing treats you with kid gloves. In a game where one death means the game is over, the balanced approach is far more dangerous than having a gamebreaking combination in place, even with serious weaknesses.

If you do "a little of this and a little of that," you never safely above the difficulty curve. Every single level you play, every major campaign you run, every dungeon you crash -- they're all dangerous.

If you've got an exceptionally good gamebreaking combo, very little is dangerous, and you can watch out carefully for the worst situations.

So, whenever possible, you want to buy the fixes that are off-build for you.

A few examples from Tales of Maj'eyal:

In TOME, some builds have excellent damage resistance. Others do not.

Tempest Peak is an important optional early-game fight that you get some great rewards after you beat it. The boss there does a tremendous amount of lightning damage.

If you're not naturally built for lightning damage resistance, it's a terribly bad idea to put points into some damage resisting skill just to get through Tempest Peak.

But at the same time, it's early enough in the game that you probably don't have your really powerful combination fully in place yet.

The answer, of course, is to start looking for lightning resistance items as soon as you're anywhere near thinking of tackling Tempest.

Okay, that's easy enough to understand.

Here's another: there's an event in the early midgame where you can save a woman's life if you're fast enough killing four cultists in the Dark Crypt.

The cultists are casters; they don't want to engage you in direct combat. If you're a caster too, you're probably fine -- you can blast them.

But if you're not a caster and not ranged, you've got problems. The time it takes to chase them down means the woman might die.

Again, it would be really dumb to "round out" your character by putting skill points into poor quality ranged attacks if that's not how your character is built.

Instead, your best bet is probably to buy two movement infusions: infusions can be swapped out later, and they make you very fast. That'll help you take out two of the four quickly.

Maybe you've got one ability to close rapidly -- Rush, for instance, will take out a third cultist.

Then, you want to stockpile enough magic items to be able to close with or blast the fourth cultist quickly from a distance. Controlled teleport would work. There's a few items that give you abilities like Firebreathing; if you picked up a couple ranged damage items, that could do the trick to take the fourth cultist out.

It's often tempting to go "off-build" to "round-out" your weaknesses, but it's usually a bad idea. The author Dr. Thomas Stanley does research into how wealthy people made their money, what habits they adopt, what their annual incomes are, what professions they made their money in, what their spending patterns are like, and so on.

One thing that stood out to me in Stanley's writing is that self-made millionaires and beyond almost never do "Do It Yourself" activities, and they don't look to pay the cheapest tradesman possible -- they get good plumbers, electricians, etc.

It makes sense. If you've got an annual income of $150,000 that requires you to work 50 hours per week, you've got very little discretionary time.

DIY construction, installing a new water boiler in the basement, putting in a new deck -- this isn't particularly cohesive with working as an executive, in finance, in high-end sales, and so on.

If you love working with your hands or you already got some excellent training in it when you were younger, go for it.

But the fact is, past basic maintenance, you've got to ask a couple questions: is this really an activity that supports and combines well the life I want to build? And, furthermore, can I ever be any good at this?

If you build a new deck that's against code, you didn't get the right permits, you didn't put the supports in well, you didn't treat the wood enough against the weather -- all of these are common enough mistakes -- this winds up costing a lot of time, money, and aggravation beyond what's initially projected.

You simply can’t be good at everything -- we have limited resources. If your work is demanding and you don't love something that's "off-build" for you, you're far better off finding a way to avoid that entirely (get a condo that requires less maintenance than a house) or pay the money to get it taken care of, instead of putting in the time to develop skills that could instead lead to game-breaking life gains.

V 9. Constructing One's Build, VII: One Point Wonder Caveat

We'll cover two important caveats to "buy what you're missing."

The first is if you can get really crazy gains from a very small investment of time and training. In Tales of Maj'eyal, there's an ability called "Waters of Life" that neutralizes poisons and curses without even taking a full action.

On the TOME discussion forums, players discuss strategy and builds. Sometimes an ability like Waters of Life is called "a one point wonder," meaning that a small investment in it permanently gets outsized large gains.

Even if your build handles those threats other ways, it's really worth a single skill point in it, because it's like an instant "off switch" for two headaches. It's really good.

In real life, a basic understanding of nutrition and of sleep hygiene are "one point wonders" -- a couple weeks of serious study can lead to permanent life enhancing benefits.

Negotiation is a one-point wonder unless you're in a really rare role like a tenured research professor with no material needs who largely works solo. The very basics of negotiation -- knowing your BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement; your "next best option" if the negotiation doesn't go through), understanding the concept of a person's "negotiating range," knowing how to do basic research and get comps, and understanding the basic idea behind making offers and concessions and asking for offers and concessions graciously -- a single focused burst of training in this pays off incredibly well, even if your "life build" doesn't include much people/verbal skills. Getting the basics of this down just saves so much money, time, and headache that it's well-worth anyone doing some training in it.

Basic awareness of your emotions and impulses is worth investing some training in -- mindfulness meditation is the most common way to train that awareness up.

V 10 Build Construction VIII Threshold Caveat

If you can cross a key threshold, even if it's off-build, it might be worth doing.

Let's say you're running that Daze/Autocritical build we talked about earlier. Undead can't be critically hit and that's a big problem for you.

If there's an ability called "Banish" that, with 5 skill points in it, can banish any type of undead resulting in getting no experience points, but removing them from the battlefield -- that might be worth doing.

It's not cohesive. Banish has nothing to do with your core build, which is all about having Daze hit and then doing a massive overwhelming critical damage.

But if undead are your only major threat, and investing a few levels into Banish just handles that entirely, it might be worth doing.

Whenever you can completely eliminate a major threat, it's worth considering. Again, you have to look at the opportunity costs and tradeoffs; if you wind up with "a little of this and a little of that" and you're underpowered, that's not a way to win.

But if you're gamebreakingly powerful but with just one or two critical weaknesses, and you can eliminate one of those, it's worth strongly considering.

For instance, high-income professions that require high hours generally don't combo well with learning advanced investing skills. If you're a dentist, you're probably better off becoming the best dentist in your city, getting Board Certified, getting some specialist ability, and otherwise investing your time into becoming excellent at what you do. The gains from going beyond the basics of investing probably aren't worth it -- you could buy a broad index fund that just tracks the stock market and put that on autopilot; the amount of research and learning about securities analysis and all that time reading financial statements to maybe outperform the market by a bit... it's not worth it. It doesn't combo well. It's not cohesive. It's being all over the place.

But, but, but -- there are a few huge weaknesses in the build of high-earning high-labor professions. First, your income falls incredibly fast if you scale your hours back (whether intentionally to pursue other interests, time with family, etc; or unintentionally through injury, disability, needing to take care of a sick parent, etc). Second, you get into the highest tax brackets fast, and you rapidly run out of deductions and tax-deferred investing accounts.

Interestingly, both of those weaknesses in build are potentially solved by real estate: learning how to invest in commercial real estate effectively takes some time and it's not strictly on-build, but there's a reason that dentists, doctors, and lawyers make up such a large amount of the real estate purchases in America: it fixes both of those potential major weaknesses.

Real estate has all sorts of tax-advantaged properties in the United States, including depreciating the property, writing off mortgage interest, and being able to invest primarily for property price appreciation which isn't taxed until sold, and even then can be tax-deferred if invested in another property.

Governance changes and the tax code changes, but putting a few points into commercial real estate investing and a few points into understanding taxes likely makes sense for a high-earning high-labor-hours professional.

It doesn't "straight multiply" the way the dentist who builds a great practice, great skill, great reputation, and gets the ability to do the most modern procedures effectively.

That should obviously come first. If we were using this as a metaphor to video games, the profession might be putting skill points from Level 1 to Level 10 into getting through law school, med school, dental school. Level 11 to Level 20 would be well-spent on building skill, quality, reputation, and perhaps additional specialization. Level 21 to 25, the basic pieces are in place, and it's worth taking some of those "one point wonders" while continuing to finish specializations and get to the forefront of the profession.

But okay, you're Level 25 now. The game goes to Level 50. Do you want to keep doubling down on the great combo you've got running, or maybe do you want to start fixing some holes in your build? Real estate isn't magical or anything, there's certainly other ways to skin that one, but training a few levels in it around Level 26, 27, 28 might generate ongoing great cashflows to protect against downside that happens if your labor intensity goes down, and helps keep more of one's cash as one's income continues to grow.

V 11. The Abstract and Concrete, part one

I once had a mechanical engineer working for me, doing general assistant and operations stuff. She was way, way overqualified to work for me -- she was in her early 40's, and had spent 20 years doing things like moving die-casting factories from other countries to China.

She'd gone to the best engineering school in Singapore, and had done very well as an engineer there. She had a brilliant mind and a relentless work ethic, but when she came back to China to take care of one of her elderly parents who got ill, she found that there was no work available.

I said point blank to her when I was hiring, "Look, you're way, way, way more qualified than what I'm looking for. I'll hire you -- absolutely -- even if you're not here for very long, which I hope you won't be... but what the heck is going on here? Why are you applying for an assistant's job instead of doing engineering?"

And she explained to me that in China, they haven't evolved the discrimination culture that we have in the West. It's basically understood that an unmarried woman in her early 40's should be marrying and having children soon, and so they don't want to give a key role that takes training and onboarding time to a woman around that age, because they expect her to leave shortly.

(As a random tangent, by the way, there's rampant discrimination against women in China. I'm not talking about the drum-beating constant-outrage stuff we have in the U.S.; I'm talking women who are more qualified sometimes making 30% to 50% less than men for the exact same job. I imagine this will get fixed at some point, but right now, If you're willing to treat Chinese staff well, push them for their best, help them develop as people, and you pay market rates or market rates+ to people who normally get short-sticked in China, you can get some really loyal and exceptional staff.)

So, yeah, I had a really talented mechanical engineer working for me.

We had some extra space in our office that was being wasted and not used, and wanted to rent it out.

I asked her to write up a description of the office space, and said I'd do the same. Sometimes, if it's quick enough, I like to have two people do the same work independently, because they'll see different things. Then you can combine the best points from each.

My description of the office space started something like this --

"Great office space in the Chaoyang Business District. Quiet building with a great view, extremely well-lit with great natural light, excellent aesthetics, and a great inspiring atmosphere for a small company hitting growth..."

Her description went like this --

"XX square meters.
 Copy machine.
 Fax machine.
 Full kitchen.
 Coffee machine.
 Full clean bathroom.
 Conference room with 8 chairs.
 Large-screen TV with input ports for presentations."

That always stuck with me. Her mind focused on almost exactly the opposite details that mine did -- she focused on precise details; I focused on the high-concept and the implications of the high-concept.

Later I'd learn that there's broadly two different kind of thinkers -- abstract and concrete.

The majority of the world are concrete-thinkers, though I strongly suspect that people who read this book this far will lean abstract.

I've seen different studies defined different ways, but abstract thinkers definitely make up a minority of the population. The numbers I see tend to cluster around 10% to 15% of the population engaging in abstract thought.

Concrete thinking: A fortress.
Abstract thinking: Controlling a trade route.

Concrete thinking: A palace.
Abstract thinking: Creating a majestic impression to reinforce authority.

Concrete thinking: Photos on Facebook.
Abstract thinking: Shared artifacts of experiences which reinforce ties.

Concrete thinking: A finely tailored suit.
Abstract thinking: Dressing in a way that pattern-matches wealth and prestige, which has subtle percentage points effects on interactions you have.

Concrete thinking: Let's watch the fireworks; it's so beautiful and exciting!
Abstract thinking: Shared rituals and cultural bonding that reinforce the traditions of the nation.

Concrete thinking: I just got my paycheck; let's go drinking.
Abstract thinking: I just got paid; I've now got purchasing power, and could do anything with it. I could go engage in leisure or looking to socialize, or I could do something else.

Concrete thinking: I want to go to the beach.
Abstract thinking: I want to lower my stress levels and reduce fatigue.

Concrete thinking: This cake is delicious!
 Abstract thinking: Eating cake provides sensory pleasure, but at the expense of a macronutrient mix that I don't really want, and it spikes insulin... I could do it sparingly in moderation if I really want to, but I ought to be careful with sweets in general.

I suppose this is lionizing abstract thinking a bit too much. A purely concrete thinker will typically have more natural effectiveness in communicating and getting things done than a pure abstract thinker.

Abstract thinking requires much more training to bring out the best in it. Being a young and inexperienced person who thinks abstractly is generally rather miserable if you're surrounded by concrete thinkers – it’s easy for an abstract thinker to think there’s futility and pointlessness to people pursuing concrete aims that lead nowhere in particular, but you lack the persuasive ability or power to change things.

A lot of abstract thinkers "retreat" into their mind, effectively renouncing their ability to have impact on the world. They see things that strike them as silly, petty, superstitious, and the majority of people don't understand them.

So, effectively, they give up. Perhaps they move to an enclave of pure abstract thinking in academia, pure research, or the arts. Maybe they find work where they're allowed to be abstract enough and don't have to deal with too many people who "don't get it," and then they associate with other people who like to operate in the realm of ideas and abstractions.

While this is perfectly understandable, to me, it's a little bit of a shame.

The paradox of the pure concrete thinker is that they seem to be operating on a "lower level" to most abstract thinkers, but they get more done and are more effective. If you look at how pure researchers who pull entire fields forwards feel about the relatively "stupider" people who commercialize and get rich in those fields, you get a sense of this in action.

Of course, it's not really a paradox. It's easy to get caught up in ideas; abstractions can be clean and precise and perfect, whereas the concrete always has a variety of messy details that never quite lives up to perfect plans.

But I do believe and continue to believe that it's easier for an abstract thinker to learn how to communicate and be effective in the concrete world than the reverse; the abstract thinker, thus, probably has the highest ceiling, even if he or she reaches it far less often and is usually less practically effective at getting things done.

The best of both worlds is the ability to see the abstract and invisible patterns, but to act in concrete terms -- and to communicate in whatever terms are most effective at getting things done, meaning, to make your conversation useful and clear to the type of person you're engaged in conversation with.

This is very possible. There are huge gains to doing so. Let's discuss this now.

V 12. Abstract and Concrete, part two

Abstract thinkers have the ability to dramatically outperform concrete thinkers, because they can -- at their best -- see invisible and intangible forces at work, and start pulling levers that most people don't even know exist.

"Pure" concrete thinkers are typically limited to working with things as they are right now, and maybe generating some novel combinations of things that already exist.

But concrete thinkers as a group, I think, typically outperform abstract thinkers.

Abstract thinkers will work out a model of how reality could be better -- but then they'll try and fall down the stairs when they're going to try to put it into practice.

No, I'm not joking and not being flippant. Literally "try and fall down the stairs" is the type of problem many abstract thinkers fall for. It's often basic stuff.

Consider, for instance, someone that develops a detailed theory of how people connect with each other, and they can actually put together metrics/numbers on things like Relevancy and Intimacy to measure one's network, etc. (I've done that. It's covered in Gateless, which I coauthored with Kai Zau.)

Well, that's all well and good -- but who is going to throw a better party?

The concrete thinker does something like this --

Great Party Checklist

*Great space
 *A few known great people who 100% confirm they're going so we have a good crowd 
*Sending invites early enough
 *Sending reminders
 *Having an easy RSVP on Facebook or something similar
 *Driving/transport directions
 *Easy parking
 *Cool theme 
*Cool lighting
*Cool music
*Snacks
 *Drinks
 *Make sure staff/bouncer/whoever is well trained, friendly, and cool.

Etc.

Now, an abstract thinker -- in theory -- could throw a party that good or better. But under the "trip and fall down the stairs" theory, they often don't because after writing up a theoretical plan for the best party ever, they forget to send invites early enough, or they don't handle parking and it becomes a disaster that slows everything down. Or one of the more marginal invited people brings a friend of a friend who is doing cocaine, who invites other shady people, and you've got no security, and all hell breaks loose.

The abstract thinker often will throw his hands up in the air and say, "People! God, people are so awful! I try to put a nice thing together, and everyone goes and ruins it! Screw it!"

And then retreats to live in a cave.

I wish I were joking. In some cities, having enough parking is really critical to throwing a nice event. Not handling parking might mean it's a bust, even if you have some really cool way to write down everyone's important interests and automatically computationally match people that really ought to be introduced to each other.

The example for video games is looking at theoretical build power without looking at any points where there's stress on you.

We've already looked at weaknesses in build. You could write,

"Enemies that can't be critical hit... a potential weakness."

The concrete thinker who understands the mechanics well can often outperform the abstract thinker. They're less likely to notice truly devastating gamebreaking combinations, but they're also less likely to trip and fall down the stairs.

A concrete approach to beating a game might look something like this --

Most Dangerous Bosses/Events

*Forest troll: Does big melee damage. Regenerates quickly.
 *Rock troll: Like forest troll, but with more resistance to damage.
 *Talia the master assassin: Ranged damage with bow, very fast, doesn't let you close distance to attack. 
*Forest dragon: Large initial damage in breath attack. 
*Ice dragon: Large initial damage in breath attack.
 *Fire dragon: Large initial damage in breath attack. 
*Ghost dragon: Completely immune to critical hits. Some nasty curse and confusion effects.
*Sinking ship: Need enough speed to get out quickly.

Put it like this: If every possible dangerous encounter is considered, you'll likely prepare better, prepare contingencies better, double-check your build, etc.

Abstract thinkers will think about damage per second, weaknesses, cohesion, build, and all the sorts of things we're already talking about.

That's correct; that's 100% correct. Many times people doing the pure concrete thing will make the linear/exponential mistake, taking a +10 now and missing how a +2% can add up to much larger amounts.

But doing some concrete thinking is what stops you from tripping and falling down the stairs, or forgetting to handle parking at an event, or not having any way to expel drunken problem-makers from your party.

V 13. Abstract and Concrete, part three: Vulnerability to Poison

The abstract solution to vulnerability to poison, in a video game, is to place with your resistance to poison, look for items or abilities to cure poison, etc.

You could also list out every zone that has a poison-dealing enemy, and then avoid those zones until you’re strong enough to handle it.

The abstract solutions to nutrition rely on studying and planning macronutrients, diet plans, training, satiety, etc.

The concrete solutions to nutrition involve having enough healthy pleasant food around, and avoiding places where junk food is eaten.

V 14. Abstract and Concrete, part four: Anti-Top 10 Lists, First Principles

A word of caution:

“Top 10 lists” are often as addictive as crack cocaine to concrete thinkers, and those are very rarely the answer.

“Top Ten Ways to Write Better
1. Write every day!
2. Get motivated!

3. Outline!
4. Give yourself permission to do a bad draft first!
5. Take a break and nap!
…
10. Don’t forget to watch the rainbow!”

Concrete thinking is at its best when used to identify real problem areas or impact areas, when used to sanity check to make everything works out… the bane of concrete thinkers is getting bogged down in details and actions that don’t ever result in any breakthroughs or gains.

Delving into concrete thinking is a great way to sanity check your abstract plans and look for weaknesses, but do beware that you’re not procrastinating or turning your mind off with a bunch of random details that aren’t the important part of the puzzle.

Section VI.

VI 1. The Feeling of a Thunderstorm

How would you explain being caught in a hurricane to someone who has never been in even a rainstorm?

"Water is pouring down around you, fast, heavily, from all directions."

"Like in the shower?"

"Well... a little bit like that, but imagine having 30 showerheads that randomly move around and change direction."

"That sounds nice."

"Well, it's not nice... umm... it's usually not warm; it's kind of cold. And the winds kick up heavily, and it feels somewhat dangerous."

"Winds?"

"Yeah, have you ever been out when it's windy outside?"

"No, I haven't."

"Oh, jeez, well, then, how do I explain this? Umm... you've vacuumed, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay, imagine there's a bunch of gigantic vacuums around being turned on and turned off, sucking things up and pulling things around."

"So being in a thunderstorm is like being in 30 showers and surrounded by 30 vacuums randomly being turned on and off?"

"Uhh, something like that, yeah."

There's a huge gap between a theoretical/intellectual understanding of what a phenomenon is like, and actually having experienced it yourself.

Having this "feel" for situations is crucial to success in both life and games, and it's one of the reasons that people who are brand-new to something have a very hard time assessing their options, evaluating how good they'll be, and getting the long-term planning right.

Vi 2. Conative, part one: Riot Policing

Let's attack this "feel" problem from a few different perspectives. We'll start with, ironically, the most intellectual explanation I've ever come across --

"Consider a thing such as a strawberry. If we wish to find the word 'strawberry', we look in a dictionary; if we wish to find a description of a strawberry, we look in an encyclopaedia. But if we are hungry, we do not go to the library, but to the field where fine strawberries may be found. If we do not know where there is such a field, we might seek guidance as to where fine strawberries may be found. [...]

"[Of the two types of knowledge, the first] is called cognitive knowledge, the knowledge born of words and numbers, and other similar devices. The other form of knowledge, conative knowledge, needs no words or other such devices, for it is the form of knowledge born of direct personal experience. So it is that conative knowledge is also known as experiential knowledge. Cognitive and experiential knowledge both have their roots in reality, but reality is complex, and complexity is more of a barrier to cognitive knowledge than it is to experiential knowledge, for when we seek cognitive knowledge of a thing, that is, understanding of it, the knowledge we gain of that thing is understanding only of its manifestations, which is not knowledge of the thing itself."

That's from Stan Rosenthal's "The Tao Te Ching" An Introduction," written in 1984. It can be found online in its entirety and is well-worth reading.

That obscure document, over 30 years old now, is the only place I came across the expression "conative knowledge" -- which is one of the most useful phrases I ever learned.

Instantly, much more of the world made sense. There's cognitive knowledge -- like describing a thunderstorm in terms of water from shower heads and vacuums -- and then there's actually standing outside in a thunderstorm for five minutes.

During the month I was in Istanbul in 2014 with Kai Zau and Bryan Hernandez, the second anniversary of a protest day came around, and people took the streets rioting and protesting.

The police came out in force with riot gear, armored personnel carriers, and tear gas.

We had rented a place in a quiet, lower-middle class religious neighborhood that stayed quiet during the riots. But we were less than a three minute walk from the Istikal, the famous broad street-and-plaza that led the way to Taksim Square where the major rioting took place.

I didn't venture into the most dangerous parts of the riot, but once things had quieted down, I took some time to walk around and observe.

I'm curious about almost everything, and policing, crisis management, protest, rioting, governance, media, etc -- this as interesting as anything else. I've read plenty on the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, or what Gandhi did in India, and so on.

But just 90 minutes observing the riot police and demonstrators gave me probably a better understanding of how demonstrations start and spread, how police respond, and so on.

The media always take pictures, of course, of the action itself. It means demonstrations seem to have a cramped and packed-in, almost claustrophobic feeling to them -- as an outsider watching media reports.

But once you go walk around, you realize the sheer vast amounts of empty space, with demonstrators and rioters either choosing to try to evade the police and start something where the police aren't, or confronting them directly, and with the police looking to control central arteries and choke points in the city.

I couldn't even describe it adequately if you've never walked around during a time like that -- but instantly I understood just about all urban demonstrator/police conflicts much better and at a deeper level than thousands of hours of reading could have given.

This is conative knowledge -- experiential knowledge -- of how riots and riot policing go, as opposed to cognitive knowledge -- theoretical knowledge built around words and symbols.

We'll apply this more to games first, and to life second.

VI 3. Conative, part two: As Applied to Gaming

We talked briefly about the "Inexperience Toll" a while ago.

Inexperience can be seen as a lack of conative knowledge.

You can compensate for it, a little bit, by reading in advance about what comes ahead.

But it's hard to fully get one's mind around.

If you're playing a roguelike, for instance, what's more dangerous in the endgame -- crowds of enemies, or single powerful enemies?

Often in the early game of a roguelike, falling into a crowd of enemies is fatal, and area-attack abilities make the game much easier.

But in the late game, regular non-boss enemies might be entirely a non-issue and ultra-powerful bosses might be the only thing that matters.

If you didn't know that while advancing a spellcaster, you might take the abilities fireball, firestorm, lightning storm, and so on. These spells might instantly kill a whole crowd of dangerous monsters.

Meanwhile, you might neglect targets-one-enemy abilities like slow, paralyze, dispel magic, and silence... and those might be exactly what you need to stop very powerful end-game enemies from wrecking you.

It might be the case that in the late-game, you can just completely ignore mundane enemies. if you have some sort of damage reduction, regular monsters might do zero damage to you. And if the game has any "grenade"-like items (potion of explosion, etc), then later once you have infinite money, you can simply stock up on those if you need to rapidly clear a room full of weak enemies.

Meanwhile, if you didn't start training in weaken-one-tough-enemy abilities, you're helpless when fighting a very powerful spellcaster who is a required fight on the way to winning the game.

It's impossible to know, the first time you play a game, what the difficult late-game encounters can be. That's conative knowledge you don't have -- experience you haven't gotten. Nevertheless, you can largely remedy it with some cognitive knowledge -- you can read recommended builds and advancement order of skills and spells.

It gets harder when it comes to the, "Am I tough enough to do this yet?" question. You walk into an area, and you see gravestones. Okay, it's a graveyard. Okay, there's probably undead here. How dangerous is this place?

If there's two alternative routes to the next place you're going, can you safely power along through the graveyard, or should you turn back and go the other route?

There can be general guidelines written online -- "don't go into a graveyard before you're Level 12" -- but these are necessarily subjective. If you've got strong fire magic or holy magic, you might be able to tackle a graveyard much earlier, relatively speaking. If you're weak against diseases and curses, you might want to just avoid the place entirely until you're way over-leveled for it.

The games that are the most addicting have a smooth difficulty curve increase, where you feels like the area you're in is slightly too dangerous for your character to be there -- but which isn't actually, really, dangerous.

I've never played World of Warcraft. After seeing a friend's roommate turn into a real-life zombie in front of the game and seeing how bright and colorful and beautiful and interesting the game looked on his monitor, I decided then and there to never play it.

But my understanding from reading some essays on game design is that World of Warcraft is one of the best at getting the difficulty progression to be most pleasing to the player. You always feel like you're pushed and on the verge of being in trouble -- but it's an illusion, you're not really in trouble; you're pretty safe all the time.

I like roguelikes because you don't get that kid-glove treatment: the difficulty curve isn't "fair" and "gradual." Often, due to procedural generation (levels randomly seeded with enemies using probability tables), you can wind up cruising along at a good pace and very safely, and then wind up in a very difficult situation suddenly and abruptly.

I like that, because it's both more interesting and makes for better learning and development on a human level.

But it's absolutely true that the first time you want into a "safe-seeming" situation that isn't safe in a roguelike, you get wrecked and die.

Not an uncommon experience in Nethack: "Oh, look, a cat. Wait, I'm dead? What?"

What do you do about it? Well, there's two potential answers.

The first answer, the one I don't go for that 99% of people prefer, is to find places that'll treat you with kid gloves and ensure you get a trophy for playing.

The second answer, the one that only crazy people prefer, is to do very difficult things to get the conative knowledge, even though the price to doing so is failure and things going wrong, and it's incredibly unpleasant.

There's no hack around it. Generally good judgment and broad applicable experience helps, but if you're facing unpredictable difficulty and you don't have that conative base of experience for if you're safe or not, you're going to take a beating periodically.

And maybe I'm crazy, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Vi 4. Author Interlude to Conative

Will you forgive the author for being self-indulgent for a moment?

It might even verge on complaining about my craft -- may I continue? Really, I wouldn't want to do it without your blessing.

It might be interesting. May I continue?

Okay. That's very kind of you. Thank you.

Here is my issue: I would like to write about conative knowledge as applied to real life.

But, here is the problem: the takeaways, written literally, seem oh-so-very basic.

It's the kind of thing that most people don't do very well.

Thus, you'd think it would be important to talk about it.

But if you talk about it, try to explain the important point, you get a bored nod. "Yeah, yeah, I already know that."

It's like -- crazy stuff that's entirely wrong can persuade, because they're not bounded by reality or truth. But if you're trying to get to the universals that drive things, it can come out sounding like something people have already heard (but not yet successfully implemented) -- but, does this get due consideration?

No, alas, no, it doesn't. It gets, "I already know that." Are they doing it? No. Does that matter? No. Should it matter? Yes.

... okay, enough of that! Thanks for letting me be self-indulgent. Let me try to create a fresh take on the conative as applied to real life.

Vi 5. Conative, part three: 40 30 30 vs 80 15 5

Here is my challenge. The following statement is true --

"When you haven't done something personally yet, you'll tend to understand it poorly and make bad estimates. This has unfortunate consequences."

Then, the applications: a non-technologist thinking it's "no big deal" to change scope on one of the programmers they work with; that's bad and slows things down.

Or, a programmer who finishes a cutting-edge highly polished app that might or might not serve any market needs, and then says "I just need someone to do the marketing now" -- not realizing that marketing isn't something you tack on after you've made the technology.

Likewise, "write a press release, it's not a big deal" or "just go make some sales" -- these are ignorant statements if you don't have the experience and the "feel" for the work you're prescribing.

Fine, fine, fine. The simplest version of these statements are totally true, but there aren't many takeaways from them. What's the takeaway? "Don't do that." No, that's not a good takeaway. "Don't assume you understand work you've never done before." That gets the 'yeah yeah, already know that, duh' reply.

The first most important application of conative knowledge as applied to work and life is this: until you've got conative immersed experience, your mental estimates and assumptions are usually badly mistaken.

But how to really get this concept across?

Try this:

40/30/30 vs. 80/15/5.

What's that?

That's how important the top 3 factors are in what you're doing.

Woe be to you if you get this mix wrong.

Let's look at three factors that a new business might have to get right:

 *Quality
 *Speed 
*Price

Let's say they're important in that order: quality is most important, speed (of delivery, of getting the product going, etc) is second most important, and price is the third most important thing.

Here's the question: if we ranked the importance of these three factors and how they matter to the buying decision, does it look like this?

Importance Mix One 

Quality ... 40% of buying decision 
Speed ... 30% of buying decision 
Price ... 30% of buying decision

If so, quality is very slightly more important than price and speed. That means, you need to be constantly balancing the three factors. Quality comes first, but you can't let the costs run high to get max quality. Meanwhile, you need to streamline and simplify so that you don't make deliveries too slowly. For instance, customization for every customer could increase quality a lot, but it increases price and is slow. In this Importance Mix, that's a non-starter.

On the other hand...

Quality ... 80% of buying decision
 Speed ... 15% of buying decision 
Price ... 5% of buying decision

In this case, quality is everything. You should do everything you can to increase quality, even at the expense of making your product very expensive.

Don't totally neglect speed -- it still matters -- but if a little slower gets you higher quality, do it.

If you do customize heavily (you probably should here), you want to use FedEx or other fast delivery-by-air to shave some time off. Again, quality and speed matter a lot, and price basically doesn't matter here.

Here's where conative knowledge (experiential knowledge) matters. You can look at a business and say "Quality, speed, and price are what matter here" -- but a veteran of the industry can tell you whether they're basically the same importance level, or if one of the factors dominates the decision.

You basically can't know that without experience.

Consider the early days of Walmart and K-Mart.

Walmart: 95% emphasis on low prices; 5% everything else.

K-Mart: 50% emphasis on low prices, 25% emphasis on quality, 20% emphasis on nice shopping experience, 5% emphasis on everything else.

Walmart goes on to be the largest company on Earth; K-Mart eventually goes bankrupt.

Sometimes you can explicitly put numbers and ranks on things. As described in Jeffrey Liker's The Toyota Way, this is precisely what Toyota did when launching the Lexus luxury car brand to target the high-end Western car market.

Toyota engineer Ichiro Suzuki (no relation to the baseball player) started by getting all the reasons that high-end car buyers chose their automobiles in Long Island. The list boiled down to --

1. Status and prestige of image
 2. High quality 
3. Resale value
 4. Performance (e.g., handling, ride, power)
 5. Safety

"More than any other information gathered, this rank ordering struck an emotional nerve because Suzuki viewed a car essentially as a vehicle of transportation, not an ornament. When he listened to people talk about Mercedes-Benz, status and prestige were number one, while performance, the actual basic function of the car, was only number four. Perhaps because of his engineering bias, Suzuki could not accept people choosing Mercedes-Benz's status appeal over performance. It was a car, after all, not an ornament."

Suzuki came around on it, eventually setting objective performance target where the Lexus would exceed all the cars in similar class in top speed, fuel consumption, and lowest noise at freeway speeds -- while simultaneously having excellent styling.

The result? The Lexus became the best-selling luxury car in the United States in 2002, shortly after launch.

He couldn't have done it on pure engineering performance without styling, nor with styling without the objective benchmarks of Lexus outperforming on top speed, fuel efficiency, and lowest noise.

Knowing what's important comes from experiential feel, not theory.

That's critical. An engineer would have bet on performance first for cars; it was the fourth-most-important factor among luxury buyers. Toyota balanced a few factors and aimed for the best at all of them, did it, and won big. K-Mart tried a balanced shopping approach and went bankrupt.

Knowing what's important is hard enough, but can be figured out. Knowing the relative importance of various factors is something else entirely.

VI 6. Conative, part four: Fingerspitz

We don't look to Germany very often for loan-words and metaphors. Sure, we'll take an odd word like "schadenfreude," but we're especially uninterested in German terms from military science or industrial production.

It's understandable. German militarism and German industrial work have always been slightly alien to the English and later American traditions. This even before Wilhelm II's Kaiserreich bids for control of Europe, and before Adolf Hitler created a morbid reconstruction of the worst aspects of the German Empire in a Versailles-avenging outburst of hatred.

No, there are almost no positive metaphors in American popular culture coming from the history of Germany. Horrors, yes; insights, no.

Thus, it surprises the American scholar who begins to study military science to see the Germans represented so heavily.

Clauswitz, Moltke, von Schlieffen, and Guderian start showing up a lot when you want to understand modern warfare -- and moreover, when you want to just understand how to get things done in general.

But the advantage of studying those Germans are perhaps the same reason they're not popular (even before the Hitler-hangover): there's a certain terse preciseness to it.

In English, you can say, "Hey, if you have a minute, if it's not too troubling, I'd kind of like to discuss what's happening over in the HR department, because it, umm, I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but I think there's some things there that are troubling."

It's basically impossible to talk like that in German. You can ask if your colleague has a minute, but then you're asking if your colleague has a minute. As for the "things that are troubling" -- you basically are just forced to say it. (Or not say it, as it were.)

"Wir haben ein Problem im HR Department.” We have a problem in the HR department. “Haben wir ein Problem im HR Department?" "Do we have a problem in the HR department?"

English so often gets euphemisms and a mix of morality and causality blended together in language. I happen to think this is mostly a strength of English, but we get in trouble when we talk around things and just assume that the listener should figure out what the speaker is saying.

Take schadenfreude: noun. "pleasure derived from another's misfortune." ORIGIN German Schadenfreude, from Schaden 'harm' + Freude 'joy.'

Englishman: "I hope this doesn't make me a bad person, but when he fell flat on his face, I got some sort of satisfaction out of that."

German: "Ah, schadenfreude."

Probably the three most profitable imports to English from German are Auftragstaktik ("commander's intent"), "Worauf kommt es eigentlich an?" (broadly, "What's the heart of the matter?", "What's the center of the problem?", "What's the core of the issue?", and "What really matters here and will make things happen?" rolled together), and -- finally -- Fingerspitzengefuhl.

Stephen Bungay writes --

"Psychologist Gary Klein has made a study of intuitive decision making. By observing experts in a given field in situations in which they made decisions, Klein realized that they did not follow the conventional “rational model” of developing and evaluating options before choosing between them. They seemed to go straight to the answer, using what appeared to nonexperts, and indeed often to themselves, to be a “sixth sense.” On analysis, the sixth sense turned out to be perfectly rational. It was based on pattern recognition. Through years of experience in their field, experts build up patterns of expectation, and notice immediately when something unusual occurs which breaks the pattern. These signals make the “right” decision obvious to them. It looks to others and feels to them to be intuitive, but the intuition is schooled, and rational. Clausewitz gives it the French name coup d’oeil, the glance of a practiced eye. Germans more usually refer to Fingerspitzengefuhl, the “feeling in your fingertips.”"

Fingerspitzengefuhl doesn't and can't make full intellectual sense until you know the difference between cognitive knowledge and conative knowledge.

Fingerspitzengefuhl could be called conative feel.

It's experience and experience alone that lets you get a feel for a situation.

This is one of the bigger problems for the well-studied inexperienced person. You might have a theoretical cognitive understanding of a situation, but you lack the fingerspitzengefuhl -- you lack the feel of the situation that comes from direct experience.

There are some ways around this.

VI 7. Blank spots on the map

“It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you think you know that ain’t actually so.”

Certainty feels good; uncertainty feels bad. Thus, people would rather color in the blank spots on their map with all kinds of terrain and boundaries that don't actually exist.

Thus, one of the more broadly effective countermeasure against a lack of experience: frankly acknowledge it, and take action anyways.

"I don't know exactly how long this will take to get down, but it's been done before, so we'll budget a healthy amount of time for it, and get at it repeatedly."

Doing this successfully is both really simple and really complex.

On the one hand, it's very simple. You acknowledge you don't know, and you refuse to act like you know.

The basic idea is you put a question mark on your map.

You say, "I'm not sure what's going on in that area. I'm not sure how good this all is. I'm going to just put a '?' there in my mind."

It's simple to say, but harder to do.

Consider governance for a moment. In a democracy, politics is how we choose the people who govern us.

But there is such a thing as good governance and bad governance. Singapore is undoubtedly governed better than Pyongyang -- on just about any parameter you want to judge it.

But when a topic comes up, such as to what extent civil service officials in a city should be allowed to unionize and collectively bargain, people instantly take positions.

They don't say: "That's interesting. Can I see comparables from different cities that have taken different policies that led to different results?"

No, not at all. Instantly, people who are generally pro-collective bargaining will take a firm position for maximum rights and privileges on that front, people who are against it will argue against it completely and entirely.

The same is true for energy policy or defense policy.

In this way, people make themselves stupid and reactive. They hear of a political/governance issue, and they immediately take a side based on... based on what? Based on nothing. Based on past feelings or identity or emotions or... all sorts of things that shouldn't have an effect on your judgment of what's good governance and not.

This is true on all sorts of things: energy policy, defense policy, policing, sentencing, social programs, types and magnitudes of taxation, etc.

These are all extremely complicated things in which tradeoffs have to be made. It would at least do well to note what the tradeoffs are. Then, there are universal principles and patterns, but most people aren't even interested in those. They just... make strong opinions for no reason, and then espouse them confidently.

Once you set an opinion, it becomes a hell of a thing to try to change it. Once you say "this is a good idea" and commit to something, you start looking to defend and confirm the idea rather than learn more.

Maybe this sounds like hyperbole, but you almost gain superpowers when you refuse to take positions and explicitly assign those '?' marks on the blank spots in the map.

Q: "What's your stance on the emissions tax?"
 A: "I don't know. I haven't looked into it."

Q: "The jails are overcrowded. What should we do about it?" 
A: "I don't know. I haven't looked into it."

Q: "I think taxes should be lower. What do you think?" 
A: "Which taxes?"
 Q: "All of them." 
A: "All of them?" 
Q: "Yeah, don't you think so?"
 A: "No, I don't think every single tax should be lower."
 Q: "Oh, what taxes should be lower and what shouldn't, then?" 
A: "I don't know. I haven't fully looked into it."

Saying that you don't know and you haven't looked into it shouldn't be used as an excuse to remain ignorant; you should look into it. But I'm much more interested in someone that can first explain the nuances of a particular policy (including the downsides and who loses as a result of it; none of this "it's 100% good at everything and there's no downside!" stuff), and then can explain the major tradeoffs, comparables to other places that have implemented the policy and the good bad things that happened, and then maybe gives a recommendation as to which way they think is best.

Thus, a person that can explain the implications of around 10 major issues through detailed learning on the topic and has strong opinions on just 3 or 4 of them is much more credible than someone who has inch-deep mile-wide fervent opinions on 100 major issues, all of them hot-button and partisan, none of them carefully thought-through.

Section VII.

VII 1. The Unfairness, part one

Sometimes I muse over whether the English language would be better if the word fair didn't exist.

It's four letters: F... A... I... R.

And it so often encodes intensely sloppy thinking that it’s difficult to think of a word that’s more damaging.

It’s not the concept of “fairness” that’s a problem. It’s that the word covers dozens of different cases with vastly different implications.

See, you can say -- "That's unfair" -- without specifying what parameter or outcome.

This is actually a rather big deal.

Consider this statement about a private boy’s boarding high school: "It's unfair to expect the boys to be disciplined right away."

That statement seems to work; it doesn't rise any urgent questions; it doesn't seem to be incomplete or broken.

And yet, what exactly is the unfairness? It could mean any of the following:

"If you expect the boys to be disciplined right away, their first time living away from home, you might be disappointed."

"If you expect the boys to be disciplined right away, their first time living away from home, you might build your curriculum the wrong way and be ineffective."

"If you expect the boys to be disciplined right away, their first time living away from home, you're going to be too harsh and could really inflict some damage to their morale, make them feel bad, etc, for no good reason."

"If you treat the boys in a way that demands discipline right away, they might hate and resent you coming from their previous backgrounds."

"I think you would be more effective at teaching if you adopted an incremental approach that didn't assume good discipline right away."

"I think you would be more effective at connecting with the boys personally if you adopted an incremental approach that didn't assume good discipline right away."

"Be careful you don't make too many promises to the parents about what you'll do -- it's unrealistic to expect immediate change when they come from normal backgrounds and aren't disciplined yet."

Any of those sentences could be the important and salient point from "It's unfair to expect..." -- and maybe the two speakers have the context, or maybe they don't.

Much of the conflict in society is from this kind of sloppy communication and incomplete thinking.

Many arguments start when two people have radically different parameters for what's important for humans to do in the world, and then they just start talking at each other without clarifying that.

Person 1: "That's unfair."
 Person 2: "It's perfectly fair. Doing what you suggest wouldn't be fair."
 Person 1: "No it's not, your policy is unfair."
 Person 2: Etc.

Person 1 could be having any position there -- higher taxes or lower taxes, stricter criminal sentencing or light sentencing, more restrictive or more liberal immigration, or really anything else.

This is not limited to politics, of course -- should seniority determine authority? What about merit? What about in an organization that relies on hierarchy to function, like the military?

If it's really this --

Person 1: "I dislike hierarchy personally. I also think hierarchy generally speaking is ineffective at everything. Merit should rule to the extent possible."

Person 2: "I don't like hierarchy, per se, but I don't think it's possible to evaluate pure merit without things like charisma, personality, favoritism getting in the way. Seniority is objective -- you know the date someone joined the company or military. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than merit."

Person 1: "I agree with you that merit can be hard to evaluate, but pure seniority systems are most unfair to people who really work to break outside the mold and really outperform, the most dedicated and potentially capable people, who then won't have authority. And by 'unfair,' I mean unfair in terms of the fact that I believe contributions should be rewarded by how they're made, and also that I think it's ineffective for the organization."

Person 2: "I agree with some of those points; however, I don't think it's a suitable way to run an entire organization. If everyone is evaluated on supposedly 'pure merit,' you have an instantly political organization where people focus on getting the credit and being evaluated well, instead of doing their job and knowing they'll be taken care of. I do agree that people who are particularly driven to contribute and perform make out badly in this system though, and I don't know how to address it."

Person 1: "Okay, I see your point about the politicization of an organization if it's all supposedly on merit. And you seem to agree that it'll be ineffective if you don't have a way for people who are driven to outperform to be acknowledged, compensated, and gain greater authority as a result. This is tricky."

Person 2: "Tricky indeed. I think we're on the same page."

The usual dialog usually degenerates.

Person 1: "This seniority system is unfair!"
 Person 2: "No it's not, it's exactly fair." 
Person 1: "No it's not, it's stupid, it's just about time in the company." 
Person 2: "Your head is full of rocks." 
Person 1: "No, your head is full of rocks!" 
Person 2: Etc, etc.

VII 2. The Unfairness, part two: Vision Radius

Most people would agree that roguelikes are incredibly unfair.

And I would argue that life is more like a roguelike than a casual game.

In Tales of Maj'eyal, there's such a thing as a “vision radius" -- that's how far away you can see on the map. It can be increased by getting a brighter lantern, casting a Sun spell, learning to see in the dark, etc.

Enemies also have a vision radius.

Vision radius determines who sees the other person first.

If your vision radius is 8 and the enemy's is 4, that means you see the enemy before they see you. That means you can prepare all your defenses while they're just standing around, and then open the fight by shooting them with an arrow or casting some nasty spell.

Just like that, out of nowhere, a fireball will explode on the enemy. Assuming they move at normal speed, they'll probably come towards you -- and they'll be 7 squares away on the next turn, still unable to see you.

You fire the next round of your barrage, they advance to square 6, you fire again, they advance to five squares away, you fire again, and finally they move into being able to see what they're dealing with (if they’re still alive).

That means, if your vision radius is eight and theirs is four, you get five attacks on them before they can even see you to respond properly.

It's not infallible, of course -- an enemy standing right behind a door you open means you're in combat right away. But vision radius is one of those things that no one explicitly tells you is a big deal, but is a huge tactical advantage if you're good at using it.

A common complaint of unfairness in Tales of Maj'eyal is that you can get one-shot killed by enemies you couldn't even see.

It's like, you walked into the graveyard next to Last Hope. You walked town into the mausoleum underneath the graveyard. You ignored the fact that it's dark and ominous and that the music is dark and ominous and that the whole area has this thematic uneasiness to it.

You kept walking towards the huge chamber at the end of the hall of coffins and tombs, and then -- bam, you died. You don't even know why. You're dead. Game over.

If you look afterwards at what killed you, it'll be recorded as Melinda the Necromancer. She saw you before you saw her, and her first spell killed you before you even knew she was there.

Many would decry this as unfair. The player might say:

"This game sucks. It's totally unfair that I walked into this place and died without even knowing what happened."

In this case, there's no political or rhetorical advantage to invoking unfairness. It's just him, playing a game, by himself, a solo game. There's no multiplayer to it.

Thus, "It's totally unfair..." is self-directed thought; it's his worldview and how he sees the world.

I argue thusly -- this is sloppy and counterproductive thinking.

Now, this isn't a criticism. If you've ever felt like life is unfair, I empathize and sympathize. We are only aiming to do better here, not feel better.

Let's distill out the possible complaints about the player who got killed by Melinda. They are:

1. I shouldn't be able to walk into an area where I can get killed by an ultra-powerful enemy that I have no shot in early in the game.

2. I shouldn't be able to get killed by an enemy who I haven't even seen yet and was never given the chance to respond to or run away from.

In regards to Complaint #1, the player is absolutely correct that they can walk into the Last Hope Graveyard at levels where they have no chance of surviving. In fact, you're almost certain to wind up in Last Hope before level 10, and unless you've got an incredibly carefully built character, you really shouldn't try to take out Melinda before level 20 or 25.

Last Hope is one of the most useful cities in the early game. You wind up there early. And then you get told of Melinda and the graveyard (which shows up on your map) at any level by the town's alchemist. If you go there immediately, you're very likely to get killed. (I did, the first time I played.)

When the player makes the "I shouldn't be able to walk into an area..." complaint, they're saying that the game developer should make it so players can't hurt themselves.

In fact, it would be very easy for the alchemist to say: "I've got something else for you to do... it's about a necromancer... actually, I don't think you're ready for it. Come back later."

Most modern games do that.

What the complainer is saying at this point is that they want less agency. They want to be protected. They don't want choices that are bad choices made available to them.

Or perhaps, they want to get extreme and explicit warnings repeatedly. For the record, TOME does give you a fair amount of warnings before you do something dangerous.

Should it be more explicit? "You feel like if you stay here, you're certain to die. Continue forwards? Y/N" It could throw those at you repeatedly. (Sometimes it even does.)

But in this way, games become a way to be stupid and become less like reality. When you go to buy stock in Groupon, you don't get: "Warning: The company has a high price/earnings and their revenue channels are not proven as durable yet. You're likely to see significant stock declines."

When you go to have your fifth glass of wine at the company Christmas party, you don't get: "Warning: Your drunkenness is increasing rapidly and your superiors are all here. You will rapidly have a risk of making a fool of yourself that damages your career."

Real life has an exceedingly large amount of bad decisions available to make. You need to hone your awareness, your mental skillset, your ability to protect yourself, and also explicitly hone your intuition to look for warning signs and signals.

I like that TOME has areas that are dangerous that you have no business being in. As soon as you enter an area and get shot with one arrow by an archer, you're forced to say, "Can I deal well with archers?" If not, you should leave.

Most games don't do that; they stack things in an order where everything available to you is safe.

TOME doesn't. There's areas that you'll absolutely wreck based on your character build, and areas that'll absolutely wreck you. You should tackle the former and delay the latter until you get the items, experience, and abilities to let you take the dangerous areas out safely.

You're forced to use an ability that has no explicit statistic or gameplay mechanism behind -- your own reasoning. You need to stay aware and ask, "Should I be here? Can I handle this? Is this a good idea?"

In my book, that's a good thing -- because those are exactly the questions you should be asking in real life.

As for the second complaint, "I shouldn't be able to get killed by an enemy who I haven't even seen yet and was never given the chance to respond to or run away from."

Could we be more sympathetic to this? We perhaps could.

This is the Inexperience Toll; this is a lack of conative knowledge.

Most new players in the game might not even realize that vision radius actually matters.

The fact is, actually, vision radius isn't that big of a deal -- except in the few occasions where it's a really big deal.

How do you learn that? Well, you could read and research the theory, or you could gain it the hard way by experience.

But the fact is, this complaint pairs with the first one: magic-users and ranged fighters (archers, etc) are typically more dangerous than melee enemies in TOME. Some melee enemies can close rapidly with Rush or teleport or casting some gravity attack that brings you to them, but most can't.

Put this way: necromancers are more dangerous than bears. Bears are slow, cannot hit you until they're right upon you, and you see them coming well in advance. Necromancers are moderately fast, can blast you from very far away, and they probably see you before you see them.

As we see, then, the second complaint is a little bit of "I wasn't aware how important vision radius is" -- but besides that, it's just a derivation of the first complaint.

"I shouldn't be allowed to hurt myself."

I think the magic of roguelikes are that you can hurt yourself. You can put yourself in unwinnable situations. You can blunder your way into a dragon's lair and get roasted. You can advance too rapidly and unprepared. You can try to convert the altar of an enemy god and get an enemy champion spawned to fight you who wipes the floor with you. You can, as a melee fighter with no ranged options, charge blindly against a band of archers and get shot down.

Or you can do the opposite. You can gain complete immunity to fire and wipe the floor with the fire dragon. You can put together game-breaking combos and go destroy an entire fortress full of elite guards. You can choose to gamble to convert the enemy god's altar, knowing the rewards are great if it works and it's death if it doesn't. You can get a bow and speed boots and harry enemy melee fighters to death without them ever being able to attack you.

Choice.

Agency.

When you find yourself saying something is unfair, ask why and break it into its component parts. Yeah, vision radius doesn't matter in most games; it's usually fixed and it's kind of an odd mechanic. But, it matters a lot tactically in TOME.

And then, yes, be careful walking into an underground dark foreboding mausoleum as a level 3 fighter with no defenses. C'mon dude.

VII 3. The Unfairness, part three: Get Better

Roguelikes are incredibly unfair, under most people's definitions of fairness.

This can help you overcome this hole in one's thinking.

A muddled view of fairness is crippling. It's very possible to feel like the world is unfair without clarifying precisely what a person means, just instead feeling a vague malaise and angst and feeling of alienation.

The great irony, of course, is that this ill-defined sense of alienation makes a person much less effective -- so an individual who has the potential to be outstandingly pro-social and help many people is instead crippled and rendered ineffective if they've got a sloppy-fairness-alienation thing going on.

Said simpler: an ill-defined sense of unfairness makes you ineffective, so you can't actually correct and fix the things you think are broken in the world.

Roguelikes are brilliant and beautiful training grounds for getting over this kind of thing.

They're unfair. They're nasty. Brutal. And you have to learn how to deal with it.

It's just you and the codebase. You're not competing against anyone else.

You could pick your computer up and throw it against the wall when an Arch-Lich spawns and insta-kills you, but what good would that do?

It would do no good.

You could curse and scream and howl that it's unfair, but what good would that do?

No good at all.

You could, of course, quit playing this genre of games. This might actually do some good.

Or... you could learn to play better.

Those are, roughly speaking, your options -- melt down, complain and do nothing differently, quit, or get better.

VII 4 The Unfairness part four: That Won't Work? Or...

"That won't work."

You hear that a lot if you're starting to do anything genuinely innovative in creating, inventing, innovating.

For years, this puzzled me. There were things that obviously worked, that people would say -- even in the face of huge evidence that it's already working -- "That won't work."

And you say, "Well, umm, it's working."

"No it's not. It's a fluke. And if it is working, It'll stop working. It's risky. Dangerous. Et cetra."

This puzzled me for years.

I asked the question over and over: there's clearly things that work and are different from how people normally do things that are twice as good, sometimes ten times as good. Why can't people see them? Why do they say they won't work?

And when they do work, why can they still not see it?

I spent many hours puzzling over this.

Eventually, I just shrugged and wrote it off, figuring it some strange facet of humanity where most people don't have enough foresight to see things that are outside of the norm.

I moved to only asking for the opinions of people highly competent and experienced who I admired, and basically ignoring everyone that wasn't either competent, experienced, or admired by me.

It worked well enough, but around 12 years after my first inquiries on the topic, the answer came in like a flash of a lightning bolt.

These people weren't really saying, "That won't work."

They were actually saying, "That shouldn't work."

These appear to be judgments of facts, but not, it's not so.

People won't even judge facts on their merits if they can't accept the conclusions.

This is, of course, crippling -- and if it's infected your psychology, you'd do well to root it out. Examples follow.

VII 5. That Shouldn’t Work, II: Air

There's a joke that goes something like this --

"Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a hundred-dollar bill laying on the ground and points it out: 'Hey, 100 dollars. It's our lucky day.' The second economist says, 'Nah, if it was real, someone would have picked it up already.'"

There's many gains and benefits in life that are completely disproportional to the work or effort required to get them.

But if you point these opportunities out and ask others about them, you'll often get, "That won't work" or "That isn't real." What they're really saying is, "That shouldn't work."

Yet, it works.

If you have a good credit score and good income in the United States, credit card companies will give you around two hundred dollars per credit card you sign up for with them.

This makes perfect sense. Businesses know statistics very well, and they know their "lifetime value of a customer" (LVOC) numbers. Likewise, the issuing bank usually gets 1% or 2% of all the spending you put on your credit. Yes, it's true, if you spend $20,000 on a credit card, the issuing bank gets around $400.

That's before factoring in the fees they get if you carry interest on the card with them (and the majority of people that get a credit card do wind up carrying interest at some point) and not factoring balance transfers, the ability to market other products and services to you, market share and efficiencies, etc.

Some of the most popular kinds of these cards are airline credit cards. For instance, Chase Manhattan Bank issues a British Airways Visa Signature. If you have good credit and sign up for it, they'll give you somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 British Airways frequent flyer miles for it.

I don't know how the money changes hands behind the scenes. Does Chase do a revenue split on the spending and interest fees on the card with British Airways? Do they buy the miles in bulk wholesale from BA?

I'm not sure, except that I am reasonably sure that it's profitable for both Chase and BA. Almost every airline and every major credit card issuer offers these types of cards and gives big signup bonuses for them. This isn't a rare obscure strategy one bank or airline is pursuing; all of them are doing it, so it almost certainly is profitable.

I've walked you through the behind-the-scenes business logic, so maybe this is starting to make sense -- but of course, these points aren't advertised. Most people are unaware that whenever they swipe their credit card, the card issuer and a variety of middlemen take somewhere between 2% and 4% of the total purchase price from the merchant you bought from.

You didn't know that?

Oh yeah. It's true. If you buy a television from Best Buy for $1000 on your card, the card issuer and various middlemen take somewhere from $20 to $40 from Best Buy. Given that credit card spending now dominates the U.S. consumer economy, it's a pretty good gig to be a bank. They get a cut on everything.

Of course, most people don't know any of this.

So they see an offer to get 50,000 air miles for... basically nothing.

And they say, "That can't work."

(They mean: "That shouldn't work.")

I've got some tens of thousands of dollars of free airfare; many of my friends have, too.

(Did my credit score went down? No, actually, it went up.)

But even though I've almost always paid my cards off in full, I still think I'm around break-even to the banks and airlines. I had one period of about eight months where I carried around $40,000 of debt after I'd been a little reckless over-expanding and counting on future business cashflow that should have came through, but didn't. At 15% APR or so, I probably paid around $4500 in interest.

Then, I've paid the annual fees sometimes -- $450 for an American Express Platinum, etc.

Not to mention, all these banks get their ~2% cut on all my spending.

In any event, imagine I didn't explain the logic of how the banks make their money to you, and instead I just said: "Dude, you can apply for five credit cards, and get 250,000 air miles."

What reply do most people have?

"That won't work." (Meaning, "That shouldn't work.")

It just doesn't feel right that having a high credit score would give you such a crazy amount of perks.

But, actually, the logic makes sense. The financial infrastructure of the United States facilitates a ton of commerce. Banks make huge profits off of people using their cards. They'll share some of that with the consumer. If you play it very smartly, you can make out very well.

But I've told a lot of people about this. I get a variety of reasons why people won't do it.

There's about four valid reasons not to do it --

1. I'm earning/achieving at a much higher rate with my time than this.
2. The cash/miles are basically worthless to me.
3. I'm buying a large ticket purchase or otherwise need credit in the next year or two and don't want to risk getting a worse loan.
4. I don't trust myself not to carry a balance on cards.

Those are not the rebuttals I hear when people opt not to do this.

They say, "That won't work." (It does work.)

They say, "What a waste of time, it must take tons of hours." (It doesn't, and can be done during leisure time in the evening instead of watching television or surfing the internet.)

They say, "It'll ruin your credit." (It actually raises your credit score over the long term.)

Or, "I don't know... I just don't think it'll work."

Yeah, because it seems like it shouldn't work, right? And yet, it does. Imagine that.

VII 6. That Shouldn’t Work, III: Solo 401k Stuff

Now is about the best time in all of history to be self-employed with a high-value skill. Much of the old value of taking salary from a large conglomerate has faded -- think of how difficult it would have been pre-Internet to research your own insurance, benefits packages, retirement, and so on. You'd have to know broadly what topics were of interest, and then either spend lots of hours in the library stacks, or spend lots of money with a corporate attorney to get it set up.

Fax machines, copy machines, and similar were rather expensive. Even getting basic telecommunications running pre-Internet, apparently, was no joke.

You got a pension, probably, and job security, probably, if you were good. Now, no more.

So these days, I see my programmer friends and sales-oriented, numbers-oriented, metricians, etc doing a variety of things. Some start their own companies. Some still take offers from growing companies. But many more do projects and contracts self-employed, setting their own schedule and hours, reporting only to their buyer and not to a layer of middle management, avoiding the majority of office politics, and otherwise doing well financially and professionally.

This is all well and good, but -- like just about everybody else -- I see a lot of my otherwise brilliant friends make some absolute blunders due to failure to apply some basic arithmetic.

I get on everyone's case to open a Solo 401k.

With this, you can -- if your income is high enough -- invest up to $53,000 per year in your Solo 401k in pre-tax money.

If you're in the higher tax brackets, it makes eminent sense to do. And oftentimes, my highest-earning friends are frugal and have fairly a lot of cash sitting around.

So I try explaining it like this: "You have $100,000 in the bank? If you literally move half of that money from your checking account to an investment account in your 401k, your taxes go down $20,000 or so."

No one does this arithmetic. At high earning levels, you can literally choose between having $50,000 in your 401k or having $30,000 in your checking account and writing a $20,000 check as a tax payment.

"Oh man, but, what a hassle on the paperwork. And it can't be really like that anyways."

ViI 7. That Shouldn’t Work, IV: Caloric Density

A common beginner dieting error is trying to "eat morally" instead of actually doing the math and chemistry needed to change weight.

For instance, most people think a bagel with cream cheese is "healthy-ish" because it doesn't feel extremely indulgent, whereas a chocolate muffin would feel much more indulgent.

It's actually usually a toss-up. A chocolate muffin might have less calories than a bagel and cream cheese. Neither is a particularly good choice if you're looking to drop in bodyfat.

Meanwhile, you can actually eating a shocking amount of roasted chicken and have it be a negligible amount of calories.

Nuts are, broadly speaking, a very healthy food -- but they've got an immense amount of calories in them. Most people would feel more pleased with themselves if they ate almonds and fruit for lunch instead of pasta, because it feels "more healthy."

Heck, it probably is more healthy, but it also probably has a higher caloric density.

Fruit juices -- any liquid calories, really -- are an outright disaster. Drinking a half-dozen cups of coffee "feels unhealthy," and certainly, stirring butter into coffee and then cinnamonning the buttered coffee probably feels "extremely indulgent" -- despite it being, for a variety of reasons, a much better choice than juice if you're looking to lose fat.

It's, like, chemistry and multiplication.

The world runs on mechanical processes. We don't perfectly understand them and nutrition science has sometimes been wrong. But we broadly understand things and people who are active practitioners who follow the scientific method and are rigorous can tell you broadly what's going on. And as much as there's been the occasional controversies, pretty much everyone agrees that fruit juice is a disaster if you want to lose weight.

But, fruit juice "seems healthy" whereas butter and cinnamon "feel indulgent," and body recomposition is all about feeling like you tried hard and not at all about biochemical processes, right?

VII 8. That Shouldn’t Work, V: Zig Zag Tunnels

Around two-thirds complete with this book, I realized I should probably beat Maj'eyal to keep my "street cred."

So I did. It was hard. My first was on the Nightmare difficulty, the highest one you can start on. (You unlock a harder one, Insane, by winning.)

Nightmare I barely got through by playing sloppy. Insane takes it up another notch entirely.

You need to have much better tactical play to not get wrecked.

One thing that I didn't appreciate the importance of earlier was solid tactical play -- and one thing I discounted almost entirely was building "Zig Zag Tunnels."

In Maj'eyal as well as many other roguelikes, you can "dig" into walls and sometimes floors with a pickaxe or spell.

If you build tunnels in a "zig zag" pattern at diagonals, you can control combat if enemies want to come after you. It might be outright necessary in an area with tough melee enemies who want to gang up on you.

But as soon as I read about it at first, I discounted it. I said, "Ahh, that's lame."

This is a subtle derivation of the "That shouldn't work" point -- I thought it was "lame" to dig zig-zag tunnels. I was thinking, not only shouldn't it work, but also "I shouldn't have to do that."

Well, you don't have to do that -- if you don't mind getting killed on higher difficulties.

Of course, there's usually other ways to tactically control the flow of combat in Maj'eyal. But you do have to play tactically excellently and limit the ability of enemies to overwhelm you at higher levels; if you come in swinging blindly, you're hitting the dirt.

It's hard to describe exactly what was going through my head when I didn't try to use that technique. It would have been trivial to try out and experiment with -- but I heard it, my "that shouldn't be like that" switch went off, and I just discounted it and forgot about it. Dumb.

VII 9 Confirmation of Worldview

The fantastical fantasy nature of games makes us less prone to blindly insist that they game “should” work in some way.

We looked at it from the fairness / “That shouldn’t work” angle.

The game, of course, does not care how you feel.

It’s a bunch of computer code. It just runs. Melinda killed you before you could even see her. You’re upset.

The game doesn’t care.

The game doesn’t even know you’re upset.

As soon as other people are involved, this goes out the window. Suddenly, the engineer-inventor starts talking about how the marketplace and customers are so incredibly stupid, because they should want his product that his theoretically better specs, “and not buy into all the marketing crap.”

The market doesn’t care.

The market doesn’t even know you’re upset.

What really succeeds in life are often counterintuitive and often aren’t the things we think ought to matter. Generally speaking, highly technical thinkers believe that everyone should make decisions technically. People with very strong moral opinions think that everything should get done on the basis of morality. People with more seniority believe that well-established people with seniority should win. Undisciplined talented people believe that raw talent should win. Hard-working people believe that hard work should win.

Should, should, should.

Yawn.

The world doesn’t care.

The world doesn’t even know.

Roguelike games are great. If you come in with a flawed or incomplete understanding of how to play, you get kicked in the face. If you come in with a perfect complete understanding of how to play, but can’t do it due to not managing yourself well, you get kicked in the face.

But it’s a fantastical kick in the face. Sure, it’s aggravating when your level 34 barbarian is permanently killed because you couldn’t deal with an arch-lich that repeatedly cast curses.

But it’s not aggravating in the same way that seeing someone with less talent and less work ethic than you get promoted at the company, because they’re in with the manager.

When the latter happens, the default reaction is to rage internally and externally, complain to your family and friends, and otherwise tear yourself up apart mentally and condemn the world.

From roguelikes, we can hopefully learn to stop doing that. “Okay. Curses aren’t a problem in the early game, but they become a problem in the late-game. A tough-as-nails fighter that can’t deal with curses is a dead fighter.”

That’s a healthy reaction.

Likewise, “Okay. Talent and hard work are critical, but not enough. I need whoever has decisionmaking authority to like me and be very seriously emotionally invested in wanting to help me advance my career.”

That’s a healthy reaction.

VII 10 (That’s Not To Say It’s Easy)

That’s not to say it’s easy.

Or pleasant.

It’s just that roguelikes get us a forum to experience the whims and vagaries and unpleasantries and unfairnesses of life — without actually taking real damage.

It’s not easy to get outside of one’s head, or to stop insisting that the world should be some way other than it is.

It’s not easy.

It’s hard.

It’s maybe the hardest thing.

And that’s not defending stupidity or shortsightedness, either.

You can consciously choose not to do something that would give you an edge if it’s outside your ethics, but you really ought to make that decision consciously.

That’s the hard part — recognizing that the world isn’t the way you want it to be.

If you recognize that and choose not to capitalize on how the world is for ethical reasons, that’s fine.

You can say: “Okay. I understand that at this company, the person who is at least minimally competent who is closest with the manager is the most likely to be promoted. Becoming more competent and producing results without navigating the politics means you won’t be promoted. I understand that, and I want to get promoted, but I dislike politics and I refuse to play in them, and I accept the consequences of that, which are that I will likely not be promoted here.”

That’s fine. Or maybe you go to another company. Problemsolving, fine, good.

But so many people don’t do that. They get their level 34 barbarian killed. They rant and rage. But then they start a new barbarian, play the game the same way, don’t get some anti-curse protection, and get killed again in the late game.

The inventor invents a better product and starts a company. He doesn’t build any sales, marketing, or distribution. The company fails as inferior products take over the market.

He rants and rages. Then he invents a new product. “Ah, this one is really the right one!” He starts a company. He doesn’t build any sales, marketing, or distribution. The company fails as an inferior product takes over the market.

He could stop and said, “Okay, inventing better products clearly isn’t enough. I need to find a way to sell them if I want to make a company successful.”

Or he could say, “I don’t want to deal with sales and marketing, I just want to invent, so maybe I should find a job during pure inventing and let the lab or company I work for deal with the business side of things if any.”

Or he could say, “I don’t care about having a successful business, I just like inventing for the sake of it. I’m going to focus on that, invent things, but not commercialize them, and that’s fine with me.”

Any of those would be fine. There’s probably a dozen more satisfactory options.

But repeatedly starting a barbarian, not getting anti-curse protection, and repeatedly getting killed in the late game…

Roguelikes can teach us a lot. But as simple as these lessons are, they’re not at all easy to get. A single-player game is impartial and unbiased; it will arbitrate your success purely on the basis of how well you navigate its source code and the random numbers that are generated.

It’s so hard to get outside your own worldview and preferences. It’s so simple to say, but it’s maybe the hardest thing. Getting repeatedly kicked in the face in a fantastical fantasy environment with no real consequences to it — this is nearly miraculously valuable.

Section VIII

VIII 1 Unacceptability of Blunders; Excellence Not Required

Roguelikes are hard. One bad blunder can negate hours of perfect play. Bam, you’re dead, there’s the Grim Reaper; do you want to play again?

The challenge to winning a roguelike isn’t the challenge of being great; it’s the challenge of being fundamentally sound, and then not making any fatal mistakes.

Life often works in the same ways. There are plenty of areas of life where the best possible performance does not excel very much over merely solid performance, but where bad performance is disastrous.

There are many implications of this.

VIII 2 Thresholds

You have heard, of course, of the “law of diminishing returns.” But what does it mean, precisely?

Imagine if you will, that you’re stranded in the middle of the desert with no food at all.

How long do you have to live? Not long. You’re going to starve to death rapidly in a hostile environment with no food.

As you find or acquire some food, the next important threshold is “starvation-level rations” — this is where you’re still slowly wasting away and will be fatal over the long term, but where you have enough food to not completely break down.

The next threshold would be “enough food to live indefinitely but while malnourished” — this is one where you could survive almost indefinitely but without having your full range of energy and strength; you’d be weakened and prone to illness and injury, heal more slowly, need to sleep far more than normal, etc.

Then there’s “enough food to live normally.” This is the most important threshold. At this point, you are squared away on food. You have a sampling of every macronutrient and the micronutrients you need to thrive. Maybe the food is spartan and you’re lacking spices and seasonings, but it doesn’t matter.

What’s above that threshold? “An abundance of food,” perhaps, is one higher — having a wide selection and a slight excess of food. Then the next threshold up is perhaps “the Emperor of Persia’s kitchen and stores of food” — a wide selection of every type of food stretching far and wide, with nearly infinite variety and in amounts that as much as desired can be consumed.

As you can see, food goes from very important to not very important very quickly.

Threshold 0: Starving to death rapidly; mere weeks to live.

Threshold 1: Starving to death slowly; months to live.

Threshold 2: Surviving weakly; can live indefinitely, but in a weak state.

Threshold 3: Surviving; can live indefinitely at normal prowess.

Threshold 4: More than surviving; can live indefinitely and have some luxuries and enjoyments.

Threshold 5: Far more than surviving; there is effectively no more advantage to increasing the amount of food in one’s possession.

In many roguelikes, you need to eat food or die. Nethack is one of those.

We intuitively seem to understand that food has diminishing returns as we get more. At first, you’re looking around frantically for rations, trying to figure out which slain enemies can be eaten, trying to build a buffer of food so your character doesn’t starve to death.

Later, you might build a little cache or storage filled with rations or get an enchanted bag of holding and fill it up with lots of food. At that point, you can largely not worry about it.

If you find a magical item like a Horn of Plenty that gives you infinite food, then, you’re set. The food thing is handled. There’s no more advantages to stockpiling food.

If you had that Horn of Plenty, you wouldn’t keep neurotically searching out more rations to stockpile in addition to it.

Yet, we can often lose sight of this principle in both games and real life.

A new company that relentlessly focuses on sales and gives very friendly pay-over-time terms to sign up customers might be adding a lot of sales numbers and future profit to the books — but might be accumulating a hell of a lot of risk and putting itself in a dangerous cashflow position.

In roguelikes, it’s all too common to see a fighter with excellent physical defense keep layering on heavier and heavier armor — and neglecting the fact that they have minimal magic defenses. Or continue to layer on more and more damage, even though they have enough to kill any normal enemy… and while their weakness are enemies that have shields that nullify damage entirely.

Most thresholds, in games and life, are not clearly marked. What’s “enough” damage per turn? What’s “enough” health? What’s “enough” magic resistance?

But it’s worth periodically thinking about. There’s many endeavors in life where going from “solid” to “excellent” doesn’t make much of a difference, and going beyond excellent is nearly completely wasteful. Meanwhile, neglecting a key area — magic resistance, cashflow — can be fatal.

VIII 3 Defensive Policies

Again, here is the problem we’re trying to solve — a single bad enough blunder can be fatal.

Playing a game (or life) competently followed by a single fatal blunder is… fatal.

Playing a game (or life) great followed by a single fatal blunder is… fatal.

Playing a game (or life) EXCELLENTLY followed by a single fatal blunder is…

… you get the point?

Greater heights of excellence won’t save you if you make a fatal blunder.

Thus, we need to remove the chances of such a blunder.

The first way we’ll do that is to dichotomize, and then set policies.

Okay. You’re playing a geomancer. You have three big healing abilities, that take you to full health. You have moderate high defenses. You have no healing abilities at all besides the big three heals.

How quickly should you run away if a fight is tough?

Remember that getting through a level faster is almost never a requisite, nor is efficiency — you need to not die.

I would suggest that you would do well to set your policy to either “I will run after using my first big heal” or “I will run after using my second big heal.”

Running after the third heal used is too dangerous — if something unexpected happens, you have no more healing ability.

So, should it be after the first or second heal used? Well, it depends. If you’re faster than the enemies around, and the enemies are only melee enemies that can’t hit you after you flee, then perhaps the second heal is safe.

On the other hand, if you’re fighting spellcasters or archers that can hit you as you run, maybe you want to flee after your first heal is used.

Ah, but can’t you decide on the fly?

Sure, you can — if you want to get killed.

Setting policies during peacetime if how you keep your head during wartime. In the heat of battle, you can get tied up and forget to keep a margin of safety. You can get obsessed on beating a particular enemy, instead of staying alive and avoiding fatal blunders.

If you “leave it to judging in the moment,” it’s very easy to overreach.

Take Napoleon Bonaparte. He’s one of the greatest universal geniuses of all-time — but he clearly did not have any set amount of reserves, defenses, or stabilization policies.

After the Spanish monarchy helped the French forces conquer Portugal, he betrayed them — and miscalculated slightly, because he set off an insurgent guerrilla war in Spain.

Despite having his best veteran troops tied down in Spain, he invaded Russia anyway. Game over.

It’s possible that no one has won as many impressive victories as Napoleon in history. He showed great talent in almost everything he did — obviously all the ability in war and leadership, but also things like unifying disparate groups, communications, technology, governance, law…

… but he never set policies to reign in and consolidate. The Spanish overreach wouldn’t have even broken the French forces, had it not been followed up by the urgency of the march on Moscow — he again won most of the battles en route to Moscow and captured the capital, but did not have the supplies to hold it. The retreat, with his very best troops still tied up in Spain, was brutal and the end was then in sight.

You need to set policies in advance to avoid the biggest risks and dangers. It’s very hard if your company is in rapid growth to slow down expansion and ensure you get additional runway and safety. It’s very hard to turn down exciting projects if you’ve just come into high prestige and are suddenly having a lot of inquiries for your skills — but going over your possible bandwidth and seeing your quality fall across the board can easily break you, whereas completing five high-profile projects instead of four in a particular time period doesn’t really add that much value.

VIII 4 Defensive Policies II

We can see fatal collapses when sudden bad things happen. Of course.

The more unsettling collapses are where things are running perfectly, people get cocky and lax, and then are ruined.

When things are going poorly or going excellently, one’s judgment tends to get compromised and it becomes harder to think clearly. You need to have already thought.

Your basic policies should emphasize whatever is most important to success:

— For the writer: write every day.

— For the salesperson: generate new referrals/prospects each day.

— For the PhD candidate: work on the thesis every day.

— For the bodybuilder: follow the fitness plan every day.

Etc.

Just having explicit policies to hone in on what’s most important is valuable.

However, you’ll find that naive and simple policies are least useful when they’re most needed… they often don’t address what to do in the face of a huge opportunity coming one’s way, or a huge crisis.

Here is the author’s “Writing Policy” —

Writing Policy

1. At the end of each day, when I plan the day ahead, my planning will include pre-scoping a piece of writing to do.

2. When the time comes, I don’t have to do that piece of writing if I’m highly inspired about something else that’s worth exploring.

3. If not heavily inspired, I will attempt to do “writing-related” stuff which means usually clarifying the outline of the piece I want to write. If it’s called for, re-reading recent writing or doing some editing might be appropriate in this time. (Usually not, but sometimes is okay.)

4. If none of the above is clicking, I will sit there and just suffer for at least an hour, doing nothing else. Suffering and doing nothing else is fine. Procrastinating or doing something that’s not writing-related, under normal circumstances, is not fine. But sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine.

5. I will schedule this writing to be the first full thing I do of the day. I will put it on the calendar and hold it as sacred as any appointment with a client, advisor, or very important contact.

6. I will add a line to my Daily Tracking Template to tick off at the end of the day.

7. I will add a “Writing Policy Adhered” line to my Lights Spreadsheet.

I’ll draw your attention to these two points:

*If not heavily inspired, I will attempt to do “writing-related” stuff which means usually clarifying the outline of the piece I want to write.

*If none of the above is clicking, I will sit there and just suffer for at least an hour, doing nothing else. Suffering and doing nothing else is fine. Procrastinating or doing something that’s not writing-related, under normal circumstances, is not fine. But sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine.

I’ll argue that those are the most useful items there. Specifying the intent (daily writing), the clear measurable duration (one hour), focusing on the process (time) instead of the result (word count, etc), tracking it (spreadsheet), planning each piece of writing the day before, doing it first thing in the day… these are all useful, but not as useful as what to do when things are going wrong.

“If none of the above is clicking, I will sit there and just suffer for at least an hour, doing nothing else. Suffering and doing nothing else is fine. Procrastinating or doing something that’s not writing-related, under normal circumstances, is not fine. But sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine.”

Sometimes the suffering really is the answer. Last week, I had a large opportunity come on my radar suddenly, and put 18 hours of straight work into doing the work to grab it. It screwed my sleep schedule up and threw my routines off. A couple days later, my sleep schedule was still screwed up, and I was waking up in the very late morning / early afternoon instead of my usual 4AM. Two entries in the journal look like this —

— really don’t want to write 2:20PM… oh well, here we go.

— nearly overwhelming hostility to writing 2:25PM… my god…

That’s okay. I was sitting there suffering.

It wasn’t so much prescient setting the Writing Policy such; I would often get sidetracked in the past when I didn’t know what to write. Sometimes I’d sit and read and hope for inspiration to come, which sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Putting an explicit caveat for what to do if I’m incapable of writing — “sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine” — is what was needed. I have a very high adherence to this policy, and unsurprisingly, when you just sit and stare at a blank page without doing anything else for long enough, eventually something clicks.

Policies that emphasize that mistakes will never happen are unrealistic. Policies that don’t take into account unusual situations are ineffective.

In almost all roguelike games, time doesn’t pass until you take an action. You can sit and think about the game state as long as you want, just like Chess.

So you might have a policy like this —

*After using one of my big heals or one of my anti-curse infusions, I will run away unless there’s a very good reason to stay in combat.

*If I do decide to stay in combat for some reason (a tough required boss is almost dead, for instance), I will take a break and wash my face, make a coffee, have a snack, and clarify my reasoning before continuing the fight.

These policies might be overly conservative, but that’s the point. Writing projects more often fail due to an inability to manage the rough times than for any other reason. Roguelikes most often are lost in a moment of panic after failing to take adequate precautions for the situation one is in.

A defensive policy to keep one sane during a bad time, and with explicit caveats for how exceptions are made — these can be very valuable. These policies are set by looking at common failure cases, and putting down rules for how to stabilize or remedy those situations.

VIII 5 Piloting I: Skill Required…

Policies are designed to make your life easier. In the span and scope of infinite decisionmaking, narrowing it down to precisely what you’re going to do before getting into the heat of battle is useful.

This gets at a larger point, which we’ll start by looking at games to understand: the ease or difficulty in “piloting” a particular character is very important.

Here’s a question — when you’re playing a game, would you rather have a range of a dozen different powerful abilities that are each nuanced effects and between all of them you’ve got every situation covered perfectly… or have one very powerful combo that’s always correct to run, but never as strong as any of those dozen abilities?

The answer is that, once you’ve gotten enough experience, you’d probably prefer to have the stronger overall character with a dozen different abilities. But when you’re starting out, you’re much better off with a clear way to play well.

This gets into how difficult it is to “pilot” your character. If you’re a spellcaster with a mix of utility abilities and curses that you can cast on the enemy — slow, stun, silence, freeze, drain mana, weaken, disarm, reduce armor, paralyze, etc — then it’s often unclear what you should do. That means that, if you panic, you can easily start mashing buttons and get yourself killed.

Oh, but we already said not to panic? Indeed, yes, but you still probably will panic and lose your cool when you’re new to a game. It’s just the nature of things. Unless you’ve established that you’re always calm and level-headed in new endeavors across the board, you should be skeptical of your ability to be calm and cool under fire in something new.

As such, life is a lot easier when there’s a clear hierarchy of the best abilities to use and the order to use them in, with almost no exceptions to the best order of doing things.

In Tales of Maj’eyal, the berserker ability “Unstoppable” makes you unkillable by direct damage. You can get another high-level prodigy ability called “Draconic Will” that makes you immune to negative status effects. Then there’s the elven ability “Timeless” which extends the duration of all useful abilities.

Thus, an order of combat of…

— use all speed abilities you have

— use all damage-increasing abilities you have

— Unstoppable

— Draconic Will

— Timeless

…is basically bulletproof. Not quite bulletproof, but pretty close.

Thus, if you’re new to the game and trying to win, going with a build that utilizes that nearly bulletproof setup makes it much easier to pilot your character.

There are other character classes that have some really excellent shielding abilities, but they have much more difficult tradeoffs. The archmage, for instance, has an ability to convert health damage into recovering mana — but if your mana bar gets entirely full, there’s an arcane explosion and you take a lot of damage.

That ability is harder to know when to trigger and turn on and off. It’s very good, but it requires a lot more skill and judgment.

When you’re new to something, you want less required skill and judgment.

Thus, it’s often preferable to choose builds where the same basic formula is useful in all situations, and then additionally to remove judgment calls about things like when to flee from combat by setting policies — the end result is that it makes piloting much easier and more straightforward.

VIII 6 Piloting II: Clarification

Thinking is expensive; it would do well to always remember that.

It’s worth doing the work of thinking if there’s great payoffs to it — but paying the thinking cost for no gain is a fool’s errand.

Here’s a great example — I’ve often seen young businesspeople get obsessed over the problematic kind-of-sort-of potential expansion opportunities for their business, while ignoring proven things.

There’s something about the unsettled, the open question, the mysterious, the problematic… that draws us to it.

It’s another thing that roguelikes can teach us — we don’t need to, and indeed can’t, afford to go fight bad matchups that aren’t required or highly profitable.

I would advise as such — always take care of your good clients, referrers, and influencers first and foremost. Too often, young businesspeople neglect their best and happiest clients because they’re not making any noise. Your business and life will largely be built on the collaborations with people who are most happiest and pleased with you; ensure you’re spending your time with them.

Then, move on to the situations that are most likely to succeed.

If you have any time left, move on to the shaky stuff.

This looks all very obvious on paper, of course, but real life is not so simple. I see young businesspeople frequently obsessing over a prospective client who is making all kinds of crazy demands and acting erratic, who really — statistically speaking — has very little chance of buying, and maybe wouldn’t be very profitable anyways.

I can’t tell you why this is appealing to people. I don’t know. Something in our minds makes us want to unravel puzzles rather than win.

You’ll probably bring this mentality to roguelikes the first times you play, and it’ll probably get you killed. It’s like — okay, if a Vampire Lord spawns on one path through the dungeon and you can’t handle it very well, you should just run and come back when you’re much higher level.

That’s the answer. That’s the right answer. If you don’t have the firepower and defenses to take out a Vampire Lord, run.

But games where you can repeatedly reload if you die teach you the opposite. They mean you can bullheadedly charge in and repeatedly try different stuff until you maybe get really lucky with the random number generator and get through the encounter.

This is a very bad lesson to learn, in games and in life. You don’t want to bullheadedly tackle problematic situations; you want to dispense with problematic situations as promptly as possible and get on to winning the game you’re playing.

VIII 7 Piloting III

This is where policies again shine. A defensive policy in a game might look like this — “If I encounter an enemy who can cast paralyze, I will immediately run as soon as I see that enemy.”

Is it noble? No. Is it glorious? No. Is it smart? Yes. Does it make you more likely to win? Yes.

Heck, maybe it is noble and glorious. Winning is noble and glorious. At the very least, we can say that being bullheaded, foolhardy, and vain aren’t noble and glorious.

You can make your life easier to pilot with explicit policies like that. For instance, if you’re a young freelancer, you should decide in advance whether your prices are negotiable, and write your answer down to what you’ll say in response to that question.

Prospect: Can you go cheaper?

You: I believe in transparent pricing — you’re getting the best pricing I can offer, and I believe in being honest with all my prospects and clients so that everyone gets the same great price. The only discount I offer is a 5% professional discount for paying the entirety in advance, which I’m happy to extend to you. And you can be confident that no one is getting a better deal than you, because everyone gets my best pricing.

(That’s a little wordy, but you get the idea.)

Refusing to negotiate pricing is a great way to make piloting your business easier. It might be useful to be more flexible, in theory, but it also leaves open the door to making more mistakes. Having a “no negotiate the price” policy just makes life really simple.

Likewise, many people in business have done well by not committing to any deal until it’s discussed with their business partner, significant other, or even perhaps one of their parents. “That deal sounds great, but I do need to run it by my spouse/cofounder/mother/father/investor/operations director/whatever.”

In theory, you lose the ability to jump on an excellent deal very quickly, and you might lose a good deal. In practice, often people commit to things without thinking them through, and then need to walk them back. You know best of all whether you’re a good on-the-fly dealmaker; if not, you’d do well to adopt a policy of never committing to anything new until discussed with whomever.

VIII 8 Piloting IV

All things being equal, if you’re new at something, you want to choose the more forgivable and easier-to-pilot way of doing things.

Forgivable means that you can make some small mistakes and survive. Oftentimes, spellcasters in games can be described as “glass canons” — they have immense damage output, but they shatter if hit once.

If you’re brand new, it would be better not to do something so fragile — it increases your likelihood of surviving long enough to do something interesting and gain some ground.

Likewise, if the character you choose to play has one very clear set of abilities that are their best abilities, then it’s clear what to focus on and what to max out. A fire mage might be very tough, an ice mage might be very tough, but a mage who puts half their points in fire and half in ice are going to miss the synergies, cohesion, and combinations — they can’t specialization their gear for fire or ice damage, and they’re thus going to do considerably less than half the damage than if they specialized.

When you’re brand new, all else being equal, you want the simpler path of advancement, prioritization, and easier choices to make — it’s hard enough to pilot your character and navigate new ground when the choices are straightforward enough and you just need to execute… you don’t need the added complexity.

In real life, this translates to doing simpler, more straightforward, and less-prone-to-fail things rather than more complex, less straightforward, and riskier things.

Expansive thinking is certainly the root of much progress, and expansionary people are much needed. However, the classical young expansionist’s error is to go expansionist on everything.

Don’t do it. Resist it. You don’t need an innovative, complicated, brand new, and highly expansionary policy on every single aspect of your life.

You want innovation and expansion where it’ll pay off — and that typically means having some experience or having done very careful analysis. In areas that won’t produce major advantages, you’re much better off keeping things more simple and straightforward.

For instance, if you’re starting a business, you generally don’t want a crazily innovative pricing structure unless you think that can be a very major source of advantage. There’s many pricing structures that are known to work, and infinitely more that simply don’t work and can’t work.

Here’s an example of attempting to innovate that doesn’t work — when I was younger, I understood there were risks to a buyer when they buy from any service business. I tried offering to clients that we’d let them escrow their money until the project is completed — they could ensure the project gets completed, and we wouldn’t have to chase down invoices.

This never worked. It didn’t happen once. Despite the inherent (seeming) logic of it, it was too weird and different. Instead, what was effective was asking for a larger proportion of money upfront and the rest on a calendar schedule (not on completion), combined with a very strongly worded and very liberal guarantee, and prominently displaying some excellent testimonials from reference clients.

Having the best quality and best fit for your market makes all other piloting easier — if you have the very best offering, most of your marketing and sales get much easier and you need to be less clever. If you don’t have the highest quality offering (broadly speaking; this isn’t just specs) and the best fit your market, that’s worth spending a lot of time on.

But eventually, you want to get out from a desire to be creative or complicated just for the sake of it. More complexity means there’s more places to make mistakes. The more areas in which the correct actions and investments are simple and easy to pilot, the better.

Section IX

IX 1 Service

I love to work. I love to produce. I love to take the shape of this rock we’re on and reshape it to be better for the human race.

If I could work nonstop — no eating, no sleeping, no resting, no breaks, no leisure — I would.

But it don’t work like that.

I get immense pleasure out of difficult and challenging work that produces results… but I found, over time, that if I didn’t take my leisure intentionally, my body and mind would rebel and take it unintentionally.

I can do no leisure, no breaks, and no procrastination… for a week or two, here and there. Followed by a certain backlash and collapse.

I came to terms with the fact that I need leisure — but it doesn’t change my fundamental orientation to the world. I want to get the most out of my leisure. I want to be recharged, but I also want to get smarter and stronger and tougher.

I have this rule — “Everything in my life should serve me, and I serve my ethics.”

I don’t serve convention or fashion or convenience or expediency. I work for what I believe is right, and everything else in my life must make the cut as to whether it supports that or not.

And very few things do that as well as a roguelike game. Yeah, if I could never eat again without getting malnourished, I’d do it. If I could never sleep again while staying at peak mental ability, I’d do it. If I could take no leisure, I’d do it.

I can’t. But I can do the next best thing. I can find the rare activities that push myself to my limits in a relaxing and enjoyable context. I can come out recharged — and stronger, smarter, tougher.

IX 2 Mettle

Yeah, I said it — stronger, smarter, tougher.

I’ve played team sports.

I’ve competed in one-on-one individual sports.

I’ve done weight training, martial arts, and learned marksmanship.

You know what? I’m not sure any of those outstrip the patience, steadfastness, coolness as things ho wrong, foresight, analytical ability, and anti-panic needed to excel at the hardest type of games.

Isn’t this odd, though? Who would celebrate this? It’s not “cool.”

But don’t we admire Chess players? Roguelikes and the similar outstrip Chess by far in the range of lessons available.

By all means, learn how to use your body and how to work in teams. These are critical, too. But if we look past petty fashions and “coolness,” we see one of most the fruitful lands to harvest self-development and learn to channel our analytical ability to higher powers while controlling our emotions.

It tests your mettle. It builds your mettle. Harvest from that fruitful ground.

IX 3 Win

And finally — it teaches you how to win.

You don’t need to be creative or brilliant.

You need to not make mistakes.

You need to work with a gameplan that has a chance of winning.

Some stuff is game-breakingly powerful. Using it will make you game-breakingly powerful.

Knowing your weakness is key.

Being cohesive is key.

Staying in control of your emotions is key.

All of this leads to winning.

It’s easy to spin your wheels in real life, wondering if you’re really making progress.

A roguelike will tell you if you’re doing it right. It ain’t always easy. But it teaches you how to win.