Monsters Through the Ages — Carrion Crawler

Last week on Wandering DMs we had a smashing chat with one of our favorite repeat guests, Matt Finch of Mythmere Games. As I write this, his Kickstarter for the new Swords & Wizards Complete Revised edition is entering its last few days -- you should check it out if you can. 

Matt is both epically knowledgeable about old-school D&D, and also impressively generous with his time and wisdom. After the live show he hung out for another hour to chat with he patrons on our Discord server (accessible at any tier on our Patreon). As part of that discussion, we got on the subject of Carrion Crawlers. Almost everyone involved had a different take on some part of how they should work -- and as we dug out our various books, it turns out that every one of our competing interpretations had some support from one text or another, which was entirely fascinating.

The Carrion Crawler is rather infamous for being probably the most brokenly imbalanced creature in early D&D. Positioned as a 2nd level monster on its birth in OD&D (Supplement I), it was re-evaluated as 6th level in the AD&D DMG, and got a special badge in its Monster Manual text: "... these monsters are greatly feared". Don Turnbull's MonsterMark System from the White Dwarf has an especially problematic time handling it. Frank Mentzer put forward using one as the single biggest mistake of his DM'ing career. And on and on. But what makes it the flagship for busting up a DM's best-laid plans?

OD&D Greyhawk (1976)

CARRION CRAWLERS: These scavangers will usually attack in order to insure that there will continue to be a supply of corpses to scavenge. They are worm-shaped, about 9’ in length, 3’ high at their head end, and move quickly on multiple legs. Their mouths are surrounded by eight tentacles of about 2’ length, and their touch causes paralization (save vs. or paralized). The Carrion Crawler is able to climb/move along walls or ceilings as readily as floors, thus allowing it to compete with Ochre Jellies, Black (or Gray) Puddings, and the like.

The "Attacks and Damage by Monster Type" table in this book (p. 16-19) confirms that a carrion crawler gets "8 tentacles" for its number of attacks, which is a very large number (rivaled only by octopi, squids, and hydra). The damage entry just says, "special", and the text here notes the paralyzing attack, which is really crippling (e.g., its one of the reasons ghouls punch so far above their weight class by hit dice). 

Note that no actual damage value is given -- I think this and the rust monster are the only two creatures to this point that lack a damage value or some other clear way of killing a PC (i.e., by poison or other death effect). This makes it a major trap and counterexample for any system that tries to measure monster threats by some kind of a-la-carte points system.

In our discussion last week, several opinions were put forward about what happens, as is quite likely, after a carrion crawler scores a TPP (total party paralysis). Does it just wander off, looking for actual dead meat (carrion), no-harm-no-foul? Does the DM start making wandering monster checks, who might actually kill the PCs and thus give the crawler something to scavenge (note that no duration was given to any paralysis abilities to this point). Does it presumably auto-consume the hapless PCs? Yes to all of these, depending what edition you play with.

AD&D Monster Manual (1977)

...

NO. OF ATTACKS: 8
DAMAGE/ATTACK: Paralysis
SPECIAL ATTACKS: As above

...

Carrion crawlers strongly resemble a cross between a giant green cutworm and a huge cephalopod. They are usually found only in subterranean areas. The carrion crawler is, as its name implies, a scavenger, but this does not preclude aggressive attacks upon living creatures, for that insures a constant supply of corpses upon which to feed or for deposit of eggs. The head of the monster is well protected, but its body is only armor class 7. A carrion crawler moves quite rapidly on its multiple legs despite its bulk, and a wall or ceiling is as easily traveled as a floor, for each of the beast's feet are equipped with sharp claws which hold it fast. The head is equipped with 8 tentacles which flail at prey; each 2' long tentacle exudes a gummy secretion which when fresh, will paralyze opponents (save versus paralyzation or it takes effect). As there are SO many tentacles with which to hit, and thus multiple chances of being paralyzed, these monsters are greatly feared.

A year later we have the 1E AD&D Monster Manual, which is almost entirely backwards-compatible with OD&D, and mostly just compiles all various stats for each monster (formerly spread around in separate pages of each book) in one place. It still gives no positive damage other than the paralysis effect, and no duration for that ability, either.

The text says that it's willing to attack living things, "for that insures a constant supply of corpses upon which to feed or for deposit of eggs". Without any specific mechanics, this could open up DM to interpret it in several ways. Maybe paralysis leads to death; maybe it waits for wandering monsters; maybe it injects eggs into PCs who get consumed by them immediately or later. The mind boggles at the hideous possibilities. 

D&D Basic Rules (Holmes, 1978)

This scavenger is worm shaped, 9' long, 3 feet high at the head and moves quickly on multiple legs. It can move equally well on the wall or ceiling as on the level. The mouth parts are surrounded by eight tentacles, two feet long, which produce paralysis on touch (i.e. when a hit is made). 

Holmes Basic is usually a faithful editorial presentation of the same rules as seen in OD&D. I briefly point out this book because it more explicitly gives a stat block for the carrion crawler that says, "Damage: 0". Zenopus Archives has a great series poring over the original Holmes manuscript for this book, which we know Gygax did an editorial pass on before publication. (And he makes the point that possibly one could argue in OD&D that by default every crawler tentacle gets a stock d6 damage on every hit, but that's taken off the table with this clarification.)

D&D Basic Rules (Moldvay, 1981)

This scavenger is worm-shaped, 9' long and 3' high with many legs. It can move equally well on a floor, wall, or ceiling like a spider. Its mouth is surrounded by 8 tentacles, each 2' long, which can paralyze on a successful hit unless a saving throw vs. Paralysis is made. Once paralyzed, a victim will be eaten (unless the carrion crawler is being attacked). The paralysis can be removed by a cure light wounds spell, but any spell so used will have no other effect. Without a spell, the paralysis will wear off in 2-8 turns.

As usual, Tom Moldvay makes the helpful decision to specify a duration for the paralysis for the first time. His stat block is back to saying, "Damage: Paralysis" (as opposed to 0 in Holmes). But most keenly he states that crawlers simply eat their paralyzed victims by fiat. (!) So DMs used to running the B/X or related systems likely have the intuition that crawlers just swallow their prey whole like a snake. No save for you.  

This same ruling is carried forward later into the Mentzer BECMI set. The Alston Rules Cyclopedia is largely the same with tiny adjustments: the stat block there says, "Damage: Paralysis or 1 point", and the text sets a timer on fast one eats paralyzed bodies: they "will eat paralyzed victims in three turns".

AD&D Monster Cards (1982)

Carrion crawlers attack with 8 tentacles that secrete a gummy fluid that will paralyze any opponents hit for 2d6 turns unless they save vs. Paralyzation. Carrion crawlers wll continue to attack as long as any opponents are unparalyzed. They will kill paralyzed creatures with their bite (DM 1-2), in order to have a constant supply of bodies to eat and to lay eggs in.

The AD&D Monster Cards are kind of a fascinating a beautiful set of products (the art at the top of this post is the front of the Carrion Crawler card). There are times I'm tempted to run a classic game by always showing players these cards, with name and info hidden on the back -- except there are too many gaps of key monsters that were never included (please, someone make a fill-in product here, take my money so I don't have to do it).

While the stat blocks are mostly identical to what's in the Monster Manual, these cards make some surprising, fundamental tweaks to certain monster rules. For example, you can see here that it specifies values for carrion crawler paralysis time (2d6 turns) and its capacity post-paralysis (a bite attack for a 1-2 damage). Other examples include specifying the duration for Ghoul paralysis for the first time in the game. So now the issue clarified for the AD&D line: a paralyzed party will clearly get TPK'd by the crawler. 

This duration and damage was copied forward verbatim into 2E AD&D, for example. In 3E the duration was given as 2d6 minutes, and the post-paralysis bite damage was raised to 1d4+1.

Big thanks to our patron Adam for pointing out this detail to us.

Conclusions

At the outset, carrion crawlers have a fairly open-field ability profile that DMs could potentially fill in many different ways. But over time each of the bifurcating Basic and Advanced D&D lines of the 1980s-1990s came around to specifying a relatively limited paralysis duration, and a direct way for crawlers to finish off prey that they'd paralyzed -- including some small-damage bite attack in their final forms. 

Even with that specific damage figure, their main disabling threat is of course the paralysis ability, so systems that try to mechanically crunch damage numbers will still trip up over evaluating these monsters. In the OED Monster Metrics simulator, a carrion crawler with its full 8 attacks gets assessed at EHD (equivalent hit dice) 12, while a reduced one with 4 attacks is still EHD 9. (Note that latter form is what I customarily run with, coincidentally similar to what Mentzer rationalizes in his games.)

How do you like your carrion crawlers? Are you happy with the post-Moldvay consensus that crawlers definitely terminate their paralyzed prey, or would you prefer different possibilities?

Random Walks in the Dungeons of the Slave Lords

I recently had an opportunity to run AD&D module A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, for the first time. This is of course the culminating adventure in the classic A-series Slavers tournament, famous for stripping the PCs of literally every resource and forcing them to outhink their way through a pitch-black labyrinth after being abandoned/ sacrificed to its horrors. We chatted about it a bit on Wandering DMs the other week. 

Once again, the playthrough made me realize several things about the adventure that I hadn't noticed, even having read through it multiple times since its release in 1981. (As usual, one of the pieces of dogma for this blog is: The acid test is gameplay.) One that came up in my discussion with WDM Paul is that, while the dungeon has 3 different possible exits, all the times we've run it the players have made it out through one exit in particular.

To investigate this, I took some graph-theory code I'd developed for one of my college courses, modeled the A4 dungeon as an abstract graph, and then simulated several thousand random walks starting from the entry area #1 to see the frequency that those walks run into the various exits. For this purpose, I annotated the dungeon map with extra areas 22-27 to mark otherwise unlabelled tunnel intersections (if you have your own map copy you can deduce where I put those labels, I'm sure). Then I cut out all of the mid-tunnel points that don't have any branches, places where the PCs are highly unlikely to turn back, counter to how a random walk will work (and this also simplifies the visual appearance of the graph, below). Here's the result, via the gvedit visualization tool:

 

Some observations: There are several interconnecting circuits in the section of areas #1-12 (top half of this graph), which allow numerous ways to navigate between those areas. But there's only one exit in that section, at area #10. 

In contrast to that, there's one critical bottleneck-tunnel from area #12 to #15; that's the only way to access the other branch composed of areas #15-21 (bottom half of the graph here). Despite the difficulty in getting there, that branch includes 2 of the 3 dungeon exits (at areas #19 and #21), as well as the notable Myconid colony (featured on the cover of the module, and the only place in the entire A series where negotiation can be profitable). If players never find their way to that particular tunnel out of area #12, then they'll never see any of that latter content.

So here's the results of my series of random walks -- note this is purely random at each location, including equal chances to turn around and backtrack from any location. After 10K simulations, the number of times each exit was reached are as follows:

AD&D Module A4 Random Walks 

Exit	Reached	Percent
10	5,360	53.60%
19	1,904	19.04%
21	2,736	27.36%

So broadly speaking, this model suggests that about half the time, players will exit from the top half of the graph, which means the exit at area #10. And the other half of the time, players will exit from the bottom half of the graph, with exits split between areas #19 and #21. Basically that toggle is a coin-flip over whether they take the tunnel from #12 to #15 or not. And consider that in this scenario, the players aren't allowed to map or properly orient themselves ("all directions should be given to them in terms of right and left", p. 3), so it's at least as likely that they'll circle back on their own path several times as they are to stumble onto the key connection. Indeed, it's the exit at #10 from which Paul & I have seen all of our playgroups escape (a small sample size, to be sure).

Regarding the difference between the two exits in the far part of our graph: our model makes it look significantly more likely that #21 is found than #19. On the other hand, it's the latter area that the Myconids are able to direct the players towards, which might shift some weight from #21 to #19; but on the other-other hand, anecdotal evidence suggests the Myconids are so frightening that it's rare for negotiations to be pursued with them. Since all of these factors are isolated in our lower branch, I don't think any such re-evaluation would affect the chance that area #10 is discovered first.

Here's he upshot: If you're preparing to run module A4, then you should prioritize being able to handle the #10 exit above the others, and more generally the whole branch that it's on, because it looks like a bit more than half the time that's how the action will play out. Secondarily you can prepare for running the more distant branch (with the complex Myconid area), in particular the area #21 exit, and not spend too much time thinking about #19, which seems to be a fairly unlikely exit point.

If you've played or run module A4, which exits did you personally see get used in play?

The Concentration Game

The issue of "concentration" for spellcasting has come up a number of times in my OD&D games lately. For those somewhat more familiar with the current-edition of D&D, two reactions are halfway common: (a) surprise that a "concentration" mechanic existed in OD&D, and/or (b) surprise that it's so infrequently required for spells in OD&D.

At any rate: Yes, Virginia, concentration was a requirement for certain spells in the very first publication of D&D (1974). Just to reflect on it a bit more, here are all the spells which mention such a requirement:

Original D&D

• Phantasmal Forces: "As long as the caster concentrates on the spell, the illusion will continue unless touched by some living creature, so there is no limit on duration, per se". This is the first appearance; kind of interesting it's used as means to avoid giving the spell a defined duration.
  
  
• Wall of Fire: "The spell will create a wall of fire which lasts until the Magic-User no longer concentrates to maintain it." This is one of my least favorite uses (in that it locks the caster down to nothing but maintaining the wall while it's in use -- can't even flee while the wall serves as an obstacle). Requiring concentration while the caster directs some dynamic activity makes sense; just maintaining a static effect not so much.
  
  
• Conjure Elemental: "The Elemental will remain until dispelled, but the Magic-User must concentrate on control or the elemental will turn upon its conjurer and attack him (see CHAINMAIL)." This is likely the most famous, idiomatic usage: concentrate on your summoned elemental or it irremediably go berserk and tries to kill you instead (which is a major downside to this spell!)

And that's it: just those 3 in the little brown books (Volume 1, Men & Magic).

A few other references can be found in Sup-III, Eldritch Wizardry, for the psionic domination ability; and in Sup-IV, Gods Demigods and Heroes, in that the Hyborean magical mirror of Lazbekri requires it (so as to function as a gem of seeing; maybe just flavor text), and that the Indian deity Rudra can cast illusions without such a requirement (as is normally the case for phantasmal forces, above).

So that's a very slight number of uses of the mechanic -- and as usual for the rules in those days, didn't really scope out exactly what the parameters of such a concentration requirement were.

The AD&D rules somewhat expand on those points, including requirements for -- gnome and halfling detection abilities, paladin detection of evil, spiritual hammer, locate animals, locate plants, wall of fire, conjure elementals, clairaudience, phantasmal forces, telekinesis, emotion, a few closely related spells, and numerous psionic abilities (in the optional Appendix I). 

One interesting point is that the 1E phantasmal force specifies that concentration ends with any movement (in addition to taking an attack, etc.), whereas the new improved phantasmal force permits half-speed movement. I find that latter rule pretty reasonable, and use it as a base assumption in my games.

Furthermore, in my Book of Spells (see sidebar) I have a tendency to include it any spells that have an ongoing detection or direction component, including (in addition to the classic ones above) -- read minds (ESP), legend lore, and move earth.

Of course, 5E D&D expanded the concentration mechanic to be a core limiting factoring in a lot more spells -- maybe something like half of all the spells in the game? When playing a caster in 5E, I routinely get tripped up by not foreseeing how many different spells have the concentration requirement, and wind up boxing myself out from good combinations and/or embarrassingly wasting a number of castings.

What's your master theory for what spells should require concentration?

Papier Und Spiele: Book of War vs. Chainmail

Blogger ahabicher at Papier Und Spiele occasionally takes a really close look at my Book of War rules for classic D&D wargaming, and I think it's really helpful to get the perspective of someone who cares so much about D&D mass combat who isn't me. This week he's done a test of a battle between two tribes of warring goblins -- done twice, once in Chainmail, and once in Book of War, to see how they compare. I kind of love this to death. You should read the action. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I will collegially point out a few things in the report that I would personally interpret or run differently:

1. Overall Book of War is trying to simulate classic Dungeons & Dragons combat (with its "Alternative Combat System" as of 1974 with d20 attack matrices), moreso than the original Chainmail book with its custom troop-type tables. That said, I'm constantly referring back to Chainmail myself for lots of stuff like the man-to-man combat sequence, modifiers, creature special abilities, movement and missile ranges, catapult/boulder/fireball targeting mechanics, etc., which are included by reference in Original D&D.
   
   
2. I don't roll initiative every turn, just once at the start of the battle, then alternate sides sequentially. This follows what's in Gygax's later Swords & Spells, but it's opening my eyes for the first time that Chainmail and also Battlesystem determine initiative every round. I can see now in my text I left that a bit vague.
   
   
3. Revisions we've made since the 1st Edition publication adjusted the successful 2d6 morale target from 10 down to 9. This was specifically to synchronize with the OD&D reaction table, which has success at a value of 9 and up (and is referenced as one of the two or three possible ways to adjudicate morale in OD&D: see Vol-1, p. 13). But that wouldn't make any difference in the current play-through, anyway.
   
   
4. There's common debate about whether in Chainmail a player should be throwing 1 attack per figure, or per man (i.e., 20 dice per figure). I do think comes down to sloppy-casual writing in the original Chainmail text, in that Gygax would swap around "man" and "figure" for the same thing interchangeably, even at mass scale. When asked in 2005 on the issue, Gary responded, "Read 'man' as 'figure' and you have it. One die is just that...". You can see the full exchange here. So there's at least an interpretation that allows for much fewer dice when running Chainmail.

That said, I can acclaim enough how incredibly valuable this battle report is! Without giving away exactly how this fight goes, I can't help but highlight ahabiche's ultimate takeaway:

Book of War is faster and easier. It is the better choice to determine the outcome of a battle within the context of a roleplaying game, when we may want to determine the fate of specific individuals by the RPG rules in single combat, and our goal with the mass battle is to find out how it goes.

If you want to see more about the current state of the Book of War ruleset, check out the sidebar, and/or our continuing biweekly series of live playtests on Youtube. Fight on!

OED on Roll20

Hey, did you know there's an official Original Edition Delta Character Record Sheet available on Roll20? Yessiree Bob, there sure is.

This a joint work between myself and Jameson Proctor (Campaign Games, Forts & Frontiers), to whom I'm immensely grateful for starting this project. The sheet's actually been online for over a year at this point, but I just recently found some time to make all the OCD/OED tweaks that would make me extra-happy to use it myself.

We've tried to keep it fairly lightweight and flexible so DMs have the freedom to adjudicate details to their personal taste. But for convenience, we've added these webby features:

• Auto-calculation of ability score bonuses.
• Auto-calculation of movement rate from encumbrance.
• Push-button for saving throws (based on character level).
• Push-button for attack rolls (rolling both attack & damage).
• Auto-summing of equipment encumbrance values.
• Checkbox interface for memorizing spellbook entries.

When you're making a new game on Roll20, or updating an old game via the Settings > Game Settings > Character Sheet Template menu, you can scroll down to "Original Edition Delta" -- or just search for "delta", and that will bring it up.

Hopefully this will suit your purposes if you're playing our style of lightly-adjusted old-school game. I like to think I'm pretty good at testing & debugging this kind of work, so it looks pretty solid to my eye at this time. But please check it out and leave a comment on anything you think I missed.

Fight on!

Radius or Diameter?

I've been working on refining spell descriptions (again) lately -- for hopefully upcoming expanded releases of the OED Book of Spells and Book of War rules. (E.g., we started testing top-level spells in mass battle play in the BOW livestream sessions the other week.) A couple of recent testbeds brought to mind the question: what's better for expressing the area of a circular spell effect, the radius, or the diameter?

For many years I've been strongly biased towards using the radius, because that's the used in mathematical definition of a circle. Arguably, however, it's easier and more common to measure real-world existing circles via the diameter (given the center is not actually part of the circle or necessarily distinguished; think tires, pizzas, wells, etc.)

Funny observation: Gygax's writing for O/AD&D was amazingly inconsistent on the matter, often flip-flopping for various spells in opposite directions. Starting with the first few spells in the Chainmail list, I see:

• Chainmail: Catapults/fireballs given by diameter, light by radius, protection from evil by diameter, etc.
• Original D&D: Fireballs by radius, light by diameter, protection from evil by radius (so, each of example toggles)
• Swords & Spells: Everything by diameter.
• Advanced D&D: Everything by radius (as far as I can tell).

I think the Swords & Spells case is interesting, because it gives a big list with all the stats (range, area, duration) for every spell in OD&D in a master list. When I did the same thing for my simulator, I found that things got confusing for a specific reason -- every other shape was being expressed by overall width (squares, lines, cubes, rectangles, etc.), but circles were listed by half-width. So I was getting a bit scrambled comparing entries of "circle-2-in." next to "square-3-in." and remembering that the former is actually bigger (wider). Note this is the case where Gygax gave diameters for everything, and I think this explains why.

The other (and related) case is trying to build templates for area spells in a VTT, specifically Roll20. There's a single pipeline for importing a token image and specifying how big it should be in map-square-units, and that interface asks for the total width (whether the image is of a square, rectangle, circle, etc.). So for my circle areas I was having to do an extra mental step and remember to double the indicated rule dimension for each token. In addition, I'd note that hand-drawing circles, ellipses, etc. in Roll20 and most drawing software I'm familiar with involves drawing and reporting on the bounding box for the shape in question; they don't draw from center to circumference.

Based on these experiences, for consistency with other shapes, I had an urge to switch all the circular specifications from radius over to diameter. But I also thought to ask opinions online, and got feedback like this on the ODD74 forums:

Similarly, folks on Twitter were almost unanimously in favor of using the radius. Voting on the Wandering DMs Discord server also went for the radius (with some votes switching from diameter back to radius based on discussion there: esp., targeting and determining casualties for a blasting spell). I didn't bother to ask on an AD&D forum, since those rules do uniformly use radius, so I assume everyone will be habituated to that.

Therefore, I'm taking that as an overwhelming preference among the classic D&D community, and not indulge my momentary instinct to switch things to a Swords & Spells type presentation, but instead keep giving radius like everyone expects.

We're all lucky I didn't find some way to argue for the circumference.

Dragon's Lair

I've gotten a chance to play the Dragon's Lair arcade game on my PC (finally in the last week or so).

I can't emphasize how ground-breaking this game was when it showed up in arcades back in 1983 (40 years ago as I write this). Up to that point, we'd only seen 8-bit sprite-based games with digital audio blips. Consider the top games from 1982 (per Wikipedia, "the peak year for the golden age of arcade video games") -- Dig Dug, Pole Position, Zaxxon, Q*bert, Time Pilot, etc. Rendered 3D games were about a decade away at that point.

And then all of a sudden the Dragon's Lair cabinet shows up with Laserdisc technology, and you're playing through a full-on Disney-quality animated movie by Don Bluth & co., experiencing booming professional voice acting, etc. My brain still hasn't recovered from what a leap it was.

For years I've tried to get a PC version working and never succeeded. I think I bought at least two CD versions and each time they were broken beyond usability. This past week I decided to do another search and, amazingly, managed to get a version that actually works. Plus the sequels: Dragon's Lair 2, Space Ace, etc.

So I'm playing through and actually learning how to play and decoding the terrifying puzzles for the first time. An amazing trip.

Here's a point: I'm finding that I don't like the sequels nearly so much. This is not remotely a nostalgia thing because, for budget reasons, I really never played any of them back in the day more than once or twice. So, why this preference?

It's because the later iterations made that classic misstep (to me) of inserting more story into the games. The first Dragon's Lair is essentially a picaresque: the action sequences come in basically a random order, and you never know what's coming next. Part of the play is keeping on your toes and identifying each scene quickly as it starts, so as to engage the right move series. This randomness keeps replayability high, and keep the focus tightly on the player skill in each puzzle as you learn and gain expertise with it.

But then each of the games afterward make the Hickman-esque movement of "this game would be better if it was more like a story you'd see in a book or movie". There are more narrative sequences of people talking when you don't have anything to interact with. More importantly, the sequence of scenes is always exactly the same for every play-through, because it needs to keep on a tightly railroaded plot. I find this has three effects: One, replays get boring faster because of the predictability. Two, it's more likely that you replay parts of the same scene back-to-back because the scene needs to get completed before you can continue. Three, when it mulligans you and just pushes you forward after a failure (death), I find that weirdly more jarring, because the Kenny-like death in the middle of the narrative story seems more lampshaded-incoherent.

This sense is of course consistent with my discomfort with the historical progression of inserting more "story" elements into games. For me, something is lost when the tilty-trap swings more in that direction away from the focus on technical player skill. My partner & I have always rolled our eyes at the narrative cut-scenes in real-time strategy games, as another example. But I think we're in the minority, as it's something I've been fairly well exhausted at debating with people over the years -- and probably more than one guest we've had on Wandering DMs has said things like "RPGs aren't about the gameplay, it's about the stories we make with our friends", which I guess I have to respect, but feel completely different about.