(no subject)

Last week's D&D session was an interesting experiment, midway between set piece and combat encounter. I wanted to create the flavor of the party stumbling into a battle between parties they weren't affiliated with, at a higher level than they were. I wanted it to be clear that if they engaged in the combat, they would not be able to hold their own and would likely die, but I also wanted their choices to matter, it's not an interesting D&D session if I just narrate a fight to them for an hour or two.

My assumption based on knowing the party was that they would take one look at the fight and try to flee, and so most of my planning for the session was based around that, how to make an interesting and challenging D&D encounter out of running away. In fact, the party's initial plan was to flee, but after a couple rounds and seeing the flow of the battle and thinking about the strategic consequences, they decided to throw in on one side of the fight while trying to remain peripheral to the fight.

This meant that a lot of my planning went for nought, but that's part and parcel of DMing, and fortunately I'd given just enough thought to what would happen if the players did stick around to be able to make the combat work.

My main experimental innovation, which would have been more significant in the running-away plot but still worked interestingly without it, was a set of random tables for battle status that I rolled at the top of each combat round. About half of the rolls on the first table would result in a status change in the main battle, either one side or the other gaining a significant tactical advantage. The remaining half of the table reflected the idea that the battle was supposed to be chaotic and full of interacting fairy magic blowing off random and dangerous magic everywhere. Those results told me to roll on one of two further tables of area effects that would affect everyone within range of the battle, even non-combatants like my players.

In the running-away story, that would have been a major part of the challenge: How do you navigate these tricky paths through the woods as the woods keeps shifting around you in response to magic being thrown off by the battle? Since the players ended up sticking around the battle site, these shifts mostly registered as weird chaotic shit happening in the background, which was still a nice atmospheric effect that made this battle feel different than other battles.

Maseches Shabbos Daf 16

Daf 16

More of R' Shimon ben Shetach, who was a Rabbinical leader during the Hasmonean period. We learned that he enacted two particular gezeiros: One is something to do with a woman receiving a gett, the other is something to do with metal implements conveying tumah.

In general, random natural objects don't convey tumah. If an insect dies on the ground, and I happen to later walk on that piece of ground, the ground does not transmit that tumah to me just by walking on the same ground. If an insect dies on a tree and I later touch that tree, I do not become tamei.

However, if the insect dies in a pot, and I later touch that pot, then depending on the material I may or may not become tamei. This only counts finished implements, if it's been partially worked but isn't a complete useable implement yet, it does not transmit tumah. It's a rule from the Torah that metal implements transmit tumah, so that can't be what R' Shimon ben Shetach's gezeirah covers. Rather, says the Gemara, his gezeirah is that broken metal implements maintain their tumah.

By strict d'oraysa, if I have a pot that a bug went into, I would have to clean the pot, immerse it in water, and wait a week for it to be pure. OR, I could smash the pot, and then it would instantly no longer be a functional implement and therefore be pure. And then I could reassemble the pieces into a new pot that would be tahor instantly.

The Gemara says that R' Shimon ben Shetach's sister was the Hasmonean Queen Salome Alexandra (not the same person as famously wicked Herod's daughter Salome), and she held a wedding banquet at which somehow all of the metal implements became tamei. Perhaps, says Artscroll, someone died inside the wedding banquet tent and by tumas ohel all of the implements became tamei. This was a big multiday feast, she needed the implements to be tahor again quickly so as to be ready for the next meal to be served, so this was a potential disaster. So she had them all broken and then immediately resoldered together. Bam, instant tahor!

Her brother and the rest of the Rabbis thereupon banned this practice. The Gemara argues about why. There's no Torah problem with this, what were they trying to prevent by banning it? The most appealing answer is that they just didn't want to circumvent the normal process of requiring immersion to purify. Sure, okay, if a pot really gets smashed then you deal with that, but we don't want to normalize this rapid-smash procedure and eliminate the spiritual value we get out of the mitzvah of tevilah. Another answer is that they were concerned that people might do the rapid-smash but not fully break the pot, and therefore end up eating from pots that were actually still tamei. Another answer is that they were concerned that people would see rapid-smash pots being used the same day of use and assume that they had been toveiled and not realize that if you toveil you need to wait afterwards before using the pots.