The Blog of Roon

Ginger has the latest WISH challenge up. This time it’s about romance: one success and one failure.

You know what? I can’t answer this one directly. All the romances I’ve seen in gaming were failures. (Well, okay, except for Anis’s marriage to a simurgh in the Al-Qadim campaign, which so far is working out fine—but that is a decidedly weird story. Plus Anis is probably the least PC-ish of my PCs; she is a bit of a nonentity, unfortunately.)

I threatened to post about sex and romance in gaming. So rather than trying to fake an answer to the challenge, I’ll follow up on my threat.

Not a few of the in-game romances I have seen were incursions from an out-of-game romance. In one case, when the OOG romance went sour, so did the IG romance. Decidedly uncomfortable situation for the other gamers; in hindsight, the game I am thinking of probably should have broken up along with the romance.

<seinfeld>Not that there’s anything wrong with that.</seinfeld> I would be a fine one to issue blanket condemnations of real-life incursions into games, wouldn’t I? I do think it’s possible for a sour real-life romance to work out acceptably in game terms, if everyone involved offers heaping helpings of trust, understanding, and honesty both in and out of game. It isn’t decent or fair to use a game, especially one with innocent bystanders, to revenge yourself on your ex.

Aside from personal nastiness, however, there is an additional risk: when some players conflate in-game and out-of-game romance, it makes in-game romance ambiguous for everyone. Okay, so her rogue likes my fighter. Does that mean…? Well, does it?

This is tough. I’m wrestling with it now in a currently-on-hiatus Temple of Elemental Evil (yes, that old chestnut—none of our group except the person who’s DMing it has played it before) campaign. Poor little Afletana has gone and fallen for the party leader. Fallen hard. He has thus far been oblivious, and I am not sure how much of that is in-game (which it could well be), how much is the other player not catching on, and how much is the other player’s out-of-game discomfort with the whole idea. The other player is married. So am I, obviously, and the other player is somebody else’s husband, not mine.

Suffice to say this is completely an in-game thing on my part—but how can the other player be sure? And how do I bring the question up out-of-game without either ruining the surprise (if it is a surprise), embarrassing the other player unacceptably, or (heaven forfend!) causing the other player problems with his wife, who is not a gamer?

I am comfortable with any in-game result. If Afletana’s overdeveloped sense of propriety (not to mention the temporary vow of silence, which has turned out to be rather less temporary than I had hoped) is keeping her from making her feelings sufficiently clear, that’s no one’s fault but hers. If she gets turned down, that’s life. If not, I am as much a sucker for a Happy Ending as anyone else.

(Though who’s to say the ending will be happy? Afletana is nearing the end of her rope; she may not survive much longer. The ToEE is a cruel place, and the party just picked up a golden skull that is proving to be the cruelest part of it. I don’t want to see her die, but I don’t want to traduce her character by giving her unlimited endurance, either. The other characters can keep her going—if they try.)

I am not comfortable with making another player uncomfortable. I don’t know that I am in this case. I hope not.

Anyway, this ambiguity contributes to the oft-noted shallowness of many in-game “romances,” even in games that otherwise defy the socially-challenged-geek stereotype. It’s just plain safer not to beg this particular question.

So we get the one-night stands. And the booty-chasers. I hate those last; I really do. Their players are invariably male, and invariably they are one-note characters, existing solely to screw NPCs and any PCs they can get hold of. This kind of behavior is not what I game for; it’s partly what I game to escape. One of these days, I’ll end up DMing a game with such a character, and I will delight in giving him/her (some booty-chasing characters are female, though as I said the players are always male) syphilis. Make that Fortitude save. DC 40.

Fortunately, I have only run into one die-hard booty-chaser whose player seemed unwilling to pay attention to my discomfort with the practice. I was, I admit, instrumental in not inviting the player into our group. Booty-chasers beware: you may poison your reputation as a gamer. If you must chase booty, at least don’t do it with your first character in a particular party, as the player I am thinking of did. I can live with booty-chasing—reluctantly—as long as I understand right to my bones it’s not the only thing I will ever see from a particular player.

I would like to see more relationships of long standing in gaming, which tends to suffer from the characters-meet-in-the-local-bar style of relation formation. Certainly romantic relationships should be part of this, as should the classic character friendship-till-death relationship. I like to see characters who understand each other’s reactions, cover for each other, care about each other, pray together, talk to each other about things other than the best way to skin a dragon or the really hot bartender in the last town.

(I should mention that I have a significant bias against disposable characters. If you don’t want to play a character for a good while, why go through all the number-crunching bother of creating one? I know that not all gamers share this bias, however, and even with me it’s not universal; I happily play one-offs in which I’ve min-maxed my character as much as anyone else at table.)

The thing is, though, romance and friendship aren’t the only long-standing relationships we have in life. Why should our characters be any different? Mentoring and teacher-student relationships, for example, I don’t see nearly enough of. Shams and Rahim had wonderful long talks as she tried to civilize him. Rat is the other side of that coin; she all but worships another character in that campaign, with no question whatever of sex. (She is a halfling and he is a lizardman—it would only lead to grief, I’m sure. Anyway, Rat has… issues when it comes to sex; and it may, if another player chooses to foreground his halfling NPC.)

So as important as questions of romance and sex are for serious gamers, I prefer to regard them as one aspect of the larger question of establishing and developing long-standing relationships among characters.

I’m not as anti-romance as I suspect I’m coming across. Juskinah and Shams just embarked on a romantic relationship that I hope will prove long-term. Anything can happen, though, in games as in life, so I could always be wrong about their prospects for a Happy Ending.

Wanted to quickly point out this wise take on the pseudonymity-in-gaming thread. Yes, “catharsis” is an important word and I certainly should have used it.

Also worth perusing is this examination of sex in gaming, the topic that dare not speak its name. (Except that I’ve been thinking about blogging about it, so…)

Turn of a Friendly Die is running a writing exercise on NPCs. Thought I’d get my two cents in.

(For you non-gamers, “NPC” stands for “non-player-character” and generally means anyone who turns up in the game who is roleplayed by the gamemaster rather than one of the players. Sometimes, however, a player may have secondary characters generally treated as NPCs.)

The best NPCs I’ve run into were those who clearly had their own agendas, orthogonal to the PCs’. Helpful reminder to players that the world doesn’t revolve around their characters. Such NPCs are far more likely to inject something new into a game, give the PCs something to chew on, something to react to, something to learn from.

No arch-villains, huh? Well, that lets out one NPC I was going to mention, but oh, well.

Rahim al-Husaini is a beggar-brat NPC in the Al-Qadim campaign my husband and I indulge in when he’s not swamped with work. (This week the movie people started kicking up their heels again—calling him after hours and generally being a nuisance.) Rahim is mouthy, bitter, and stubborn, with a naive but not entirely unconvincing sense of class warfare.

My characters found him snooping around their rented house in Muluk and nabbed him (injuring him in the process, neither intentionally nor seriously). We impressed him into the party rather than let him go, as we were figuring prominently on city wanted posters at the time and could not afford to have our departure gossiped about. (Long story. We had not in fact done anything particularly wrong.) It wasn’t until considerably later that Rahim revealed he had been sent by one of our friends. It was very like Rahim to hold such cards close to his chest; it often fed his sense of personal injustice.

Juskinah alternately pitied him, got annoyed with him, or ignored him. Shams did her level best to teach him language and deportment, with rather mixed success. He lives in Muluk now, and (we believe) is employed as a spy by the current sultana of that city.

NPCs who betray the PCs tend to be memorable. Handsome, green-eyed Fadiyah was no exception. She and her nonentity brother Omar guided our little group someplace we could find no other way to reach, with the aim of opening talks with a group of bandit-assassins. Juskinah did not listen as carefully as she should have to Fadiyah’s history and reasons for accepting the post as guide. On the way, Fadiyah became rather smitten with Juskinah (how honestly so Juskinah has never been sure), managed to seduce her—and then betrayed the group for reasons of her own, attacking the assassins’ leader. The betrayal was not successful; Fadiyah was captured and executed by the bandits.

Juskinah has only once commented on the episode since… but that was a private conversation which I have no intention of sharing with you. The betrayal certainly left its mark.

And then there is Sid, the benevolent, studious nobleman in Rat’s campaign. Who turned out to be a silver dragon. Talk about memorable. Rat won’t go anywhere near him these days unless forced to, though he had been kind to her before she joined the party. Rat has strong opinions on the continuity of identity, shall we say, and Sid rather transgressed against them.

I am at a severe disadvantage in philosophical discussions, which makes me wonder why I participate in them… but let that go for a bit. My disadvantage lies in complete inability to build theories and hypotheses from the top down rather than the bottom up. (Not just to build, either, but even to understand.) I can’t do birds-eye views. Born a worm, I guess, with a worm’s lowly eye.

So my contributions to philosophically-oriented blogthreads, when I make them at all, tend to be lived-experience anecdotes, and questions that spring from them. Data. I’m good at data. I’m good with data. Unfortunately, Real Philosophy, from the little I know of it, doesn’t much go in for a data-centered approach. Too limiting, or something.

Nevertheless. AKMA’s latest on pseudonymity and its dangers cannot help but remind me of my participation in role-playing games, a pastime substantially based on pseudonymity. Granted, it is a pseudonymity that breaks often, and for many participants is superficial or considered entirely ludic; nevertheless, pseudonymity.

The usual mud cast at RPGs, just as at many other games, is that unacceptable behaviors leak from the RPG context into non-RPG interactions. Last night, an RPG character of mine (“Rat” is her name) killed and wounded a number of creatures (small-r rats, mostly—Rat hates rats) with her slingshot and her knife. Certainly a dim view would be taken of my emulating her behavior, even with small-r rats.

AKMA’s take is a little different, however (for which I am profoundly grateful). He asks what is to be made of me for harboring such pseudonymities as Rat the street urchin. I use the plural advisedly, of course, as all half-serious gamers must; my game pseudonymities have included

• Fechan the witch, who went quite thoroughly mad, devastating considerable territory and not a few lives while not in her right mind
• Magdalena the accidental vampire
• Fiera the take-no-prisoners were-panther
• Juskinah the loyal desert nomad
• Shams: poet, historian, and singer
• Afletana the prim priestess

Not to mention Rell the healer and “Brother” Smith the taciturn druid, for those who think I play only women. Slice it how you will, that’s a lot of pseudonymity.

I hear an objection from the gallery: you’re just playing, Dorothea; that’s not real pseudonymity of the type under discussion. Perhaps. I’m not sure the line between ludic and other pseudonyms is so easily drawn as that. Is it coincidence that at the same time leaving graduate school shattered my self-concept, Juskinah transgressed badly, lost a number of special abilities the gods had given her, and likewise had to pick up the pieces of her self? (For second-edition D&D aficionados, she lost her ranger status over a no-question-that-was-THOROUGHLY-and-unnecessarily-evil action.)

In hindsight, it does not feel like coincidence. Why should it? Insofar as my RPG characters derive their selves from mine, they ought to exhibit my habits of thought and emotion; they ought to end up echoing bits of my life. Just as pseudonyms have been blown for employing the verbal and rhetorical tics of their owners.

They don’t necessarily stop there, though, as Rat and her deadly sling demonstrate. Because the context is ludic, because actors and acted-upon are deliberately un-real, I can take risks with their actions and their identities I cannot (or dare not) with my own, and explore the result. Minus the ludic context, this is the identical reason many pseudonymous folks put forward for their pseudonymity. Ain’t that curious.

So what are we to think of me? The RPGs-are-Satanic crowd would doubtless say that the irredeemable evil in my soul simply makes itself known in RPG hack-and-slash, completely ignoring the many impressively decent things my various characters have done. (Last night Rat, to take a relatively minor example, threw herself in front of two stunned and helpless comrades to take rat-bites they would otherwise have suffered. Bites from rats, in RPG-land as everywhere else, carry significant risk of disease. Gamine Rat knew that full well.)

AKMA might dismiss my RPG characters as “inauthentic,” not really part of the Dorothea identity, since they and their context are clearly fictional (and perhaps because I have no trouble discussing them in third person). He would, as I cannot, ignore the overlap between their lives and mine, their concerns and mine, their personalities and mine. I have been as mad as poor Fechan; it’s just lucky I didn’t have her tremendous power to damage others. I actively try to emulate one or two of my characters, when they behave in ways I ought to; how weird is that?

The best conclusion I can come to just now is this: if we are to count the costs of pseudonymity, something I have no trouble admitting is necessary, we ought to consider that perhaps it confers benefits (beyond the merely exculpatory) as well. It can illustrate parts of us we are not aware of (good and bad), help us deal safely with parts we wish we didn’t have, let us model behavior we would like to transfer to non-pseudonymous contexts.

Plus it can be a lot of fun, of course. Not to be sneezed at, fun.