For you non-gamers who were wondering what a play-by-email game looks like, I cordially invite you to peek at what’s going on in The Grand Ellipse. Despite some initial difficulty thinking up a character, I think I’ve got a good one going.
Intrigue. Excitement. Quality time with atlases. Yummy.
Plenty of stuff happening in email that isn’t reflected on the pages, of course. Shirley narrowly avoided an Ellipse-ending injury…
Some folks you wouldn’t first think of have reason to be relieved that the DC sniper has been caught…
Thank you, Ginger, for this week’s WISH question. It’s just lovely. It’s about a “heart character,” one who embodies recurring themes in a gamer’s gaming history.
I think I’m a serial heart-character creator. I typically have one at any given time, but I’ve had more than one over my gaming career. Fechan was certainly a heart character. Juskinah is, right now. Other characters I currently play have pieces, sometimes large pieces, of my heart in them—Afletana, Rat, Shams, the tandem of Aino and Ahti, even throwaway-character Bellis—but a heart character is a heart character and they aren’t heart characters.
So what themes do my heart characters embody? What pieces of my heart do my other characters carry? There’s hope for me yet; the themes have changed over time. I hope they’ll go on changing.
I do doubt I’ll ever have a male heart character, though I’d be pleased to be wrong about that. There’s too much I need to think about and work through (gee, you think?) with regard to being female.
My heart characters—all my best characters, really—are never quite entirely integrated into their surroundings, though they aren’t usually obvious misfits. I designed Juskinah to be such a misfit, actually, but she is now an assimilated citizen of her new land and a shaikh’s adopted daughter. Afletana is an implacably proper well-born lady and a priestess. Even guttersnipe Rat had carved out a place in the street world before she joined the party.
Curiously, I can’t play a completely in-tune-with-environs character. I’ve tried, now and then. The result is invariably flat. My Vampire character, Magdalena of clan Gangrel, was pretty, ordinary, passive, status-quo—and boring as all hell. (No fault to the game, which was great; Magdalena just wasn’t a compelling character.) Even Bellis, designed to be lawful (and, yes, played that way), is an ex-monk. Naturally she left because she felt confined. Naturally. Sometimes I’m so transparent I astonish even myself.
If they aren’t total misfits, my heart characters aren’t fight-the-power revolutionaries, either, probably to their discredit. Fechan went for psionics training (more munchkinism on the part of the GM), and thought the fortress where she trained and its sexist, racist, classist, rigidly hierarchical occupants utterly loathsome—but she did not struggle against them except to retain her own identity. (I wish I were kidding about the psionicists, one of whom was probably a heart-character for the GM, but I’m not. They were truly vile.)
Still, these characters look about them and they question. Sometimes the questioning is silent, sometimes overt. They do not like to be caged, ordered around, made to do what goes against their senses of ethics or pragmatism (and they are quite pragmatic). They are self-effacing, accepting, followers rather than leaders when fate allows it—but they transgress when they must. They know they’re transgressing (as if anyone would let them forget it!) and they accept the consequences. Ungracefully, at times.
Insanity, pain, scarring—these come up a lot, and I once thought they were themes. Typical angsty tripe, I thought. I know better now. The theme is recovery. The theme is resilience.
My heart-characters have been hurt, terribly so, but not broken; their journey during the game is toward wholeness, health, integrity. They may fall ill, be hurt, make mistakes, backslide, lose their way, lose their minds—they may even run up against something too much for them and die—but their faces are toward the sunrise. They do not want to be broken, spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but contemplating their hurt.
They will also go to the wall for a loved one, no matter the cost. How they find such intimates is an open question. Fechan had no family; Juskinah is adopted. Fechan turned down marriage, but had close friends; Juskinah and Shams are embarking on a tentative, questing romance. Doesn’t matter how the tie forms, really. If a true friend, a lover, or another loved one is in jeopardy, my heart-characters drop everything to help.
Juskinah features a new theme: finding and losing a mentor. No secret how this theme arose; I am curious to see what will come of it. Rat embodies this also, right down to the recent loss, which she is not handling well at the moment.
I notice that I am also creating a number of older characters, middle-aged and on up. Nur bint Leila, in Juskinah’s campaign, is one, and I drew up a recent widow for a play-by-email Al-Qadim campaign. I don’t know that aging is quite a heart-character theme yet, but I don’t doubt it will someday become one.
Game WISH wants to know what’s off the table. Where I won’t go.
You mean, aside from maturity-challenged males and their masturbatory fantasies? Right, right, okay, you all knew that already.
Truth be told, I’ll put up with a lot, and I’ll try almost anything. There’s really not very much that’s completely off the table.
Game systems and games completely predicated on physical conflict. That’s pretty much off the table. I don’t play superhero games for that reason, nor am I much intrigued by mecha. People relate to each other in myriad ways aside from trying to kill each other. Characters should have the same freedom. Even D&D is trying my patience on this point lately.
Monty Hauls. Munchkinism. Push my buttons. Look, if all you want is kewl swag, just sit around and create 16th-level characters all day, with the ridiculous amount of swag allotted by the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Don’t bother me with it; I have other things I want to do. Like play a character, not a collection of kewl swag and uber-buff abilities. If I ever run a D&D campaign, it’s going to be very low-swag.
Random character deaths push my buttons; I’m trying to get over that, actually, because I recognize that characters get into dangerous situations and they shouldn’t be guaranteed to survive them.
Resolving character-generated conflict out-of-character irks me. Your character got a problem with mine? Take it up with her in-character, please. If you need clarification on whether I and my character are bleeding into each other, by all means ask—99 times out of 100 the answer is “no.” Otherwise, please respect that my character has opinions about people she encounters. Your character doesn’t have to like those opinions, and is welcome to try to change them. You, however, are requested not to edit my character outside the game. I offer the same courtesy in return, naturally.
The single biggest button I have, though, is GMs who try to trap me when I elide over things that ought to be obvious. My husband is a past master at this; he knows it ticks me off and does it anyway. If you need to know a detail beforehand because part of the plot hooks on it, ask. If the standard preparations I make for a desert journey do not matter to the plot, and I don’t care about them, please don’t make me make an exhaustive list of everything I’m hauling along. If you do make me make such a list, it had better matter. Conversely, if you did not ask about a particular preparation, don’t use my not having said anything about it to gig me later on.
Grrrr. Argh. I hate when that happens.
In this week’s Game WISH, we are to talk about three sorts of props and why we use them.
Well, the obvious example is miniatures. I’m not a painter, so I don’t get the ego-boo from artistic endeavor that the painters do. I do appreciate the use of minis in game play, however. Cuts down on arguments over combat tactics. (“You sure you want to do that? Five attacks of opportunity coming at you, look at the board.”) It seems less important in other games (e.g. Ars Magica) than in D&D, which is heavily spatial—you need to know where that lightning bolt went. I could be wrong about this, however; it may be simply a question of the amount of combat in a particular campaign.
I like GMs who use props to create setting and character. This can be as simple as pictures from travel magazines, or as elaborate as elaborate costumes (which, I hasten to say, no GM I’ve had has ever tried). Music can be a prop, properly chosen. A well-drawn map. There’s no need for the GM to rely on voice alone.
As for my own characters—I can get myself in trouble with props. Afletana undertook not to speak (except to pray) until a certain condition had been fulfilled. I had thought that achieving fulfillment of the condition would be easier than has proven the case; she’s still silent. I had been using a dry-erase board to represent her slate and chalk (I looked all summer at yardsales for a proper chalkboard and could not find one).
That did not work out well: too slow. Afletana with her elf-lady’s upbringing could write well; in fact, I rather imagined her trained in several different scribal hands (elves live long enough to survive a good many lettering fashions), and used that to some effect in writing about her. Unfortunately, a key feature of her training and medieval literacy in general is use of abbreviations. Afletana, in other words, could write a great deal faster than I, her player, could. This got to be a problem in live play.
How did I solve it? Pure bloody anachronism, that’s how. I brought my laptop to game sessions, located an appropriate not-quite-uncial freeware font, and typed into my text editor. Worked not half badly.
Even so, when that campaign gets going again I think I am going to have her pray to be released from her promise. All this is just awkward enough to need to end. (Plus, a bit of worthwhile drama, I think—the rest of the party is very accustomed to her silence. I look forward to them finding out how much she has to say.)
This week’s Game WISH asks what’s changed in my gaming life over the years, what I miss and what I wouldn’t change.
Like a lot of no-longer-teenaged gamers, I miss having time to game. Not so much personal time as collective time; I have plenty of time if I need it, but getting a group of gamers together is a logistical nightmare these days.
Oh, you meant game mechanics or house rules? Er, I’m an agnostic on those, mostly. In any case, I find that these days there are so many innovative ideas with regard to mechanics that almost any gaming style can find a game to match.
I do recall a house rule I’d like to see again, though. One of our college GMs handed out little glass pebbles whenever a player did something particularly clever or memorable. These could be traded in for rerolls at especially high-stakes moments. This little mechanic rewarded good roleplaying (all the more important because the game was D&D) and gave players a chance to protect well-loved characters. I liked it.
Another worthwhile tradition from the same group was part of what we called “BSing for XP.” (Er. That sounds like a Microsoft public-relations ploy these days. Ah, well.) At the end of each session, a small experience-point award went to the player whom all players agreed deserved it that week. No agreement, no award. This sent everyone home feeling good about the game.
I suppose I miss the clarity, the psychological simplicity, of my early gaming a little bit. It was nice not to know how subversive Fechan was. On the other hand, it’s nice to have the mental equipment to be aware of what I’m doing, too.
What do I not miss? Well, the overt and covert sexism that blanketed my early games, certainly. There’s also quite a lot to be said (and I’ve said some of it already) about playing with intelligent, creative adults rather than teenagers. (With the usual caveat about age and wisdom correlating far from perfectly.)
I don’t miss the gamer-as-Satanist-freak meme. It’s still around, but I don’t run into it much, and that’s just fine by me.
Openended question, this one. I suspect the answers will vary widely. Well, I hope mine are vaguely enlightening. Or something.
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