The Blog of Roon

Ginger opines that play-by-email games may “salvage RPGs as an art form in the age of computer gaming.” This in response to an Ampersand post that claims “I’m convinced, years later, that we took role-playing to new heights of both depth and technical achievement.”

They could both be right. I don’t intend to support or dispute either statement. I quoted them because they dovetailed with a back-of-the-head series of thoughts on written gaming, spurred also by Steve’s remarks on blognovels. I meant not to write until I had my thoughts in better order, but who knows when that will be.

I have never been in a campaign that never involved fluff-writing on my part. (My personal definition of “fluff” is “prose set in the context of an RPG campaign.” Others’ definitions may differ.) Not even once. Moreover, the more involving the campaign, the more I write about it. Which is not to say post hoc ergo propter hoc; it’s just as likely that writing itself binds me tighter to the game.

These hypotheses are likely to be tested, as I am intentionally curtailing my fluff habit as regards my gaming-buddies’ campaigns. (It’s past time I did that. ’Nuff said.) I don’t know if not writing will decrease my interest, or if I will instead figure out how to sublimate the desire to write fluff into other gaming behaviors.

I do wonder how it will affect my characters, though; it seems to me that I do much, if not most, of my character development in writing. Shirley, for example, has developed verbal mannerisms that do not resemble mine in the slightest, yet are not pastiche or otherwise imitative of existing literature as far as I am aware. (My mind is a pack-rat’s nest, though, so Shirley may contain riffs on a long-ago read that I can’t consciously recall.) It’s just how Shirley talks.

My fluff addiction might explain why I never got into computer games. No writing to do. Not even a universe openended enough to allow fluff. (Though that could well be a calumny; I haven’t played any up-to-date computer games.)

Though I am hardly unique in my propensity toward fluff-writing, I cannot claim that fluff is a universal component of gaming, either. One of my tabletop group’s GMs actively dislikes fluff; for him, a good roleplaying experience resembles a good stage improvisation, not a good fantasy novel. Keeping that in mind, let’s dig in and talk about fluff…

Someone—probably Ginger—has noted by now that my definition of fluff includes what goes on in a play-by-email. Intentional. Unquestionably there are differences between fluff that is PBeM exchanges and fluff that is ancillary to a tabletop game or LARP, and I intend to delve into these differences in a bit. The reason I use the big umbrella is that the differences sometimes blur.

For example, the Grand Ellipse is a PBeM, and the writing I have done for it shows all the stigmata of PBeM style (again, stick with me, folks; I fully intend to discuss what those stigmata are). That said, I wrote a long piece for the Ellipse a while ago in which Shirley details his personal history to his fellow Ellipsoid Margaret. That piece was just plain fluff, much less—er—stigmatized. Yet its context was a PBeM.

(Oh, and if y’all were wondering at all, Shirley and Margaret are indeed An Item. The course of true love is not exactly running smooth—but it could not possibly have anyway. They are doing about as well as they can, all things considered. I mean, believing your life is in danger from a gun-wielding international criminal can kinda put a crimp in the romance.)

Play-by-email fluff—that is, connect-the-dots prose from various PBeM posts—is often not very good writing, read after the fact. This is not a reflection of lack of skill either at writing or gaming; it’s an inescapable function of the cooperative, decentralized nature of the beast.

When I write for the Grand Ellipse, I do not act or speak for Margaret or Esperanza (Li’s NPC, Margaret’s lady’s-maid) if I can possibly avoid it. Alisa naturally extends Shirley the same courtesy, and Li as GM can’t take either of our characters over without rousing suspicion and possibly ire. This means that the Ellipse writing is often diffuse, wandering, purposeless; nobody can quite know where anyone else is going, and there are no preset plots or character arcs to control direction.

(If, incidentally, you get the impression that this is an apologia in advance for the Ellipse writing of mine that Li is eventually going to post online—you are absolutely correct. I know I suggested posting this stuff in the first place, but I confess I feel like the proverbial long-tailed cat in the rocking-chaired room about it. I love writing fluff, but I regularly cringe at what I write.)

Another issue with PBeM fluff is piecemeal conversations. As good email correspondents, Li and Alisa and I snip out parts of emails that don’t directly relate to the immediate response. We do, however, write several parts of a given conversation at once; for example, I might toss out several of Shirley’s hypotheses regarding the latest turn of events in a single email, and Alisa/Margaret would respond to each. As pieces of the conversation age, they get snipped out of subsequent email.

The problem being, of course, that we don’t keep track of the shape of the entire conversation; the various topics often don’t transition into each other intelligently or even intelligibly. C’est la vie virtuelle.

PBeM fluff often features odd speech acts and crude point-of-view moments governed not so much by narrative necessity as game mechanics or the need to telegraph an action or strategy to another player. Again, if I want Margaret to come to Shirley’s conversational rescue at some point, I can’t just write a line of dialogue for her. All I can do is telegraph that Shirley needs help, and hope that Margaret will respond.

(Sometimes it’s just easiest to handle this sort of thing with out-of-character comments, but too much of that tends to leach the fun out by making responses too predictable.)

Finally, PBeM fluff is almost always written in the present tense. I hate that, myself, as I find present-tense prose bloody awkward both to write and to read. My non-PBeM fluff is invariably past-tense. Still, present tense does seem to be the standard, and in the immediate context of the game there is some sense to it, so I succumb.

Fluff that is about the game, rather than fluff that is the game, need not suffer the just-listed problems. I must say it sometimes does anyway. Such fluff, speaking broadly, comes in two flavors: chronicle fluff that turns a game session into prose, and expansionary fluff that zeroes in on something the game passed over, be it a character moment, a bit of history, a retcon, an alternate history, or a tangent invented out of whole cloth.

Chronicle fluff particularly falls prey to the diffuse directionlessness of PBeM writing. The only way to tighten it up, in my experience, involves some retconning and some judicious excision—at which point the chronicle is no longer quite a chronicle, is it?

Steve, I hope this gives you some idea of the pitfalls of attempting a multiply-authored blognovel. Not an easy undertaking at all. Everyone, I hope it is clear that I make no claims whatever of deathlessness as regards my to-become-public-someday Ellipse prose. Indeed, its mortality may be its only grace.

Shirley has a few things to be happy about in this week’s Times. He doesn’t know about them yet in his personal timeline (we’re roleplaying a dinner party in Madras), but I can still talk about them.

Public Enemy Number Two, Herbert Addison, is in custody. This is a tremendous relief. Certainly it would be nice to know the identity of Public Enemy Number One (somebody has to have hired Addison), which will probably have to wait for a molasses-slow extradition process. Even so, getting PE#2 out of circulation ought to make Shirley’s journey rather safer, given that PE#2’s flunkies have thus far been pretty ineffectual.

(Assuming that the AlexandriaDamascus, duh gunman was in fact PE#2, an assumption as yet unproven.)

Not that Shirley is letting down his guard much, if at all. PE#1 is still out there. Somewhere. At least Addison’s capture, unlike Finnegan’s, can’t remotely be blamed on Shirley.

(And either I am getting better at figuring Li out or she stole the extradition idea from an email I sent. I should learn to keep my mouth shut, I should.)

So little Libby Wells was not sufficiently bribed, or something. (Can’t see why she would be in any actual danger. Lady Davies and her solicitor don’t play those games, or straight-arrow Shirley would have nothing to do with them.) Spirited off to Essex or France, perchance? I can’t otherwise explain Mr. Carter’s curious invasion plans.

Speaking of which, there is one thing I want to know. Rather urgently, in fact. Exactly when did Roland Carter, who only happens to be Vroomfondel’s solicitor, become a devoté of the Rusty Nail tavern, which appears also to have been the dive of choice for the Finnegan gang?

Hey, I have been very good about not blaming everything on Vroomfondel. This, however, is a considerable coincidence to explain away.

Shirley feels sorry for Carter, though. Judge Remington strikes again. And it’s an open question whether the judicial-bribery inquest goes ahead after Wilcox’s death. If it does, Carter may be in deep water indeed. If Shirley were asked—though there’s no reason he should be—he’d advocate for letting the whole thing go. Wilcox is dead, the defamation lawsuit is in good hands—there’s no need to shame Wilcox’s family further.

Still no word on the Mongols. I am sure all will eventually become clear.

Thanks, Ginger, for pointing out this bulletin-board thread recasting The Two Towers as a Dungeons and Dragons 3rd-edition module.

Don’t click unless you have at least a passing knowledge of DND rules and have seen The Two Towers—but if you do and you have, click! Funniest stuff you’ll read all day. Guaranteed.

Last week’s Game WISH (yup, I am bloody late again—put it down to not being at work most of this week) asks about fantasy series that gamers ought to read. Let’s see if I can avoid the totally obvious, both in series and in reasons to read them.

Number three: Elizabeth Moon, Deed of Paksenarrion. Tactics, people, tactics. And a fair bit on what heroes are like before they’re heroes, something gamers ought perhaps to consider. The series ends as soon as Paks earns worldwide renown. I approve of that.

Number two: Lord Dunsany, the Pegana books. (My old friend Blackmask—oo, I bet I just made him twitch—has an e-text of The Gods of Pegana here.) Faith honestly gets shafted in far too many games. It’s admittedly a tough topic for monotheists, but there’s such scope for creativity in it that I find it a shame more GMs and gamers don’t try harder at mythmaking. Dunsany does a bang-up job; you won’t find a more original or engaging pantheon anywhere.

Number one: Ursula K. LeGuin, Earthsea. All of it. For the very simple reason that LeGuin retconned her entire world for purposes of greater gender equity and managed to get away with it. Sure, we aren’t all geniuses, but I see no reason a few more gamers (and especially game designers) can’t try to follow LeGuin’s example.

And I see a lot of reasons they should.

Vroomfondel’s line just widened a bit, what with Wilcox’s death making this week’s Times. I should think, however, that with Wilcox gone and confirmation that the Davies lawsuit is what’s at issue, Vroomfondel’s solicitor is in for a very bad time.

Poor lad. He won’t be able to concentrate on making his case… and I rather imagine Lady Hester doesn’t particularly want to settle.

I look forward to the coroner’s report. We need not assume poor Wilcox was poisoned, but any smart coroner will be looking…

I’ve no notion which Ellipsoid was on the Princess Helen (except that given the dateline it must be either Lady Bonnet or Captain O’Neill), nor do I know what a bunch of marauding Mongols has to do with anything.

Shirley sent an irritated telegram to the Times correcting this “vicious attack” calumny; look for it next update. The article for February 3rd gets the events correct.

Deoraj’s fiancée had me in stitches all last week. Completely Li’s invention, and it floored David completely. I believe his response to seeing the Princess in the Madras station was along the lines of “Hello, my peach-pit, my rose-sepal, my ubiquitous panther-cub. What are you doing here and where is my elephant? And shall we be married right away or wait until tomorrow?”

I don’t think he quite expected the Princess to take him up on it. But that’s Li.

Go Selena Theopolis! Somebody has got to beat Vroomfondel.

Well, Shirley and Margaret made it into Madras all right, and a telegram awaiting them gave some indication that the Bad Guys are not to be found in the vicinity.

(Not that Shirley trusts that overmuch. Especially considering that the source of the telegram predicted earlier that the Bad Guys would be in Madras. Shirley is inclined to believe they haven’t any more of a clue what’s going on than he does.)

Margaret managed to thoroughly embarrass the poor bloke, who is otherwise starting to feel very much like a fifth wheel. We shall see.

But first we have to get out of Madras without getting ourselves shot up or beaten senseless. Trust Li to lull us into a sense of security and then throw everything in the book at us. This player doesn’t lull.

(And I have a few notions of what’s coming that I’m not sharing. I don’t know how to stay even an inch ahead of Li except by not showing all my hand.)

Now these are my kind o’ gamers. Wonderful stuff on plot-driven versus character-driven games, narrative flow, dice versus diceless, and… look, just go read, hm?

Also very worthwhile is this series on the various stances taken by players toward the game.

Both via Alas, a blog; alas, I didn’t know until now that its proprietor was a gamer! But I’m always happy to run into thoughtful gamers. Thoughtful gamers rock.

In Game WISH this week, the topic is newbie characters, and the care and feeding of groups that have to incorporate them.

I have very strong feelings about this, I warn you in advance. One of the strongest of these feelings is that integrating characters should not be the GM’s problem, aside from the logistics of the actual introduction. Integrating characters should be the players’ responsibility, and it requires some metagame thought on their part.

To me, it is simply unacceptable to show up to a long-established campaign with a character who is nothing more than numbers on a piece of paper. (One-offs, con rounds, LARPs—different, obviously. I’m talking about straight campaigning here.) That, to me, is treating the GM’s worldbuilding efforts and the other players’ character-building with extreme disrespect.

(Plus it’s disruptive to the collective fiction. Any character swap is going to be—I see more retcons here than anywhere else—which creates, at least for me, both desire and responsibility for keeping the disruption as minimal as possible.)

Now, this doesn’t mean I think you have to have your character’s entire history and personality defined down to the nth degree—what would be the point of roleplaying then? Go write a novel!

I do think, however, that players coming up with new campaign characters must figure out two things. First, they must understand how their characters came to be in the GM’s world. This means no whacko prestige classes that don’t fit the milieu, no pulling feats out of six different obscure sourcebooks just because they’re super-cool, and please no “my character was hanging around in this bar, when…” (I think I must play the only teetotaling D&D characters in gaming history.) Characters ought to take at least some cue from the context they will have to operate in—even if that cue is somehow subversive (as with me it not infrequently is). How can they work within that context otherwise?

I admit that Rat violated this rule a wee bit, though in my own defense I didn’t know until I’d already created the character. The GM’s world didn’t contain halflings. I was quite willing to bend on this when I found out about it—Rat would have made a perfectly fine half-elf. The GM, however, allowed me to keep the character concept, and it worked out all right. (Rat may in fact represent a shift in the cosmogony, but nobody’s quite sure about that, including as best I can tell the GM. She may be just an ordinary lusus naturae.)

Second, players need to know why their characters are joining the party, and why they’ll stick with it. The reason need not be evident at first glance—if, looking ahead, you think your character will develop a friendship with someone else’s, that’s just fine by me. Does the reason have to be wishy-washy nice-nice stuff? Nah. Mercenary contracts happen. Feudal responsibilities just are. Or maybe your character is covering up an extreme hatred for another character preparatory to an assassination attempt. Fine, though I would certainly talk to the other character’s player first!

It’s possible to integrate a very goal-focused character with no intrinsic ties to the rest of the party. The problem, of course, is what that character will do once her goal is met. If you know how you’ll solve this problem (and again, I don’t think it’s quite kosher to have your character just walk away from the group), go for it.

Cooperative versus competitive games—interesting question. I should think it easier for a player to develop a character in a competitive game given a strong tie to the goal of the game. Certainly David is much more involved in the Grand Ellipse now that he’s struck on the reason Prince Deoraj is in the race. (No, shan’t tell—Shirley doesn’t know and neither should anyone else. But it’s a great rationale.)

That said, I doubt it’s impossible to do otherwise. Nothing wrong with following your love interest, or a family member, or a creditor, into a competitive campaign. Again, the question is how you stay in the game—and if you’re a good player, I don’t doubt you’ll find a way.

What is the GM’s role, then? The GM asks the questions. “Okay, where does this character come from? How’d s/he learn to do that? What is s/he doing in this part of the world, given all these exotic tricks learned elsewhere? How do you see this character fitting into the party?”

And sometimes, I hate to say, it is the GM’s responsibility to send the player back to the drawing board. “Cool character, but I honestly don’t see how s/he can work out.” A character who doesn’t fit a campaign may break it. No one wants that.

The 1882 London Times has been updated. Things Are Not As They Seem, Shirley firmly believes, though I do not propose to enlighten you as to what he knows that guides him to that conclusion.

Vroomfondel is walking a very thin line. I wonder if he knows it.

As for Shirley himself, the one thing that probably is as it seems (though the poor chap is desperately trying to convince himself otherwise) is that Addison is gunning for him out of sight somewhere. (Addison is decidedly conspicuous by his absence from the _Times_, you will notice.) Madras and Rangoon should be troublesome, not that Bahrain was exactly a cakewalk.

Ah, the famed retcon. What about it, asks this week’s Game WISH.

(For the non-gamer and non-comics-fan, “retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity,” the act of changing something that has already happened in order to justify whatever is happening now.)

Well, I see a false dichotomy in the question. Yes, retconning is a cheat, but yes it is a valuable tool also.

Some things that are called retconning aren’t. If there is a hole in a character’s history, filling it in later isn’t retconning unless the fill-in is an obvious bid for Godlike Munchkin Power. If it is—or, more mundanely, if it is a ploy to get out of a puzzle or predicament too easily—I still prefer that GMs deal with it in-game. So a player invented a long-lost cousin who just happens to know where the adamantine dragon is? She may know, but will she tell? Perhaps a long-buried family feud is about to rear its ugly head…

Particularly in larger groups, minor retcons involving the last few actions only are often the easiest way to get out of a situation that would otherwise devolve into rules-lawyering or who-said-what arguments. I have no problem with this practice. The six-second retcon is an immensely valuable tool.

Retcons to do away with inadvertent game-world inconsistencies are acceptable also. Stuff happens sometimes. Retcon it, make sure everyone understands the new reality, and get on with the game.

Like anything else in game mechanics, retcons can be abused. I don’t myself consider that a reason to ban them.