The Blog of Roon

“Fire rhetoric thrusters fore and aft!” riposted a friend of mine while I was in the middle of the latest broadside.

Okay, I giggled. It’s true. I’m terrible when I get on a soapbox. I’m just glad I’ve got friends who can kick it out from under me once in a while, without disparaging me in the process.

I gave Shirley (who is thus far finding marriage a very lovely thing) a habit of gentle self-mockery that I probably ought to appropriate for myself more often. My new Lunar Ellipse character, Hannah Fisher, is closer to me in that regard—blunt and occasionally downright vicious, but no harsher on others than herself. The reverse, if anything.

I like Hannah already. Li and I have been working out a few pre-game character issues, and I have a pretty clear picture of her. (Even visual; David did a pencil sketch that I want to scan and send Li.) Like nearly all my characters, she has a fundamental core of decency. She has been hurt, though; it remains to be seen how far that decency extends. The Lunar Ellipse is her opportunity to prove herself. What will she do if circumstances threaten to thwart her?

My Lunar Ellipse character is outlined, though I have yet to do up her stats. Unlike Shirley, this character is designed to win. Lunar Ellipsoids beware.

Turns out Shirley’s mildly acrophobic. I didn’t know that. I’m not sure he did. But he is.

Which means he’s not having as much fun on Miss Theopolis’s dirigible as he might otherwise, poor chap.

The things you learn about your characters… and before you ask, I’m not really acrophobic at all; I’m not thrilled about heights, but I can tolerate them.

His wedding was lovely (see Penelope Moore’s writeup in the Times for April 7), though, and his wedding night was absolutely none of your business.

This week’s Game WISH appears to have stirred up more response faster than some previous ones. I don’t let myself read answers until I write one, though, so here goes.

The question this week is whether character creation starts from an idea about who the character is—a “concept&#8221—or from Da Rules.

I’ve kinda done it both ways, in a sense, which is horribly waffly of me. Afletana came about because Da Rules pretty much dictate that any party needs a cleric, so I had to roll one up. She isn’t noticeably less rounded or enjoyable a character than, say, Shirley, who is the utter epitome of high-concept characters.

(No, you don’t know what the concept is, though you are welcome to guess. I assure you I haven’t offered enough clues for you to be sure. Do feel free to email me your guesses, though I shan’t tell you if you have it right until the Ellipse is over. As I’ve said before, Shirley’s concept is a total MacGuffin, and I don’t want the other players getting hold of it—so kindly no blogging your guesses either.)

Even under the strictures of plugging a hole in a party, though, I can’t be satisfied with numbers on a page. If all you know about Afletana is that she is a DnD3e cleric, you know practically nothing of importance about her. You need to know that she’s from an ancient family reduced by conquest to marrying money, that she is a refugee, that she’s clashed with her church hierarchy, that she’s fallen in love with the party leader (and the entire party knows it)… much of this stuff that typically falls under the heading of “concept.”

Concept can and does develop over time, certainly. I didn’t know all these things about Afletana when I first rolled her up. (Er, partly because she hadn’t fallen in love with the party leader yet; she hadn’t even met him.)

It starts with setting, though. I knew the party I had to fit Afletana into; I knew what they were up against, and I understood the place and time of the campaign setting. If I don’t understand these things, at least a little, I find I can’t create a workable character at all. Either the character becomes all-concept (as happened with a Vampire character of mine), or s/he withers into numbers on a page. Or both.

I am guessing, by the phrasing of the question, that some people consider character templates such as DnD3e’s prestige classes to be “character concepts.” I don’t. The essential bit that these things miss (I mean, other than that they’re generic, not individual) is “What is this person doing here?” Templates can spur a character concept; they are not of themselves concepts. In my ever-so-humble opinion, and all that.

I thoroughly enjoy playing alongside strongly-envisioned characters. I vastly prefer it to the alternative. For obvious reasons I don’t necessarily expect much of a just-introduced character; it can take time to get used to a new one, no matter how much thought went into character creation. When all I’ve got to react to are a bunch of numbers, however, I get bored.

DATE: April 3, 1882
PLACE: Osaka, Japan
FROM: Shirley Addam
TO: Lady Hester Davies, York

MARRYING DR MARGARET BYRD THIS AFTERNOON STOP NO SECRET STOP HER FAMILY APPROVES STOP EXPECT TIMES STORY SHORTLY STOP VERY HAPPY STOP LEAVING OSAKA TOMORROW STOP REGARDS SHIRLEY

Li keeps pullin’ ’em outta her head. I don’t know where she gets this evil streak.

Mrs. Lavinia Martingale, Miss Selena Theopolis’s Very Proper Aunt, just offered Shirley and Margaret a ride in Selena’s dirigible to Vladivostok with them. And the maid. And the footman. And the vulgar Texan aeronaut. And Mrs. Martingale’s two yappy Pomeranians.

Because Shirley and Margaret are just so civilized, don’t you know. (Margaret is doing the Fine Lady, and Shirley is blending into the background.)

No. Just… no. No no no no no no no no no no no no. Ever so no. Very no. There must be more words than no that mean no. Consider them all spoken.

Yeah, yeah, in game-mechanics terms it’d be a win for us because it’s fast.

But there is just no way Shirley is spending days of travel in that ménage.

Update: I do not believe this. Margaret wants him to agree to it.

Well, it’s Valentine’s Day. Love conquereth all, et cetera. But she ever so owes him.

With trust, any game mechanic works, quoth Ampersand.

Yabbut… that doesn’t mean it’s a good mechanic.

Last night it occurred to me that the Ars Magica damage system actually does much of what I want a damage system to do—make people think!—and does so without complicated hit-location tables.

Really quite simple. No automatic healing in Ars. And ordinary healing takes a loooooooong time.

Consequences. Consequences! I always approve of consequences.

Interestingly, the GM for my current D&D campaign handled my brief foray into Ars also. The same man paid a great deal more attention to describing physical damage in Ars than he does in D&D. I can’t attribute that to anything but the system.

Annia ex Bjornaer got herself badly hurt—burned from a granary fire, then broke a leg in a bad fall. That was, real-time, several months ago. Afletana went down to three hit points last session. I frankly don’t remember how. Er, oh, yeah, walking suits of armor with greatswords. Whatever.

The system does matter. I stand by my earlier post.

As for game balance, I’m not so keen. The whole idea smacks of my youthful desperation for a world I could consider fair. That’s not a notion that appeals to me in a gameworld as much as it once did; I’m more interested in investigating stacked decks, acting in spite of them. Losing once in a while.

(Explains why I enjoy gaming with Li. This woman stacks a deck cold, and does it so cleverly you never notice.)

I subscribe to the every-character-needs-a-niche theory, expounded by several other Game WISHers. In fact, I’m often quite happy taking niches other players don’t even want, Afletana being a cogent example. (Some priests fight. She isn’t one of them. I literally cannot imagine anyone else in my current group wanting to play her or anyone like her.)

A niche need not be granted by game balance, however—and in some games (yup, D&D3e again) game balance is raised to such a near-deific level that everything else is subordinated to it. I hate hearing “this party needs a cleric” and “this party needs a rogue.” What all parties need are interesting characters.

And sometimes it’s precisely the imbalance of the world that makes characters—or people, for that matter—interesting.

The latest Game WISH asks for the one bit of game mechanics that we really, really, really wish games would get right.

No contest. For me, it’s physical injury.

This is not, incidentally, because I am a drama queen who wants to roleplay every excruciating moment of agony. Okay, perhaps I am such a drama queen—it’s still not why.

Part of “why” is that I get dumped rudely out of immersion every time somebody who is just hanging on to his/her life suddenly pulls a Jackie Chan move and mows down half the field because his/her injuries haven’t slowed him/her down one iota. I am sorry. I don’t care how epic your character is. This should not happen—or at the very least, it ought to be highly unlikely.

Another part is that in D&D, at least, the generic, non-localized hit-point system puts too great an onus on people playing healers to keep mental track of everybody’s state of health. There’s a rule, I believe, stating that no one is even allowed to tell another player his/her character’s current hit-point level.

Fine—hit points are a metagame distraction—but how is Afletana supposed to do triage? The rules offer no hit-point proxy for her to determine approximate state of injury for anyone but herself. In other words, the system permits Afletana much less information than a simple look around at her companions would offer! Ridiculous! (And, yes, I have lost track of who needed the most help and nearly gotten someone killed thereby. I was sorry for it, as Afletana would do her best to keep such things from happening; it irks me that the rules themselves are getting in the way here.)

A third part is missing so many chances for problem-solving and juicy dilemmas. Your arm is broken. You need to get out of this pit you fell into. What do you do? Your comrade needs help walking, but you need both hands free. What do you do? Your comrade suffered a head injury and is unconscious. You have got to scram, fast, but if you move your comrade you could worsen the injury. What do you do?

A fourth part is… hm, this one is hard to verbalize. I guess I think that most gaming systems are too oriented toward soldiering through every imaginable injury. It bothers me that players don’t have to stop and consider their characters’ pain, since that pain has no game-mechanic consequences. It bothers me that long-term disability only seems to happen at character creation, never as a result of a fight that went badly. It bothers me that the only risk from a fight is death.

I also think characters lose a lot of just plain looking out for each other. Ten hit points, Cure Light Wounds, ho-hum. No sitting around the campfire bandaging each other, rubbing the sore spots, commiserating. No interesting scars. No old wounds. Seems oddly sterile, when you get right down to it.

Okay. That said. Designing a system to answer the flaws I have outlined is incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible. Injury level is a function of so many things—general character health, type of damage, type of armor, body size, style of defense. I hope I’ll get some responses to this with suggestions of better injury systems (not that it’s hard to do better than D&D3e), but chances are I won’t find one I consider ideal. Just a hard problem.

The latest London Times is up.

I totally expected Roland Carter to roll over. Saw that coming a mile away. My husband says that since Vroomfondel is a peer, they can’t hang him; they’ll have to behead him. I’m starting to suspect it could happen. As long as Lady Davies gets her money, that’s just peachy with me.

Nor is Shirley the only character with blood in his eye, as Lady Bonnet’s interview demonstrates. (Yes, I have finally—reluctantly—come to the conclusion that Vroomfondel is the prime mover in all this. Shame on him.)

But I still don’t understand the significance of the Libby Wells impersonator. And I still want to know how Herr Heinrich Adler fits into the whole.

“Amiable traveling companions” is a fair description, but I think Margaret is miffed at Shirley at the moment—he may have played the interview a little too coolly. Well, he’s in a cleft stick, poor chap, and he knows it.

Onward to Siberia! Where with any luck Shirley and Margaret’s advance preparation will finally pay off in gained time.

So the sex in gaming Role Call question came along at an interesting time in the Shirley-and-Margaret trajectory. (I have, incidentally, posted some thoughts on the question before.)

Shirley, bless his repressed little heart, actually found himself rejecting caresses from Margaret because—well, they turned him on. A little too much for comfort. She took it well—as Alisa pointed out, they’ve gotten into a pattern of Margaret advancing, Shirley freaking out, Shirley later deciding it’s okay—but it was a good exchange.

I haven’t had any trouble roleplaying Shirley’s sexuality opposite another female player. Hasn’t bothered me a bit. Possibly that’s play-by-email distance at work. Possibly not. I honestly think I’d be more comfortable in general roleplaying sexual situations with another woman than with a man (other than my husband, anyway). Though this is the first time it’s happened, and what’s gone on so far is decidedly tame (this is the Victorian Era we’re talking about!), so I daresay I shouldn’t generalize.

Anyway, the Times finally figured out that Shirley and Margaret were travelling together, and is interviewing them right this minute. Margaret sent a telegram home to her brother immediately afterwards so that he wouldn’t hear about the situation from the newspaper. She also said that she loves Shirley, but won’t marry without consent, and asked for advice.

(As you will recall, the issues dividing them are social status and money.)

Shirley knows the telegram was sent, but believes Margaret sent a bare notification and left it at that. (I only know the entire contents because of an email error.) Alisa has, I believe, gotten a response from Margaret’s brother—but there’s a bit of roleplaying left before Shirley and I find out what the response was.

As I said. Interesting moment to be asking about sex.