The Blog of Roon

The best GMs I’ve had, I can completely bollix up their plans and they don’t wink an eye—they get even. I dunno how they do it. But that’s why they’re GMs and I’m not.

I am not good at figuring out when I’ve done the Wrong Thing. Insofar as I am a Robin Law “tactician,” I am one in the service of keeping well-loved characters from dying horribly. (This is why I rather like the trick in some recent indie RPGs of letting the player narrate what happens when his/her character gets hurt or fails, while the GM narrates character successes. I don’t mind my characters screwing up or being hurt, but I like to feel just a tiny bit in control of it.) I don’t, in other words, set out to dink with the GM’s mind.

I am told, however, that I do so with some frequency. So, I’m sorry. It isn’t intentional.

The best I can say is that it really isn’t that hard to keep my characters in line. They all have people and principles they care about. Threaten those. It’s that simple.

I can’t say I have a whole lot of experience with being railroaded. There was that GenCon campaign round, and there was the uber-munchkin GM from college—but even he just complained good-naturedly when we’d bollixed up his plans; he didn’t make us take back our brilliant idea or anything. (Fechan once… but that’s another story.)

I do think, though, that there’s a fine line between the characters having zero effect on the campaign world, and their having too much. The best GMs walk that line. The others either railroad their players or turn them into munchkins.

I just got approved access to the files for an Ars Magica play-by-email. In the house rules, I found this:

If you’re not enjoying the game though, let the sg’s know why and we’ll try to accommodate your ideas. Requests for scenes with semi-naked Nuns I can do. Asking for semi-naked monks will get you a kick in the balls next time we meet up.

Ah. Dude. Your assumptions are showing. Nor are they all that is.

I thought about writing the storyguide to register a protest, but you know what? It’s totally not worth it. I’d frankly rather storyguide my own game than try to fit into a game with a storyguide who thinks this kind of joke is funny. (So funny, in fact, that the above citation is not even the first reference to “semi-naked nuns.”)

Just for the sake of irony, I’ll point out that the character I had in mind to play was bouncy, social, overtly sexual Aino the otter-mage. Weird how these things work.

I’m unsubscribing. I believe the Pyrenees were right nice in the early twelve hundreds. Anybody want to found a covenant?

Update: The beta storyguide mailed me to ask why I unsubbed, which was nice of him, so I didn’t give him an earful, just said “based on some stuff in the house-rules document I read, I don’t think I will be comfortable in this campaign” and apologized for bailing.

And in a stunning display of cluelessness that left even cynical old me dumbfounded, the beta storyguide thought my problem was with the rules. Oh, my gamers!

Look. I’m not even going to get into the ethics of the question. It’s really simple. If you run games, and you would like gamers of the female persuasion to join your games, DO NOT DO THIS STUFF. Just bag it, ’k? No matter what a good guy you (think you) are, overtly sexist jokes and assumptions that all gamers are male are huge red flags that send gamers of the female persuasion fleeing faster than a first-level rogue from an ancient red dragon.

So just don’t do it. Thank you.

I recently joined a free-form play-by-email RPG called Galactic Renaissance. GalRen is actually several RPGs in one, as it is set in a multi-planetary Imperium such that several planets host their own separate threads. So we’ve got an Amberesque intrigue-fest (into which I inserted my character), a rather generic fantasy, a bit of cyber-noir, and some pretty well-written sci-fi.

“Ruth is about to do something pointlessly stubborn,” I said to David as I began another GalRen post. (And she did. Having been instrumental in saving the infant Duke of Aquila from kidnapping, she refused reward on the basis of her service to the nation, because she didn’t give a flying flip about the nation—she just wasn’t going to not help a child. This is pointless stubbornness because at some point she is going to accept the proffered post in the ducal court, because that’s how she’s joining the game.)

David rolled his eyes. “Do you ever play characters who aren’t stubborn?” he asked.

“Sure I do!” was my immediate response. Then I thought about it. “Er, I think.”

I give in. They’re all stubborn, in the right circumstances. They aren’t all equally stubborn, and some of them are stubborn about better things than others, but I do have to admit that they have a strong ethical sense, every single one of them, and when their ethical buttons get pushed, they don’t give.

Which isn’t to say they know it all. Poor little Renate’s major problem is that she hasn’t got an internal anchor to protect her from the blows her life is handing her. So she is overliteral in gauging her own behavior and its effects. Even so—put a goal in front of her, or threaten the external anchors in her life (her friends, her family), and watch her stubborn streak expand to fill your vision.

Nor are they exactly bullheaded or confrontational. Lots of ways to get where they’re going, usually, and they’ll take any of them. But they are, every single one of them, $DEITY bless them all, stubborn.

This is a lefthanded answer to this week’s WISH, which asks how our work insinuates itself into our games. Someday, I know, I’m going to play a heroic librarian (if Ashcroftian power grabs don’t force me into dead-earnest heroism). Until that day, what has snuck into my characters from the way I do my work is a vital and essential stubbornness about matters ethical.

Been meaning to answer the latest Game WISH for a while, as it’s a pet peeve.

Li has already written about good old D&D Baervan, so I will merely note that I have written about him too and move on, merely noting that gaming very rarely tackles the sheer hegemony religion often represents, and that seems a shame.

The al-Qadim system of gods feels grafted-on to me and always has. They’re there because something needs to give clerics their spells, and more or less for no other reason. Pure game mechanics, in other words, and it irks me. Either get rid of clerics altogether, replacing them with sha’irs or some other sort of genie magic, or tie clerical magic to something that doesn’t feel like Olympus plucked bodily out of Greece and dumped in the desert.

The construction of Fate, with the Law and the Loregiver, I quite like, as it offers plenty of scope for in-character philosophy—one of my husband’s NPCs is a profound skeptic, and Juskinah agrees with him more than she finds it politic to admit. I see no reason that the pragmatic-moralist-ethoist dimension of al-Qadim clericdom (which isn’t a bad formulation, all told) can’t be tied to the Law instead of a gaggle of ill-sorted gods.

Rat’s campaign boasted a rather curious sort of Sisterhood—a chain of brothels run by women, for women, with its own Great Mother–based religion for background and its own army of (female, of course) agents. This is one of those things that shouldn’t have worked but did. I can’t quite explain it. Part open subversion, part playing with gamer stereotypes, part bawdy humor (in a group mature enough to handle such), part pure weirdness—I’m sorry they never got a chance to recruit Rat.

Tamasi’s religion was a rarity amongst gaming religions—it was, quite simply, godless. Not even quite deistic, as I understand the term. Or, at least, if darkness was deity to her (and it surely was), it was the sort of uncaring primum mobile that human religions don’t generally seem to go for. I’ll admit I never worked all that out fully, though—and I shan’t have the chance now, of course.

Now, on to pet peeves…

The more power a deity has, the more remote it ought to be from the point of view of the players. Honestly. That’s how it has to be. Which is why I think the stat blocks in Deities and Demigods and its ilk are thoroughly pointless for gameplay. What characters see isn’t the gods—it’s the social and cultural effects of worship and worshippers. Guess what hardly any splatbooks pay attention to? Stupid. Just stupid.

Especially since the really juicy roleplaying stuff lives in church hierarchies, schisms, moral dilemmas, and the like. The link between clerics and deities in D&D is entirely too direct. It isn’t the deity who should be enforcing doctrinal correctness—it’s the deity’s church, what else is a church for? And moving the focus back to the gameworld instead of the outer planes is practically always a good thing.

Is there room for direct experience of deity in a gameworld? Sure there is. I got no beef with local deities, sharply-limited deities, quasi-deities, whathaveyou. I think the Pegana deities, from the Big Three right down to Kilooloogung, are terrific game-world deities. And I’m all for a good epiphany—ought to happen more often. I just think gaming ought to pay a lot more attention to the social aspects of religion than it generally seems to.

This week’s Game WISH asks about good villains. Always a fine thing to have in a campaign.

Sometimes the good villains are just so horribly loathsome that one gets a pure thrill of good-feeling from taking them down. The wizard Jamal in my al-Qadim campaign is one of these. He is a thief, a liar, a murderer, several different kinds of traitor, and a total misogynist pig to boot (don’t even ask what goes on in that man’s harim). He stole Juskinah’s father’s genie-ring and turned its genie, her father’s lifetime friend, against her father and his tribe. Now, that’s just slimy.

The matter of the genie has been resolved, but Jamal is still out there. One day, when she actually manages to have time, she’s going to do whatever it takes (probably quite a lot) to kill him. Oh, yeah.

Hedrack, from the late lamented Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, was a mighty fine villain as well. His excellence stemmed from total unpredictability. We never knew when he’d show up, whether he did or didn’t have his hand in whatever pie we were mucking about in, what he actually wanted or how we could deny it him. We were sure, mind you, that he had a rationale for everything he did. We just never could figure out what the hell it was, and guessing was a lot of fun.

I don’t have his measure yet, as the campaign has barely begun, but Dragonhunt’s Dark Eternal has all the makings of an excellent villain. He’s the roughest, toughest, scariest dragon around. He’s got that lovely touch of villainous arrogance that’s always a pleasure to foil. He threatens much that is dear to Renate’s heart. And he’s just filthily plausible, the nasty bastard.

Personally, barring a really impressive effort from the other Dragonhunt players, I don’t think Renate can take him down, any more than she could Hyuri. But it’s still going to be fun to try. If she’s terribly, terribly lucky, she might be able to fight him to a draw.