Happy birthday
It’s not every game that will give up an entire session of precious gaming time for a leisurely exploration of one character’s birthday party. Fitting, I suppose, that this particular session should happen almost exactly a year after I started playing Dragonhunt.
(Just getting this far is something of an achievement. The end of last calendar year, I was seriously starting to question whether I could stick with a game—any game. Wasn’t too far from giving up the hobby.)
The GM and I tossed around Wodehouse commonplaces with much glee—since Rennie’s birthday is a day before midsummer, her father moved the traditional fete, so there was much room for all those wonderful bits of Wooster weirdness. (Rennie lost the egg-and-spoon race. But only just, despite much behind-the-scenes cheating on all sides.)
Rien and his alter ego gave Renate what amounts to a “Win This Combat Free” card; I shall try to use it well. Aryk went straight for the jugular heartstrings instead, getting her a sheepdog puppy so that she could carry a piece of her home with her. It was so sweet of him. I got all choked up behind the keyboard.
And because we can’t allow too much of that soppy stuff, I immediately went and named the poor pup Dorothy. Dorothy may turn out to be a useful party adjunct, in fact; we shall see.
The part of me that sits back and watches the story of a game as a story danced with glee over Aryk’s next foray: a comic star-crossed lovers scene with Renate’s sister Sabine that parodied Renate and Rien’s angsty go-away-closer relationship in truly Shakespearian fashion. Lovely, lovely stuff.
I learned—had reinforced, really; I think I knew this, subliminally—what drives Renate’s lack of enthusiasm for her own achievements. “It’s not enough,” she told her trainer Aaron Wrenfall when he mentioned how far she’d come. It’s never enough, for Renate. Whatever she does, there is always something she could have done better, always something else to do. She always comes up just that little bit short. Call it middle-child syndrome or what you will, it’s what keeps her wound up and moving when she really has no hope at all.
Curiously, Renate doesn’t need hope. In fact, if she had hope, her need to choose the path that would realize her hopes would paralyze her, render her incapable of action. (Her player shares this tendency when it comes to game combat, unfortunately.) In its way, despair frees her to do what she thinks right, rather than what is immediately expedient. If nothing she does matters anyway, she might as well pick the course she can best live with—or die for.
Her bewildered hopelessness to some extent reflects mine. Despite a good many hints about how to lose the Dragonhunt, I’m not sure what the “winning” course through this game is. That course may, in fact, rest on some GM presuppositions that I don’t share. In which case, I am left squarely in Renate’s shoes—win the game, or stay true to what I myself think?
It isn’t every game that raises that sort of dilemma. I do approve of the ones that do.
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