The Blog of Roon

Well, hey, I may just be joining a new face-to-face Dogs in the Vineyard campaign after the first of the year, thanks to FindPlay. This is not uncool.

I haven’t forgotten about poor Monrroyo. I have to refamiliarize myself with characters and situation, come up with some curveballs to throw at people, and make sure my old players are willing to give me another try. Soon, I hope.

And I haven’t talked about Dragonhunt in ever so long. Shall have to remedy that, because as John Kovalic knows, gamers just love to talk about their characters.

Renate never wanted to be a hero. She wanted to be a sidekick, specifically, her brother’s—and failing that, she wants to raise cattle and kids (the human variety) and lavish love on all the people around her who deserve it.

No ambition, some would say of her. I disagree. She’s got plenty of ambition. Just not the personal kind. I mean, really, if keeping your home safe from the depredations of the meanest damn dragon in the world plus all his badass henchlings isn’t ambition, what is?

I don’t think most of the people she meets manage to read that off her. In a way, that’s good; it’s why the more-Kahanite-than-Kahan Dorothy Durai keeps failing to shove her off course. It does point to a possible weakness, however. The first person or dragon who offers her what she knows perfectly well is her deepest wish could succeed in removing her from the board entirely. I imagine we shall see.

This musing arises because I myself seem to confuse people. Because I’m puppy-dog enthusiastic, don’t mind work in a good cause, and don’t have any speaking phobias, SLIS handed me the “ambitious” tag and I’m still rather boggled about it. Because, c’mon, me?

There’s stuff I’d like to see happen during my career, sure. It’s got jack-all to do with fancy titles, fancy pay, or fancy office space. Everything to do with righting wrongs, kicking butt, and taking names. Fighting the good fights as they come up.

Yeah, I’m almost as corny as my characters. There’s a reason I’ve got Don Quixote on my office bookshelf.

(Crossposted from Alan’s blog, mostly because of the Dragonhunt comment. And because I didn’t want to lose it, though it’s a little profane for CavLec proper.)

Saw Kingdom of Heaven yesterday. Thought it kicked Gladiator’s ass all over the screen.

I totally see why some people didn’t like it, and I totally disagree with them. This is not a heroic film, which everyone seems to have been expecting. This is a film about snatching what small victories you can from the Inescapable Logic of Fate. About not being a fricking hypocrite, even when half the world around you is—and about the discovery that when you’re not a fricking hypocrite, the people around you do strangely heroic and non-hypocritical things in order to follow your example.

It’s a very Dragonhunty film, actually, aside from the near-total absence of women (in the flick, not in Dragonhunt!). Tell me the Templars aren’t Heaven/Hell all over.

And I dug it. Really good flick, I thought, and one more people could stand to see and think about.

It’s a very anti-religion film. Very. I suspect that’s where some of the reviewers’ hate comes from, covertly. Me, I loved every anti-clerical moment of it. Which isn’t to say it was one-note about religion; there are decent and honorable religious characters, the main difference between them and the indecent and dishonorable ones being (again) the lack of hypocrisy.

Ridley Scott films a mean mass-battle scene. As good as Jackson. My husband says better, but I disagree; the focus in this film is different from LotR, so of course the techniques are different. There’s one post-battle scene that’ll haunt the hell out of you. I don’t know why no one’s done it before, but there it is.

Kingdom is significantly less manipulative than Gladiator; the manipulation scale isn’t at zero by any means, but most of the manipulation happens early in the movie in order for the Logic of Fate to take over about one-third through. I felt manipulated by the whole long-lost-daddy setup (I would rather have seen than been told of Godfrey’s basic humanism), but I didn’t feel manipulated at all by the fate of the King of Jerusalem (which I won’t spoil).

The cast is pretty darn good, and Orly actually mostly manages to hold up his end of things despite being up against the likes of Liam Neeson and the totally kick-ass Jeremy Irons. Props to the casters for actually casting Arabs as Arabs (even though Saladin wasn’t an Arab, he was a Kurd, but oh well—I can forgive that one, especially as the actor was fabulous).

Orly’s got two basic problems, one of which he can probably fix and one of which he may be stuck with. The first problem is his utter lack of irony. A few moments in Kingdom needed a shit-eating grin or some other indication of Orly’s awareness of the irony he was surrounded with, didn’t get one, and fell a little flat because of it. The second problem is Orly’s reedy, weightless voice, and honestly, I’m not sure that’s fixable. Still, he did okay, and he was certainly pretty to look at.

So was Martin “Celeborn” Csokas, playing a total asshole. Wouldn’t have thought he could do it, but he was great, creeptastic without having to chew scenery.

Good film. Dorothea-Bob says check it out. If you stay for the credits and are a total LotR geek, watch for the impressive number of LotR people involved with this one. Good to know those folks aren’t going hungry.

We dropped by the local big-box bookstore after dinner today. Said store has a gaming section, which amounts to “anything you want as long as it’s d20″ with a few other things tossed in as afterthoughts.

Stupid editing trick number one: David stopped at the White Wolf section, stared a moment, then asked me in bemusement, “Vampire: The Penguin?”

I can’t find an image of the spine of this book, and the font is different on the cover, but go here and take a look at the first item on the navigation menu for what he was talking about. Because, yeah—what is supposed to be “requiem” sure as hell does look like “penguin” on first glance, because of really quite excruciatingly bad font design.

(Unfortunate trend in gaming publications, bad font design is. We glanced through d20 Oriental Adventures for the heck of it, and I have quite a hate on for their faux-I Ching header font. Yucko. Unreadable.)

Stupid editing trick number two: As long as we’re singling out d20 and Latin, who the hell let the title “Libris Mortis” get by? Okay, okay, I know the most exposure Joe Average has to the Latin word for “book” is the cute little bookplates with “ex libris” on them, but they couldn’t have bothered consulting a Latin dictionary? They have such things online nowadays.

Clue, jackasses, and for free, yet: Latin is a case language. “Ex libris” is both plural (which y’all don’t want) and the wrong case: “from the books [of so-and-so].” Y’all want the nominative singular, which happens to be “liber.”

(And even then, just for the record, the title wouldn’t translate to what they want. It would be the “Book of Death,” rather than “Book of the Undead.” “Immortalis” is completely the wrong idea, of course, but “immortuum,” genitive plural “immortuorum” might work.)

We gamers get enough sneers from the literati. Don’t make it any freaking worse, hm?

I found this lovely story about how Dungeons and Dragons brought unlike souls together, and had to share.

Shame this chap hasn’t tried diceless RPGs. I think he might like them.

“If ever I doubted how much vanity there is in most men’s courage…” or something like that, quoth Mary Renault.

Eh. It’s true. I think the major reason I haven’t fallen apart like an overcooked chicken over what is going to happen to my poor benighted country is that Renate and Juskinah and Suhayla would despise me for it. (Afletana would understand, but even she would hope for better.)

Renate’s a good kid. I wouldn’t want her ashamed of me.

Granting that most games don’t allow multiple PCs, granting that Ars Magica already has this model a little bit… I don’t see why more games don’t allow players to adopt particularly appealing NPCs.

Such a trick would, for example, ease the process of mopping up after character death: the player just picks up the already-adopted NPC and life goes on. It also gives more scope for roleplay, I think, because PCs have more people to interact with. Anything that eases drain on the GM’s time and energy is generally good, yes?

Obviously some NPCs are unadoptable for reasons of plot spoilage, but that needn’t invalidate the entire concept. Because, you know, there’s always that one NPC who came out of nowhere that everybody likes and one player loves… why not keep the NPC around?

What I prefer to NPC adoption, actually, is the arrangement I see in a fair few PBeMs as well as the Dragonhunt: NPCs who aren’t obviously plot spoilers live in limbo, free for anyone’s use. This gives so much more scope for thoughtful roleplay (and of course fluff) it’s not even funny.

I am of the selfish opinion that I’ve enriched a few Dragonhunt NPCs by playing around with them. Perhaps not the better-established ones like Sabra Congreve; but I’ll take credit for Sabine and Clara von Adler. (A previous Dragonhunt variant mentioned the analogue to Sabine in the tired old “time to marry her off!” chestnut. I don’t think Alan would dare shuffle off Sabine herself in that fashion. She’s too much of a person by now—besides, Aryk has an irremediable crush on her.)

Some caveats: If retcons are irretrievably evil in your game, then a Limbo full of NPCs will not work. We all slip up now and again. And players of course have to take extra care not to contravene established knowledge about and behavior of NPCs. While I felt fine, for example, upping Talos Clybourne’s respect for Renate over the course of their conversation (I thought she’d earned it, on the whole; she went in prepared and she presented herself well), I certainly didn’t turn him into a mindless von Adler flunkie. The guy is clearly an independent thinker, and I made sure he stayed that way; he didn’t so much as openly sign on to her plans.

For this to work, it helps if GMs signal NPCs’ opinions on matters dear to the PCs’ hearts, as well as attitudes toward the PCs themselves. Again, sometimes this isn’t feasible—but when it is, it helps.

I’m noodling on a little in-betweener fluff. It started out long ago in my head, a little story about Renate’s desire to show her pride in her country origins through dress, and her ensuing discovery of an immensely rich and lovely cultural history that she had had no part of because she had disdained “girly stuff” too long.

It’s still going to be about that, a little bit. But mostly it’s going to be about Clara von Adler, Renate’s mother. We don’t as yet know much about her. We know she was a noted beauty in the city of Atlantis before she married Renate’s father. We know she is a stickler for etiquette (though, as the story will probably show, perhaps not for the strictest construction of propriety). We know she isn’t openly responsible for anything much in the political or economic management of the barony.

And we know that she doesn’t seem to have had much impact on her middle child. Why not? And what the heck does this woman do all day? Is she a total trophy fluffhead, a lazy do-nothing, or what?

I’ll let the story answer these questions rather than answering them here; I’ve just finished some rather long expository paragraphs about the first one. I do know Clara rather better now, however—and damn it, she’s Tamasi without the fish-tail. (Tamasi? See Passions of the Tide archives.)

No, no, she can’t fight like Tamasi. But she’s Tamasi. Intelligent, capable, responsible—and at the core, a seethe of helpless frustration locked behind steely restraint.

Why do I keep coming up with this character? I never meant to come up with Tamasi, I didn’t sort out what Clara had to be like until I started writing her this morning, and I didn’t realize that Clara was Tamasi until I stopped to reread. Who are these women? Why do they keep clawing out of my subconscious?

Partly they’re my mother. Partly they’re me, though less so these days as I claw my own way out of frustration toward work I want to do. But it’s telling that they only come up in game cultures that are explicitly patriarchal, sometimes not even working toward egalitarian. (Dragonhunt-world is working slowly toward gender equality, but it’s far from there yet, and it’s been explicitly made clear that the country is a wee bit behind.) Mostly, I think, they’re my appalled fascination at the work women must have had to do to stay sane under garden-variety patriarchy.

I mean, hell’s bells, how did they do it? Tamasi and Clara are my answer, seemingly the only answer I can envision of myself. No rebellion either overt or covert. No repining. No re-imagining their situations; both Tamasi and Clara could have used a good old-fashioned 1970s consciousness-raising. They never admit even to themselves that they are bored, frustrated, and lonely. They rarely show temper, and never uncontrolled temper, though they are easily offended or hurt.

They do whatever they are allowed to do, whatever meaningful tasks they can sneak out from under the noses of the men; Tamasi ran her estate, and Clara is an avid gardener who despite her urban origins probably knows more about some strains of agriculture than her country-bred husband by now. Otherwise, they efface themselves, in all likelihood afraid that if they are noticed, the activities that keep them sane will be taken from them.

Etiquette is their shield, their means of establishing themselves as proper women, how they keep prying eyes at a distance. The people who live with Tamasi and Clara do not know them very well, as a rule, because all they ever see is the rigidly polite exterior. Even wise, insightful Sabine doesn’t know her mother as well as she thinks she does.

Clara offers a question childless Tamasi couldn’t: how does this woman respond to a daughter who breaks the mold? The answer so far: first with offense and a desire to control, to bring the errant daughter back in line; later with distasteful acceptance; eventually, perhaps, with real pride. Regret? I don’t know. I don’t know if Clara can re-imagine her own life in the light of Renate’s enough to reach regret.

I do know that this story is about Clara and Renate reaching a rapprochement at last, learning to appreciate each other despite being entirely different women. Renate will at last understand the role of women in maintaining and transmitting culture; Clara will realize that Renate is just as committed to that culture as she is, though Renate’s expression of that committedness is of necessity very different.

And I’m learning why Tamasi fascinated me so.

My poor Dragonhunt GM emailed me in response to yesterday’s offhanded comment that the Dragonhunt world was sexist. He was (and has been for some time) concerned that sexism would eat away at my enjoyment of the game. Given that I have a whole category devoted to sexism, and a significant percentage of what’s there is gaming-related posts, I certainly can’t tell him it’s an unwarranted worry.

He can chill, though. It doesn’t really work that way.

The fact of the matter is, I’ve never-not-even-once played in a game world that wasn’t sexist. Gender of the GM doesn’t matter. Gender of the game-writers doesn’t matter (though there aren’t a whole lot of women writing games, and it shows). Genre of game doesn’t matter. They have ALL been sexist, one way or another, whether it’s full-blown gonzo barefoot-and-pregnant sexism or quieter, separate-but-eh-more-or-less-equal sexism.

(One or two have attempted a bit of reverse sexism, e.g. Trollbabe, which I’ve actually never played but would still like to. Even so.)

So if I insisted on gender-egalitarian gameworlds, I’d be doing an awful lot of no gaming.

In my judgment, we don’t even know quite how to imagine a non-sexist world; I’ve never read a so-called feminist utopian fantasy that struck me as workable or even desirable. (Sheri Tepper got very close once, by granting humans control over whether sex leads to conception in the last pages’ deus-ex-machina closer—but only female humans. Bzzt. Wrong answer. LeGuin got this mechanic right with the Hainish, though.)

A sexist gameworld, like all gameworlds, is a reflection of what we can’t quite manage to get away from. All by itself, that’s not enough to throw me off. I’m used to sexist worlds; I live in one.

So what does throw me for a loop? Herewith, a partial list:

• Gameworld restrictions based on hardcoded, so-called “real-world” limitations on women. For example, female PCs can’t be as strong as male PCs because we all know women aren’t as strong as men. Where do I even start with thinking like that? It isn’t whether women are as strong as men; it’s whether my PC is stronger than your PC—and back in the day before my wrists entirely went, I used to win arm-wrestles handily, thanks.
• Corollary to the above, gameworlds where restrictions on women (unaccompanied by restrictions on men, naturally) are considered a fine and wonderful thing by GM and players.
• Gratuitous out-of-character sexism, particularly when it assumes that women do not game, thereby making those of us who do game invisible. For example.
• Gameworlds where all NPC women are young, leggy, big-breasted, round-heeled barmaids. That or hags. (Not crones, hags.)
• Gameworlds where all PC women are expected to be young, leggy, big-breasted, and preferably round-heeled.
• Gameworlds so relentlessly anti-woman that I can’t come up with a PC I’d want to play. (Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sorry to say I think it could.) A large part of this, I think, would be whether I can use the PC to resist the gameworld’s existing social structures. If I can’t, there’d better be damn good in-game reason why not—and acceptance that I’d do it anyway.

Has the Dragonhunt ever irked me? Sure it has. The pressure to pair Renate off has occasionally gotten old (I lampooned it in the society-page puff-piece I wrote), and I think the other players could stand to dial down their impressions of her physical attractiveness a bit, as I explicitly made her much less pretty than her kid sister Sabine. She’s a work horse, not a show horse.

However. I’ve had free rein to say no, and free rein to kick over the traces both in-character (Renate’s been about as sharp with Aryk as Renate ever gets—while Sabra, being rather less polite than Renate, has called a spade a spade) and out-of-character. Aryk’s player knows full well that Aryk is a bit of a jerk, in more ways than sexism can account for; part of Aryk’s character arc is growing out of that. That’s cool. Lots of people have to learn these things; why not simulate the process?

And on the rare occasion I’ve had concerns, I’ve been listened to out-of-game with respect. That’s all I need.

What’s more, sometimes I’ve had my nose rubbed in my own sexist assumptions, which is all to the good. Last session, a lieutenant-colonel in Ilium’s answer to SWAT rode up and introduced herself as Shandria Klein. Yup, you guessed it—I’d initially assumed the lieu had to be a guy. Instead, she reminds me a little of Bellis, an old character of mine. I quite liked her, and the mental kick in the pants her presence gave me.

Have I ever played a sexist character? Yup. Alex of Galactic Renaissance was designed to be seriously over-chivalric, the kind of guy a gal can’t bloody well get rid of because he’s so terribly concerned she’ll be hurt by the big bad world. Afletana and Delphine had fairly stratified notions of where women belonged in the scheme of things. Shirley was, well, Victorian. As I said—it’s impossible to get away from. Best I can do is acknowledge it, play with it, subvert it.

Gaming is partly about exploration to me, always has been. No reason sexism can’t be one thing to explore, and plenty of reason that it should. As long as there’s a base awareness that in-game scenarios don’t reflect out-of-game disrespect, I don’t object. Dragonhunt meets that criterion handily.

David and I spent our second wedding anniversary in New York City. It was more fun for him than for me, because I was there primarily to go to the first Open eBook Forum annual meeting. But we did manage to get out to the Cloisters together, whereupon I discovered that I love that place to pieces.

I think I ducked a business-type dinner of some kind for an anniversary dinner with David. We went to an important Indian restaurant in Midtown—and I rediscovered why I prefer little hole-in-the-wall places to haute cuisine.

It’s not the food. It’s all the intimidating, unwritten etiquette rules that I don’t understand that mark one indelibly as someone who does or doesn’t belong in That Kind Of Place. The restaurant staff at that place knew immediately, and communicated to us without a single word, that we did not belong. Some places actually think that’s kinda cute. This was not one of them. We were interlopers, David and I, and I suspect the staff breathed a sigh of relief and mocked us unmercifully when we left.

They say that etiquette exists to ease social relations, and to some extent that’s certainly true. What etiquette also does, though, is enforce social caste. Know the protocol, be one of us, whoever “we” are—this is as true of plain old ordinary handshakes as it is of secret ones.

But be that as it may.

My first few experiences with play-by-email RPGs were pretty low-crunch, low-stress affairs. An email comes, I react to it, end of story until the next email comes. As a rule, I answered email expeditiously because it seemed polite so to do, but the definition of expeditious varied inevitably by circumstance. And it was good. I enjoyed myself, and felt that my participation was providing enjoyment to others, too.

So thinking I more or less understood the genre, I joined a couple of other PBeMs. And walked right through the door of that Midtown Indian place. Rules, my heavens, rules! Quite an elaborate protocol, with a fluid but nonetheless indelible caste system organized around it. And for the most part not explicit, never explained or put into context. Break the rules, become the one everyone’s writing snarky protected LiveJournal entries about. Or the one kicked to the curb.

(You don’t see those LJ entries, of course, because you’re politely left off the list, but you do hear, and you do see a rant or two that send an arrow past your head nicking your ear rather than pegging you straight in the chest.)

To put it mildly, I didn’t get off to a good start. The protocol system enveloped me like a bunch of funhouse mirrors, and I tripped over my own big feet again and again and again, half the time without knowing I was doing it.

Truthfully, if the waiters at that restaurant were glad when we left—so was I. (Not least because we went to a really quite keen concert at Lincoln Center afterwards.) Trying to navigate an unfamiliar protocol is exhausting and paranoia-inducing. In the game, I felt the scorn looming, the same scorn of a haute-cuisine waiter for someone who doesn’t know which spoon is for the soup. You’re not fitting in here. You’re not clicking. What made you think you could come here?

I tried to bail on the game twice. Both times, I was talked out of it (the GM is enormously patient, and a couple of other players were supportive). And, you know, I do learn, now and then. I was starting to assimilate all the protocol rules, figure out how I could observe them and still be myself.

And it even started to be fun. I got to relax a little and just play. Until yesterday, when a scene that I experienced as gleefully energetic became the subject of a virulent “why was this even allowed to happen? how dare they?” rant from another player, a rant that picked up several supporters (as well as, in fairness be it said, a couple of demurrals).

Put a chill on the game, too (unless somebody called a time-out while I wasn’t looking). No posts today. I’m certainly not going to write anything until prompted. Mine might be the next head bitten off.

Argh. Starting to want out again. Even though I don’t want out because in spite of impenetrable protocol and the drubbings that follow violations thereof, there are scraps of enjoyment to be gleaned.

I guess now I know. Heavy-protocol games make me feel like a hayseed in a haute-cuisine restaurant.

(And lots of extra points to anyone who knows what the title of this post comes from. It’s pretty obscure. No fair Googling.)