The Blog of Roon

I went out to lunch yesterday with a friend whose birthday it was. Said friend was a member of the face-to-face gaming group that broke up a year or so ago, after some ugliness that I must confess I contributed to.

A considerable fraction of that group, including my friend, has gone on to another face-to-face. I got an explicit invitation to rejoin—not from my friend, but from a woman who is currently the only woman in the group.

Politely, kindly, obliquely, without stating my reasons—I said no. I’m not entirely happy about saying no, because I hate not being able to mitigate her discomfort, but it was unquestionably the right thing to say.

It seems that the person most irked by my particular gaming… idiom, sir? yes, idiom!… recently rejoined that group. I really, really, really think putting the two of us together across the same gaming table would be a bad idea. Not because I dislike him; I don’t, though (truth be told) toward the end of the last group’s life he did some stuff that got under my skin. Nothing I can’t forgive, mind you—nobody’s perfect and I’m a good deal less perfect than most.

But I just don’t see the reunion working real well. I wish I did, but I don’t. Moreover, what I know of the game just doesn’t interest me all that much. It’s standard DnD dungeoncrawl. Been there, done that—call me an addict or what you will, but I need something more compelling than that for my gaming fix these days.

So. I said no. Right thing to say. Still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Things are going great guns over at the Grand Ellipse blog. I’ve gotten Shirley all the way to Alexandria and his dinner with Margaret.

If you know nothing about this game but are still curious to read the logs, you should take a look at Li’s Ellipse pages first, to get a sense of the game goals and setup. I’m not being very good about linking to the Times, so you may want to have the Times archive open while you read.

For a sane reading experience, I recommend the category archives, starting with Chapter 1; after some futzing yesterday, I figured out how to get them to appear oldest-post-first.

Some veteran gamers always know the right thing to say at a momentous occasion. I am not one of those gamers. Every once in a while, though, I do manage to make exactly the right words come out of a character’s mouth. So with Shirley, who on leaving Margaret after their fateful dinner together said, “Thank you, Margaret dear, and G-d bless you! You are such an extraordinary woman that I rather regret that I am only an ordinary man.”

Which is just, I am telling you, completely bloody perfect. If you read Chapter 2 you’ll see why.

A caravan making the rounds of the Five Cities picked up a girl in the Third City to do odd jobs. The girl went with them willingly, for the caravan leader invited her with soft words and asked kindly after her comfort the first few days after she joined; and the girl had seen far worse, and knew when she was well off.

The caravan was a large one, and well-found, and everyone from merchant down to camel-tender knew her (or his) job. No one raised her (or his) voice in anger. There was no quarrelling, not even the self-satisfied sort of lazy quarrel that comes from a full stomach after a good day’s run.

As for the girl, she learned her work slowly, for she was a city girl by birth and breeding and she did not know the ways of the caravans. No one beat her when she erred. Indeed, one of the merchants took it into her head to impart everything she knew—or thought she knew, or imagined to be true—about what the girl was doing wrong; the girl could not so much as approach this merchant’s camel without receiving a criticism of some sort or other.

And though those cavils were invariably couched in the kindest and most sympathetic tones imaginable, the girl found herself looking over her shoulder, trying to figure out what the caravan could possibly want of her, since she knew so little, and everything she did she seemed to do wrongly. She learned nothing. The caravan went on as it always had, placid as a pond where no wind blows.

Between the Fourth City and the Fifth, an old arms merchant lost his temper in the middle of after-dinner coffee, shouted “I’m leaving!” and did so.

“Well,” one of the merchants said, tossing her head. “Glad he’s gone.”

“So am I,” said another. “A waste of good camel-flesh, that one. Now we’ve got the proper sort of caravaneer. The caravan will do well now.”

And the girl found herself looking over her shoulder, trying to see what had driven the old merchant off, and why the other merchants who had never before offered him so much as a cross word now despised him so. She thought about leaving, and timidly broached the subject with the caravan-leader, but was invited to stay so kindly that she did not feel right to go. For after all she had never had to endure so much as a harsh word.

Between the First City and the Second, another merchant blazed up like a fire at evening. This time, the caravan-leader pointed an imperious finger down the road; the angry merchant obeyed with alacrity.

“About time,” the caravan-leader said, and a murmur of assent arose from the encampment generally. “He’s been asking for it half of forever.”

The girl said nothing, but she looked nervously over her shoulder, where the departing merchant’s camel-hooves could still be seen kicking up dust. “Oh, don’t worry,” the caravan-leader told her. “This hardly ever happens. Why, look around—most of our merchants have been with this caravan for years! And where will you find a caravan as lasting and withal as peaceful as this?”

But the girl left the caravan when it got to the Third City she had been born in. She did not look over her shoulder as she walked away, nor (though the deafness cost her some effort) did she listen to what was said of her by the women (and men) of that caravan afterward.

This is the official Game WISH catchup post.

Game WISH 70 asks about challenging games. The greatest challenge to me in games is figuring out how best to fit my style to suit that of others. The number of games I’ve been kicked out of does tend to indicate that I have work to do in that arena. Still, there is hope even for the meanest and lowest of us, so I’ll keep trying.

WISH 71 asks if we buy into NPCs as presented, or expect them to be as devious and otherwise non-straightforward as PCs. Well, I do tend to play pretty straightforward PCs, so… no, come on, what do you think I am, stupid? Of course NPCs have their own agendas. What’s the point of them if they don’t? That isn’t to say an NPC’s personal agenda necessarily has to conflict with that of the PCs, of course—but NPCs aren’t henchlings and shouldn’t act as if they were.

The plain fact is that I do my best roleplaying when the other characters I’m playing with are strong. Cardboard (N)PCs turn me cardboard. I had far rather be part of a true ensemble cast than the nonstop center of attention. Which may seem odd given my propensity for overposting, but it’s true; I only overpost to games that intrigue me enough to pay attention, and that invariably means strong other characters. A good plot helps, but isn’t anywhere near enough.

Okay, now I get to answer my own question, about characters untimely cut off. I wish I had managed to finish Afletana’s story. She deserved a nice wedding to Elmo and a good life with lots of kids. (Afletana is perhaps the only character I’ve ever played who really would have wanted kids and been a fine mom.) We were really close to finishing the story when that group broke up. Too bad.

And I do miss proud, lonely, capable Tamasi. I’ll play others like her again, but she was in large part a creature of her environment. There won’t ever be a character exactly like her. I’m not sure what would have happened to her. It seems likely that the logic of her fate (as she saw it) would have gotten her killed.

I have other characters who deserve more of an outing than they got—Bellis and Aino spring to mind—but they don’t have incomplete stories the way Afletana and Tamasi do.

I’m still two WISHes behind, but this feels like enough for now.

Having fallen behind on Game WISHes, I’ll tackle a couple at once.

No, I’ve never played in a co-GMed game, though I certainly wouldn’t turn one down. (Well, okay, there was the one one-off in which a co-GM handled some of the cannon fodder, but that doesn’t really count.)

There are advantages to it. Roleplaying, particularly face-to-face, has the same problem as Greek tragedy—too many damn people on stage at once. Splitting the GM duties allows for more small-group and individual scenes.

Truth is, I’d like to be a co-GM. I’m not really cut out to be a good soloist, I don’t think. I’m not quick on the draw, not a good world-builder, not a good plotter, assuredly not a patient referee. What I do do, though, are the chores that GMs often profess not to like: creating, naming, and keeping track of NPCs; playing minor encounters with a fillip of added flair; chronicling and similar recordkeeping. And I like knowing the shape of the plot beforehand, something that is my besetting sin as a player, but lets a co-GM add all kinds of fun foreshadowing and omens and things.

I don’t get greedy over somebody else’s world or plot—I can generally be trusted to stay within bounds, though I do like to fill in details of language and social custom and so on, and I might get upset if that privilege were denied me.

Well, we’ll see, I suppose.

The next question is non-RPGs for gamers. Shan’t be original here; not worth the effort.

Munchkin. Excruciatingly bad puns. Highly weird combinations of stuff. Quick game play. Amusing treachery. Lots of John Kovalic art. I need say no more.

Illuminati. Take over the world!

Settlers of Catan. Easy to learn, but very strategic; a fine choice for a mixed group of roleplayers and non-.

Oh, and a bonus game: Apples to Apples. I have never played a game of this that failed to reduce me to tears of helpless laughter. It is that good.

Well, phew. That’ll do for now. As long as the NCSU people don’t use IE5.

So now I can talk about stories. Stories are lovely things. Collective stories, when they work, are lovelier still.

Making them work is not easy. I don’t think it’s coincidence that most of the better fluff—in a literary, this-story-hangs-together sense—that have come out of my games have come from smaller games, or from side-avenues the main game never explored. It’s just downright hard to pull a story together when six or eight people are dragging it in different directions.

How to do it, then? Awareness, I suppose. Building a character who is incomplete, unfinished, to begin with, someone who has someplace to go and a better self to grow into. Ensuring that that character leans on the others to cover what she lacks, and allows herself in turn to be leaned on. Seeing the shape of the larger story, and helping that shape emerge.

Because the GM controls the world and many of the events in it, the GM is often thought to be uniquely responsible for the story-ness of a campaign. This is, of course, an overstatement. The GM can ruin a story, to be sure, dropping threads or keeping a campaign relentlessly episodic. Players can ruin it too, though, and all too often they do so by advancing their own character at the expense of everyone and everything else. The story that comes from an RPG must be collective, or it will not be a story at all.

The resulting stories don’t usually have the nice, neat structures that lit-critters love. They’re more like Arabian Nights confections, tall towers of untruth with weird spiral staircases within and without, resting on shaky foundations. They are, however, no less enjoyable for that.

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.