Friday, September 16, 2022

I Don't Toboggan Any More

I don't toboggan any more.  Once upon a time, I did so at every opportunity in the winter, because it used to be a thing and because I was young and fit and could climb up a 100-ft. hill dozens of times.

I took this shot last night from atop St. Andrew's Heights in Calgary, usually considered the best sledding hill in the city.  The sign indicates clearly that it's still possible to freely participate in this somewhat dangerous activity.  The hill is 100 feet, according to Google Earth, though it looks somewhat higher.  A photograph, and even a video, doesn't do it justice.  I've added a photograph below, but in two-dimension it just can't capture the sense of vertigo I felt standing atop the hill last night.  It's strange to think how I went down this hill, alone, when I was the same age as the boy in the video.  Once, I was that happy.

A quarter-mile from the Foothills Hospital, which has a helicopter available if they can't get your body up the slope by carrying.  It was occasionally needed.  I've been down this hill on a wooden tobaggan, a sled with metal rails, a truck's inflated inner tube, one of those discs with handles and on a crazy carpet.  My father and I broke a toboggan in half jumping off a glassy-iced snow jump once, scattering us and pieces of the toboggan down the slope.  Note that the sign above says "no jumping."  In the 1970s, there was no sign.  But there were super-bright sports lights atop poles so people could sled at night.  Those poles are gone.

Why did I stop?  Hm.  My hard-core tobogganing days took place between the age of 9 and 13 ... with a few occasional times taking place in my teens and then a few more times with my daughter, who wasn't that into it.  When getting down to it, tobogganing is fun, but it's ... well ... repetitive.  Each time down the slope adds to a store of memories that steadily reduces the excitement and newness of future runs.

To compensate for this, we build new ways to make the tobogganing fresh again.  Once, we piled nine people on a four-foot wide inner tube and, clinging as tight as we could to one another, we went down the slope.  And then we did it again, only this time we went over the jump.  When we hit the ground, it was like a bomb made of people and kids.  No one was hurt.  We chose not to do it again.

New toys, new combinations, deliberately choosing places where the snow was ice, deliberately making ice ... we kept our interest going for a while.  But there's always the hill to climb up again.  And the next run is always a little bit more disappointing.  And the winter weather is never a plus. Until finally one day you're with a bunch of your fifteen year old friends and someone suggest sledding and everyone says, "nah ..."

I've been thinking about Lance's comment yesterday, where he wrote

"At this point I've played so many characters I just don't care that much about the how good or bad my pc is and would prefer to fit into a role than come to the table with my own prefabricated concepts.  There have been times where I've randomized my class choice and equipment selection. For me the choices are presented while playing the game, not before especially because I've made every one of those pregame choices hundreds of times and would rather be surprised by a result I would never choose(I'm naturally a bit of a min-maxer) than feel like I'm just playing the same character with a different name again. ..."


It's a bit sad, I think, when the notion of drawing up a character achieves the status of dragging a toboggan one more time up a hill for one more 27-second run.  Where it's so repetitive we have to design mini-games inside the character creation process to give ourselves a reason to care.  Right there's the slow death of a grognard losing his taste for the game.

I have not, as a point in fact, rolled up "hundreds" of characters, in large part because I stopped rolling my own characters at all in the 1980s, when I gave up playing for DMing.  But I also feel that I probably have barely topped a total of 100 characters for all the players who ever played in my campaigns.

During the one long campaign I ran between 1984 and 1994, I think I helped players roll a total of about 17 characters.  Prior to that, in the two brief campaigns I ran between 1979 and 1984, I could probably count maybe 25?  Six, eight players, occasional deaths, two campaigns ... hm.  Maybe 30.  Then, between '94 and 2003, I didn't run any games; I played in a couple and I worked on my game world, but no actual running.  Then, starting in 2003, out of about 14 players off-line, who have run the same main character since entering the campaign, it works out to about 40 characters and henchfolk.

That leaves the online people.  Maybe 10 characters with the first group, 8 more with campaigns that went nowhere, somewhere around 7 or 8 with the Juvenis campaign?  Call it 8.  All told, in the ball park of 125 characters that I've introduced into my D&D campaigns since I started in 1979.

Maybe that's why I simultaneously don't see D&D being about character creation all the time, and why I'm not bored with character creation.  I haven't remotely been down the tobogganning slope often enough to see the game through either lens.  I still think of character creation as "cool," so that I'm interested every time, while constantly building new angles on it to support the larger campaign game.  And while I do kill player characters, I don't do it that often.  People have seen me do it online, but in fact most of the time, the players live through each struggle and go on.  PLUS, when they die, they usually don't do it by slipping off a boat into the sea, where they'll be lost forever.  Usually they die of wounds.

So, I feel for Lance.  It hurts to see someone talking about character creation in those jaded frames.  It speaks of too, too many one-off games ... of too many 20-foot high toboggan hills.  Just ... just wrong. 






7 comments:


  1. Yeah. I'm with you on this one.

    I think...I *think*...that even when it comes to playing D&D (which I've done more of lately, being a little busy for running my own campaign), my approach has been far less about my character and far more about the adventure at hand. The character is only a means to an end...a jumble of numbers to be worked with and utilized in conjunction with the other party members to best tackle the scenario at hand.

    THAT, I think, is the proper approach to playing. As a player, the "100' toboggan hill" of D&D is climbed only once, really: when you learn the rules. After that, it's all downhill fun with the only question being how hard you want to hit the jumps as they come up.

    Running is different, of course (and the toboggan analogy doesn't really hold) but perhaps MORE satisfying due to the effort involved.

    [sorry I've been absent from reading/commenting...the last few weeks have been exceptionally busy]

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  2. "The character is only a means to an end...a jumble of numbers to be worked with and utilized in conjunction with the other party members to best tackle the scenario at hand. "

    that I think is a wonderful distillation. thx for adding to Alexis' wonderful disquisition

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  3. To be fair I'm nearly done rebuilding my character generation rules, I've added a few things which do make me have reinvigorated the desire to make few npcs.

    I've created far more pcs/nocs than I've played, but I have played a lot of characters mostly due to the haphazard nature of our games growing switching between adventures and pcs based on who was present and which of us felt like dming. For basic/classic dnd I have something like 30+ pcs, another dozen or so for more modern versions of dnd(in which I just found the extension of character creation options to be tedious rather than exciting, many of these are the ones I randomized all choices including class), and another score or so for non dnd rpgs. this doesn't include any one shot pregen or convention pcs, all these were multiple session/relatively longterm. There are only a handful of these that I've had a chance to play over many years though and those are the pcs I care about. I really haven't participated as a player in years, only making new characters in the role of dm.

    So yeah, at this point it is bit like tobogganing/ sledding, the reward just isn't really worth the effort anymore. I'd rather just get on with play. I realize this comment got a bit longer than intended...

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  4. Given how long my comments run, Lance, I shouldn't worry.

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  5. If he's losing that many characters he's either a bad player or is playing with a DM who's first priority is killing characters.

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  6. Matthew,

    Playing a traditional game, especially with adherence to old school modules, mass slaughtering of characters was standard practice, whether or not the DM's priority was killing. For many, that's just the way the game was played (perceived as playing the game "as written"). Much of the failing came (and still comes) as a total lack of proper counselling on HOW TO DM by the originators ... so many participants of the game have gone the traditional route because they just didn't know any better.

    Now, I've never been a traditionalist. I didn't play with modules, and I've always felt that the "multi-player character death" thing arose out of a very poor approach to the game, one I began resisting and preaching against when I was still in my teens. And here I am, 40 years later, still preaching against it.

    Anyway, all I'm saying is that you're oversimplifying the problem. Even the very BEST players commonly die in traditional D&D, because it's a Spartans vs. the Persians situation. No matter how good you are at playing, and if the DM adheres to the module as written (because he or she doesn't know any better), then everyone dies eventually. The traditional game becomes, effectively, not about whether you die, but WHEN you die, and how long you can go before that happens.

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  7. Yeah almost none of my pcs have ever died. Playing so many characters comes from an old style of play that's not common anymore. Instead of sticking to a single pc from level 1 to 20(or 36 as the case may be) to go on a single epic campaign story arc, we used a rotating cast(or stable as many call it now) of adventurers from which we would decide who to play from session to session. I still run my own game this way, though with more limitations and detailed tracking.

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