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.