"Nostradamus Rule:" All legends are 100% accurate. All rumors are entirely factual. All prophecies will come true, and not just someday but almost immediately.
There is a very, very good reason for this: the depiction of false myths is boring. It is the fantasy gaming equivalent to opening Al Capone's vault. There's no point in spreading a myth out for the party to investigate if there's no reality to the myth ... and besides, myths are interesting frameworks upon which to hinge games. They make fine mcguffins, theatrical climaxes and ethical conundrums. Why, we wouldn't even have these myths if its wasn't that the fascination about them endures.
What is sad and pathetic about the use of myths in games is the relatively short list that exists in the ordinary imagination. Not only because the DM can't come up with something new and interesting by reading a few books, but more to the point that players aren't likely to get fascinated with a myth of which they've never heard. If you haven't heard the myth before, it hardly carries much sentiment and romance ... in fact, the DM might as well have made it up in his or her own head, for all the oomph the myth has. Thus it happens that if you're going to depend on myths for your game, to get the oomph, you're stuck with very, very few choices.
And its worse if, as a DM, even you can't get interested in your own imagination.
So what does that give us? Well, everyone has seen Indiana Jones, Stargate, Buffy, Sanctuary, True Blood, etcetera, etcetera ... so you're safe if you mine those sources for your world. But there's a pretty big uggh factor if your players have considerable gaming experience: "Again, Bob? Another sword in the stone? That makes three this year, doesn't it?" And there I am, stealing the example from the TV tropes page just to hammer the point home.
If your players have managed around five years of steady game play, I promise you they've seen virtually everything ... that is, the habitually reworked list that television and the movies reserves for their Monster of the Week formula. The emotional juice you hope to wring from that dessicated and worm-eaten harvest is pretty much depleted. Expect your players to repeat the formula in their heads as you outline the tale at the table. Yeah, yeah, a vampire is loose in the neighborhood, there's a chick asleep in the castle, merlin left this hear before moving back in time, the spear of destiny is buried in zombie Hitler's tomb, Achilles is assaulting Troy, the sphinx has three questions and Nefertiri is ready to spread 'em because, well, she just wants to.
Yawn.
A great many DMs invoke these things from their pseudo-mastubatory appeal, like a cosplayer who can't wait to dress like Wonder Woman or the Green Gunker (sorry, there's about fifteen 'Green' choices, I just went with the word that defines my emotional feel about all of them). "Wow," thinks the DM; "won't it be really, really cool to have the Loch Ness monster in my campaign!" Or characters from The Planet of the Apes or the Queen from Snow White (who really ought to be dead) or whatever the hell else turns their crank. Sometimes, you can watch your DM get a little obsessed with an invocation like this ... it's creepy.
Of course, if you can figure out a way to introduce the monster/item/event with an unexpected originality, you will probably be able to pull your party out of its malaise ... but chances are that 'new' is going to be a lot closer to the disastrous discontinuity of Van Helsing rather than effect you desire. But you're welcome to prove me wrong.
I think it needs to be said that, in reality, you don't really need to invoke myth in order to give your campaign verve. It's a crutch, anyway. It's what you employ for lack of a good idea. That's why television leans so hard on it.
But the very young and unjaded will still like it, because they're young and unjaded. But if they're that young, they better be your own children.
Showing posts with label RPG Cliches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RPG Cliches. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Sorting Algorithm of Evil
"Local Control Rule:" Although the boss monster terrorizing the first city in the game is less powerful than the non-boss monsters that are only casual nuisances to cities later in the game, nobody from the first city every thinks of hiring a few mercenaries from the later cities to kill the monster (unless it's you).
Sometimes these posts are like macing toads in a beer stein. Every long-term player is perfectly familiar with class and level-based monster assignment ... some DMs spend months or even years carefully working out with an eyedropper just how many monsters to throw at a party whatever their given level, number, distribution of magic items, etcetera, etcetera. I was one of them.
Problem is, the logic is sound and compelling - for the same reason the algorithm occurs in so many films and film sequels. Equally matched opponents produce a more interesting dynamic. Even better is the situation being unequally matched by a marginal amount - with the players in the deficient position. Dickens knew that overcoming odds that are not in your favor wins over an audience. It also wins over a party. There's little pleasure in crushing fourteen orcs when you're 6th level. And 14 orcs are too many when you're first.
For all the hue and cry about how worlds need to be potentially dangerous, and how encounters shouldn't be tailored to parties, actually carrying through with that philosophy doesn't make a very good fit in a campaign. Running away gets awfully dull awfully fast. True, I wish now and then my players would have the good sense to back off ... but as things happen they tend to be pretty resilient. They're able to raise or replace their dead as necessary, as they wisely keep a war chest handy.
It brings me immense pleasure in the first few rounds of a battle to hear the party gnash their teeth in panic, saying "We're all dead!" and "Let's get the hell out of here." But then two or three members of the party will advance, and then the magic will come out and the party will discover they have a great deal more strength and power than they really know. Recently I tossed 45 flesh golems at them, manufactured in a steam punk contraption and released all at once. After the initial terror, the druid formed a wall of fire, hemming them in, and the 9th level mage got off a fireball. The player rolled unusually high, reducing a large number of the golems' hit points down into the teens, making them manageable for the fighters. Yes, I knocked them around some, but the party handled the matter just fine.
What's important is that they didn't think they would, at first. Their first reaction - dead wrong by the evidence - was that they were all going to die. Back when they were 4th level, I threw one flesh golem at them that rattled them pretty good. They still had that memory. So when they overcame the far, far greater number, it surprised them.
Now, would it have been a better encounter if I had made it 450 golems? Or if I had rolled a d100 and come up with 7? No. In fact, it wouldn't have been better or worse. It would have been merely what it was. Except ...
If the number had been 450, I would have had to run it differently in order to retain the drama of the situation. Of the 45 that I created, the party in fact only killed approximately 4/5ths of them. The others walked off into the woods, in different directions ... because my intention was to force the party to go looking for them before they could find civilization. If I had started with 450, I would have increased this number of disappearing golems, and more than the party would have had to be involved with hunting them down.
On the other hand, if I had thrown only 7, that wouldn't have been enough to make things very interesting. I would have had to create some other 'effect' to keep the party's interest. Such as having the golems' bodies inexplicably, upon death, increase in temperature - invoking some greater and less tangible danger. This was, in fact, where I left the party. That is precisely what is happening to the golems they killed. They don't know why.
My point is that DMs, to retain a sense of tension, MUST increase the algorithm progressively. The party can feel success, they can feel they are getting on top of the problem - but if you want them to keep coming back session after session, there's nothing better than the Perils of Pauline. One more seemingly insurmountable cliff-hanger, one more very slightly mis-matched situation, one greater non-boss monster to be overcome.
Don't let the party know it, however. They don't need to know they're being jerked around.
It is our nature to be bored with things we can already master. And disinterested in things that can never be mastered. But something right in the middle ... that's the holy grail, my friends. It may be disingenious, but as people keep telling me, the game is about fun.
Or at least it's about as many life-threatening circumstances as possible.
Sometimes these posts are like macing toads in a beer stein. Every long-term player is perfectly familiar with class and level-based monster assignment ... some DMs spend months or even years carefully working out with an eyedropper just how many monsters to throw at a party whatever their given level, number, distribution of magic items, etcetera, etcetera. I was one of them.
Problem is, the logic is sound and compelling - for the same reason the algorithm occurs in so many films and film sequels. Equally matched opponents produce a more interesting dynamic. Even better is the situation being unequally matched by a marginal amount - with the players in the deficient position. Dickens knew that overcoming odds that are not in your favor wins over an audience. It also wins over a party. There's little pleasure in crushing fourteen orcs when you're 6th level. And 14 orcs are too many when you're first.
For all the hue and cry about how worlds need to be potentially dangerous, and how encounters shouldn't be tailored to parties, actually carrying through with that philosophy doesn't make a very good fit in a campaign. Running away gets awfully dull awfully fast. True, I wish now and then my players would have the good sense to back off ... but as things happen they tend to be pretty resilient. They're able to raise or replace their dead as necessary, as they wisely keep a war chest handy.
It brings me immense pleasure in the first few rounds of a battle to hear the party gnash their teeth in panic, saying "We're all dead!" and "Let's get the hell out of here." But then two or three members of the party will advance, and then the magic will come out and the party will discover they have a great deal more strength and power than they really know. Recently I tossed 45 flesh golems at them, manufactured in a steam punk contraption and released all at once. After the initial terror, the druid formed a wall of fire, hemming them in, and the 9th level mage got off a fireball. The player rolled unusually high, reducing a large number of the golems' hit points down into the teens, making them manageable for the fighters. Yes, I knocked them around some, but the party handled the matter just fine.
What's important is that they didn't think they would, at first. Their first reaction - dead wrong by the evidence - was that they were all going to die. Back when they were 4th level, I threw one flesh golem at them that rattled them pretty good. They still had that memory. So when they overcame the far, far greater number, it surprised them.
Now, would it have been a better encounter if I had made it 450 golems? Or if I had rolled a d100 and come up with 7? No. In fact, it wouldn't have been better or worse. It would have been merely what it was. Except ...
If the number had been 450, I would have had to run it differently in order to retain the drama of the situation. Of the 45 that I created, the party in fact only killed approximately 4/5ths of them. The others walked off into the woods, in different directions ... because my intention was to force the party to go looking for them before they could find civilization. If I had started with 450, I would have increased this number of disappearing golems, and more than the party would have had to be involved with hunting them down.
On the other hand, if I had thrown only 7, that wouldn't have been enough to make things very interesting. I would have had to create some other 'effect' to keep the party's interest. Such as having the golems' bodies inexplicably, upon death, increase in temperature - invoking some greater and less tangible danger. This was, in fact, where I left the party. That is precisely what is happening to the golems they killed. They don't know why.
My point is that DMs, to retain a sense of tension, MUST increase the algorithm progressively. The party can feel success, they can feel they are getting on top of the problem - but if you want them to keep coming back session after session, there's nothing better than the Perils of Pauline. One more seemingly insurmountable cliff-hanger, one more very slightly mis-matched situation, one greater non-boss monster to be overcome.
Don't let the party know it, however. They don't need to know they're being jerked around.
It is our nature to be bored with things we can already master. And disinterested in things that can never be mastered. But something right in the middle ... that's the holy grail, my friends. It may be disingenious, but as people keep telling me, the game is about fun.
Or at least it's about as many life-threatening circumstances as possible.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Improbable Weapon User
I had to write this post, if for no other reason than to show this brilliant panel from Girl Genius from many weeks ago.
I must start by being clear about the use of improbable weapons ... I'm all for it. If no other weapon is available, I'd like to see more players taking advantage of what's immediately available: bar stools, small farm animals, 50' lengths of rope (bundled, of course), backpacks, filled money belts ... whatever. If one does not happen to have a hand-axe, because its already been thrown in this combat, a full wine bottle will do. I think its a shame that my characters don't resort to these things more often.
That said, there's a good reason why. In reality, a thrown wine bottle doesn't aim for shit. It doesn't turn like, say, a balanced knife. This is true for every kind of makeshift weapon. Good for that specific moment, when you need something, and that bassinet is very handy. Not so good for the long haul. The 'Shoveler' would be replacing his shovels on such a steady basis that it would make him think twice about that being his weapon of choice. The same goes for continued use of cricket bats, hockey sticks, golf clubs and so on. Yes, lovely weapons when used against unarmed people. A golf club's survival time against a traditional long sword? About one swing.
A great deal of effort is put into making weapons so that they are easy to handle, so that they balance well and so that they deliver a good, solid blow that the wielder doesn't feel. Yes, a frying pan will open an enemy's skull, no question. It's also damn hard to hold onto as a parrying weapon, its reach is a little short for convenience sake and - let's face it - the thing is hard to hang on your belt.
While I might be for immediate use of anything that comes to hand, I would put obstacles in the way of a character who decided to take 'kittens with sharpened claws' as a proficiency. It would be all very interesting, no doubt. And very funny. I'm sure the character's enemies would be suprised ... just long enough to roll it over in their minds as their balanced spears impaled the character's organs.
This is about all I can say about this subject. I know others bend towards the less prosaic, as the quote says ... but give me a mace any day. Sort of like melting down the weight of the frying pan into an aerodynamic ball, fixing it to a longer stick and adding points.
Wait, that's more than 'sort of like,' isn't it?
Friday, January 28, 2011
Unusually Uninteresting Sight
Wow. I haven't written one of these since last July.
"Just Nod Your Head And Smile:" No matter how big that big-ass sword is, you won't stand out in a crowd. Nobody ever crosses the street to avoid you or seems to be especially shocked or alarmed when a heavily armed gang bursts into their house during dinner, rummages through their possessions, and demands to know if they've seen a black-caped man. People can get used to anything, apparently.
The above cliche certainly applies to hundreds of videogames produced in the last ten years, and mostly occurs because game designers feel that 'people' make nice scenary, but they're too much trouble to program. I would argue that the cliche occurs to a greatly lessened degree in non-video RPGs ... but it still does occur. Most parties, I think most any DM could argue, sincerely fail to recognize what they must look like to NPCs.
What player doesn't argue that their character is in full armor, along with every weapon in their personal arsenal, when they drop down to the local tavern for a drink or two? Yes, that's right, every individual sitting at the bar is in plate mail, shield on their arm, bristling with three or four weapons - including a four-foot long heavy crossbow on their back - just in case a fight breaks out. And the bartender, obviously, doesn't mind at all.
Don't believe me? Instigate a fight of some sort, involving a player character, when they're in the middle of shopping. The moment you hear the fighter say, "I buy two weeks' rations," have a cow or something break loose in the market and make a rush. Ask the fighter for AC, and I promise you he or she will include their shield. Because, you know, it is permanently strapped to their arm, all the time.
It is a power player's headspace. They don't want to get caught with their pants down, ever, and they don't like their armor class being even slightly below full power. Attack them in their sleep, attack them while they're taking a crap behind a tree, attack them while they're bathing ... that armor will be no more than an arm's reach away. Along with everything else they possess. You just never know when you're going to need that scroll of protection against lycanthropes; it brings a special comfort to drum your fingers on the scroll case, day and night.
I can't blame the characters. There's nothing worse than being attacked by six wereboars and having the DM point out that the scroll and case (along with your other scrolls) might either be in your saddle bag, hanging on a hook somewhere in the stable downstairs (we don't store it on the horse!), or possibly in one of the sacks in that pile of articles you stacked in the corner several hours ago ... and not exactly on hand at the moment. Just about every player I've ever met would argue that no, they'd never leave a magic item in some random location, even though they've had the item for two years of game time and they've never needed it.
Therefore, if the player is to be believed, they travel everywhere as a group of profoundly encumbered persons, and this phenomenal encumberance never bothers anyone. Not the enormous mace hanging from the player's side, nor the sharpened khopesh, nor the odor of the many flasks of oil the player carries in their pack, nor anything else.
Sound, of course, is a biggie. The world is phenomenally deaf. Enemies stand at readiness while the DM waits for the party to decide what to do, as they call each other names and argue and make suggestions. I have taken it for granted that my offline party never surprises anyone - they haven't in an age - because they never stop talking, they never consider what they're wearing as they lope down corridors or streets, through forests and glades and up and down hills. I love that my players are excited and involved with the game, that they are loaded up with energy and thrilled to be out and adventuring ... but stealth is not in their playbook.
In reality, my players - and probably yours too, if the gaming club I attended a few weeks ago is any evidence - should be a kind of monster-pulling gravity well, so that as they move over the landscape the monsters find themselves helplessly drawn in to find out what in hell is making so much noise. But reality is overrated. It is troublesome, inconvenient, and makes poor drama. I mean, I like a strong dose of real and all, but the facts are its easier not to have to roleplay every stranger standing around a 5,000 population town. Yes, I could describe the townspeople staring at the party, or have people ask the players to please put their shields down. It is never a good thing when I have to explain that there's no armor allowed inside the town walls, or that weapons can't be carried. I do actually do this. But it never goes over well. To the players, it seems to feel like cheating, somehow, that I am merely looking for an excuse to take away their weapons, so that I will be able to kill them more easily. I don't know why they don't trust me.
I can't give out advice on this - I'm as guilty as anyone. I think every DM just has to accept how far this goes to the extent that makes them comfortable in their worlds ... and beyond that, not worry about it very much.
I have to get up now and take a walk. If I sit too long with these greaves on, it just kills my legs. I'm not as young as I used to be.
"Just Nod Your Head And Smile:" No matter how big that big-ass sword is, you won't stand out in a crowd. Nobody ever crosses the street to avoid you or seems to be especially shocked or alarmed when a heavily armed gang bursts into their house during dinner, rummages through their possessions, and demands to know if they've seen a black-caped man. People can get used to anything, apparently.
The above cliche certainly applies to hundreds of videogames produced in the last ten years, and mostly occurs because game designers feel that 'people' make nice scenary, but they're too much trouble to program. I would argue that the cliche occurs to a greatly lessened degree in non-video RPGs ... but it still does occur. Most parties, I think most any DM could argue, sincerely fail to recognize what they must look like to NPCs.
What player doesn't argue that their character is in full armor, along with every weapon in their personal arsenal, when they drop down to the local tavern for a drink or two? Yes, that's right, every individual sitting at the bar is in plate mail, shield on their arm, bristling with three or four weapons - including a four-foot long heavy crossbow on their back - just in case a fight breaks out. And the bartender, obviously, doesn't mind at all.
Don't believe me? Instigate a fight of some sort, involving a player character, when they're in the middle of shopping. The moment you hear the fighter say, "I buy two weeks' rations," have a cow or something break loose in the market and make a rush. Ask the fighter for AC, and I promise you he or she will include their shield. Because, you know, it is permanently strapped to their arm, all the time.
It is a power player's headspace. They don't want to get caught with their pants down, ever, and they don't like their armor class being even slightly below full power. Attack them in their sleep, attack them while they're taking a crap behind a tree, attack them while they're bathing ... that armor will be no more than an arm's reach away. Along with everything else they possess. You just never know when you're going to need that scroll of protection against lycanthropes; it brings a special comfort to drum your fingers on the scroll case, day and night.
I can't blame the characters. There's nothing worse than being attacked by six wereboars and having the DM point out that the scroll and case (along with your other scrolls) might either be in your saddle bag, hanging on a hook somewhere in the stable downstairs (we don't store it on the horse!), or possibly in one of the sacks in that pile of articles you stacked in the corner several hours ago ... and not exactly on hand at the moment. Just about every player I've ever met would argue that no, they'd never leave a magic item in some random location, even though they've had the item for two years of game time and they've never needed it.
Therefore, if the player is to be believed, they travel everywhere as a group of profoundly encumbered persons, and this phenomenal encumberance never bothers anyone. Not the enormous mace hanging from the player's side, nor the sharpened khopesh, nor the odor of the many flasks of oil the player carries in their pack, nor anything else.
Sound, of course, is a biggie. The world is phenomenally deaf. Enemies stand at readiness while the DM waits for the party to decide what to do, as they call each other names and argue and make suggestions. I have taken it for granted that my offline party never surprises anyone - they haven't in an age - because they never stop talking, they never consider what they're wearing as they lope down corridors or streets, through forests and glades and up and down hills. I love that my players are excited and involved with the game, that they are loaded up with energy and thrilled to be out and adventuring ... but stealth is not in their playbook.
In reality, my players - and probably yours too, if the gaming club I attended a few weeks ago is any evidence - should be a kind of monster-pulling gravity well, so that as they move over the landscape the monsters find themselves helplessly drawn in to find out what in hell is making so much noise. But reality is overrated. It is troublesome, inconvenient, and makes poor drama. I mean, I like a strong dose of real and all, but the facts are its easier not to have to roleplay every stranger standing around a 5,000 population town. Yes, I could describe the townspeople staring at the party, or have people ask the players to please put their shields down. It is never a good thing when I have to explain that there's no armor allowed inside the town walls, or that weapons can't be carried. I do actually do this. But it never goes over well. To the players, it seems to feel like cheating, somehow, that I am merely looking for an excuse to take away their weapons, so that I will be able to kill them more easily. I don't know why they don't trust me.
I can't give out advice on this - I'm as guilty as anyone. I think every DM just has to accept how far this goes to the extent that makes them comfortable in their worlds ... and beyond that, not worry about it very much.
I have to get up now and take a walk. If I sit too long with these greaves on, it just kills my legs. I'm not as young as I used to be.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Hey, I Know You
This is a long and varied cliche, but let's do it all at once (I've edited the below to suit my needs - the exact wording can be found here):
"Hey, I Know You!:" You will accumulate at least three of these obligatory party members:
What I want to say from the outset is that developing a worthy, interesting character, either as a player or as a DM, is a difficult proposition - difficult enough that it has stumped writers for generations, leading to the kind of cliches above that have been presented by everyone from bad 17th century playrights, right through cheesy Hollywood Serials writers and the sort of hacks now writing for video companies. A good character takes time and it takes enormous effort. Realistically, it takes the writer who is able to bend the events of unreality in order to make the character seem plausible and likeable. When I am writing fiction, my chief concern is the motivation of my characters - to make those motivations clear, and to draw my reader into the mindset of the various players in the story, I twist and turn the story in just such a way as to provide the characters to show their bravery and chicanery, their strengths and their flaws, their altruism and their selfishness.
RPGs are shit for producing this sort of nuance.
And thus you are stuck with the sort of crap where Mighty Knight #1 talks in Bravado English ("I have come to rescue the FAIR princess") only to be answered in like manner by Posing Bad Guy #3. Speaking for myself, I find the whole affair a little vomit inducing ... as do my players, who aren't interested in performing the equivalent of cheap street theatre. None of them consider themselves to be actors; not a one has any ambitions in that direction.
I have at least had experience with the foolish process of standing in front of audiences and improvising; so I will throw it into my campaigns, delivering a speech by so-and-so or playing up an NPC so as to give the campaign some color. But I don't demand this of my players for one simple reason. They don't like doing it.
Quickly I've been covering two different things: it isn't easy to invent a good character, and often players have no interest in trying. That is because, realistically, most self-aware people know their own limitations, and would feel like a fool playing either the gruff mercenary or the soft-spoken princess - the best they feel they are likely to invent, if pressed to do so.
Now, at this point some jack-hole is going to pipe up in the comments and say, "Hey! It's fun to be foolish, and an RPG is there to give us the opportunity! Hooray!" He probably won't hear me here, now, when I say beforehand, fuck all that. I know there's a hugely vocal contingent of RPGs who somehow think that D&D is really just a gateway drug to LARP or the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I and my players don't roll that way. We're the sort of sardonic, cynical bastards who see fuckwits cavorting around in said manner and wonder what's happened with their medication.
'Roleplaying' - for us - does not accurately describe the game as we play it. We do not view D&D as our great chance to shine the flashlight on our egos, but as a problem-solving game. I do not think we are alone in this. I suspect there are many thousands of players who would like to go to conventions without having to dress up like a freak. I also feel there are many who feel the 'pretending' that has been incorporated as a must-have feature of the game smacks of infantile, childish regression.
You know, back to an age when cheesy characterizations looked fresh and noble.
I can't say I expect to make a lot of points with this argument among a lot of those I've seen; the internet tends to pull the reality-challenged to its warm and porny bosom. But if the gentle reader does find that they're running in a world that seems to skirt over the issue of roleplaying in favor of straight gamesmanship, realize that you are not alone.
It is enough that we know what our characters can do.
It is enough that we puzzle out the world and gamble our character's talents to that solution.
It is enough to watch our characters grow in power and possibility. It is enough that we achieve through our efforts and dream up greater goals as the game goes on. It is enough that we love our characters for the time we've invested.
We need not bark like actors on the lighted stage if it doesn't interest us. We need not fabricate pathos and angst, nor concern ourselves with motivation. We can leave that to the playwrites if that is their thing.
We only need play D&D in the way it makes us happy.
"Hey, I Know You!:" You will accumulate at least three of these obligatory party members:
- The spunky princess, rebelling against her royal parent, who is in love with the hero
- The demure, soft-spoken female mage and healing magic specialist who is not only in love with the hero, but is also the last survivor of an ancient race.
- The tough-as-nails female warrior who is NOT in love with the hero (and the only female character in the game who has any deformity, such as a spectacular scar, a missing eye, cyborg limbs and so on).
- The achingly beautiful gothy swordsman who is riven by inner tragedy.
- The big, tough, angry guy who, deep down, is a total softy
- The hero's best friend, who is actually much cooler than the hero.
- The grim, selfish mercenary who over the course of the game learns what it means to really care about other people.
- The character who is actually a spy for the bad guys, but will instantly switch to your side when you find out about it.
- The nauseatingly cute mascot who is useless in all battles.
What I want to say from the outset is that developing a worthy, interesting character, either as a player or as a DM, is a difficult proposition - difficult enough that it has stumped writers for generations, leading to the kind of cliches above that have been presented by everyone from bad 17th century playrights, right through cheesy Hollywood Serials writers and the sort of hacks now writing for video companies. A good character takes time and it takes enormous effort. Realistically, it takes the writer who is able to bend the events of unreality in order to make the character seem plausible and likeable. When I am writing fiction, my chief concern is the motivation of my characters - to make those motivations clear, and to draw my reader into the mindset of the various players in the story, I twist and turn the story in just such a way as to provide the characters to show their bravery and chicanery, their strengths and their flaws, their altruism and their selfishness.
RPGs are shit for producing this sort of nuance.
And thus you are stuck with the sort of crap where Mighty Knight #1 talks in Bravado English ("I have come to rescue the FAIR princess") only to be answered in like manner by Posing Bad Guy #3. Speaking for myself, I find the whole affair a little vomit inducing ... as do my players, who aren't interested in performing the equivalent of cheap street theatre. None of them consider themselves to be actors; not a one has any ambitions in that direction.
I have at least had experience with the foolish process of standing in front of audiences and improvising; so I will throw it into my campaigns, delivering a speech by so-and-so or playing up an NPC so as to give the campaign some color. But I don't demand this of my players for one simple reason. They don't like doing it.
Quickly I've been covering two different things: it isn't easy to invent a good character, and often players have no interest in trying. That is because, realistically, most self-aware people know their own limitations, and would feel like a fool playing either the gruff mercenary or the soft-spoken princess - the best they feel they are likely to invent, if pressed to do so.
Now, at this point some jack-hole is going to pipe up in the comments and say, "Hey! It's fun to be foolish, and an RPG is there to give us the opportunity! Hooray!" He probably won't hear me here, now, when I say beforehand, fuck all that. I know there's a hugely vocal contingent of RPGs who somehow think that D&D is really just a gateway drug to LARP or the Society for Creative Anachronism, but I and my players don't roll that way. We're the sort of sardonic, cynical bastards who see fuckwits cavorting around in said manner and wonder what's happened with their medication.
'Roleplaying' - for us - does not accurately describe the game as we play it. We do not view D&D as our great chance to shine the flashlight on our egos, but as a problem-solving game. I do not think we are alone in this. I suspect there are many thousands of players who would like to go to conventions without having to dress up like a freak. I also feel there are many who feel the 'pretending' that has been incorporated as a must-have feature of the game smacks of infantile, childish regression.
You know, back to an age when cheesy characterizations looked fresh and noble.
I can't say I expect to make a lot of points with this argument among a lot of those I've seen; the internet tends to pull the reality-challenged to its warm and porny bosom. But if the gentle reader does find that they're running in a world that seems to skirt over the issue of roleplaying in favor of straight gamesmanship, realize that you are not alone.
It is enough that we know what our characters can do.
It is enough that we puzzle out the world and gamble our character's talents to that solution.
It is enough to watch our characters grow in power and possibility. It is enough that we achieve through our efforts and dream up greater goals as the game goes on. It is enough that we love our characters for the time we've invested.
We need not bark like actors on the lighted stage if it doesn't interest us. We need not fabricate pathos and angst, nor concern ourselves with motivation. We can leave that to the playwrites if that is their thing.
We only need play D&D in the way it makes us happy.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Kleptomaniac Hero
I confess. Where it comes to the RPG cliche, "The Higher the Hair, the Closer To God," I have nothing to say. It is a visual cliche, I don't have any real connection with anime and I'm just going to skip it.
That brings us to:
"Garrett's Principle:" Let's not mince words: you're a thief. You can walk into just about anybody's house like the door wasn't even locked. You just barge right in and start looking for stuff. Anything you can find that's not nailed down (or on fire) is yours to keep. You will often walk into perfect strangers' houses, lift their precious artifacts, and then chat with them like you were old neighbors as you head back out with their family heirlooms under your arm. Unfortunately, this never works in stores.
Morality in D&D has always been highly questionable, but all the more so when characters of so-called 'good' alignment casually walk off with the same treasure as any other character at the adventure's end. Thou shalt not kill ... actually, its more of a guideline. Thou shalt not steal ... listen, on the QT, this one is really for the common folk - don't you worry about it, I know you're going to have to take stuff to get the job done.
I don't play alignments, so for the most part I don't give a shit about whether my players are decent people or not - nor do they. And treasure IS a central feature of the game's dynamic, along with ripping off the prized possession of every temple and isolated tribe from here to Panjot.
Admittedly, some players do possess a certain righteousness where it comes to treasure - thinking about the second Indiana Jones film, the 'right' thing is done by taking the stone from the evil cult and giving it back to the peaceful village ... but no one questions, ever, how this particular peaceful village obtained the stone in the first place. They obviously did not dig it out of the ground. Given the early history of India, I find it more likely that the bad people who like to burn people up are actually the legitimate owners ... having probably been given the stone by Shiva thousands of years earlier - who's nickname is, after all, the 'Destroyer,' and not the 'Happy Village Giver.'
Origins are important. It is particularly laughable when Indiana, at the beginning of movie 3, shouts righteously about the Cross of Coronado (or whatever damn thing it was), "THAT SHOULD BE IN A MUSEUM!" And then makes sure that it goes to one - an American museum, of course. Not a Mexican Museum. Or a Spanish Museum. Oh no. Let's not get crazy with our righteous indignation.
My point is that treasures actually originate from somewhere. Tell me if this sounds familiar. A village is raided by a party of seventy-five kobalds; the villagers appeal to the strong-looking party members to help them, and the party goes out and does that deed well, slaughtering the bad guys and plundering the treasure. They return to the village, who cheer and welcome the conquering heroes with a great feast. The heroes re-equip and head on their happy way.
So let me get this straight. The kobalds steal the villager's wealth; then the party steals the villager's wealth from the kobalds, calling it treasure. They don't give ANY of it back to the village, and in gratitude for this great achievement, the villagers give food and entertainment. Hurm.
Naturally, parties view that sort of selflessness as 'payment' or some such ... the village is rid of the kobalds, right? Heck, they can make more money next year. I need a sword now. What's the problem?
Players do have a bit of a blind spot where it comes to this sort of thing. The treasure I described in the last post, that my party just collected from the drow and their goblin horde was itself collected from neighboring hexes - and the people dwelling in the party's fief - over the previous year. Some 500 ordinary human and elven villagers (men, women and children) were systematically massacred one village at a time, and 800 more elves, humans and other residents were driven off from an area of about 900 sq.m., in order to amass the coin and other treasure found ... but I'm sure the party hasn't considered giving a single coin to the distressed families. Not yet. I'll point it out, and they'll hand over some token sum.
But in fact ALL of it originated otherwise from the villains who were just killed. However well-intentioned the party might be, a considerable number of residents have lost their homes and their possessions and won't see them returned. Which is all well and good, this is D&D. But is it heroic?
Face it, the answer is no. I don't have a problem, I've always argued the players aren't expected to be fucking heroes, haven't I?
Not that there aren't proud players out there who adhere to Francis of Assisi's inspiration of poverty, who would hand back the whole kobald treasure to the village - or, at least, their share of it. Most times, these wonderful selfless players sort of overlook their association to the more possessive members of the party, while spouting such 'worthy' rhetoric as, "Each must come to understand the goodness of generousity for themselves," or "I am here to help them see the light."
Uh huh. To put it another way, their character is there to shore up the left flank, and help these as-yet-selfish bastards the opportunity to enrich themselves, with your character as dupe. You know, Father Francis didn't hang out with the Pope, or the Medicis, or any of the mulititude of self-serving Italians who were around in his day. You don't aid charity by helping plunderers plunder. Just a small point there.
Yet this is D&D, and we have to overlook things like hypocrisy and such ... good ol' Francis would have made a pretty dull player character.
As a DM, however, I'd suggest making the local NPC's a little less grateful to players who are just thieves who steal from the local thieves. How about when the players return to the village, the villagers tone down the joyous celebration for a bit until the party answers a simple query: "How much of OUR stuff did you get back?"
It's a fair question.
That brings us to:
"Garrett's Principle:" Let's not mince words: you're a thief. You can walk into just about anybody's house like the door wasn't even locked. You just barge right in and start looking for stuff. Anything you can find that's not nailed down (or on fire) is yours to keep. You will often walk into perfect strangers' houses, lift their precious artifacts, and then chat with them like you were old neighbors as you head back out with their family heirlooms under your arm. Unfortunately, this never works in stores.
Morality in D&D has always been highly questionable, but all the more so when characters of so-called 'good' alignment casually walk off with the same treasure as any other character at the adventure's end. Thou shalt not kill ... actually, its more of a guideline. Thou shalt not steal ... listen, on the QT, this one is really for the common folk - don't you worry about it, I know you're going to have to take stuff to get the job done.
I don't play alignments, so for the most part I don't give a shit about whether my players are decent people or not - nor do they. And treasure IS a central feature of the game's dynamic, along with ripping off the prized possession of every temple and isolated tribe from here to Panjot.
Admittedly, some players do possess a certain righteousness where it comes to treasure - thinking about the second Indiana Jones film, the 'right' thing is done by taking the stone from the evil cult and giving it back to the peaceful village ... but no one questions, ever, how this particular peaceful village obtained the stone in the first place. They obviously did not dig it out of the ground. Given the early history of India, I find it more likely that the bad people who like to burn people up are actually the legitimate owners ... having probably been given the stone by Shiva thousands of years earlier - who's nickname is, after all, the 'Destroyer,' and not the 'Happy Village Giver.'
Origins are important. It is particularly laughable when Indiana, at the beginning of movie 3, shouts righteously about the Cross of Coronado (or whatever damn thing it was), "THAT SHOULD BE IN A MUSEUM!" And then makes sure that it goes to one - an American museum, of course. Not a Mexican Museum. Or a Spanish Museum. Oh no. Let's not get crazy with our righteous indignation.
My point is that treasures actually originate from somewhere. Tell me if this sounds familiar. A village is raided by a party of seventy-five kobalds; the villagers appeal to the strong-looking party members to help them, and the party goes out and does that deed well, slaughtering the bad guys and plundering the treasure. They return to the village, who cheer and welcome the conquering heroes with a great feast. The heroes re-equip and head on their happy way.
So let me get this straight. The kobalds steal the villager's wealth; then the party steals the villager's wealth from the kobalds, calling it treasure. They don't give ANY of it back to the village, and in gratitude for this great achievement, the villagers give food and entertainment. Hurm.
Naturally, parties view that sort of selflessness as 'payment' or some such ... the village is rid of the kobalds, right? Heck, they can make more money next year. I need a sword now. What's the problem?
Players do have a bit of a blind spot where it comes to this sort of thing. The treasure I described in the last post, that my party just collected from the drow and their goblin horde was itself collected from neighboring hexes - and the people dwelling in the party's fief - over the previous year. Some 500 ordinary human and elven villagers (men, women and children) were systematically massacred one village at a time, and 800 more elves, humans and other residents were driven off from an area of about 900 sq.m., in order to amass the coin and other treasure found ... but I'm sure the party hasn't considered giving a single coin to the distressed families. Not yet. I'll point it out, and they'll hand over some token sum.
But in fact ALL of it originated otherwise from the villains who were just killed. However well-intentioned the party might be, a considerable number of residents have lost their homes and their possessions and won't see them returned. Which is all well and good, this is D&D. But is it heroic?
Face it, the answer is no. I don't have a problem, I've always argued the players aren't expected to be fucking heroes, haven't I?
Not that there aren't proud players out there who adhere to Francis of Assisi's inspiration of poverty, who would hand back the whole kobald treasure to the village - or, at least, their share of it. Most times, these wonderful selfless players sort of overlook their association to the more possessive members of the party, while spouting such 'worthy' rhetoric as, "Each must come to understand the goodness of generousity for themselves," or "I am here to help them see the light."
Uh huh. To put it another way, their character is there to shore up the left flank, and help these as-yet-selfish bastards the opportunity to enrich themselves, with your character as dupe. You know, Father Francis didn't hang out with the Pope, or the Medicis, or any of the mulititude of self-serving Italians who were around in his day. You don't aid charity by helping plunderers plunder. Just a small point there.
Yet this is D&D, and we have to overlook things like hypocrisy and such ... good ol' Francis would have made a pretty dull player character.
As a DM, however, I'd suggest making the local NPC's a little less grateful to players who are just thieves who steal from the local thieves. How about when the players return to the village, the villagers tone down the joyous celebration for a bit until the party answers a simple query: "How much of OUR stuff did you get back?"
It's a fair question.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Impoverished Patrician
"Poor Little Rich Hero (Meis Rule):" If the hero comes from a rich and powerful family, it will have fallen on hard times and be broke and destitute by the time the game actually starts.
This is really the opposite of the farm boy who has come to the big city to make good; this is the sophisticate who comes to the farm in order to learn the true value of family, friendship, loyalty, et al, so that when they win the crown and head back to their sophisticated world they can take with them the down-home goodness of honest folks.
Really more of a fan-fiction thing than D&D, as I would guess more than half the people who sit down to write a Terry Pratchett-style book begin with a character of pure, noble blood who's estranged from an evil/misunderstanding father and loving mother, who must 'succeed on his own' ... or crap to that degree. I don't find players follow this one up very hard - I can think of a few who make a note about a misunderstanding father (its always the father, isn't it, since our fathers never seem to understand D&D), but it never seems to go anywhere.
Of course, in a long-term sandbox game, there's not much desire on the part of the DM to make everyone an ex-noble of some kind ... because it creates large problems where it comes to group roleplaying. Do you A) make sure that everyone in the party is an equal noble person of the same rank, to end jealousy?; or B) do you encourage other members of the party to play roles that are respectful of the one party member who is of noble blood?; or C) do you downplay the whole noble thing when it comes up?
Well, the three questions above assume that there's some kind of generation system in place to determine the social status of your players. Otherwise, the question becomes, is everyone noble or is everyone not? How many DMs are going to point to player two from the right and say okay, you're Prince blah-blah of the Kingdom Yah? I don't imagine that the DM that did would then follow it up with, "You're rich, you've got a personal bodyguard of forty men, from whom you have absolute loyalty." Seriously, are you going to play a thief standing next to that crowd?
Well, I would have issues.
More likely the DM will pull out the old saw, yes, you're a prince, but you've got no money, the kingdom is being run by your uncle that married your mother, and your father's a ghost, etcetera. What's more, the kingdom of your birth is a long way from here - but yes, you have noble blood.
On some level, it might be fun to be a second rank player in a party like that, struggling to keep the prince alive against all odds, restraining the prince from doing anything foolish, fighting ultimately towards the goal where the prince could be reimposed upon the throne and all could be happiness and spoils.
Except for one thing - the male player who is playing the prince is almost certain to become the biggest prick in the universe. Such is D&D.
Nerds and geeks being what they are - ie., not gentlemen - there is bound to be a dearth of noblesse oblige, something that can be measured by how many special benefits/privileges that you as DM give to the little snot once the dice come up that say, yes, this fighter is of noble blood. Give him anything and he's certain to become the Marquis St. Evremonde by the second session. Give him nothing and he's apt to pout and whine that what's the point of being a noble if you can't lord it over your friends?
Now, I've been decidedly masculine in my adjectives for a reason - simply because I believe you have a much better chance of party solidarity if the girl player of the group happens to be the one of noble blood - even if she's playing a male character. Women, by and large, tend to handle this stuff better, with a sense of the dignity and responsibility that comes from being a noble person, without all the strutting testosterone that inevitably becomes the crowning center of a heavily male D&D contingent. It reminds me that I should write a post about pissing contests in D&D ... but we'll leave that off until later.
At any rate, I do have a system that allows for a very low chance of an individual being a noble; and I've always presumed that this RPG cliche would be carried forward; I've twice had a noble person rolled up. The first was successfully put on the throne of a small, regional country, just before the campaign ended permanently. The other had died, unfortunately, at fourth level before anything could be done with it.
But now I'm thinking how interesting it would be to introduce a new player into a long-time party, who happened to be a noble. Think of it: I start everyone at 1st level, which is a huge trial for new players who find they must play side by side with 7th-9th level characters. I don't have a party that pushes noobs around (my gaming group is 4/7ths female), so it works out that if the noob keeps their head down, does a small bit and lives, they go up to 4th or 5th very quickly.
But how would it be if the 1st level did start with 40 personal armed guards, led by a sixth-level-fighter and several middle level chiefs and sub-chiefs? Not henchmen, mind you, as these would have their own agenda - keep the king's spawn alive while seeing to it that he/she got some experience in the wide world - but they would be something to reckon with where it came to power plays within the group dynamic.
I think I've just talked myself into drawing up some guidelines ... someday.
This is really the opposite of the farm boy who has come to the big city to make good; this is the sophisticate who comes to the farm in order to learn the true value of family, friendship, loyalty, et al, so that when they win the crown and head back to their sophisticated world they can take with them the down-home goodness of honest folks.
Really more of a fan-fiction thing than D&D, as I would guess more than half the people who sit down to write a Terry Pratchett-style book begin with a character of pure, noble blood who's estranged from an evil/misunderstanding father and loving mother, who must 'succeed on his own' ... or crap to that degree. I don't find players follow this one up very hard - I can think of a few who make a note about a misunderstanding father (its always the father, isn't it, since our fathers never seem to understand D&D), but it never seems to go anywhere.
Of course, in a long-term sandbox game, there's not much desire on the part of the DM to make everyone an ex-noble of some kind ... because it creates large problems where it comes to group roleplaying. Do you A) make sure that everyone in the party is an equal noble person of the same rank, to end jealousy?; or B) do you encourage other members of the party to play roles that are respectful of the one party member who is of noble blood?; or C) do you downplay the whole noble thing when it comes up?
Well, the three questions above assume that there's some kind of generation system in place to determine the social status of your players. Otherwise, the question becomes, is everyone noble or is everyone not? How many DMs are going to point to player two from the right and say okay, you're Prince blah-blah of the Kingdom Yah? I don't imagine that the DM that did would then follow it up with, "You're rich, you've got a personal bodyguard of forty men, from whom you have absolute loyalty." Seriously, are you going to play a thief standing next to that crowd?
Well, I would have issues.
More likely the DM will pull out the old saw, yes, you're a prince, but you've got no money, the kingdom is being run by your uncle that married your mother, and your father's a ghost, etcetera. What's more, the kingdom of your birth is a long way from here - but yes, you have noble blood.
On some level, it might be fun to be a second rank player in a party like that, struggling to keep the prince alive against all odds, restraining the prince from doing anything foolish, fighting ultimately towards the goal where the prince could be reimposed upon the throne and all could be happiness and spoils.
Except for one thing - the male player who is playing the prince is almost certain to become the biggest prick in the universe. Such is D&D.
Nerds and geeks being what they are - ie., not gentlemen - there is bound to be a dearth of noblesse oblige, something that can be measured by how many special benefits/privileges that you as DM give to the little snot once the dice come up that say, yes, this fighter is of noble blood. Give him anything and he's certain to become the Marquis St. Evremonde by the second session. Give him nothing and he's apt to pout and whine that what's the point of being a noble if you can't lord it over your friends?
Now, I've been decidedly masculine in my adjectives for a reason - simply because I believe you have a much better chance of party solidarity if the girl player of the group happens to be the one of noble blood - even if she's playing a male character. Women, by and large, tend to handle this stuff better, with a sense of the dignity and responsibility that comes from being a noble person, without all the strutting testosterone that inevitably becomes the crowning center of a heavily male D&D contingent. It reminds me that I should write a post about pissing contests in D&D ... but we'll leave that off until later.
At any rate, I do have a system that allows for a very low chance of an individual being a noble; and I've always presumed that this RPG cliche would be carried forward; I've twice had a noble person rolled up. The first was successfully put on the throne of a small, regional country, just before the campaign ended permanently. The other had died, unfortunately, at fourth level before anything could be done with it.
But now I'm thinking how interesting it would be to introduce a new player into a long-time party, who happened to be a noble. Think of it: I start everyone at 1st level, which is a huge trial for new players who find they must play side by side with 7th-9th level characters. I don't have a party that pushes noobs around (my gaming group is 4/7ths female), so it works out that if the noob keeps their head down, does a small bit and lives, they go up to 4th or 5th very quickly.
But how would it be if the 1st level did start with 40 personal armed guards, led by a sixth-level-fighter and several middle level chiefs and sub-chiefs? Not henchmen, mind you, as these would have their own agenda - keep the king's spawn alive while seeing to it that he/she got some experience in the wide world - but they would be something to reckon with where it came to power plays within the group dynamic.
I think I've just talked myself into drawing up some guidelines ... someday.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Bag Of Spilling
It's convenient that, whenever I have nothing particular to say, I can do another of these:
"Let's Start From The Very Beginning (Yuna Rule):" Whenever there is a sequel to an RPG that features the same main character as the previous game, that character will always start with beginner skills. Everything that they learned in the previous game will be gone, as will all their ultra-powerful weapons and equipment.
Now, I've said it before - the video game cliches do not translate universally to D&D. But what this makes me think of is all those DMs that are out there who are treating their worlds as though they are a collection of Final Fantasy editions. In other words, Hey guys, lets dump our old characters and roll up NEW ones! Won't that be fun? Hooray!
If you'd like to know why every - fucking - superhero - movie has to be an origin story - for the good guys in the first movie, and for the bad guys in every movie thereafter - it is this rather sickening need for geeks of a particular nature to connect the word reboot with good. Having had to run a ranger for all of two complete sessions, they are now tired of running a ranger and would like to run a mage instead. Thus, let's roll up characters tonight!
And this of course translates to the DM also, who after running a D&D world for - gasp! - a whole evening, they'd like to run ... Shadowrun! Or GURPS or Call of Cthulu or the Masquerade or Whoremaster or whatever other fucking game came out in the last five minutes. Thank Buddy Christ and flapjacks, at last everyone can now reboot their adopted personalities and spend a good two or three hours rolling up or choosing new skills and abilities. Yes, we're having a good time now.
Without question there's something appealing in knowing that in rolling up new characters tonight, the dice might come up with one of those perfect combinations that will make this character truly memorable ... which is not unlike the same emotion that comes from heading down to the videogame shop (or scanning for new crap games on-line) with the dream that THIS game will be unlike any other that has ever come before, and will shatter one's malaise by proving, at last, what computer gaming can be!
Of course, the Bag of Spilling rule is there because the game makers can't think of any other way to make the game take sixty hours to play without bringing you right back to the beginning again. If they started you out at the point of the last game, the only thing they could do to fill up the time would be to make you fight the same combat over, and over, and over.
Which, let's face it, some people think would be great. This being people who have not yet found that its possible to masturbate without a video screen. The handheld, electronic device still has merit, but its not made by xBox ... though it sounds like it should be.
And so we can argue that DMs start new compaigns because, obviously, after the rolling up of new characters and the careful placement of town rumors and the cliched front entrance of the Designated Place of Questing ... they're pretty much out of gas. Their imaginations have been strained to the very limit and now, NOW, there's nothing left to do but start again. With space this time. Or steam. Or whores.
(Now I'm thinking I have to invent an RPG called 'Whoremaster,' where Players act as slavers from the Land of Albion, who must pursue their quarry through lands distant and dangerous to provide the means of resuscitating the flagging bloodlines of their Ancestral Lineage ...)
It is a weakness of the videogame format, which continues to be dependent upon creators who then provide manna for users. 'Interaction' is limited to reviewer feedback, or cheesy limited choice options after the manifestation of the game.
It is a powerful aspect of D&D that creation and participation have the potential to occur simultaneously, with the DM making shit up on the spur of the moment based upon something the players happen to mutter out loud, and the players in turn responding immediately to the invention of the DM. But whenever people speak of playing at the very edge in this manner, out come the naysayers.
Carl over at Three Hams Inn has a post up that's getting plenty of feedback related to this: you can read it here. On the page Carl makes the following point about the traditional style of playing, the one promoted in the DMG:
"Leading the group around by the nose results in frustration. Frustration for me because no one ever follows my clues or finishes my adventures, and frustration for the players because they want to do what they want, not what the DM tells them. Railroading also utterly destroys suspension of disbelief. It's like watching a movie and figuring out the entire plot in the first 10 minutes. You know what's going to happen but instead of just leaving, you have to sit there for another 90 minutes before it's over. I never want a game to go like that. I want it to be almost as much of a mystery for me, the Dungeon Master, as it is for the group of players."
To which I would add, there is a hope that characters who felt free to participate in a game that they CAN influence by their behavior will be less inclined to dump that game for the 'thrill' of once again rolling up new characters. The DM is less inclined to run out of ideas, and at the same time can enjoy the 'mystery,' as Carl puts it.
It must be very dull for some DMs to have everything laid out, where the only interest is to see how other people react to the designs I have created, at some point in the past. Believe me, I understand that interest - I'm experiencing it now, since I am writing this and it is being done at some point in the gentle reader's past. It is an experience that does not compare to the animated, spirited experience of being in a room full of people all creating at the same time. Writing, as far as its emotional gratification, is tepid compared with the gritty back-and-forth of a game. Which would be why I could understand many DMs getting upset that their carefully preplanned adventures don't rouse the room quite as spiritedly as they hope for -
Whereas beginning again, that jumpy, urging excitement that comes with the fresh spilling of dice and the results that are produced - where no one knows what's going to happen - too often proves to be the best moment in a DM's campaign. Which is a sad thing to think about.
"Let's Start From The Very Beginning (Yuna Rule):" Whenever there is a sequel to an RPG that features the same main character as the previous game, that character will always start with beginner skills. Everything that they learned in the previous game will be gone, as will all their ultra-powerful weapons and equipment.
Now, I've said it before - the video game cliches do not translate universally to D&D. But what this makes me think of is all those DMs that are out there who are treating their worlds as though they are a collection of Final Fantasy editions. In other words, Hey guys, lets dump our old characters and roll up NEW ones! Won't that be fun? Hooray!
If you'd like to know why every - fucking - superhero - movie has to be an origin story - for the good guys in the first movie, and for the bad guys in every movie thereafter - it is this rather sickening need for geeks of a particular nature to connect the word reboot with good. Having had to run a ranger for all of two complete sessions, they are now tired of running a ranger and would like to run a mage instead. Thus, let's roll up characters tonight!
And this of course translates to the DM also, who after running a D&D world for - gasp! - a whole evening, they'd like to run ... Shadowrun! Or GURPS or Call of Cthulu or the Masquerade or Whoremaster or whatever other fucking game came out in the last five minutes. Thank Buddy Christ and flapjacks, at last everyone can now reboot their adopted personalities and spend a good two or three hours rolling up or choosing new skills and abilities. Yes, we're having a good time now.
Without question there's something appealing in knowing that in rolling up new characters tonight, the dice might come up with one of those perfect combinations that will make this character truly memorable ... which is not unlike the same emotion that comes from heading down to the videogame shop (or scanning for new crap games on-line) with the dream that THIS game will be unlike any other that has ever come before, and will shatter one's malaise by proving, at last, what computer gaming can be!
Of course, the Bag of Spilling rule is there because the game makers can't think of any other way to make the game take sixty hours to play without bringing you right back to the beginning again. If they started you out at the point of the last game, the only thing they could do to fill up the time would be to make you fight the same combat over, and over, and over.
Which, let's face it, some people think would be great. This being people who have not yet found that its possible to masturbate without a video screen. The handheld, electronic device still has merit, but its not made by xBox ... though it sounds like it should be.
And so we can argue that DMs start new compaigns because, obviously, after the rolling up of new characters and the careful placement of town rumors and the cliched front entrance of the Designated Place of Questing ... they're pretty much out of gas. Their imaginations have been strained to the very limit and now, NOW, there's nothing left to do but start again. With space this time. Or steam. Or whores.
(Now I'm thinking I have to invent an RPG called 'Whoremaster,' where Players act as slavers from the Land of Albion, who must pursue their quarry through lands distant and dangerous to provide the means of resuscitating the flagging bloodlines of their Ancestral Lineage ...)
It is a weakness of the videogame format, which continues to be dependent upon creators who then provide manna for users. 'Interaction' is limited to reviewer feedback, or cheesy limited choice options after the manifestation of the game.
It is a powerful aspect of D&D that creation and participation have the potential to occur simultaneously, with the DM making shit up on the spur of the moment based upon something the players happen to mutter out loud, and the players in turn responding immediately to the invention of the DM. But whenever people speak of playing at the very edge in this manner, out come the naysayers.
Carl over at Three Hams Inn has a post up that's getting plenty of feedback related to this: you can read it here. On the page Carl makes the following point about the traditional style of playing, the one promoted in the DMG:
"Leading the group around by the nose results in frustration. Frustration for me because no one ever follows my clues or finishes my adventures, and frustration for the players because they want to do what they want, not what the DM tells them. Railroading also utterly destroys suspension of disbelief. It's like watching a movie and figuring out the entire plot in the first 10 minutes. You know what's going to happen but instead of just leaving, you have to sit there for another 90 minutes before it's over. I never want a game to go like that. I want it to be almost as much of a mystery for me, the Dungeon Master, as it is for the group of players."
To which I would add, there is a hope that characters who felt free to participate in a game that they CAN influence by their behavior will be less inclined to dump that game for the 'thrill' of once again rolling up new characters. The DM is less inclined to run out of ideas, and at the same time can enjoy the 'mystery,' as Carl puts it.
It must be very dull for some DMs to have everything laid out, where the only interest is to see how other people react to the designs I have created, at some point in the past. Believe me, I understand that interest - I'm experiencing it now, since I am writing this and it is being done at some point in the gentle reader's past. It is an experience that does not compare to the animated, spirited experience of being in a room full of people all creating at the same time. Writing, as far as its emotional gratification, is tepid compared with the gritty back-and-forth of a game. Which would be why I could understand many DMs getting upset that their carefully preplanned adventures don't rouse the room quite as spiritedly as they hope for -
Whereas beginning again, that jumpy, urging excitement that comes with the fresh spilling of dice and the results that are produced - where no one knows what's going to happen - too often proves to be the best moment in a DM's campaign. Which is a sad thing to think about.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Science Is Bad
"Luddite Rule (or, George Lucas Rule):" Speaking of which, technology is inherently evil and is the exclusive property of the Bad Guys. They're the ones with the robots, factories, cyberpunk megalopolises and floating battle stations, while the Good Guys live in small villages in peaceful harmony with nature. (Although somehow your guns and/or heavily armed airships are exempted from this.)
Ah, this.
Within my experience, this is far more a trope of film and video game than it is of D&D. It was advanced for film as a thematic principle for a number of reasons - it creates conflict, first and foremost, and it was important in the 1920s and 30s to establish the main character as someone the audience could identify with ... at a time when audiences were less well off and were largely rural born and living in cities when their parents were not. Thus, the viewer IS someone who came from a small village, and now found his or her self in a highly technological world (full of switchboards, tubes and typewriters), where the Bad Guys were bosses with the technology who forced farm boys and farm girls to work as operators and secretaries. So it made sense that they'd go to the moviehouse to watch ordinary rural-derived heroes put down smarmy, know-it-all villains with their honesty, their home-spun good sense and their spunky insight. This is called the George Lucas rule because he loved those old films and serials that devised those themes.
If the gentle reader will forgive me for not rushing straight into D&D, I'd like to also mention a similar theme, where a technologically dependent city-dweller is presented as a feckless boob when faced with the common sense of the ordinary clodhopper. It was a favorite theme of O.Henry, and made it's way through successful franchises like Ma & Pa Kettle, right up to the Beverly Hillbillies of the 1960s, where the rich, connected banker wound up being made a fool in every single episode.
So it isn't so much that science is somehow something that only bad people like, it is that science is understood by one kind of person, which is then seen as bad by the sort of people who do not understand science. And since group B is a lot bigger than group A, and films are dependent upon selling to the largest possible market share ... science is bad.
This has been carried forward into video games largely because many of the front line programmers working out there (and those with money) were born in the 60s and the 70s and are still influenced by those themes that were pounded into their heads at an early age. That, and the writing for video games is atrociously awful, and hopelessly mired in themes that the writers themselves are plainly too ignorant to understand ... i.e., it was always done this way, this works, let's keep doing it. As the TV tropes page says, "Writers are not scientists."
But of course video gamers aren't rural born, love technology, don't relate remotely with the whole "I was born in a small village" cliche and generally get mildly sick at all the sappy bullshit.
Which is why D&D seems exempt from this. I know there are players out there who embrace the concept of happy peasants capable of doing anything a king can do (yes, still pissed about that). Still, I think most players don't identify their characters as rural hayseeds, but rather fundamentally cosmopolitan and awfully streetwise. This is because, well, we are, aren't we? D&D has never been an overly popular game in small towns and villages (woe betide the poor bastard living in Jordan, Montana, population 364) and it is far easier to get a game going in a big city - anything with more than 200,000 is a safe bet there's a game going on somewhere. As such, the busy ratrace of daily life is ordinary for us and we're tapped into the highest technology available ... there's a shop just down the road that sells it. So it's a rare player that eschews an artifact of massive power potential on the basis of, 'my character is a simple soul and despises gadgets.'
Moreover, there's a natural reason not to give the enemy too many specialized items; unlike the movies, where everything gets conveniently blown up, many items - after being used by the Bad Guys - fall into the hands of the Good Guys. A smart DM knows not to load up the villains with too many nice toys, since those toys will have a drama-destroying impact on future obstacles the DM cares to invent.
Going one step further, my players will generally speak of the days when they will have the resources to make their own golems, raise their own remorhaz beasts, build their own underwater submersibles and so on ... so clearly, they're ready to embrace the power. I don't know one of them who talks of the day when they'll retire their character to some small village somewhere.
I guess they all want to be Bad Guys.
Ah, this.
Within my experience, this is far more a trope of film and video game than it is of D&D. It was advanced for film as a thematic principle for a number of reasons - it creates conflict, first and foremost, and it was important in the 1920s and 30s to establish the main character as someone the audience could identify with ... at a time when audiences were less well off and were largely rural born and living in cities when their parents were not. Thus, the viewer IS someone who came from a small village, and now found his or her self in a highly technological world (full of switchboards, tubes and typewriters), where the Bad Guys were bosses with the technology who forced farm boys and farm girls to work as operators and secretaries. So it made sense that they'd go to the moviehouse to watch ordinary rural-derived heroes put down smarmy, know-it-all villains with their honesty, their home-spun good sense and their spunky insight. This is called the George Lucas rule because he loved those old films and serials that devised those themes.
If the gentle reader will forgive me for not rushing straight into D&D, I'd like to also mention a similar theme, where a technologically dependent city-dweller is presented as a feckless boob when faced with the common sense of the ordinary clodhopper. It was a favorite theme of O.Henry, and made it's way through successful franchises like Ma & Pa Kettle, right up to the Beverly Hillbillies of the 1960s, where the rich, connected banker wound up being made a fool in every single episode.
So it isn't so much that science is somehow something that only bad people like, it is that science is understood by one kind of person, which is then seen as bad by the sort of people who do not understand science. And since group B is a lot bigger than group A, and films are dependent upon selling to the largest possible market share ... science is bad.
This has been carried forward into video games largely because many of the front line programmers working out there (and those with money) were born in the 60s and the 70s and are still influenced by those themes that were pounded into their heads at an early age. That, and the writing for video games is atrociously awful, and hopelessly mired in themes that the writers themselves are plainly too ignorant to understand ... i.e., it was always done this way, this works, let's keep doing it. As the TV tropes page says, "Writers are not scientists."
But of course video gamers aren't rural born, love technology, don't relate remotely with the whole "I was born in a small village" cliche and generally get mildly sick at all the sappy bullshit.
Which is why D&D seems exempt from this. I know there are players out there who embrace the concept of happy peasants capable of doing anything a king can do (yes, still pissed about that). Still, I think most players don't identify their characters as rural hayseeds, but rather fundamentally cosmopolitan and awfully streetwise. This is because, well, we are, aren't we? D&D has never been an overly popular game in small towns and villages (woe betide the poor bastard living in Jordan, Montana, population 364) and it is far easier to get a game going in a big city - anything with more than 200,000 is a safe bet there's a game going on somewhere. As such, the busy ratrace of daily life is ordinary for us and we're tapped into the highest technology available ... there's a shop just down the road that sells it. So it's a rare player that eschews an artifact of massive power potential on the basis of, 'my character is a simple soul and despises gadgets.'
Moreover, there's a natural reason not to give the enemy too many specialized items; unlike the movies, where everything gets conveniently blown up, many items - after being used by the Bad Guys - fall into the hands of the Good Guys. A smart DM knows not to load up the villains with too many nice toys, since those toys will have a drama-destroying impact on future obstacles the DM cares to invent.
Going one step further, my players will generally speak of the days when they will have the resources to make their own golems, raise their own remorhaz beasts, build their own underwater submersibles and so on ... so clearly, they're ready to embrace the power. I don't know one of them who talks of the day when they'll retire their character to some small village somewhere.
I guess they all want to be Bad Guys.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Videogame Settings
“The Compulsories:” There’s always a fire dungeon, an ice dungeon, a sewer maze, a misty forest, a derelict Ghost Ship, a mine, a glowing crystal maze, an ancient temple full of traps, a magic floating castle, and a technological dungeon.
If you will follow the link, you will find a long, long list of cliche'd videogame settings - any one of which, if worked upon with imagination and a glimmer of originality, will probably win you the 'design your own dungeon' contest of your dreams. As I look over the list, it occurs to me that there are a lot of them that I have used for D&D in the last two years, notably Chokepoint Geography, the Shifting Sand Land (when my players were in a Persian desert) and a First Town. I've used quite a few on the overall list in thirty years, so I don't claim any innocence. A setting like those named is easy to create on the spur of the moment, easy to grasp for the players and typically fairly direct in terms of running through a number of scenarios, one after another. I will probably use them again.
But my opinion of them? I mean, how do I feel, as a DM, after running as long as I have?
Meh.
Remember that as I write this that I've been running a single combat with my offline campaign which has now gone continuously for 8 runnings. So I am clearly insane. My players, too, are clearly insane. I was told over the weekend by another DM that he wished he had players with the sort of resolve and commitment that I have. I suppose I should be grateful ... except that it seems to me that I've always had players like that and I am therefore guilty of taking them for granted. Naturally, as they read this they will agree that I am very ungrateful and that to show my gratitude for all their years of loyal playing and appearance at sessions I need to grant them all one level and their choice of three magic items ... each ...
Ahhh ... fuck 'em.
But keeping this steadfast, plodding behaviour in mind, I have no strong desire to subject my players to a lengthy dungeon, of any variety. Online, it would make the most sense that I would put my new players inside some underground hole and have them fight their way out ... and then let them find some tiny village, and only after that let them find their way to some significant city. In that way they would've had the opportunity to guess my playing style and get comfortable with it. But did I do it that way? No. I screwed them by dropping them very unfairly into this greatly random environment with unlimited choices and opportunities, and then expected them to adapt.
Even when I dropped one group onto a moving ship, without any chance to move about, I still didn't give them a clear set of objectives. I gave them nothing. And in the space of a year, with three different parties, I still have not employed a single lair of any sort ... not one that was underground, or on a mountain top, or anywhere else.
I am such a selfish bastard.
The reasons for this selfishness is simple. I am bored stupid with the video game format of get this, grab that and go there. I don't even play that sort of video game any longer - mostly because I consider myself spoiled by games like Sim City 4, Zoo Tycoon, Civilization IV and yes, the Sims (not the recent version, however, where everything was grossly dumbed down for the popular people). I call these things 'maintenance games,' since they mostly force players to fix and replace and fiddle and what have you to keep the game going optimally. Civ IV is of course the most linear of them, but I am a fiddler at heart - I want to play games without clear guidelines as to winners and losers. I don't have the necessary testosterone to give a shit who shoots who in Call of Duty or any other first person shooter game, based on the seratonin-induced thrill of pretending to kill. My seratonins are long since dried up - except for actual, real life sexual activity - and I need diversions for my brain. To many guys, I know, that makes me a bit of a pansy. Twas ever thus. Who knew that someday jocks would start defining manliness where it applied to video games?
As a result, the more two-dimensional the format, the harder it is for me to get interested. This massive combat I'm playing is anything BUT two-dimensional. It is complex, non-guaranteed strategy played at its limit, with no promise of victory. That fascinates the hell out of me, and it fascinates my players.
I am reminded of the first time the game of D&D was explained to me, back in September of 1979, using these approximate words:
"Imagine that you're standing in front of a door and beside the door there are three buttons. And you have to pick the right button, or a big block falls down from the ceiling and kills you. But if you pick the right button you can go through the door and live. What do you do?"
Well, back then, when I was fifteen, that sounded pretty cool. Now it sounds stupid. It sounds, in fact, moronically insipid to the extreme ... and it begs me to ask, "Do I have to press a button? Couldn't I just walk away?"
But for most DMs, of course, you DO have to press a button. That is the whole point. You are not permitted any non-button-pressing privileges. This format is designed that a button must be pressed and you are to do the pressing. You are told, "If you look very closely, and very carefully at the clues that I have spent half the night before concocting in my brain, you will know exactly what button to press. Go on. Make up your mind."
I have. I've decided to play the game differently.
I've decided that, now and then, I will create such moments if the party insists on getting themselves into such a trapped situation - but I won't trap them there, and chances are they haven't really trapped themselves, either. Chances are, there's a different way out - most likely, the way they came in.
In other words, if the party really wants to explore an underground lair, I won't stop them. But they've got to want it. They've got to want it enough to seek out such a place, and enter it all on their own ... in which case, they are welcome to stay for as long as they want.
Personally, I can think of other things to do.
If you will follow the link, you will find a long, long list of cliche'd videogame settings - any one of which, if worked upon with imagination and a glimmer of originality, will probably win you the 'design your own dungeon' contest of your dreams. As I look over the list, it occurs to me that there are a lot of them that I have used for D&D in the last two years, notably Chokepoint Geography, the Shifting Sand Land (when my players were in a Persian desert) and a First Town. I've used quite a few on the overall list in thirty years, so I don't claim any innocence. A setting like those named is easy to create on the spur of the moment, easy to grasp for the players and typically fairly direct in terms of running through a number of scenarios, one after another. I will probably use them again.
But my opinion of them? I mean, how do I feel, as a DM, after running as long as I have?
Meh.
Remember that as I write this that I've been running a single combat with my offline campaign which has now gone continuously for 8 runnings. So I am clearly insane. My players, too, are clearly insane. I was told over the weekend by another DM that he wished he had players with the sort of resolve and commitment that I have. I suppose I should be grateful ... except that it seems to me that I've always had players like that and I am therefore guilty of taking them for granted. Naturally, as they read this they will agree that I am very ungrateful and that to show my gratitude for all their years of loyal playing and appearance at sessions I need to grant them all one level and their choice of three magic items ... each ...
Ahhh ... fuck 'em.
But keeping this steadfast, plodding behaviour in mind, I have no strong desire to subject my players to a lengthy dungeon, of any variety. Online, it would make the most sense that I would put my new players inside some underground hole and have them fight their way out ... and then let them find some tiny village, and only after that let them find their way to some significant city. In that way they would've had the opportunity to guess my playing style and get comfortable with it. But did I do it that way? No. I screwed them by dropping them very unfairly into this greatly random environment with unlimited choices and opportunities, and then expected them to adapt.
Even when I dropped one group onto a moving ship, without any chance to move about, I still didn't give them a clear set of objectives. I gave them nothing. And in the space of a year, with three different parties, I still have not employed a single lair of any sort ... not one that was underground, or on a mountain top, or anywhere else.
I am such a selfish bastard.
The reasons for this selfishness is simple. I am bored stupid with the video game format of get this, grab that and go there. I don't even play that sort of video game any longer - mostly because I consider myself spoiled by games like Sim City 4, Zoo Tycoon, Civilization IV and yes, the Sims (not the recent version, however, where everything was grossly dumbed down for the popular people). I call these things 'maintenance games,' since they mostly force players to fix and replace and fiddle and what have you to keep the game going optimally. Civ IV is of course the most linear of them, but I am a fiddler at heart - I want to play games without clear guidelines as to winners and losers. I don't have the necessary testosterone to give a shit who shoots who in Call of Duty or any other first person shooter game, based on the seratonin-induced thrill of pretending to kill. My seratonins are long since dried up - except for actual, real life sexual activity - and I need diversions for my brain. To many guys, I know, that makes me a bit of a pansy. Twas ever thus. Who knew that someday jocks would start defining manliness where it applied to video games?
As a result, the more two-dimensional the format, the harder it is for me to get interested. This massive combat I'm playing is anything BUT two-dimensional. It is complex, non-guaranteed strategy played at its limit, with no promise of victory. That fascinates the hell out of me, and it fascinates my players.
I am reminded of the first time the game of D&D was explained to me, back in September of 1979, using these approximate words:
"Imagine that you're standing in front of a door and beside the door there are three buttons. And you have to pick the right button, or a big block falls down from the ceiling and kills you. But if you pick the right button you can go through the door and live. What do you do?"
Well, back then, when I was fifteen, that sounded pretty cool. Now it sounds stupid. It sounds, in fact, moronically insipid to the extreme ... and it begs me to ask, "Do I have to press a button? Couldn't I just walk away?"
But for most DMs, of course, you DO have to press a button. That is the whole point. You are not permitted any non-button-pressing privileges. This format is designed that a button must be pressed and you are to do the pressing. You are told, "If you look very closely, and very carefully at the clues that I have spent half the night before concocting in my brain, you will know exactly what button to press. Go on. Make up your mind."
I have. I've decided to play the game differently.
I've decided that, now and then, I will create such moments if the party insists on getting themselves into such a trapped situation - but I won't trap them there, and chances are they haven't really trapped themselves, either. Chances are, there's a different way out - most likely, the way they came in.
In other words, if the party really wants to explore an underground lair, I won't stop them. But they've got to want it. They've got to want it enough to seek out such a place, and enter it all on their own ... in which case, they are welcome to stay for as long as they want.
Personally, I can think of other things to do.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Nominatives
There may be a few people out there who felt that, since my first few cliche posts were negative, that I intended to rant about all of them. So it might have been odd that the last couple weren't especially vitriolic - I may have disappointed some.
As it happens, my acidic responses are not something I have on tap. I have to actually despise something before I can rail against it. I know, I know - if that's the case, what am I doing on the internet? Sometimes I'm not sure. Just waiting for a streetcar, I guess.
That said, we'll move forward. This is the first multiple cliche I've tackled - because they are connected:
"Some Call Me ... Tim?:" Good guys will only have first names, and bad guys will only have last names. Any bad guy who has a first name will become a good guy at some point in the game. Good guys' last names may be mentioned in the manual, but they will never be referred to in the story.
"Nominal Rule:" Any character who actually has a name is important in some way and must be sought out. However, if you are referred to as a part of a possessive noun ("Crono's Mom") then you are superfluous.
Naming is often a novelist's pet subject, and has been ever since Dickens taught us we could name characters Honeythunder and Skimpole - the conception that a character's names could mean something significant to what the character was. I have named survivor characters "Seth" (Adam's 3rd son), unlucky characters "Murphy" and heartless murderers "Kelt" (invaders from the north, remember?), only to have readers scratch their heads and miss the point. For the most part, I might as well have named them Bob and Rick ... but I keep trying, since it's more fun for me. These days, you still have to incorporate names as unsubtle as Dickens for them to be noticed, but with a modern flavour, like calling a gay pimp "Dick Joint." But I digress, and I haven't even started yet.
The two cliches above can be explained easily. Last names are colder and have less emotional attachment than first names. Coming up with meaningful names for people is hard.
A lot of the time, we never do find out a person's name ... particularly if that person is just scenery for us. We chat with the girl in the coffee shop every day before work, but it can be months before there's a convenient moment to find out their name - which we then forget promptly as it isn't that important (unless we plan to date her, right?) We don't care about the names of bus drivers, the asshole driving the sportscar that just cut us off, the kid in the ticket booth or the poor slob emptying the garbage outside the bathroom at the sports arena. When the usher tells you to get your feet off the seat in front of you at the movie theatre, you don't ask for their name, do you?
If you do, you have serious confrontation issues.
So it is convenient enough to make some grunting statement about the guard telling you to move it along or the tax man clipping you for two gold for that shiny mithril helmet you must wear every place and won't leave in your room at the Inn. If I gave you a name, you wouldn't remember it, and I wouldn't remember it. I have better things to do as DM than to make endless notes about what the tax man's name is until - yes, he's relevant.
Deciding who is relevant can be a tremendous hassle. Fact is, for every forty names that I give a party, there is perhaps one that gets remembered - and still usually with a dialogue like, "Who's Gracco?" "You know, the guy who ran that Inn in the town outside Brawnick." This is usually how it goes, off-line particularly, since my online players can look shit up. I've given the city as Brunswick, not 'Brawnick,' the town was Wolfenbuttel and the Inn was named the Red Roan. But who remembers?
Give the party a hireling, tell the party to name the hireling and they will remember the hireling's name. But tell the party the hireling's name and they'll be saying for three sessions, "Rudert? Rugert? Which is it?" - when the fellow's name is Goethe.
The whole first name/last name thing breaks down a little, since the more bad ass we want the good guy to be, the more likely you remember him by his last name ... particularly if the guy's name gets shouted at lot by his partner or by the bad guys. McLean was the Die Hard, Riggs was the Lethal Weapon, Porter went after the Payback and both Angel and Butterman are the Hot Fuzz. It has ever been such: we remember all badass historical figures by the last name: Patton, Lee, Rommel, Wellington, Wallace, Custer (not as much a badass as he thought he was) and so on. American Presidents get both names, but the last is still more important. Kings get a first name, which is why it's 'Napoleon' and not 'Bonaparte.' King Louis XIV, Philip II and Queen Elizabeth had last names, but they don't get mentioned unless the whole line is being discussed. When you're really big, people think that your title is your last name; Genghis Khan, or Augustus. And finally, the Gods get to use their only name, always.
So unless it is a king or a god, the tougher and nastier I want the NPC to be, the more likely I am to give them a last name. Makes them more distant, more obscure. I have a paladin named Eberhardt Hornung, I'm going to call him by his last name. But I want his girlfriend to be softer, warmer, more emotionally attached - so she gets called Serafina. If I want a sort of pleasant, clerical fellow to be met along the way, he gets named Jan. If its a brother and sister pair of murderers and con-artists, they get to be known as Herieux. And so on.
So it isn't so much protagonist vs. antagonist. More like threatening vs. non-threatening. When I was young I used to dream of the day when I would grow up and be called Mr. Such-and-such, like I had to call everyone older than 18 when I was just a kid. But by the time I got old enough to be called that, my culture got all soft and sympathetic, deciding that Mr. This or Ms. That was just too threatening for everyday contact ... and so we are all reduced to the general arrangement first established in kindergarten. Makes me bitter whenever I think about it.
I like being known by my last name. Makes me feel badass. Yeah. Don't fuck with --. He'll hurt you.
As it happens, my acidic responses are not something I have on tap. I have to actually despise something before I can rail against it. I know, I know - if that's the case, what am I doing on the internet? Sometimes I'm not sure. Just waiting for a streetcar, I guess.
That said, we'll move forward. This is the first multiple cliche I've tackled - because they are connected:
"Some Call Me ... Tim?:" Good guys will only have first names, and bad guys will only have last names. Any bad guy who has a first name will become a good guy at some point in the game. Good guys' last names may be mentioned in the manual, but they will never be referred to in the story.
"Nominal Rule:" Any character who actually has a name is important in some way and must be sought out. However, if you are referred to as a part of a possessive noun ("Crono's Mom") then you are superfluous.
Naming is often a novelist's pet subject, and has been ever since Dickens taught us we could name characters Honeythunder and Skimpole - the conception that a character's names could mean something significant to what the character was. I have named survivor characters "Seth" (Adam's 3rd son), unlucky characters "Murphy" and heartless murderers "Kelt" (invaders from the north, remember?), only to have readers scratch their heads and miss the point. For the most part, I might as well have named them Bob and Rick ... but I keep trying, since it's more fun for me. These days, you still have to incorporate names as unsubtle as Dickens for them to be noticed, but with a modern flavour, like calling a gay pimp "Dick Joint." But I digress, and I haven't even started yet.
The two cliches above can be explained easily. Last names are colder and have less emotional attachment than first names. Coming up with meaningful names for people is hard.
A lot of the time, we never do find out a person's name ... particularly if that person is just scenery for us. We chat with the girl in the coffee shop every day before work, but it can be months before there's a convenient moment to find out their name - which we then forget promptly as it isn't that important (unless we plan to date her, right?) We don't care about the names of bus drivers, the asshole driving the sportscar that just cut us off, the kid in the ticket booth or the poor slob emptying the garbage outside the bathroom at the sports arena. When the usher tells you to get your feet off the seat in front of you at the movie theatre, you don't ask for their name, do you?
If you do, you have serious confrontation issues.
So it is convenient enough to make some grunting statement about the guard telling you to move it along or the tax man clipping you for two gold for that shiny mithril helmet you must wear every place and won't leave in your room at the Inn. If I gave you a name, you wouldn't remember it, and I wouldn't remember it. I have better things to do as DM than to make endless notes about what the tax man's name is until - yes, he's relevant.
Deciding who is relevant can be a tremendous hassle. Fact is, for every forty names that I give a party, there is perhaps one that gets remembered - and still usually with a dialogue like, "Who's Gracco?" "You know, the guy who ran that Inn in the town outside Brawnick." This is usually how it goes, off-line particularly, since my online players can look shit up. I've given the city as Brunswick, not 'Brawnick,' the town was Wolfenbuttel and the Inn was named the Red Roan. But who remembers?
Give the party a hireling, tell the party to name the hireling and they will remember the hireling's name. But tell the party the hireling's name and they'll be saying for three sessions, "Rudert? Rugert? Which is it?" - when the fellow's name is Goethe.
The whole first name/last name thing breaks down a little, since the more bad ass we want the good guy to be, the more likely you remember him by his last name ... particularly if the guy's name gets shouted at lot by his partner or by the bad guys. McLean was the Die Hard, Riggs was the Lethal Weapon, Porter went after the Payback and both Angel and Butterman are the Hot Fuzz. It has ever been such: we remember all badass historical figures by the last name: Patton, Lee, Rommel, Wellington, Wallace, Custer (not as much a badass as he thought he was) and so on. American Presidents get both names, but the last is still more important. Kings get a first name, which is why it's 'Napoleon' and not 'Bonaparte.' King Louis XIV, Philip II and Queen Elizabeth had last names, but they don't get mentioned unless the whole line is being discussed. When you're really big, people think that your title is your last name; Genghis Khan, or Augustus. And finally, the Gods get to use their only name, always.
So unless it is a king or a god, the tougher and nastier I want the NPC to be, the more likely I am to give them a last name. Makes them more distant, more obscure. I have a paladin named Eberhardt Hornung, I'm going to call him by his last name. But I want his girlfriend to be softer, warmer, more emotionally attached - so she gets called Serafina. If I want a sort of pleasant, clerical fellow to be met along the way, he gets named Jan. If its a brother and sister pair of murderers and con-artists, they get to be known as Herieux. And so on.
So it isn't so much protagonist vs. antagonist. More like threatening vs. non-threatening. When I was young I used to dream of the day when I would grow up and be called Mr. Such-and-such, like I had to call everyone older than 18 when I was just a kid. But by the time I got old enough to be called that, my culture got all soft and sympathetic, deciding that Mr. This or Ms. That was just too threatening for everyday contact ... and so we are all reduced to the general arrangement first established in kindergarten. Makes me bitter whenever I think about it.
I like being known by my last name. Makes me feel badass. Yeah. Don't fuck with --. He'll hurt you.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Parental Abandonment
“Single Parent Rule:” RPG characters with two living parents are almost unheard of. As a general rule, male characters will only have a mother, and female characters will only have a father. The missing parent either vanished mysteriously and traumatically several years ago or is never referred to at all. Frequently the main character’s surviving parent will also meet an awkward end just after the story begins, thus freeing him of inconvenient filial obligations.
The last three words are the kicker - parents, and family in general, are plainly something that we'd like to ditch where it comes to our imaginations. Good thing, too, since Mom probably wouldn't approve of gouging out that goblin's skull and using it and your favorite dagger to play snag-the-eye-socket when things get dull. When I write novels I tend to whack off both my protagonists parents before the story starts, mostly because I don't like my own parents and I'm not interested in creating an ersatz functional family. It helps my characters retain their rugged lone wolf natures, people going it alone with a fuck-you attitude towards others. Much like any group of D&D players.
I pretty much hate family stories, in film or literature, since they tend to be very preachy. RPGs are proof-positive that players believe happiness can be obtained without needing family ... either the one that spawns us, or one we might spawn. I offer this piece of advice, as something the gentle reader should never do as a DM: if you want to curse a female character in a party, make her pregnant. The player will not be amused. And that, dear friends, is a social commentary on many, many levels.
(I did have a player who did get married, and did have children, and the campaign running long enough for that player's children to grow into young adults. But this is extraordinarily rare in my experience).
In recognition that we in western society clearly hate our parents and will happily identify with orphans and abandoned children in film after film, have a look at the truly impressive list of children's stories, from Disney, Pixar and Don Bluth, where parents are non-existent or clearly an afterthought. This goes on and on, in live action children's films as well as animations ... we are programmed from the age of four to fantasize about discarding our parents. Why, look at the three great children's stories of English literature: Peter Pan, the Wizard of Oz and Alice of Wonderland.
Adventure begins when the parents are gone.
That's really all I have to say on the subject. I can hardly encourage players to think more about their imaginary mothers and fathers, now can I? Who would, anyway? I mean, unless your father is the King of the Land ...
But then a thought does occur to me. What would anyone say to a starting adventure for a party being the intentional murder of the character's rich, wealthy parents, in order to usurp the family business, or merely to obtain for themselves a nice compensation. Yes, that's right Marvolo ... your father is rich, very rich, and he has been a bastard to you all your life - your mother too! Don't you remember, your mother killed your dog Rex ... and fed his to the corpse to the pigs? For ten years, you've hated them, despised them, thought of all you could do with their money. And now today, this very morning, your master has declared there's nothing else he can teach you. Today you are a first level thief!
Naw.
The last three words are the kicker - parents, and family in general, are plainly something that we'd like to ditch where it comes to our imaginations. Good thing, too, since Mom probably wouldn't approve of gouging out that goblin's skull and using it and your favorite dagger to play snag-the-eye-socket when things get dull. When I write novels I tend to whack off both my protagonists parents before the story starts, mostly because I don't like my own parents and I'm not interested in creating an ersatz functional family. It helps my characters retain their rugged lone wolf natures, people going it alone with a fuck-you attitude towards others. Much like any group of D&D players.
I pretty much hate family stories, in film or literature, since they tend to be very preachy. RPGs are proof-positive that players believe happiness can be obtained without needing family ... either the one that spawns us, or one we might spawn. I offer this piece of advice, as something the gentle reader should never do as a DM: if you want to curse a female character in a party, make her pregnant. The player will not be amused. And that, dear friends, is a social commentary on many, many levels.
(I did have a player who did get married, and did have children, and the campaign running long enough for that player's children to grow into young adults. But this is extraordinarily rare in my experience).
In recognition that we in western society clearly hate our parents and will happily identify with orphans and abandoned children in film after film, have a look at the truly impressive list of children's stories, from Disney, Pixar and Don Bluth, where parents are non-existent or clearly an afterthought. This goes on and on, in live action children's films as well as animations ... we are programmed from the age of four to fantasize about discarding our parents. Why, look at the three great children's stories of English literature: Peter Pan, the Wizard of Oz and Alice of Wonderland.
Adventure begins when the parents are gone.
That's really all I have to say on the subject. I can hardly encourage players to think more about their imaginary mothers and fathers, now can I? Who would, anyway? I mean, unless your father is the King of the Land ...
But then a thought does occur to me. What would anyone say to a starting adventure for a party being the intentional murder of the character's rich, wealthy parents, in order to usurp the family business, or merely to obtain for themselves a nice compensation. Yes, that's right Marvolo ... your father is rich, very rich, and he has been a bastard to you all your life - your mother too! Don't you remember, your mother killed your dog Rex ... and fed his to the corpse to the pigs? For ten years, you've hated them, despised them, thought of all you could do with their money. And now today, this very morning, your master has declared there's nothing else he can teach you. Today you are a first level thief!
Naw.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Competence Zone
I'm enjoying writing these, so ...
"Logan's Run Rule:" RPG characters are young. Very young. The average age seems to be 15, unless the character is a decorated and battle-hardened soldier, in which case he might even be as old as 18. Such teenagers often have skills with multiple weapons and magic, years of experience, and never ever worry about their parents telling them to come home from adventuring before bedtime. By contrast, characters more than twenty-two years old will cheerfully refer to themselves as washed-up old fogies and be eager to make room for the younger generation.
Some weeks ago, upon attending the horrendous local convention, I did notice that the age of most players was upwards of thirty ... and quite a bit upwards of thirty. My friend Carl of Three Hams Inn has written the same about PAX, but his blog doesn't seem to have an archive that I can search, so I can't find the relative post ... but you have to believe me. The DM's all seem to be forty. There are younger players out there, I'm sure - but they don't seem to make themselves known. Even those players who drift through the local gaming store hereabouts seem, at their youngest, to be in their 20s (what the hell, they play 4e anyway).
So the cliche, at least in regards to RPG players identifying themselves as free teenagers who don't have to pay attention to their parents, seems something that applies to consoles. Some of those 40-year-old players are probably still living in their parents basements - or, as in one case I know, in their parent's house now that the parents are dead - but they've moved past the rebellious stage. They're doing their mom's laundry because it keeps mom happy.
However, yes. Characters in the game are still very young. I've never known anyone who started players at tenth level who suggested that those characters should be in, say, their thirties. It is still assumed that these brand new tenth level characters are young - as seen by the artistic depictions of players. My offline players are all in their early twenties, and massively into hardcore anime (the nasty stuff, where characters wash their hands in the guts of other characters - none of that Inuyasha shit), and so yes, all the depictions of their characters on their sheets or desktops are fourteen-year-old girls and guys. It disappoints them when I say that their new mage is in his late thirties, or that the dwarven cleric is old. But no matter - because they forget all that when it comes to playing their character anyway.
The whole issue is locked closely into the perception of charisma that goes along with the game. Bad enough that virtually every depiction of a character is an image that has at least a 15 charisma (my online campaign subverts this, for the most part) ... but unquestionably, every character who speaks to an NPC does so with the expectation that they will be a) respected on account of their level; or b) respected on account of how carefully the player has decided to shape the words they use in roleplay. Invariably, a 10-charisma character, speaking to the local innkeeper, will leap in with, "My good man, be a good fellow and see to it that my friends and I are set up with good drinks, a fair bit of entertainment and of course some excellent venison ... be quick and I'll ensure your efforts are well paid!"
No one wants to approach a bartender with, "Uh, I'm a ... I was thinking ... is the ale ... uh, good? Can I get some?"
Some people, playing a 7 or lower charisma, might try, "Gods, what a dump. Got any ale that isn't piss?" Which is, of course, fun - but this low-born loquaciousness immediately evaporates when the character is faced with someone, or something, capable of re-fashioning the character's spine into a deck chair. Too much bad charisma is not good for one's health.
I think people would rather be beautiful, and they would rather be accepted as beautiful - and throughout the culture, young is beautiful. Even the 40-year-old wants to be 16 again, this being a fantasy of older persons since forever - and in a way D&D, as it and the players age, becomes more and more a venue for that. I would expect to see, in another twenty years, the game played in old age homes as a nostalgic way to get reacquainted with youth. They learned it in high school ... when again they're forced into a social living environment, they can revisit the game again.
No doubt, a given portion of the population finds this cliche intolerable. I'm not one of them. I am much more attractive in my mind than I am in reality, and as my forty-fifth year dwindles away I am much younger in my mind also. I still view 22-year-old fetish fuel pump jockeys in leather and chain bikinis pretty much as I did twenty years ago ... only now, I know if I actually met one they'd look at me and think, "Why is that old fart hanging around here?" Once upon a time, this would have been closer to, "What the hell does that geek want?" So my expectations aren't any lower, they're just redirected.
Thus, I don't look at my player's representations of themselves and say, "Isn't that a little much, given that your face was cut up very badly in that run-in with the pedaphile treant?" No, I just look at the image and say, "Cool."
"Logan's Run Rule:" RPG characters are young. Very young. The average age seems to be 15, unless the character is a decorated and battle-hardened soldier, in which case he might even be as old as 18. Such teenagers often have skills with multiple weapons and magic, years of experience, and never ever worry about their parents telling them to come home from adventuring before bedtime. By contrast, characters more than twenty-two years old will cheerfully refer to themselves as washed-up old fogies and be eager to make room for the younger generation.
Some weeks ago, upon attending the horrendous local convention, I did notice that the age of most players was upwards of thirty ... and quite a bit upwards of thirty. My friend Carl of Three Hams Inn has written the same about PAX, but his blog doesn't seem to have an archive that I can search, so I can't find the relative post ... but you have to believe me. The DM's all seem to be forty. There are younger players out there, I'm sure - but they don't seem to make themselves known. Even those players who drift through the local gaming store hereabouts seem, at their youngest, to be in their 20s (what the hell, they play 4e anyway).
So the cliche, at least in regards to RPG players identifying themselves as free teenagers who don't have to pay attention to their parents, seems something that applies to consoles. Some of those 40-year-old players are probably still living in their parents basements - or, as in one case I know, in their parent's house now that the parents are dead - but they've moved past the rebellious stage. They're doing their mom's laundry because it keeps mom happy.
However, yes. Characters in the game are still very young. I've never known anyone who started players at tenth level who suggested that those characters should be in, say, their thirties. It is still assumed that these brand new tenth level characters are young - as seen by the artistic depictions of players. My offline players are all in their early twenties, and massively into hardcore anime (the nasty stuff, where characters wash their hands in the guts of other characters - none of that Inuyasha shit), and so yes, all the depictions of their characters on their sheets or desktops are fourteen-year-old girls and guys. It disappoints them when I say that their new mage is in his late thirties, or that the dwarven cleric is old. But no matter - because they forget all that when it comes to playing their character anyway.
The whole issue is locked closely into the perception of charisma that goes along with the game. Bad enough that virtually every depiction of a character is an image that has at least a 15 charisma (my online campaign subverts this, for the most part) ... but unquestionably, every character who speaks to an NPC does so with the expectation that they will be a) respected on account of their level; or b) respected on account of how carefully the player has decided to shape the words they use in roleplay. Invariably, a 10-charisma character, speaking to the local innkeeper, will leap in with, "My good man, be a good fellow and see to it that my friends and I are set up with good drinks, a fair bit of entertainment and of course some excellent venison ... be quick and I'll ensure your efforts are well paid!"
No one wants to approach a bartender with, "Uh, I'm a ... I was thinking ... is the ale ... uh, good? Can I get some?"
Some people, playing a 7 or lower charisma, might try, "Gods, what a dump. Got any ale that isn't piss?" Which is, of course, fun - but this low-born loquaciousness immediately evaporates when the character is faced with someone, or something, capable of re-fashioning the character's spine into a deck chair. Too much bad charisma is not good for one's health.
I think people would rather be beautiful, and they would rather be accepted as beautiful - and throughout the culture, young is beautiful. Even the 40-year-old wants to be 16 again, this being a fantasy of older persons since forever - and in a way D&D, as it and the players age, becomes more and more a venue for that. I would expect to see, in another twenty years, the game played in old age homes as a nostalgic way to get reacquainted with youth. They learned it in high school ... when again they're forced into a social living environment, they can revisit the game again.
No doubt, a given portion of the population finds this cliche intolerable. I'm not one of them. I am much more attractive in my mind than I am in reality, and as my forty-fifth year dwindles away I am much younger in my mind also. I still view 22-year-old fetish fuel pump jockeys in leather and chain bikinis pretty much as I did twenty years ago ... only now, I know if I actually met one they'd look at me and think, "Why is that old fart hanging around here?" Once upon a time, this would have been closer to, "What the hell does that geek want?" So my expectations aren't any lower, they're just redirected.
Thus, I don't look at my player's representations of themselves and say, "Isn't that a little much, given that your face was cut up very badly in that run-in with the pedaphile treant?" No, I just look at the image and say, "Cool."
Monday, April 12, 2010
Orphan's Plot Trinket
"Cubic Zirconium Corollary": The aforementioned mysterious girl will be wearing a pendant that will ultimately prove to be the key to either saving the world or destroying it.
How old is this? Old. When Plautus was writing Three's Company plays in the third century BCE, this was old. (Seriously. Three's Company. Go look it up.) And as it was good enough for a host of brilliant writers (including Victor Hugo or Somerset Maugham), I shouldn't go too far in dissing it here. The plot device is just too damn useful ... and frankly, I wouldn't be above it myself.
I don't have any fault that a pendant would ultimately, somehow, make the difference in the adventure - but does it have to be the only exceptional bauble mentioned in the entire campaign? Yes, this is a gem, and this is a necklace, and this is a pendant that is made of a substance you have never seen, with a weird and deeply compelling glow, that apparently serves no special purpose whatsoever.
Oh come on. We're not idiots.
If you will use this device (and I encourage its use), please try to remember that repeating the presence of the item over and over tends to destroy the 'surprise' element that is inherent in the device's inclusion. We don't need to be told every time the girl is mentioned that she is also wearing the pendant; it doesn't have to glow; it doesn't have to have any special characteristics at all. In fact, don't even mention the thing, at least not until Act III, when it should be accidently discovered and given some purpose that actually closes the player's mind on the subject.
NOT, I might add, having it said that "Oh, this thing? I don't know where it came from, or what it's for ... but I've had it since birth ..."
Why not just hang a neon sign around the girl's neck? Try instead, "It's a piece off my mother's ring - pretty, isn't it?" Say it with a really dumb voice and you might get that past the players. Even, "I bought it three months ago for two gold pieces - the vendor said it wasn't real." In other words, make the presence of the thing believable. You are not, after all, Charles Dickens.
Here's another thought. Make it a red herring. Make the damn thing actually have no value whatsoever. Then you can pump it up to your heart's delight, and laugh fit to kill watching the party trying to insert the thing into every crack and crevice from the top of the dungeon to the bottom. Until finally they show it to the big bad at the end, who takes it and says, "This? They sell these six for a copper in Xjjaytt!" before unconcernedly tossing it aside.
Sometimes there's no trouble with the cliche. It's all in how it's played.
How old is this? Old. When Plautus was writing Three's Company plays in the third century BCE, this was old. (Seriously. Three's Company. Go look it up.) And as it was good enough for a host of brilliant writers (including Victor Hugo or Somerset Maugham), I shouldn't go too far in dissing it here. The plot device is just too damn useful ... and frankly, I wouldn't be above it myself.
I don't have any fault that a pendant would ultimately, somehow, make the difference in the adventure - but does it have to be the only exceptional bauble mentioned in the entire campaign? Yes, this is a gem, and this is a necklace, and this is a pendant that is made of a substance you have never seen, with a weird and deeply compelling glow, that apparently serves no special purpose whatsoever.
Oh come on. We're not idiots.
If you will use this device (and I encourage its use), please try to remember that repeating the presence of the item over and over tends to destroy the 'surprise' element that is inherent in the device's inclusion. We don't need to be told every time the girl is mentioned that she is also wearing the pendant; it doesn't have to glow; it doesn't have to have any special characteristics at all. In fact, don't even mention the thing, at least not until Act III, when it should be accidently discovered and given some purpose that actually closes the player's mind on the subject.
NOT, I might add, having it said that "Oh, this thing? I don't know where it came from, or what it's for ... but I've had it since birth ..."
Why not just hang a neon sign around the girl's neck? Try instead, "It's a piece off my mother's ring - pretty, isn't it?" Say it with a really dumb voice and you might get that past the players. Even, "I bought it three months ago for two gold pieces - the vendor said it wasn't real." In other words, make the presence of the thing believable. You are not, after all, Charles Dickens.
Here's another thought. Make it a red herring. Make the damn thing actually have no value whatsoever. Then you can pump it up to your heart's delight, and laugh fit to kill watching the party trying to insert the thing into every crack and crevice from the top of the dungeon to the bottom. Until finally they show it to the big bad at the end, who takes it and says, "This? They sell these six for a copper in Xjjaytt!" before unconcernedly tossing it aside.
Sometimes there's no trouble with the cliche. It's all in how it's played.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hiro Rule
“Thinking With the Wrong Head”: No matter what they are accused of or how mysterious their origins, the hero will always be ready to fight to the death for any girl they met three seconds ago.
Quite some time ago, I wrote a rather frothing rant about heroism and D&D, and I find myself with this particular cliché forced to cover some of that ground over again. My argument at that time was that the player was not a hero. The response made it quite clear that many people wanted to be heroes - and that I was insensitive to that position.
So much for old times.
It is this stupid cliché above, this nonsensical knight in shining armor perspective on women, that says they have to be protected and that it takes a DUDE to do it, that frankly sickens me. But mostly it is that DMs (and the makers of RPG games) rely so fundamentally on this testicle-generated motivation … I mean, I don’t mind bringing up love in a game, or even pushing a player to accept lust as something they have no control over - but I don’t expect players to sacrifice their character (which has tangible qualities) for girlie NPCs (which don’t).
But - and I hate to admit this - I probably could.
My experience has been that it's shooting fish in a barrel to get a group of nerdy RPGers to rescue chicks from … wherever. I don’t know why. Not getting enough, I guess. It must be that every player needs a “rescued the princess” war story to tell at some mythical gathering of players at some convention or other. As a DM, you introduce the girl, introduce the villain, have the villain openly insult the player and then flit off with the girl (who is sweet and cute and wouldn’t say shit if her mouth was full of it) … and you have a ready adventure.
Gag.
What is it that turns so many cloistered pud-pounding virgins into macho shitheads the first time they get a chance to roleplay? Very often I’ve had to admit to myself (and to either of my wives) that it is probably for the best that some nerds are rather socially leprous and bad smelling. If they had girlfriends, they’d probably hit them.
That … was pretty low. But if you’re taking umbrage at it, I think you’re ready for a really close look in the mirror. Given the number of times I can remember being at a gaming table and seeing the way the one girl player was treated (an odd combination of condescension and hopeful lip service), I can’t believe that every player who is out there can’t see there being a problem with a certain species of player who must identify so strongly with the squashing-monsters-for-chicks perpective of the game. The console manufacturers make money from it, the film industry make money from it … I’m only laying it out here as it works in the real world.
It isn’t, however, as though the women themselves who play this game identify particularly with the Virgin Connie Swail. They seem just as enriched by blood lust as the men, moderated perhaps by having somewhat less need to save innocents to gratify their egos. Women players play backstabbing thieves, murderous assassins, ball-busting rangers and fire-sacrificing clerics with all the aplomb and taste for rampage as their sexual counterparts … so what is it with all the purity crap?
You should have noticed by now that the cliché quoted above never says that the women the heros are fighting for ARE, in fact, innocent. There is a subtext, however - that it is assumed somehow that no matter what they may be, they are still presumed to be innocent, and therefore to be fought for. Somehow, this hero mindset makes every woman, however presented, necessarily pure … simply because I, Clodd of Oatenchew, shall not let her die!
For shit’s sake.
Quite some time ago, I wrote a rather frothing rant about heroism and D&D, and I find myself with this particular cliché forced to cover some of that ground over again. My argument at that time was that the player was not a hero. The response made it quite clear that many people wanted to be heroes - and that I was insensitive to that position.
So much for old times.
It is this stupid cliché above, this nonsensical knight in shining armor perspective on women, that says they have to be protected and that it takes a DUDE to do it, that frankly sickens me. But mostly it is that DMs (and the makers of RPG games) rely so fundamentally on this testicle-generated motivation … I mean, I don’t mind bringing up love in a game, or even pushing a player to accept lust as something they have no control over - but I don’t expect players to sacrifice their character (which has tangible qualities) for girlie NPCs (which don’t).
But - and I hate to admit this - I probably could.
My experience has been that it's shooting fish in a barrel to get a group of nerdy RPGers to rescue chicks from … wherever. I don’t know why. Not getting enough, I guess. It must be that every player needs a “rescued the princess” war story to tell at some mythical gathering of players at some convention or other. As a DM, you introduce the girl, introduce the villain, have the villain openly insult the player and then flit off with the girl (who is sweet and cute and wouldn’t say shit if her mouth was full of it) … and you have a ready adventure.
Gag.
What is it that turns so many cloistered pud-pounding virgins into macho shitheads the first time they get a chance to roleplay? Very often I’ve had to admit to myself (and to either of my wives) that it is probably for the best that some nerds are rather socially leprous and bad smelling. If they had girlfriends, they’d probably hit them.
That … was pretty low. But if you’re taking umbrage at it, I think you’re ready for a really close look in the mirror. Given the number of times I can remember being at a gaming table and seeing the way the one girl player was treated (an odd combination of condescension and hopeful lip service), I can’t believe that every player who is out there can’t see there being a problem with a certain species of player who must identify so strongly with the squashing-monsters-for-chicks perpective of the game. The console manufacturers make money from it, the film industry make money from it … I’m only laying it out here as it works in the real world.
It isn’t, however, as though the women themselves who play this game identify particularly with the Virgin Connie Swail. They seem just as enriched by blood lust as the men, moderated perhaps by having somewhat less need to save innocents to gratify their egos. Women players play backstabbing thieves, murderous assassins, ball-busting rangers and fire-sacrificing clerics with all the aplomb and taste for rampage as their sexual counterparts … so what is it with all the purity crap?
You should have noticed by now that the cliché quoted above never says that the women the heros are fighting for ARE, in fact, innocent. There is a subtext, however - that it is assumed somehow that no matter what they may be, they are still presumed to be innocent, and therefore to be fought for. Somehow, this hero mindset makes every woman, however presented, necessarily pure … simply because I, Clodd of Oatenchew, shall not let her die!
For shit’s sake.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Doomed Hometown
So, that went fairly well. Let’s try another one.
“No! My beloved peasant village!”: The hero’s home town, city, slum or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.
Let me just say, I never saw Alderaan. I don’t know how beautiful a planet it was, I never sat down and had tea with any of the people who lived there, I really had no attachment to the place at all. When it blew up, I suppose I had a very similar thought to other people: “That was pretty cool.”
And now even the explosion was pretty lame.
Going down the list on TV Tropes, I never did have much concern for any of those poor sacrificed, burnt or butchered people in any of those movies – except that I thought Conan’s mom was pretty hot. I prefer not to see hot chicks beheaded in movies. In this case, however, it was done so artistically I am ready to make an exception.
My point is this. I am a character in your world, and you have just had my village decimated (though that doesn’t mean what people think it means), eradicated, eviscerated or expurgated ... why should I care? I didn’t grow up with any of these people as my parents, I don’t have memories of being picked up and soothed after stabbing myself in the foot with a sharp stick, none of them taught me anything about the Gods. Sure, Conan had memories like that, and I can reflect and relate to Conan ... but my character in your world isn’t the subject of a major motion picture and there are no important memory sequences between my character and his dad before his dad gets butchered by brigands. So why are you wasting your time trying to create this motivation for me?
Most of the time DMs are unsurprisingly ready to destroy towns, cities, kingdoms – whatever it takes to evoke an visceral reaction from their players. Now, this is not the sort of thing I am at all interested in. For me, it’s going to be pretty fucking hard to explain just where the hell Germany went – particularly as it is still there after tanks and bombers blew the shit out of the country from end to end for four years. Pieces of land, ethnic entities and so on are surprisingly resilient. Even cities. Want to guess how many times Rome was gutted by fire and pillaged? And yet the Coliseum is still there. Go figure.
In D&D, of course, there’s never anything left except a hole. Or a expanse of burnt field. There are never any survivors, as fire literally rained from the heavens and if the gods don’t want survivors, there are no survivors. That’s how it goes.
And still the players look at all this wanton destruction, and go “meh.” Or even better, “Well fellas, we’ll be drinkin’ Saturday nights at the next town over.”
But break a minor possession of one player, say an ‘egg-cup of mediocre healing,’ enabling an increase of 1 hp of healing per day if the player takes the time to soft boil an egg ... and the villainous cretin who “Done broke my eggcup!” will be pursued to the ends of the world. Players relate to things they, well, that they relate to. Personal, treasured things, often the cuter the better. That egg-cup will mean much more to them than a +2 sword, since +2 swords are a dime a dozen once you drop below dungeon level five, but where the hell are they going to get another egg-cup like that? “I loved that egg-cup,” the character will moan at regular intervals, until all the other players scream at them to shut up!
The destruction of the village/town/planet or what have you is a sign of dreaded overkill, and quite frankly evidence of a bad writer, who has failed to recognize that we actually don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the value of our country or hometown. Yes, we’re told we ought to do so, it is something we are propagandized to do ... and we probably would deeply regret having said entity blown all to hell. But this is something that doesn’t even translate very well into an alternative real entity, when it isn’t ours. Not living in New York, my sense of loss about the Two Towers is pretty much all second hand. I know there are people out there who miss them awfully; but for me, who has seen them on one occasion, the most it means to me comes when I see them in a movie made before 2001. I’m not connected to them in the way that a New Yorker is – and even though a New Yorker feels that I ought to be, just as I ought to love everything about New York simply because it IS New York ... I really don’t feel much of anything. I’m not even American, so I have trouble identifying with the whole “They attacked us!” mind set. Yes, they attacked Americans. They didn’t attack me.
It’s worse with fictional destruction. You want to destroy something fictional, you better spend more than a little time relating it to me, personally. I’m saying that a few establishing shots of Alderaan might have made a difference. It might have made the planet more than just a big ball.
Help me. Make the village my friend, first. Demonstrate its importance to me. Make me care. Otherwise, you might just as well leave the damn thing standing there.
And besides, it might not have occurred to you ... but the greater the permanency you establish with elements of your world, the greater the effect will be when, maybe years later, you do destroy that village. I may actually care by then.
“No! My beloved peasant village!”: The hero’s home town, city, slum or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.
Let me just say, I never saw Alderaan. I don’t know how beautiful a planet it was, I never sat down and had tea with any of the people who lived there, I really had no attachment to the place at all. When it blew up, I suppose I had a very similar thought to other people: “That was pretty cool.”
And now even the explosion was pretty lame.
Going down the list on TV Tropes, I never did have much concern for any of those poor sacrificed, burnt or butchered people in any of those movies – except that I thought Conan’s mom was pretty hot. I prefer not to see hot chicks beheaded in movies. In this case, however, it was done so artistically I am ready to make an exception.
My point is this. I am a character in your world, and you have just had my village decimated (though that doesn’t mean what people think it means), eradicated, eviscerated or expurgated ... why should I care? I didn’t grow up with any of these people as my parents, I don’t have memories of being picked up and soothed after stabbing myself in the foot with a sharp stick, none of them taught me anything about the Gods. Sure, Conan had memories like that, and I can reflect and relate to Conan ... but my character in your world isn’t the subject of a major motion picture and there are no important memory sequences between my character and his dad before his dad gets butchered by brigands. So why are you wasting your time trying to create this motivation for me?
Most of the time DMs are unsurprisingly ready to destroy towns, cities, kingdoms – whatever it takes to evoke an visceral reaction from their players. Now, this is not the sort of thing I am at all interested in. For me, it’s going to be pretty fucking hard to explain just where the hell Germany went – particularly as it is still there after tanks and bombers blew the shit out of the country from end to end for four years. Pieces of land, ethnic entities and so on are surprisingly resilient. Even cities. Want to guess how many times Rome was gutted by fire and pillaged? And yet the Coliseum is still there. Go figure.
In D&D, of course, there’s never anything left except a hole. Or a expanse of burnt field. There are never any survivors, as fire literally rained from the heavens and if the gods don’t want survivors, there are no survivors. That’s how it goes.
And still the players look at all this wanton destruction, and go “meh.” Or even better, “Well fellas, we’ll be drinkin’ Saturday nights at the next town over.”
But break a minor possession of one player, say an ‘egg-cup of mediocre healing,’ enabling an increase of 1 hp of healing per day if the player takes the time to soft boil an egg ... and the villainous cretin who “Done broke my eggcup!” will be pursued to the ends of the world. Players relate to things they, well, that they relate to. Personal, treasured things, often the cuter the better. That egg-cup will mean much more to them than a +2 sword, since +2 swords are a dime a dozen once you drop below dungeon level five, but where the hell are they going to get another egg-cup like that? “I loved that egg-cup,” the character will moan at regular intervals, until all the other players scream at them to shut up!
The destruction of the village/town/planet or what have you is a sign of dreaded overkill, and quite frankly evidence of a bad writer, who has failed to recognize that we actually don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the value of our country or hometown. Yes, we’re told we ought to do so, it is something we are propagandized to do ... and we probably would deeply regret having said entity blown all to hell. But this is something that doesn’t even translate very well into an alternative real entity, when it isn’t ours. Not living in New York, my sense of loss about the Two Towers is pretty much all second hand. I know there are people out there who miss them awfully; but for me, who has seen them on one occasion, the most it means to me comes when I see them in a movie made before 2001. I’m not connected to them in the way that a New Yorker is – and even though a New Yorker feels that I ought to be, just as I ought to love everything about New York simply because it IS New York ... I really don’t feel much of anything. I’m not even American, so I have trouble identifying with the whole “They attacked us!” mind set. Yes, they attacked Americans. They didn’t attack me.
It’s worse with fictional destruction. You want to destroy something fictional, you better spend more than a little time relating it to me, personally. I’m saying that a few establishing shots of Alderaan might have made a difference. It might have made the planet more than just a big ball.
Help me. Make the village my friend, first. Demonstrate its importance to me. Make me care. Otherwise, you might just as well leave the damn thing standing there.
And besides, it might not have occurred to you ... but the greater the permanency you establish with elements of your world, the greater the effect will be when, maybe years later, you do destroy that village. I may actually care by then.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Sleepyhead
Admittedly, there has been a considerable amount of complaining on this blog of late; I have not posted any rules or maps or spreadsheets, that sort of meat that I have recently called for, primarily because I have been arrested with certain philosophical pursuits which have been time consuming. What time I have spent towards D&D I have used to crunch numbers in an attempt to make my massive 20 meg distance table more accessible, which I’ve done by making it a 40 meg spreadsheet with a great deal more information on it. Sadly, it isn’t the sort of the thing that makes good posting material.
If you are going to have a blog that lasts more than two years, I can suggest strongly to you that you develop a set of features … which will give you something to write about when nothing comes to mind. My Civilization posts, for example, which I’ve been putting out for months now, and will put out for months yet. They do tend to be a bit dry, however, and I have been thinking about something I could rant on regularly that would have more … zest, shall we say. I think I’ve hit on something which, unfortunately, both inspires me to write and also suggests I am setting myself up for a mighty fall. Nevertheless, nature hates a coward, so we shall give it a try. Don’t think too ill of me if in a month or two I simply give it up.
There is a list, available here, under the pompous title: The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches. It is very good for a laugh. For me, I figure, if I'm going to bitch about things, I might just as well do it by the numbers.
Now, while I know these things are supposed to apply to video games, they don't just apply to video games. For example: the first one on the list:
Sleepyhead Rule: The teenaged male lead will begin the first day of the game by oversleeping, being woken up by his mother, and being reminded that he's slept in so late he missed meeting his girlfriend.
I'm just going to say right up front that I am throwing out all references to video games, manga, anime (where this applies in spades) and so on ... because I want to talk about only the one RPG in particular. If you have any personal comments to make about video games and this rule, please feel free to write them in your own blog.
Writing a lede for a story, that being the journalist's word for the first sentence or the first paragraph, is a bitch. That's why the initial opening of virtually every kind of game begins with a terrible, obsequious cliche - you walk into a tavern; you awake in an inn; you arrive at the town gates; you're at the town gates and you're leaving ... and so on. Openings always suck. The story hasn't happened yet and you don't want to commit the players to anything before they've had time to breathe. For example, try starting your players off with,
"You all meet for the very first time as together you flee two hundred villagers armed with pitchforks and clubs ... one of you must have said something wrong."
Now, I just know someone is going to write a comment that says, "I have started a campaign this way!" Like that was a good thing. It really isn't, since it just requires the DM to come up with a cheap deus ex machina gimmick (a convenient hiding place, someone suddenly arriving and standing the villagers off, etc.) ... and you are right back where you started: dullsville. Most times, that machine of the gods is nothing but a huge hook, to start the story off. I won't, at the moment, go off on why that pisses me off - the gentle reader should know I'm not a fan of story-driven D&D. I'm just not.
If you want a sandbox, you've got to realize that starting off the adventure as a 'sleepyhead' is the RIGHT way to start. I don't know about you, but no matter how fucked up my day is, I usually start it by getting out of bed. Not always my bed ... but when that does happen, it's in the middle of the story and the characters ARE entitled to a beginning. They shouldn't be robbed of it.
Yes, it will almost certainly be dull. I heard the typical bleating with my last post about how DM's should make things exciting for the players, but let me tell you something - fuck all that. I am not the tap-dancing fucking entertainment director on a cruise ship. I've said that before, but the sheep just don't hear me. I DO NOT ENTERTAIN MY PLAYERS. I create a world, where my players are expected to entertain themselves.
Sure, I might mention in passing that the girlfriend did stop by, and that sleepyhead did miss the girlfriend, but that is not handing the party an adventure on a silver platter. I will throw out some very gentle hooks, some very gentle hints ... but not to tell them what to do. I do it because shit happens. If you stand on a street long enough, you will see shit happen.
In the meantime, D&D is sometimes boring. It should be ... any dramatist will tell you, that's how you build tension. You establish a baseline of careful mundanity and ratchet the moment up to GODLEVEL terror. It is the careful and clever pacing of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. The sort of pacing that will still be around when Michael-scream-from-the-start-to-the-end-Day reaches his inevitable "who the hell is he" status.
So yes. Allow for a small bit of calm, uninteresting behavior on the part of the sandbox characters. If it isn't boring them, it shouldn't be boring you. Of course, if it is boring them - and it often is - let them wallow in it at least a little while, long enough to admit they don't really have this whole sandbox thing under control.
It will teach them how to appreciate when things do start to happen.
If you are going to have a blog that lasts more than two years, I can suggest strongly to you that you develop a set of features … which will give you something to write about when nothing comes to mind. My Civilization posts, for example, which I’ve been putting out for months now, and will put out for months yet. They do tend to be a bit dry, however, and I have been thinking about something I could rant on regularly that would have more … zest, shall we say. I think I’ve hit on something which, unfortunately, both inspires me to write and also suggests I am setting myself up for a mighty fall. Nevertheless, nature hates a coward, so we shall give it a try. Don’t think too ill of me if in a month or two I simply give it up.
There is a list, available here, under the pompous title: The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches. It is very good for a laugh. For me, I figure, if I'm going to bitch about things, I might just as well do it by the numbers.
Now, while I know these things are supposed to apply to video games, they don't just apply to video games. For example: the first one on the list:
Sleepyhead Rule: The teenaged male lead will begin the first day of the game by oversleeping, being woken up by his mother, and being reminded that he's slept in so late he missed meeting his girlfriend.
I'm just going to say right up front that I am throwing out all references to video games, manga, anime (where this applies in spades) and so on ... because I want to talk about only the one RPG in particular. If you have any personal comments to make about video games and this rule, please feel free to write them in your own blog.
Writing a lede for a story, that being the journalist's word for the first sentence or the first paragraph, is a bitch. That's why the initial opening of virtually every kind of game begins with a terrible, obsequious cliche - you walk into a tavern; you awake in an inn; you arrive at the town gates; you're at the town gates and you're leaving ... and so on. Openings always suck. The story hasn't happened yet and you don't want to commit the players to anything before they've had time to breathe. For example, try starting your players off with,
"You all meet for the very first time as together you flee two hundred villagers armed with pitchforks and clubs ... one of you must have said something wrong."
Now, I just know someone is going to write a comment that says, "I have started a campaign this way!" Like that was a good thing. It really isn't, since it just requires the DM to come up with a cheap deus ex machina gimmick (a convenient hiding place, someone suddenly arriving and standing the villagers off, etc.) ... and you are right back where you started: dullsville. Most times, that machine of the gods is nothing but a huge hook, to start the story off. I won't, at the moment, go off on why that pisses me off - the gentle reader should know I'm not a fan of story-driven D&D. I'm just not.
If you want a sandbox, you've got to realize that starting off the adventure as a 'sleepyhead' is the RIGHT way to start. I don't know about you, but no matter how fucked up my day is, I usually start it by getting out of bed. Not always my bed ... but when that does happen, it's in the middle of the story and the characters ARE entitled to a beginning. They shouldn't be robbed of it.
Yes, it will almost certainly be dull. I heard the typical bleating with my last post about how DM's should make things exciting for the players, but let me tell you something - fuck all that. I am not the tap-dancing fucking entertainment director on a cruise ship. I've said that before, but the sheep just don't hear me. I DO NOT ENTERTAIN MY PLAYERS. I create a world, where my players are expected to entertain themselves.
Sure, I might mention in passing that the girlfriend did stop by, and that sleepyhead did miss the girlfriend, but that is not handing the party an adventure on a silver platter. I will throw out some very gentle hooks, some very gentle hints ... but not to tell them what to do. I do it because shit happens. If you stand on a street long enough, you will see shit happen.
In the meantime, D&D is sometimes boring. It should be ... any dramatist will tell you, that's how you build tension. You establish a baseline of careful mundanity and ratchet the moment up to GODLEVEL terror. It is the careful and clever pacing of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. The sort of pacing that will still be around when Michael-scream-from-the-start-to-the-end-Day reaches his inevitable "who the hell is he" status.
So yes. Allow for a small bit of calm, uninteresting behavior on the part of the sandbox characters. If it isn't boring them, it shouldn't be boring you. Of course, if it is boring them - and it often is - let them wallow in it at least a little while, long enough to admit they don't really have this whole sandbox thing under control.
It will teach them how to appreciate when things do start to happen.
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