Happenstance is a funny thing.

The building where my office was until last month is in the process of being torn down. All the other graduate students and professors were emptying out their offices of unwanted books so that they didn’t have to carry them in the move to a new building. As such, tables lining the hallways were piled high with books like miniature paper fortresses. While walking through this dense forest of books, a book with a clever little title caught my eye.

“The Elfish Gene.”

When I looked closer, the subtitle was “Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing up Strange.”

“Huh,” thought I. “This looks fun. And the price is right.” As I walked home I opened it up the first page and began reading. I had, literally, no idea what to expect. It turned out it was a sort of memoir by a British author named Mark Barrowcliffe of his D&D addicted youth. By the time I had reached my apartment, I had read the first three chapters. While walking.

Now, having finished the book, I can say this was a nice little bit of happenstance. Who knows if I ever would have found this book had some unknown professor not propped it in the free book piles? And boy am I glad I did. This book is fan-fucking-tastic.

To me, what this book really did is define nerdom better than any book I’ve ever read. At one point, Barrowcliffe is talking about how when he got into metal (predominantly because it made sense with his fantasy obsession) he went way overboard with the clothes. He then relates a story about how he recently went into a gaming store with his wife and found himself attempting to one-up the clerk with his old-school gaming knowledge. He concludes these stories by saying that it’s never been enough for him to be obsessed with something. Everyone he encounters must KNOW he’s obsessed.

Nerd. Defined.

This story is really a fairly classic coming-of-age memoir, minus all the sex and drugs and rock-n-roll that usually fill those books. Instead of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, it’s dungeons, dragons, and more dungeons. Barrowcliffe talks about D&D like junkies talk about heroin. He mainlined it, non-stop, right into his veins his entire adolescence.

The narrative really revolves around his relationships with hi friends, however, in particular two young boys named Billy and Andy. Barrowcliffe looked up to both of these boys, despite their night and day differences and vast discrepancies in the way they treated him. Billy was a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, literate and sensitive, who treated Barrowcliffe with genuine friendship. Andy is a manipulative, snide, fascist who treats Barrowcliffe with a combination of ambivalence and disdain. Their relationships unfold in ways which are funny, heartbreaking, and infuriating, always striking true to life.

In fact, I challenge anyone, D&D nerd or not, to read this book and not see something of their own relationships, their own life story, their own insecurities or obsessions in the narrative. I found the book calling up long-lost memories from my high school years like a wizard summons animal familiars to her side.

(Clever, eh? I thought so.)

So what about the role-playing?

It seems to me, someone who came up in the late 80s and 90s, that I was learning a little something about the early days of gaming. Barrowcliffe portrays the gamers as a group of reactionary, math-obsessed, hyper-macho, rules-lawyers living out their adolescent power-fantasies via the games they played. In other words, it sounded like a Munchkin fest. Barowcliffe seems to blame this in equal measure on both the gamers and the games, which he seems to suggest simultaneously encourage superiority and inferiority complexes.

This leads me to my main problem with the book. At times, Barrowcliffe writes in a semi-accusatory style, in which he seems to be blaming D&D for any and all problems in his young life. D&D wasn’t his problem. His problem was that he appears to have been a giant asshole when he was younger who spent all his time hanging out with other giant assholes, all of whom were completely socially inept.

Barrowcliffe does own up to this several times in the book, especially towards the end, when he actually makes some very interesting points about friendship, adolescence, gender, and relationships. Having said that, several chapters end with Barrowcliffe making overblown statement like (paraphrasing) “as I walked home that day, I had yet to realize just how dark my life was about to become as I spiraled further and further into my D&D addiction.” You can practically hear the “Dun-Dun-DUUUUHHHN!!!!” as he drops these over-dramatic cliffhangers. In fact, early in the book, as I began noticing these little asides, I worried it was going to turn into some weird cautionary, Christian tale about how awful and sinful and addictive D&D is.

Despite its too dramatic treatment of D&D as an addiction and its too frequent portrayal of the rouges gallery of dickheads at its center as blameless addicts, The Elfish Gene spends most of its time relating hilarious stories about hurt feelings over games, awkward encounters with girls, and the inability to flip off the nerd switch. My girlfriend got sick of me reading paragraphs out loud to her as I snickered and giggled at passages which were simultaneously gamer in-jokes and universalistic stories of adolescent insecurities. I truly can’t recommend this book enough to anyone who enjoys gaming, or, for that matter, to anyone who enjoys reading. Although the tendency towards treating D&D as causal in any problems in his youth rubbed me the wrong way, Barrowcliffe has more than enough brisk wit and genuine insight into growing up jammed into The Elfish Gene to keep you turning pages.

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I give up, I really do. What is it about Vincent Baker’s work that turns me in to a giggling fanboy? In general, I have little patience for fanboyism. To me the term evokes a sort of blind and arbitrary ardour for something. A kind of nerdish religious fundamentalism that brooks no critical analysis or discussion. But it would be hard to describe my relationship with Baker’s games and game theory as anything else. I have a hard time finding fault with anything that he puts out, or the style in which he does it. Even the one major complaint that I have voiced, that the rules can be obscure and dense, I actually secretly think is a good thing: I honestly love his writing style as being an act of poetic terseness! He uses one word exquisitely to say what would otherwise be said with 10! For fucks sake! Any criticism I might muster is inherently weak, because I honestly just believe that this shit is just too good.

At least I can take refuge in the fact that I’m apparently not alone in this. With the advent of his game Apocalypse World Baker has set up a some forums to provide support and give people access to hack the game for their own design. A game that I have always thought of as having a rules set utterly inseperable from the setting, being adapted to other settings? C’est impossible! But then you look at the discussion, and realise that the heart of the game is not the moves as per se, but the principles and agenda of the Master of Ceremonies. The moves, the mechanical actions possible, are really artifacts of the setting. Which means you can have a hack for the rules for most settings. There’s one in planning for Iceland, which is amazingly hot (Viking viking viking! viking!). How about the apocalypse of D&D, Dark sun? No worries! Or, my favourite two so far (both partially or fully the brain child of Baker of course) one for the game of Knife and Candle (Echo Bazaar) and one of Vincent Baker’s own design called Dragon Killer: a fantasy post apocalypse. “When the dragon lived, there was magic everywhere, and ley flowed like water. But when the King of Death broke the dragon’s heart, everything was ruined.”

Seriously, who doesn’t want to play in that world? Who doesn’t want to know what happens next, what does the dragon’s death mean, how does doom come upon us all? I feel like I should be branded, like some sort of cattle. I’ll be the Hefer with the Vx branded on it’s side. I shall attempt to maintain the poise of a critical decision maker, but in the end it’s all just the lowing of steak-in-waiting.

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Via Apocalypse world, I heard tell of a thing called Echo Bazaar. A sort of online game, played through your browser using a twitter account, of life in subterranean London after it was stolen by giant bats. You start off escaping from prison and try to make your way in this fanciful world.

It’s pretty amazing, so far. easy to play, interesting to get involved in, and there’s no time commitment other than you can when you get a mo’. I invite you to join in, delicious friend. All you need is a twitter account. You can find me under my alter ego, Motipha. I look forward to seeing you,perhaps a bout in the game of Knife and Candle, eh? All is well that never dies, you know.

Here’s a guide that helps explain what’s going on. Here’s a quick guide to the very beginning of the game, to get you started.

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R.I.P. Brother Caleb Abernathy. (Absentee) father, (former) husband, Watchdog, and a real bastard.

In our Dogs game last night, my character Caleb Abernathy bit the dust in a most spectacular way. It’s hard to die in that game and I made a pretty unlucky roll to achieve such a fate.

Caleb might be one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created. He’s sort of a combination of El Topo, The Man With No Name, and Nathan Fillion’s creepy priest (also named Caleb) from the last season of BtVS. He’s actually a revamp of my character from APoWo cultist character who intentionally had his hand shot off and whom I never felt I got to fully explore. Caleb was more fully explored, but with his death it becomes quite apparent that the gaming gods don’t want me to explore zealotry as much as I want myself to.

I have mixed feelings about Caleb’s death. It sucks that he died because I really liked the character and I was looking forward to more fully exploring his zealotry, as well as seeing how his relationship with Rob and Reek’s characters unfolded. Rob’s character Brother Joshua an infinitely more gentle soul and I was interested in seeing where their relationship led.

Having said that, he sure went out in a cool way. After dispelling the two demons left in the town the Dogs were in, Caleb, with his last bit of will, burned the home where Brother Joshua’s sinful sister Ruth and her slothful husband Josea lived, something that Joshua would have never been able to do himself. All three died in the blaze. Brother Joshua tried to rescue Ruth, but had to give up to save his own life. After that, he could only watch as the house burned down.

How often do you get an ending like that, right?

Which leads me to my point: I’m a big fan of games in which the death and dying mechanics allow the characters to frame their own deaths. Dust Devils has a similar mechanic, in which a character isn’t forced to “die,” but is removed from the game, at their own discretion, and allowed to narrate how they leave, given the circumstances. This certainly can be a dramatic death scene, or it can be something quiet and thoughtful, or, if the circumstances allow, it can be some mega-happy ending. Just as long as the character is retired, somehow.

I feel this mechanic can also be brought into games where it’s not intended. Who’s to say that when you hit 0 hit points in D&D (or negative 10, or whatever) you don’t get to decide how your character goes out? As a GM I would be quite sympathetic to a player saying they take some villain, or something, with them if they could think of a super-cool way to do it.

Either way, we’ll all be seeing Caleb in RPG character hell. He’ll be the one preaching about sin to a room full of powergame barbarians looking confused.

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So there are some quality issues with fifty-three that are being sorted out. In the meanwhile, episode fifty-three has been severely delayed. Sorry about that guys, hopefully we’ll get it out soon.

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On the way to work this morning I heard this story regarding a book about facebook. The author interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (It seems appropriate to link to his facebook account) and mentioned one point that caught me: Apparently Mr. Zuckerberg believes that all people have one identity. My understanding of his position is that all people should have one face they show the world, one unified approach/social persona/whatever for all the people who interact with them. This is apparently part of his drive for facebook, and an argument for why you should use it to link information not only for friends, but coworkers, business partners, and absolutely everyone and anyone you might come in contact with.

While I have not read the book I must say: codswallop. Claptrap, even. I’d go so far as to say bunkum (For those of you wondering, yes, I did look up synonyms for this post. Do you see the research I do for you guys?). Speaking for myself, I have distinctly different personalities dependent not only on whose company I am in, but the situation and environment. While my underlying self does not change, the external demeanour I show the world changes radically in order to suit my needs. In this way I can maintain relationships with deeply divergent groups of people. While there is a core self that does not change, there are other aspects that do. Not everyone needs to interact with me in the strongly pedantic and literal fashion in which I relate to my co-workers about work. My relationship with my parent’s is conducted in a normal speaking voice and with few if any exclamations. I enjoy spending time with people with whom I would never, ever indulge in ad hominem attacks because with them it’s not a necessary part of banter, but a hurtful attack that does nothing but derail and damage our friendship and conversations.

I’m not even going to touch on the need for space between paramours.

I think as gamers we have an interesting perspective on this subject. On the cast we have mentioned that most people tend to play characters that are alike in some ways; you might call it that player’s signature. But beyond such similarities we play many and varying personas, some as outlets of ourselves, some as explorations of who(m?) we are not, as well as other reasons. We revel in multiple identities in our fantasy worlds, because they provide space for us to truly, completely express ourselves. People are far, far more complicated than a single identity could truly give vent to: at times paradoxical (hypocritical, even), often conflicted, mostly expressing ourselves in a way that best suits our situation at that moment. To suggest that we should try to be all these parts of ourselves at once at the same time invites confusion, incomprehensibility and even madness.

While I appreciate Mr Zuckerberg’s apparent desire for understanding and comprehension between people, I think it is deeply mislead. People not only are but need deeply complex and ridiculously plural in natures: to try to boil that down to a single identity is a waste of time and a disservice to humanity. The alternative approach, to encapsulate all the vagaries and variation of a person in one go, would end up with an unintelligible morass of detail that it would take years of study to comprehend. let people be different to each other, and complicated, and hidden. We understand each other better that way, and it takes less work than people trying to pretend they’re always the same person.

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So we began our game of BASH this past weekend, and I think that it went pretty well, overall.

What I really wanted to do was create a fairly open world superhero game which was based on my own, personal, academic and political interests (social movements, corporate malfeasance, journalism, partisanship, post 9/11 paranoia, etc). BASH seemed like an idea system because it’s very rules light when compared to most superhero games, which read like airplane instructions. What I wanted was a simple mechanic which could almost disappear as the characters explored the world and the characters.

I told my players that I wanted them to play a grittier sort of superhero. Some of my inspirations for the game are Brian K. Vaughn’s brilliant Ex Machina, the great videogame Infamous, various Batman stories, and various Alan Moore projects. This, to me, meant that they didn’t necessarily have to call themselves “(insert something here) man” and wear capes. I would have been perfectly happy if they just had regular names and no costumes. They rose to the challenge. They created a group of super heroes with names which are more like nicknames than superhero names (“Pockets” because he wears a big coat, “Doctor” because he’s a scientist, etc.), none of whom wear costumes, all of whom have complicated backstories.

Oh yeah. And Scott’s playing a dog. A literal dog. Who can’t talk.

This all got me thinking: what makes for a good hero to play, or just a good hero in general? Certainly, comic books have moved from 2-dimensional do-gooder type characters to more nuanced characters. Does this make them more interesting?

BASH suggests that all characters must have a “mental malfunction” which is the reason they fight crime (i.e. Batman’s parents were killed. HIS PARENTS WERE KILLED!!!!!!). So is it true that heroes are more interesting, or realistic, or whatever, when they have some kind of quirk which demonstrates that they’re as flawed as the rest of us?

Personally, I tend to think that, yes, heroes are more interesting when there’s something wrong with them. People are more interesting when there’s something wrong with them, so it stands to reason that the same would go for heroic type folks, right? Having said that, what makes a good “mental malfunction,” in BASH’s terms? I’d imagine that a very small percentage of the population has had someone close to them die under mysterious circumstances, but I’d put money on the table that over 50% of RPG characters are currently dealing with some kind of ridiculously tragic death (Batman’s parents were killed. HIS… PARENTS… WERE…. KILLED!!!!!).

What are some other possibilities? It occurred to me that I like to play people driven by some kind of intense zealotry. That’s a nice little thing to drive someone. Next time I make a player character, though, I might flip it around. How about a heroic character who is recovering from some kind of unsavory ideology? I think I might enjoy playing someone who just got out of a cult, who just gave up on being a white supremacist, or who is attempting to deal with their own tendency towards misogyny, because they realized that these ideologies or groups were somehow intellectually and morally bankrupt. Rather than being driven by revenge, hatred, power, etc., they could be driven by penance.

I think as our world has changed, our understanding of heroes have changed. When we were fighting Nazis in WWII, Captain America made sense. He was the ultimate good to fight the ultimate evil. Evil, however, has become more complex. Most criminals are not Adolph Hitler, they’re people who are victims of an unequal society or paper pushers who go to work everyday in a culture of greed and corruption and are just trying to keep up.
The Nazi war crimes trials showed the world, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil.” When we live in a world where evil is understood to be everyday, doesn’t it stand to reason that flawed heroes would be the most interesting to play?

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So Lost is over, and without getting too far into spoiler territory, I would say it was a highly emotionally satisfying ending, without being a particularly intellectually satisfying ending.

In other words, it was the exact opposite of the ending to, say, The Dark Tower series.

That got me thinking about what the difference is, and what works best in an R.P. situation. In some ways, it’s the difference between having your character “win,” or something like that, at the end of a campaign, versus having the thing that makes sense happen to your character. Do you like to end the campaign with that flawed, interesting character of yours succumbing to those faults, or are you only happy if you slay the dragon, rescue the princess, and get crowed new king of Awestometonia forever and ever, Amen.

Granted, that’s a false dichotomy. It’s really more of a continuum, and emotionally satisfying and intellectually satisfying can certainly co-exist, but walk with me here, for a minute, in black and white world.

It occurred to me, after watching the finale, that I almost always like the often rough, intellectually satisfying stuff to happen to my character. I like it when characters die, I’m happy when they drown in their own hubris, etc.

Having said that, I liked the ending of Lost a great deal. I don’t think they needed to explain everything. One word: midichlorians. Mysteries are cooler than explanations, almost always. If I was PLAYING Lost, however, and that was how my character wound up, I think I would have been pretty bummed out. I think on some level it demonstrates the way I think about R.P. For me, gaming is much more of an intellectual and creative output than an emotional one. I’m not a “power fantasy” type gamer. I’ve never bragged about my sword or gun. As such, I could care less if I kill the dragon. If getting killed by the dragon can bring some more pathos to the story, then that’s great.

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A friend of mine sent me this.

I actually really appreciated that story. I sometimes struggle with what it is that makes someone a “good role player.” I don’t think that characters HAVE to keep things that characters wouldn’t know secret from the other players, as in the story, but the reveal there would have so thoroughly blown my mind that it would have been worth it for me.

Either way, cool story, huh?

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Via Topless Robot.

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