There is currently a non-zero chance I'll get to game in the next few months, so I've been hard at work on a Dungeons & Dragons setting called the Island of Yane. I plan to roll it out here over the next few weeks for your reading pleasure. This should go without saying, but if you plan to play in my campaign, please don't read any of the content here.
Oh, but I'm excited! Up next: a rather ugly map.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Monday, October 28, 2013
Game Systems That Push Back
As I analyze what I want from a game it's increasingly clear that my chief criterion for a game I like is this: I want a game that lets me come up with a concept and then supports multiple ways to build a character like that.
Most classless point-buy systems, though I can respect them, offer me no visceral satisfaction when creating a character because there's only one obvious way to create any given concept. Want to be a swashbuckler? Get a high Dexterity, crank up your Rapier skill, and select swashbuckler-related Advantages. Breezily simple, and ideal for many purposes, but in some perverse fashion, I would rather feel my hands sink into clay when building a character rather than swimming through air.
In the opposite fashion, old-school D&D-style games are frustrating because other than the handful of concepts the game supports, there's no way to build most characters. Want a swashbuckler? Ask your DM to carve out exceptions for you because otherwise the rules say you'll be sub-optimal to the point of total ineffectiveness.
By contrast, robust class systems (and a few robust skill-and-power systems) offer multiple routes to a single core concept. In D&D3/3.5/Pathfinder, you want a swashbuckler? Right out of the core book, you've got the obvious choice (a rogue), rangers, certain fighter builds, bards, maybe one or two other classes if you rope in supplements. You've got a system that pushes back and gives you chewy mechanical ways to build different kinds of swashbucklers, or dragon wizards, or pyromancers, or whatever nerdy stuff you want.
(One of my frustrations with the monk when I ran D&D3 was its lack of conceptual flexibility. The strict, limited power progression meant that there was only one concept associated with the monk class: the "monk" concept.)
In creating Genius: The Transgression, this goal of mine reaches its deranged and borderline-ridiculous zenith, where for almost any given mad scientist concept, you can find a home in the game's 5x2 structure (ten groups total, built along two axes, so all characters belong to a "job" group and a "personality" group). And each option gives you a bit of mechanical "pushback" to your concept and a lot of narrative and conceptual pushback. If you want to play a "plant scientist," the obvious choice is the Progenitor Foundation, but less obvious choices create weird new juxtapositions that are inherently interesting. What about a Direct Plant scientist? King of the plant people! What about a Navigator (the "combat" Foundation)? A knight of thorns? Spore guns and vine grapple-hooks? Likewise, the personality axis yields strange, chewy results that enrich whatever concept you've envisioned. Genius' classes don't just support your core concept, they distort it through a prism of unusual assumptions that, I hope, gives you more ideas than you started out with.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
D&D Novels: They Are Bad
Breaking news, right?
In high school I probably read a combined total of around a hundred million words of D&D-inspired fiction. That sort of thing should prevent me from ever becoming a real writer, but I think I learned something from the experience.
D&D novels, like most media tie-ins, are bad. Among other reasons, they're bad because they cannot use one of the most important tools in the speculative fiction writer's arsenal: the ability to tie the plot to the world's setting.
The best fantasy (like the best science fiction, which is one of the many sub-genres of fantasy that is fun because it's easier to believe it could be real) derives its plots from the rules of its world. The Lord of the Rings loses its power if you remove its underlying metaphysical and moral assumptions about the nature of loss, power, and the need to preserve the past. If The Lord of the Rings isn't conservative (in almost every sense of the word), it's nothing, and since the first wave of Tolkien clones hit in the 70s, critics have lamented the inability of Tolkien's imitators to understand that you can't separate Tolkien's plot from his own personal views.
D&D fiction goes further than that, creating an enforced bubble of artificial reality (the D&D rules) in which the plot must take place, but the D&D rules don't make for good metaphysics, for obvious reasons: a deep, metaphysically robust game system makes for a bad universal fantasy system. So D&D writers, who are not all terrible, substitute familiarity for the metaphysics-as-plot link that fantasy needs. Instead of building a story around a magic system (think Elantris; in fact, go ahead and think of almost any good speculative fiction), the writers parade before us one familiar item after another--here is a magic missile spell; here is a paladin; here is a beholder.
I'm writing this because, like with Lieutenant Worf, it's a lesson I learned too well, and I'm increasingly aware that my comic tips in the opposite direction: without a proper understanding of the metaphysics of The Water Phoenix King setting, the plot is incomprehensible from top to bottom. Tolkien, at least, had evil ghost-wizards trying to take over the world; by contrast, WPK's antagonists don't necessarily even look like antagonists until you understand the underlying rules of reality that motivate them.
It's interesting to see how many elements of my own writing--including things that I'm increasingly convinced aren't very good--are reactions, and overcompensations, to the terrible rubbish-entertainment I consumed as a kid.
In high school I probably read a combined total of around a hundred million words of D&D-inspired fiction. That sort of thing should prevent me from ever becoming a real writer, but I think I learned something from the experience.
D&D novels, like most media tie-ins, are bad. Among other reasons, they're bad because they cannot use one of the most important tools in the speculative fiction writer's arsenal: the ability to tie the plot to the world's setting.
The best fantasy (like the best science fiction, which is one of the many sub-genres of fantasy that is fun because it's easier to believe it could be real) derives its plots from the rules of its world. The Lord of the Rings loses its power if you remove its underlying metaphysical and moral assumptions about the nature of loss, power, and the need to preserve the past. If The Lord of the Rings isn't conservative (in almost every sense of the word), it's nothing, and since the first wave of Tolkien clones hit in the 70s, critics have lamented the inability of Tolkien's imitators to understand that you can't separate Tolkien's plot from his own personal views.
D&D fiction goes further than that, creating an enforced bubble of artificial reality (the D&D rules) in which the plot must take place, but the D&D rules don't make for good metaphysics, for obvious reasons: a deep, metaphysically robust game system makes for a bad universal fantasy system. So D&D writers, who are not all terrible, substitute familiarity for the metaphysics-as-plot link that fantasy needs. Instead of building a story around a magic system (think Elantris; in fact, go ahead and think of almost any good speculative fiction), the writers parade before us one familiar item after another--here is a magic missile spell; here is a paladin; here is a beholder.
I'm writing this because, like with Lieutenant Worf, it's a lesson I learned too well, and I'm increasingly aware that my comic tips in the opposite direction: without a proper understanding of the metaphysics of The Water Phoenix King setting, the plot is incomprehensible from top to bottom. Tolkien, at least, had evil ghost-wizards trying to take over the world; by contrast, WPK's antagonists don't necessarily even look like antagonists until you understand the underlying rules of reality that motivate them.
It's interesting to see how many elements of my own writing--including things that I'm increasingly convinced aren't very good--are reactions, and overcompensations, to the terrible rubbish-entertainment I consumed as a kid.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Stan's Legacy
Jupiter's Legacy: another comic book about superheroes about comic books about superheroes about comic books about superheroes. From Watchmen to the early 2000s, when Warren Ellis and co. were hammering superheroes into a semblance of something worth reading again, to the present day, we've suffered through reinvention after reinterpretation of superheroes, finding exciting new ways to drag them into the muck, mire, and Twitter accounts of the real world, and it looks like Jupiter's Legacy (written by Mark Millar, beautifully illustrated by Frank Quitely) is another duck in the duck-row of "realistic" superheroes.
There's a reason no one reads this stuff.
I find myself thinking back through all the super comics I've read and trying to think of some good, critically acclaimed ones that weren't just gritty reinventions. The "Dark Phoenix" run on X-Men might qualify. Morrison has gone there once or twice. But superheroes writers keep returning to Stan's "realism" trough again and again. Stan Lee (or Kirby, or Ditko, or Francis Bacon, or whoever really wrote the Marvel comics of the early 1960s) got this ball rolling before JFK's head went back and to the left. It's hard to imagine the lurid four-color trash of the early Marvel universe as edgy, but for its day it was grim, Punisher-esque realism compared to the dead-eyed authoritarianism of DC. Early Marvel was full of for-its-time realism: ditching secret identities, operating in real cities, even attempts at "real problems." Very early X-Men rings hollow because it takes a few dozen issues to flesh out the "superheroes as oppressed minority" core conceit.
And like lesser fantasy authors imitating Tolkien's form without adapting any of his underlying message, superhero comic writers continue to reach for the simplistic solution of "more realism!" without understanding why they ought to do that. Stan (or whoever) was reaching out to a generation of young people just starting to react to the alienation of the late 50s and early 60s; the kids reading Fantastic Four #1 in grammar school would go on to become the flower children in college. The realism of those early Marvel comics didn't exist for its own sake, or because of some underlying anxiety about the laughable immaturity of superhero comics; early Marvel aimed at realism because no one was speaking to the youth of 1961. Early Marvel belongs alongside the Beatles and mod fashion: it tapped into a huge need (with the potential for huge profits), and all it had to do was acknowledge a demographic.
This means that, ultimately, the appeal of realism in those early Marvel comics was based on demographic and economic concerns: Stan was tapping a market, just like the cynical marketeers a few years earlier who saw in Elvis Presley a potential youth icon whose white skin would make him palatable across America. Of course Stan was cynical, but I would take Stan Lee's honest appraisal of the value of an untapped market over WHATEVER is motivating superhero comic writers to fling themselves at "realism" over and over again like those gene-damaged mice that only know how to run in clockwise circles.
My own comic is the absolutely self-indulgent work of an amateur. I write and draw exactly what I want without a thought for my audience. A major release from a corporation looking to make money SHOULD NOT possess that same level of self-indulgence. Consider this a plea for something I never thought would be necessary: more money-grubbing, focus-group-driven profiteering.
Superhero comics make as little money as it is possible to make. They are the Absolute Zero of profitability, earning money only through the quantum fluctuations of obligation: obligation from obsessive collectors, from reviewers, from people who love a character and don't care what plots he's driven through, and from people who, if questioned, would be as unable to explain their motivations as the average Batman TV villain. A combination of merchandising and alternative media (movies, video games) can keep a few hundred career writers and artists afloat, but that's it, and until writers can stop chasing the same ideas that appeared in 1961 and were--let's be honest--concluded to the satisfaction of any reasonable person in 1985, comics will continue their decline into irrelevance.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Odd Dreams
I'm back for more. A couple years ago I basically concluded my participation in tabletop gaming because I just couldn't get a decent group together, but right now I'm writing a novel and I need a release valve for my non-novel ideas.
Today's topic: weird dreams I had. I'm writing them down so they'll stick--and stay useful as idea-fodder, not because I expect you poor people to care.
The first was (or resembled) a Truman Capote novel, a sort of late-period 20th century meditation on declining male sexuality seen through the lens of either anthropological fiction or magical realism--I'm not sure which. In it, Capote (or "the narrator", since it was a Capote novel only by implication) finds himself in Tibet, or a place like Tibet. At first believing he is the only white man, he instead finds himself in the shadow of a fellow-researcher of whom the narrator has always been jealous, who attracts more attention and respect from the people there, especially from the young women. The narrator finds himself in a Watson-like role, recording the exploits of his friend while growing increasingly frustrated with both his friend and himself. Despite its meager plot, the novel spoke powerfully to the frustrations of people who, thinking they had escaped themselves, experienced something that once again made them who they always were. The novel ends abruptly with the two in burial shrouds, though it is implied that the narrator faked his own death--the friend did not.
The second is a trashy genre or perhaps book-list called "Havaoc," a 70s spy/martial arts thriller in the tradition of Clive Cussler, full of books with alluring covers that feature too many men in turtleneck-suits. The stories are full of beautiful women, barely coherent plots, and secret temples, with an emphasis on popular interpretations of martial arts techniques and a lot of technical information that is as detailed as it is nonsensical.
These two dreams amuse me not because they're particularly interesting, but because I can see my usual writing process in them, working even while I'm unconscious. Both are no more than combinations of things I've seen, tossed together as a bunch of interesting images, themes, and moods, with little in the way of a coherent plot-structure. I'm no good at plots. (Tabletop gaming will do that to you--plots aren't my job, after all.) The "Capote" novel is a combination of a handful of things I recently experienced, from In Cold Blood to Steven King discussing the origin of Carrie's themes to a David Foster Wallace article on the decaying trajectory of 20th century "literary" fiction to the new Great Gatsby movie (that "Watson-like" role is probably more "Carraway-like") to an article I read on sky burial to the hardcover copy of the book Alive, which I grew up staring at as a little kid and which, returning to my mother's house the other day, I saw in the same spot it always has occupied. By contrast, I think the "Havaoc" books (boy were they bad!) is my brain screaming at me to write a novel that normal people would want to read, prompted by Richard Kadrey tweeting that he found his books at an airport kiosk--a great triumph for the legitimacy of an old cyberpunk!
Today's topic: weird dreams I had. I'm writing them down so they'll stick--and stay useful as idea-fodder, not because I expect you poor people to care.
The first was (or resembled) a Truman Capote novel, a sort of late-period 20th century meditation on declining male sexuality seen through the lens of either anthropological fiction or magical realism--I'm not sure which. In it, Capote (or "the narrator", since it was a Capote novel only by implication) finds himself in Tibet, or a place like Tibet. At first believing he is the only white man, he instead finds himself in the shadow of a fellow-researcher of whom the narrator has always been jealous, who attracts more attention and respect from the people there, especially from the young women. The narrator finds himself in a Watson-like role, recording the exploits of his friend while growing increasingly frustrated with both his friend and himself. Despite its meager plot, the novel spoke powerfully to the frustrations of people who, thinking they had escaped themselves, experienced something that once again made them who they always were. The novel ends abruptly with the two in burial shrouds, though it is implied that the narrator faked his own death--the friend did not.
The second is a trashy genre or perhaps book-list called "Havaoc," a 70s spy/martial arts thriller in the tradition of Clive Cussler, full of books with alluring covers that feature too many men in turtleneck-suits. The stories are full of beautiful women, barely coherent plots, and secret temples, with an emphasis on popular interpretations of martial arts techniques and a lot of technical information that is as detailed as it is nonsensical.
These two dreams amuse me not because they're particularly interesting, but because I can see my usual writing process in them, working even while I'm unconscious. Both are no more than combinations of things I've seen, tossed together as a bunch of interesting images, themes, and moods, with little in the way of a coherent plot-structure. I'm no good at plots. (Tabletop gaming will do that to you--plots aren't my job, after all.) The "Capote" novel is a combination of a handful of things I recently experienced, from In Cold Blood to Steven King discussing the origin of Carrie's themes to a David Foster Wallace article on the decaying trajectory of 20th century "literary" fiction to the new Great Gatsby movie (that "Watson-like" role is probably more "Carraway-like") to an article I read on sky burial to the hardcover copy of the book Alive, which I grew up staring at as a little kid and which, returning to my mother's house the other day, I saw in the same spot it always has occupied. By contrast, I think the "Havaoc" books (boy were they bad!) is my brain screaming at me to write a novel that normal people would want to read, prompted by Richard Kadrey tweeting that he found his books at an airport kiosk--a great triumph for the legitimacy of an old cyberpunk!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Character Death
So yeah, I've neglected my blog. I blame Twitter. Rarely do I have something that's worth reading for more than 140 characters that isn't a comic. But that's changing. I've had a number of essays brewing lately, and right now I have one fresh in my mind.
I'm a gamer, and I always hated that nut-swinging Gamemastering style where I lord it over the players and kill them off because they weren't "smart enough" or whatever. And I'm trying to square my inclusive, tolerant, open approach to GMing with the fact that two of my characters just died like dogs in my Genius game.
Some background: Genius is a game I made for the new World of Darkness. You play mad scientists. This time, only two players showed up due to scheduling problems. They wanted to explore a warehouse full of bad guys. And basically, they screwed up, often. They made their presence known to people who were willing to kill them, they got cornered, one character got captured, the other character surrendered without a rescue plan or a call to the "cavalry," then, following an escape that, while it involved no technical fudging on my part, involved a great deal of generous NPC behavior, coincidence, and clue-dropping, the characters escaped. Wounded, they saw the crashed airship of their comrade, ran toward it, got fired upon by hidden machineguns that (miraculously) missed, kept running toward it, and got gunned down.
But that's not even a "neutral" retelling and I'm not going to pretend it is. Who knows what the players were thinking at the time? Perhaps that unwise surrender was a player role-playing a badly-shaken character (he had just killed a guy, after all). Motivations are tricky things. And I don't just want to say that the players made "bad" decisions because 1) I've dealt with stupid players--I mean, really, pig-ignorant, clueless, lazy morons, and these two aren't like that, and 2) I'm so enmeshed in the behind-the-scenes elements of the game that I can't tell if their decisions made sense to them at the time with what they knew.
Nonetheless, they died, and here, I think, is why those characters died: I ran out of explanations why they didn't die. Let me explain: ever have a player who won't latch on to any plot hooks, who just ignores and glides past them, again and again? Is it cluelessness? Peevishness? Miscommunication? Sometimes it's hard to tell. (It's probably miscommunication; it is when I screw up this way, on either side of the table.) And at the end, sometimes as the GM you're just like, "Look, you missed every single one of my attempts to get you onto the adventure, we're at an impasse." And you're probably pissed, even if the player isn't doing it deliberately or maliciously. I sort of ended up in the same situation with regard to not killing my characters. I would have been mad, but there was plenty of disappointment to go around when those last dice fell that I felt no reason to add to it.
Rather than leading a character toward a plot hook, this time I was leading them away from death. And I ran out of good "don't die" hooks. The PCs got themselves into really deep shit, again and again, and the quagmire just kept getting worse. So I found myself casting around for ways to get the PCs out, because I hate even the implication of sadistic "killer GMing."
Because I want the players to have fun; I want their characters to look cool. What does your lightning sword look like? Does it look awesome? You bet it does. You need help describing how awesome your lightning gun looks? No problem, that's what I'm here for. And I try to keep the characters alive and the players making choices and the game going; in fact, I pride myself on taking all sorts of messy situations and turning them into dramatic gold. Miss the adventure hook? No problem, I've got a cool scene that will bring you back to the main plot. Get captured? No problem--the other characters can save you, or you can sneak out, or something. Even player "mistakes" are, in my mind, just an excuse for more cool scenes.
But I have my limits. Like willworkers in old Mage who can "feel" when reality is going rubbery and paradoxical, I can feel when the world's illusion is breaking down due to too many coincidences, too many lucky breaks. If the players dodge five "Go to the Fortress of Eversummer!" plot hooks, the sixth big neon sign starts to look a bit absurd, and I just have to let it go. If the players dodge five "Survive despite going up against very dangerous people when outnumbered and without proper planning" signs...I just have to let them go. I can't stand to see the world unravel.
I don't know if my players would agree with me. They might be all "Fuck the illusion, I want my mad scientist back!" But I'm here to have fun too, and I just can't have fun when the game world's integrity falls apart. I'll move encounters around, adjust difficulties, fiddle with bad guy numbers behind the scenes, but I have a limit. Every GM has a different "world integrity" limit, from an absolutely fixed reality to a total shell-game, and I know where I draw the line.
So they died because it was either character death or, basically, dropping the facade, and I wouldn't have fun if I exposed the bare stage on which the game is played. It wasn't out of malice, either. That seems like a desperate attempt at defending myself, but it's not. I've killed characters out of malice, in my younger and more dickheaded days, killed them in a fit of "fuck you for being so stupid." I remember a thief-based D&D3 game that fell apart because one player pissed me off too much with his stupid bullshit, so off with his head when he wouldn't run away. Fair rolls, of course, but malicious ones. And I made it clear that it was his stupidity that got him killed. None of that this time; I apologized profusely, like I had just run over the players' cat or something. Because I did feel bad. It's no fun losing characters. It's no fun losing all that hard work, and it's no fun feeling foolish, or that you "lost the game." I felt bad for 'em; not even pity, just empathy. It sucked.
But it was done. My girlfriend, an avid gamer, when I described the final machinegunning, asked "Couldn't you have asked them, 'Are you sure that's what you want to do?'" Ah, the old GM "Don't Do That" hint. And I could have. In retrospect, maybe I should have. But here's my rationale, perhaps a bit post hoc: it felt railroady. That might seem strange, but there's a railroading of GM intent in addition to the regular kind. I could, if I chose, give the players all the clues they need to succeed, and no information that does not contribute to their success. But that sort of clue-train strips away a player's liberty to play his character as surely as a badly-railroaded plot. It removes a player's ability to interact with the world on his own terms, at his own pace, and in his own way. And I had already moved too far in the direction of "clue-dispenser" during the course of that session, and I felt I was stripping agency from my players. Could I have warned them? Yeah. Did I feel it was right? No; I felt I had already chipped away at their freedom of interaction and begun to expose the game's facade. Was it the right call? I don't know.
So there's my little tale. I've probably learned more about how I run games from this one session of Genius than the last 20 or 30 assorted adventures I've run. Pity a bunch of characters had to die for me to learn something, but I hope it means that future sessions will be even better.
I'm a gamer, and I always hated that nut-swinging Gamemastering style where I lord it over the players and kill them off because they weren't "smart enough" or whatever. And I'm trying to square my inclusive, tolerant, open approach to GMing with the fact that two of my characters just died like dogs in my Genius game.
Some background: Genius is a game I made for the new World of Darkness. You play mad scientists. This time, only two players showed up due to scheduling problems. They wanted to explore a warehouse full of bad guys. And basically, they screwed up, often. They made their presence known to people who were willing to kill them, they got cornered, one character got captured, the other character surrendered without a rescue plan or a call to the "cavalry," then, following an escape that, while it involved no technical fudging on my part, involved a great deal of generous NPC behavior, coincidence, and clue-dropping, the characters escaped. Wounded, they saw the crashed airship of their comrade, ran toward it, got fired upon by hidden machineguns that (miraculously) missed, kept running toward it, and got gunned down.
But that's not even a "neutral" retelling and I'm not going to pretend it is. Who knows what the players were thinking at the time? Perhaps that unwise surrender was a player role-playing a badly-shaken character (he had just killed a guy, after all). Motivations are tricky things. And I don't just want to say that the players made "bad" decisions because 1) I've dealt with stupid players--I mean, really, pig-ignorant, clueless, lazy morons, and these two aren't like that, and 2) I'm so enmeshed in the behind-the-scenes elements of the game that I can't tell if their decisions made sense to them at the time with what they knew.
Nonetheless, they died, and here, I think, is why those characters died: I ran out of explanations why they didn't die. Let me explain: ever have a player who won't latch on to any plot hooks, who just ignores and glides past them, again and again? Is it cluelessness? Peevishness? Miscommunication? Sometimes it's hard to tell. (It's probably miscommunication; it is when I screw up this way, on either side of the table.) And at the end, sometimes as the GM you're just like, "Look, you missed every single one of my attempts to get you onto the adventure, we're at an impasse." And you're probably pissed, even if the player isn't doing it deliberately or maliciously. I sort of ended up in the same situation with regard to not killing my characters. I would have been mad, but there was plenty of disappointment to go around when those last dice fell that I felt no reason to add to it.
Rather than leading a character toward a plot hook, this time I was leading them away from death. And I ran out of good "don't die" hooks. The PCs got themselves into really deep shit, again and again, and the quagmire just kept getting worse. So I found myself casting around for ways to get the PCs out, because I hate even the implication of sadistic "killer GMing."
Because I want the players to have fun; I want their characters to look cool. What does your lightning sword look like? Does it look awesome? You bet it does. You need help describing how awesome your lightning gun looks? No problem, that's what I'm here for. And I try to keep the characters alive and the players making choices and the game going; in fact, I pride myself on taking all sorts of messy situations and turning them into dramatic gold. Miss the adventure hook? No problem, I've got a cool scene that will bring you back to the main plot. Get captured? No problem--the other characters can save you, or you can sneak out, or something. Even player "mistakes" are, in my mind, just an excuse for more cool scenes.
But I have my limits. Like willworkers in old Mage who can "feel" when reality is going rubbery and paradoxical, I can feel when the world's illusion is breaking down due to too many coincidences, too many lucky breaks. If the players dodge five "Go to the Fortress of Eversummer!" plot hooks, the sixth big neon sign starts to look a bit absurd, and I just have to let it go. If the players dodge five "Survive despite going up against very dangerous people when outnumbered and without proper planning" signs...I just have to let them go. I can't stand to see the world unravel.
I don't know if my players would agree with me. They might be all "Fuck the illusion, I want my mad scientist back!" But I'm here to have fun too, and I just can't have fun when the game world's integrity falls apart. I'll move encounters around, adjust difficulties, fiddle with bad guy numbers behind the scenes, but I have a limit. Every GM has a different "world integrity" limit, from an absolutely fixed reality to a total shell-game, and I know where I draw the line.
So they died because it was either character death or, basically, dropping the facade, and I wouldn't have fun if I exposed the bare stage on which the game is played. It wasn't out of malice, either. That seems like a desperate attempt at defending myself, but it's not. I've killed characters out of malice, in my younger and more dickheaded days, killed them in a fit of "fuck you for being so stupid." I remember a thief-based D&D3 game that fell apart because one player pissed me off too much with his stupid bullshit, so off with his head when he wouldn't run away. Fair rolls, of course, but malicious ones. And I made it clear that it was his stupidity that got him killed. None of that this time; I apologized profusely, like I had just run over the players' cat or something. Because I did feel bad. It's no fun losing characters. It's no fun losing all that hard work, and it's no fun feeling foolish, or that you "lost the game." I felt bad for 'em; not even pity, just empathy. It sucked.
But it was done. My girlfriend, an avid gamer, when I described the final machinegunning, asked "Couldn't you have asked them, 'Are you sure that's what you want to do?'" Ah, the old GM "Don't Do That" hint. And I could have. In retrospect, maybe I should have. But here's my rationale, perhaps a bit post hoc: it felt railroady. That might seem strange, but there's a railroading of GM intent in addition to the regular kind. I could, if I chose, give the players all the clues they need to succeed, and no information that does not contribute to their success. But that sort of clue-train strips away a player's liberty to play his character as surely as a badly-railroaded plot. It removes a player's ability to interact with the world on his own terms, at his own pace, and in his own way. And I had already moved too far in the direction of "clue-dispenser" during the course of that session, and I felt I was stripping agency from my players. Could I have warned them? Yeah. Did I feel it was right? No; I felt I had already chipped away at their freedom of interaction and begun to expose the game's facade. Was it the right call? I don't know.
So there's my little tale. I've probably learned more about how I run games from this one session of Genius than the last 20 or 30 assorted adventures I've run. Pity a bunch of characters had to die for me to learn something, but I hope it means that future sessions will be even better.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
What Matters
I've been thinking about what matters to futurists. Now it's information, a fact so obvious that it's almost baffling to look at Heinlein and Clarke and see their tremendous excitement over, of all things, transport. Because that's what a lot of 20th century science fiction was about: moving faster, moving better. And that was the trajectory of the 20th century: from the train to the car to the airplane to the jet to the space-rocket. And we just kept getting faster, and our enthusiasm for speed stayed strong, until some time well after the Apollo missions.
What's interesting is that though now so many science fiction writers are focused on information, transport wasn't the first thing to fascinate science fiction. Go back to the dawn of SF and you see an even earlier fascination with production, a concern even more distant from our own time. The early 20th century Socialist SF writers were always going on about production and efficiency and labor and all that other stuff that's as boring to us now as--no doubt--our present-day SF ramblings about gigahertz and petaflops will be to readers from the next century. If there had been more SF in the 18th and early 19th centuries, no doubt they would have massively obsessed over these new speculative political developments as much as we massively obsess over spimes and cloud computing.
This opens up a number of questions for any SF writer. The obvious one is, of course, what's going to engross the next century's SF writers? Politics, production, transport, information...then...what? Some new personal-scale sociological development? The creation and proliferation of new biological or digital organisms? We probably don't even have a word for it yet. But also--and here's one of greater interest to me--with the rise of various retro-future SF tales, from steampunk to neo-post-atomic-holocaust, it behooves us to analyze what drove the speculative fevers of previous eras, to see how we can use those concerns in our own fiction, rather than overwriting what interested a previous era and replacing it with our own fascinations. Steampunk's revolutionary original conceit--industrial-age people interested in information-age concerns--has grown a bit worn since The Difference Engine. I think a re-evaluation of our retro-speculation is in order, which would allow us to mix and match eras and obsessions. I love steampunk, but I'm getting a bit tired of seeing 19th century + information. I want to see new combinations of times and interests, new ways to bring later interests to earlier times, and speculation about how later eras, even our own, could return to the obsessions of previous centuries.
What's interesting is that though now so many science fiction writers are focused on information, transport wasn't the first thing to fascinate science fiction. Go back to the dawn of SF and you see an even earlier fascination with production, a concern even more distant from our own time. The early 20th century Socialist SF writers were always going on about production and efficiency and labor and all that other stuff that's as boring to us now as--no doubt--our present-day SF ramblings about gigahertz and petaflops will be to readers from the next century. If there had been more SF in the 18th and early 19th centuries, no doubt they would have massively obsessed over these new speculative political developments as much as we massively obsess over spimes and cloud computing.
This opens up a number of questions for any SF writer. The obvious one is, of course, what's going to engross the next century's SF writers? Politics, production, transport, information...then...what? Some new personal-scale sociological development? The creation and proliferation of new biological or digital organisms? We probably don't even have a word for it yet. But also--and here's one of greater interest to me--with the rise of various retro-future SF tales, from steampunk to neo-post-atomic-holocaust, it behooves us to analyze what drove the speculative fevers of previous eras, to see how we can use those concerns in our own fiction, rather than overwriting what interested a previous era and replacing it with our own fascinations. Steampunk's revolutionary original conceit--industrial-age people interested in information-age concerns--has grown a bit worn since The Difference Engine. I think a re-evaluation of our retro-speculation is in order, which would allow us to mix and match eras and obsessions. I love steampunk, but I'm getting a bit tired of seeing 19th century + information. I want to see new combinations of times and interests, new ways to bring later interests to earlier times, and speculation about how later eras, even our own, could return to the obsessions of previous centuries.
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