Assuming everything goes according to plan, Winterim 2023 will see me and a score of kids playing, dissecting, and creating our own board games. It’s going to be good--at least, I hope it will--and I’ve been prepping for it for a few months already. I’ve purchased a lot of games on the school’s dime: Too Many Bones, Wingspan, Carcassonne, The Big Book of Madness, Azul, Mysterium, Marvel United, and a handful more. Part of the class is to talk about the history of board games. There’s a pretty great video by the Shut Up & Sit Down guys (one of the preeminent board game reviewers on YouTube) that takes about an hour to watch and gives a good overview. However, I wanted to have something a bit more substantial. I often want some sort of book read before the Winterim starts (for my dinosaur Winterim, for example, I had them read Raptor Red; for the fantasy Winterim, I had them read Elantris), so I set out to see if there was an accessible and worthwhile look at the history of board games. I found It’s All A Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan by Tristan Donovan. And what do you know? My local library had a copy. I picked it up at the beginning of the summer, picking at it as the mercury climbed. Donovan has an easy and approachable style that weaves through the key points and puts in context a lot of pieces (pun, as always, intended) that I hadn’t thought of before. Additionally, he includes a lot of the connective tissues of how one game inspires another, responds to it, or fails to catch the imagination of the masses yet opens up pathways to future inventions. It’s really fascinating, and I enjoyed my time in the book overall. A couple of points really stood out to me. The first one comes from my own sensitivity towards public perception of video games. I’ve been a gamer all my life, and while I’ve had a healthy love of board games, most of my adult life’s entertainment has been in the digital realm. There’s a pretty obvious reason for this: You don’t have to coordinate time, schedules, or energy levels with other humans to get to play (most) video games. I can plop myself down on the couch and away I go. My wife enjoys board games, too, but a lot of her downtime is spent at the sewing machine. So while board games have always been in our home and we’ve waxed and waned on different titles, video games have held a place of primacy since the beginning. Because of that sensitivity, there’s always a raising of hackles when the idea of “video games are bad for you” starts cropping up. A recent study indicates that one’s well-being is not necessarily negatively affected by video game playing, with a caveat that compulsive or addictive playing makes for a noteworthy exception. While it’s important that we continue to do research into this new medium, I have to admit that the stigma around video games, particularly their influence in increasing violence in participants, has always left me a bit uncertain. I do believe that what you absorb through media can affect you--it’s why I think there needs to be more diversity in the genders, races, and situations that are depicted on all of our screens everywhere. Positive representation really does make a difference. And yet, there are loads of examples in Donovan’s book that explain how board games have led to real violence. He talks about how the crossword puzzle was invented back in 1913 (originally called Word-Cross, but, due to a negligent error, turned into Cross-Word). A decade later, finishing the crossword puzzles had become so addictive to some that it strained relationships. Some took their puzzle-solving way too seriously. In 1923 one Chicago woman filed for divorce because her husband stopped going to work so he could focus on his crosswords. The following year a man shot his wife because she refused to help him with a particularly vexing crossword. (139) From Monopoly’s original intention (a critique and condemnation of the rapacious greed of landlords) to the Japanese game go and how it’s influenced AI development and neural networks, It’s All A Game provides wonderful stories, fascinating anecdotes, and worthwhile glimpses into the histories that have created so much of the world that we live in. And that’s the other thing that I really took from this book: Each game on my shelf has a story behind it. And while most of what I play right now isn’t in the book, each one could have been added in without any real detriment to the overall thesis. Every game I have had some motivation in making it (probably profit for a lot of them, though I know for certain that isn’t the case for all of them), and every game that I have tried to make likewise came from a place of desire. Though I’ve only three or four games in different stages of development, each one came from a desire at a certain time in my life. (Example: During 2020’s Harry Potter Winterim, before the world ended, I wanted to try to make a game based on Quidditch that utilized the idea of height--not a 2D game, but one with a vertical ability, too.) The last thing that stood out to me was the eerie explanations of the roots to the game Pandemic. The book, written in 2017, has a couple of chilling paragraphs as Donovan looks at the global response to SARS in 2003. He writes, The world watched on [at China’s response to the virus], wondering if this was the start of a terrifying global pandemic similar to the 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed the lives of at least fifty million people. […] The SARS outbreak infected several thousand people and killed more than seven hundred, but the rapid global response saved the world from an epidemic that could have been much, much worse. (225) Yeah. It’s kind of creepy to read that.
So, yeah. This book is great. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to assigning it to my students. I will have to tell them that they aren’t required to read the chapter entitled “Sex in a Box” that talks about how Twister came to be and what games it inspired. While it doesn’t go into anything shockingly explicit, it’s not really the direction that I want to take the class. (Obviously, students will likely still read that chapter, but it won’t be assigned.) You could give it a whirl. Kind of like board games, it’s a lot of fun. At the beginning of 2021, I taught a D&D Winterim with a coworker. As is common in almost all of my Winterims, the big assignment of the students is to make their own version of whatever it is that we're studying. When I taught Lord of the Rings, I had the students make the beginnings of their own language. When I taught video game theory, they created a concept of what video game they would like to make, had they the time and expertise. When I taught D&D, they made their own TTRPGs.
I usually find it enjoyable to make a similar product while the students are working. It isn't always very good (my Quidditch game from the Harry Potter Winterim was an interesting, albeit very flawed version of multi-leveled chess), but it's always really fun. Last year…er, rather, eleven months ago…I started making my own version of a TTRPG that was heavily inspired by Bloodborne. (I had finished the game for the second time just a few weeks before and it was big in my brain…still is, as a matter of fact.) I wanted a game that had the same sort of frenetic kind of action, one where the dice rolling happened simultaneously and frequently. I started it off as simply a Bloodborne RPG, using the names of weapons and locations from the video game as my starting point. Eventually, I pushed away from the streets of Yharnam and instead created my own city wallowing in its own destruction, a place called Drimdale. I concocted an interconnected introductory campaign in a single location to help me conceptualize what the game would feel like and play like, only to hit a bit of a roadblock part way through the summer. Maybe, I thought, I'm looking at this from the wrong medium. I started writing a novel set in Drimdale (it was part of my abortive attempt at winning NaNoWriMo this year), I tried to write lore and a catalogue of background information…it just wasn't working. While I really like what I've made, it wasn't gelling as it was supposed to. As the year has worn on, a new hobby emerged: Miniature painting. This is also directly influenced by Bloodborne, as I bought the board game of the video game from a Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately (or not, depending on how I look at it), I "accidentally" bought a good $200 worth of the game--with four expansions on top of the base game. They contain dozens of miniatures of creatures from the game, and I quickly ended up spending several orders of magnitude more on painting the figurines than in playing the game. (I still play it, occasionally, and I have a lot more fun with the painted minis than I do the unpainted ones.) As my hobby time and money started flowing into this new exercise, I picked up a lot of interest in wargames (Warhammer, as cool and robust and deep as it is, can't justifiably fit into my budget--though some of the Age of Sigmar and Necromunda stuff is just so tempting). Nothing was quite right for me, though, despite some really cool looking things. Then, on Black Friday, two things happened: Miniature Market had a massive clearance sale on its Wrath of Kings stock, and Amazon was selling one of the most highly-rated board games of all time, Gloomhaven, for about $80. I had received a $200 Amazon gift card from a student's orthodontist's office (I don't know who the student was, but I'm flattered that they thought of me) that was burning a hole in my pocket. What better way to use some of that unexpected money than buying a new board game that I would likely only end up playing by myself? I'll give another post about Wrath of Kings later (once I've actually managed to, y'know, play it), and this isn't a review about Gloomhaven (which I'm liking mightily). The point is, this all converged in making me want to revisit some of the core mechanics that I made for Drimdale. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the flavor and theme of my own board game to stick right, but the modification of my TTRPG ideas into a modular, tile- and dice-based board game is coming along really well. I've created a bunch of small cards, a player mat, the tiles, and a few thousand words of rules. I've even used my 3D printer to give me more tactile, more interesting versions of some of the terrain. (It makes a big difference when you can see a pile of stones and think, Hey, that's a pile of stones, rather than a red cube and think, What is that supposed to be again? Oh yeah. A pile of stones.) Utilizing a lot of the miniatures that I've acquired over the past dozen months--including the stuff that I've 3D printed as well as purchased for Gloomhaven or the Bloodborne Board Game--I've cobbled together a fairly strong prototype. It's far from finished: I want to have five classes with different abilities depending on the gender the player selects, as well as a card system to help mitigate the randomness of the dice-rolling process, and a host of other issues. However, it's basically playable in its reduced form right now. In fact, I played it with my son yesterday. We started at about 12:30 and didn't end until 2:45. I hadn't realized that I'd created a multi-hour experience. More than that, though, is the fact that it was actually fun. I mean, I know that's the point of a board game--of games in general--but this isn't the first time that I've tried creating something like this, only to be severely disappointed in my prototype. Part of what really speaks to me--and, indeed, is the core inspiration for the combat mechanic--is that I get to use a lot of the dice I've collected over the years since I started playing D&D. And by "a lot" I mean that, at the two-player minimum level of play, you need to have approximately 25 dice of different types. There are times when you're holding entire fistfuls of dice and dropping them on the table, then picking through them like a prospector seeking out some golden nuggets. This game was designed for dice-goblins (you know who you are) and fully justifying having spent way too much on plastic polyhedrons throughout the course of one's life. It's also fun because you get to play as your own character, but also as the enemies who challenge your opponent. (It was originally thought of as a co-op game, but that possibility no longer really fits…I think. We'll see.) So your turn involves making life harder for your opponent while struggling to win the game yourself. It means that turns are quick, and you're never long from rolling dice again. And again. And again. The fact that there are still a lot of kinks and bugs to iron out is frustrating only in the sense that it's hard to playtest something solo. My son is a good sport and I think he really enjoys the game…but he's also 11. He has other, more digitally based things to do. So I often find myself sitting on the couch, staring at slips of poorly-trimmed pieces of paper, a notebook with so many contradictory notes scrawled into it that it's essentially incomprehensible, trying to devise what I actually want from a Trap Card, and always thinking…Who's going to play this? That is, of course, the wrong thing to consider at this point. Having almost fully given up on creative writing because I got so enamored of the idea of publishing that almost all desire to write has evaporated, I don't want to accidentally poison my passion for this game by trying to think that it will become more than what it is. Then again, there's a strong motivation in wanting to see one's internal vision become external and tangible. The dream of seeing the game fully realized with artwork, miniatures (original ones, rather than stuff cribbed from other sources), and polished to the point that other people might enjoy it? That's a powerful dream. I've learned, though, that powerful dreams can sometimes overpower reality, and that discrepancy can really hurt. So I'm trying to manage my expectations. Still…it is a lot of fun. I began creating my own tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) back in January. After about five months, I've written well over 35,000 words among the sundry components of the game: A loose outline of the rules for the game, a module that acts as a training manual for how the game begins, and a growing body of lore that fleshes out the world and tries to make a more interconnected, cohesive-feeling experience. I also have started a novel (I guess…I don't know how long it might be) that adds another 10,000 words or so. With all of these and the occasional notes and outlines and miscellanea, I have almost 50,000 words invested in this world.
I keep coming back to the question: Why, though? I mean, there's always the "safe" answer of "I have an idea and a need to create so I should follow that impulse." And that's true, as far as it goes. After all, I've dumped over one and a half million words into my different novels over the past seventeen or so years (not counting all my before-marriage writing). So I've clearly put a lot of effort into generating new worlds, new stories, new characters, new ideas. This, however, is different. It's not just because it's a game. I've designed games before (though it's not quite what I wanted, I do like the Quidditch-inspired board game I made a year ago), and I've done pure world-building exercises on occasion, too. Really, what I think is perhaps the biggest thing that's fueling this question is one that Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence". He uses his prodigious reading career to try to trace the ways in which certain authors are so heavily influenced by a certain source that it affects how they end up writing. In some cases, there's almost an exorcism of the influence that he can see in some of the works--Shakespeare's exorcism of Spencer and Marlow are, I believe, a couple of his posits (though I haven't read his book on it yet, so I can't say for certain). I bring this up for two reasons: One, because I believe that, were Bloom alive and knew about my using his theory for discussing board- and video games, he would likely be rather put off; and two, because I think it's a salient point. Perhaps his readings aren't entirely accurate, but the theory of an anxious influence on an artist is something that I certainly feel myself. It isn't just about writing in the shadow of Shakespeare (as Mark Edmund--another fantastic writer--asks, why write when Shakespeare already has?), as everyone is writing in his shadow, whether they know it or not. That doesn't bother me so much. It's about knowing what to do about the things that I get involved in. See, this game world, Drimdale, is not simply a TTRPG: It's a response to the fact that I wanted to try playing a hunter from Bloodborne in D&D and was tired of trying to figure out how to tweak the rules enough to make the hunter work inside of that game system. Now, I'm a big fan of D&D, even if I'm not the most knowledgeable about it, and so the idea of having a Bloodborne hunter as a character was really exciting. Despite the versatility and flexibility of D&D, however, I just wasn't getting out of these homebrew solutions what I wanted from a Bloodborne-inspired character. So I just…made up my own version. It isn't particularly good--I think it has potential, but I don't have a lot of playtesting opportunities to refine the ideas--though it certainly has a lot of the Bloodborne vibe. However, after a few pages of work, I realized that I was really making my own thing, my own version of a grimdark, Gothic world filled with monsters and violence. I switched it up, tweaking the terms that are from the video game and generating my world moving forward. I've written tens of thousands of words of lore for Drimdale, and every time I sit down to work on it, I have to ask myself if it's worth it. The influence is so large, the changes feel almost more like an insult than anything else. Why should I bother pursuing something that is so derivative? I recognize that there are no original ideas--everything is based off of something else. Heck, even Bloodborne is indebted to Lovecraft and gothic England for much of its verve, art-style, and concepts. And I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm not trying to flatter Hidetaka Miyazaki, though. But I can't really say what it is that I'm trying to do. A couple of years ago, I did an etude of the beginning of Stephen King's It. I practiced it (It) to try to figure out what King does and why it works out so well. I also attempted this etude in order to exorcize the Losers' Club and Pennywise from my mind. To a certain degree, it worked: I didn't feel the need to reread It during the summer of 2020--which was the first time since 2017 that I skipped the book. (That I watched the movies as a stopgap is a fact we shall pass in silence.) To another degree, however, it didn't work at all. I wrote a novella, Mon Ster, in a very Kingesque way. My Pen+ notebook, handwritten novel--a tortured little piece called The Strange Tale of Charles Green--is another attempt at capturing what fascinates me about Derry and its monstrous past. I'm still haunted by King's work; his influence gives me, as it were, anxiety. There's nothing wrong with me continuing to work on Drimdale, of course. There's nothing wrong with my fanfic-as-a-game, of taking another's idea and twisting it into my own version. I know that. What I still struggle with is how much time I'm investing into this project. I'm not a published author, but when I write one of my own stories, there's at least a possibility that I might be able to turn that into something potent enough to sell. The odds are long, but they're there. When it comes to Drimdale and this goofy little TTRPG, this constantly-expanding document of lore, I have to wonder why I always want to write more. I don't know how to find the answer to that. My addictions in two parts:
Hi, I'm Steve, and I have tsundoku. It's a genuine problem: This past half month alone I've purchased, that I can remember, at least four books--all of them new, one of them over $30--and though I really want to read them all, I doubt that I'll so much as crack the cover of them until at least May, possible even later. There are reasons for that: I'm a teacher and I have a lot of work that I have to do to prep for my classes. A great chunk of my reading is going through, at this time, World War II material. Not only did I start Okinawa yesterday, but I also have to pick through John Keegan's The Second World War and, if I can scrounge up the time, Churchill's Memoirs of the Second World War. Additionally, I'm supposed to read some more of Much Ado About Nothing for my Shakespeare class. The books I've recently purchased aren't directly related to school (I talked about them here), so I'm not going to list them. Nevertheless, I'm excited to get into them…somehow. And that's the thing. I have so many books that I'm dying to read, but I'm so mentally exhausted by the end of the day that I don't feel I have the bandwidth to dive into any of the titles. Admittedly, the difficulty of some of the books is pretty high. I have stuff by Slavoj Zizek that I want to get into, also some Greenblatt and an entire book on philosophy that Norton sent to me when I thought I might get a chance to teach a philosophy course next year. I have Renaissance drama to bone up on (since I will be teaching a class that incorporates more of that text next year). I still (!) haven't finished The Iliad, nor The Canterbury Tales. In other words, there's a lot of heavy lifting on my "to read" shelf. But I have a bunch of lighter stuff, too. Science fiction, some horror, and (of course) endless options of fantasy. I have books on dinosaurs that run the gamut from highly technical to conversationally approachable…but I leave it out, pining for it and can do…nothing. The problem is in the second part and its corollary: Hi, I'm Steve, and I'm addicted to writing. I write about my writings all of the time (very meta, I know), so if you've looked at many of my essays, you know that I do a lot of writing. By my rough calculations--not counting the NaNoWriMo entries--I've written over 500 essays in the past eighteen months. That is…a fair number. Some of them have been, in my distorted opinion, pretty good. Others…not so much. The point has always been, though, that I write. Every day. About whatever crosses my mind. I've written about video games, comics, music videos, guitar tabs I'm learning, war, God, and a bunch of other topics. Some of what I've written has likely offended people (which I don't really know about because I'm not writing for a conversation, necessarily). I've spent way too long on some and not long enough on all the rest. They're all rough drafts--I slam them out, publish them, and then move on with my life--and that shows. It's almost embarrassing how bad some of these essays are. No, strike that: It is embarrassing how bad some of these essays are. But I can't seem to stop. Yeah, sometimes I'd rather be doing anything else than writing my essay. I'll glance down at the word count (which I try to hit, at minimum, 1,000 words in each essay) and feel a twinge of despair to see it's scarcely crested 500 (I'm at 629 right now, if you're curious). I would become a better writer if I spent some of the time editing what I've written--indeed, I've thought about doing so a number of times, though that's usually because I'm drawing a blank on a topic, so I figure I'd go over something from before--but I'll also become a better writer by writing more. Hence the addiction. I don't want to stop--I want to improve my writing. If nothing else, this gives my fingers additional workouts so that I can write for longer when the opportunity presents itself. However, because I spend so much time on the computer, I drain those final dregs of intellectual effort that I need for reading my massive stack of books. And that leads to the corollary: Hi, I'm Steve, and I like video games. That's basically the whole thing, right there. I know a lot of people vegetate at the end of a day--heck, most people probably do. I know my dad plops down in his comfy armchair and watches the news and some other DVR'd programing when his day is over. Others pick up a Netflix series or watch something new on Hulu. Others will watch a movie. For me, the "mindless decompression" of the day is in the form of video games. I finish writing, then I go and twiddle my thumbs on a controller for an hour or two before heading to bed. This pattern is not a bad one by any means…but it's what I do because I'm too drained by the time I finish these essays to want to do anything that requires too much of my mind*. And that's my dilemma: I'm addicted to buying books that I really want to read, but then find ways around actually reading them. I'm only partially joking when I say that I need a reading retreat. Maybe if I'm away from video games and the Internet long enough, I'll finally finish a book in a reasonable amount of time. --- * Keep this in mind when you see my essays on Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy X, both of which have filled up pages in my notebook of things I thought about whilst playing them. While most video games don't make me want to sit up and take note, those two have, so far. In fact, I wish I could've done more notetaking on my most recent pass through Final Fantasy VII. I think there's another couple of essays in there, at the minimum. So, while I admit that games are so that I'm not straining my mind as much, I can't fully turn off my brain, even whilst relaxing. Today.
Today was a pinball experience, with me playing Superfight with two different classes, teaching my Shakespeare class how to cook, having that soup we were working on not finishing in time, plus my wife and son coming to the school, on top of an assembly at the end of the day. Then, once that was all finished, a two hour long session with ten people in the party led to a very chaotic and raucous gaming session of D&D. When I got out of school--which ended with me talking to a coworker about potential ways of writing a memoir she's thinking of--I took my two older boys to Barnes and Noble for a celebratory birthday treat and to buy some books. We then went to Toys "R" us to see if there were any good deals (there weren't; they're closing, but everything is only 10% off right now). Then I came home, inviting my little brother over to create a character for a D&D campaign that I'm running tomorrow with my boys. Needless to say, I'm surprised that I'm not falling asleep in my chair as I write this. So, in order to maximize my time (Gayle wants to watch Sword Art Online and I'm not one to dissuade her), I'm going to use my daily writing as a chance to sketch out an idea for tomorrow's campaign. Since I bought some city tiles that I can use to make a map, I think I'll start off with the adventurers in a city… The heroes will already be in a party, ready for what may come. They're in the streets when they hear a cry. I'll get them to investigate the shout, only to see that there's a person being attacked by a couple of kobolds. This is odd, since the city normally has a pretty good police force. The heroes will engage and defeat the kobolds. The victim will be dead by the time they finish. On the person--who will definitely be looted, since one of the characters is a greedy rogue--will be information that will let them know that the victim was going to be waiting to help someone through the city gate at midnight. At this point, the sun will be setting, so that'll give them a chance to look around the city and move across the map. Then, once I'm bored with them dinking around, I'll flashforward to midnight and they'll arrive at the gate. Then there will be an advance scout crew of kobolds who are there to ransack the city. The adventurers will choose between helping out--taking the role of the victim--and stopping the kobolds. Odds are almost certain they'll stop them, since most of the adventurers are good or neutral good. Since I'm pretty sure they're going to attack the kobolds, I'll have one of them escape, running toward the sewers. In his hand, there is a glittering key. They can either chase him down or they can go to the guards to report the problem. Either way, the heroes will end up down into the bowels of the city, where they will hunt through some typical monsters--spiders, rats, bats, and maybe a wild-boar that got lost in the tunnels beneath the city. After dispatching these creatures--and maybe having to restore some health--they'll arrive at an underground warren where the kobold has led them. They'll have a chance to sneak in and try to get the key. If they're successful, they will be faced with a choice of taking it to the guards or, if the guard is with them, giving it over. When they do, the guard will attack them, claiming this prize for the Prince of Thieves. If the adventurers agree to join the guard, they'll be shown into a deeper recess, unlocked with the key. If they disagree, they'll attack him and his kobold minions. Provided they survive, they will then have to choose: Destroy the key and keep the kobold thieves out of the city, or use it to explore deeper into the recesses below the city…. And that's as far as I got. I don't want to go too much farther, because I don't know if my kids can maintain that kind of concentration with anything that isn't also a glowing rectangle (they can play Minecraft for three hours straight and forget that they haven't eaten, but if I try to carry on a conversation with them, they space out within three minutes). I don't think this is a really thrilling or exciting adventure, but I'm also trying to think of ways of making the story more involved than a "You walk down the street. Oh, no, you're being attacked by robbers. You killed them. Now you're at an inn" kind of story. There's nothing wrong with that, of course: I just want to do something with a bit of intrigue and the possibility of having them accomplish other tasks that don't involve swinging a sword or, in the case of Puck, completely misfiring yet another magical cantrip and missing his target entirely. Anyway, I know this isn't the most thought-provoking or profound essay I've ever written, but I hope that tomorrow's campaign will be enjoyable and that everyone will end wanting to play some more of it. And, hey, if it's really that much fun, then maybe I'll be writing a "sequel" to this campaign next Friday. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. Despite growing up in the eighties and nineties, I never played Dungeons and Dragons. I knew about the game: I had a friend tell me that kids had committed suicide when their characters died, but I was, maybe six or so when he said that and I didn't really know what he meant. So far as I knew, characters were just that, and if a player didn't want them to be dead then…they weren't. When I hit my teenage years, a neighbor friend was into Rifts RPG, as well as the Robotech RPG (and, once, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I had fun playing those games with him and his brother, but when it was just the three of us, it only had so much momentum. A couple of fun nights were had, crowded in his basement, eating pizza, and trying to combat the Invid invasion, but I never got too into it. Still, those experiences--which dovetail nicely with my continued appreciation of RPGs, both Western and Japanese, in video games--have kept me connected to a substratum of geek culture. Today, I got to try Dungeons and Dragons itself for the first time. It was a lot more fun than I expected. As context: I'm teaching a mentoring class in which about two dozen teenagers work together to create a shared universe/world. There are alphabets, songs, sports, games, races, magic, technology, and religions--all developed by the students. I'm there to help them along--as I've done my fair share of world-building and reading in the fantasy/sci-fi genre--but merely as a manager/mentor, never as a real contributor. At one point, one of the students asked me if we could play D&D as a mentoring group. While we didn't have time in class to do this, I did invite him and anyone else who was interested to come after school on Fridays to do some campaigns. Last week, for sundry reasons, we found ourselves creating the characters we would use in the campaign. I instantly latched onto the idea of really making the character (whom I named D'Corta, as it sounds very fantasy like and it has an apostrophe, which is also very fantasy like). I decided that I would have my character be a tiefling, which is a part-demon, part-human creature with a demon's tail and glowing eyes and the ability to smell evil. To make it paradoxical, I put her class as a paladin, which is a holy warrior. Her background is that of an urchin, so I don't know who her parents are. Then, simply because I thought it would be fun, I gave her a lisp. Oh, and she has multiple personalities: Like Two-Face from Batman, whenever she has to make a decision, I roll a die to see if she goes with the good idea or bad idea for the choice. It adds a very chaotic element to the entire experience, and is very often hilarious. Once my paladin demon woman was completed, we started up with an actual campaign. As I said, today was my first time really playing the "original" tabletop RPG, and I laughed through almost all of it.
Here's the thing that's so engaging about this game (at least, from my highly limited experience): The dispositions and characteristics of the player (and character) make every interaction interesting. Our particular group of adventurers mostly had chaotic inclinations, and since we were playing the roles pretty well, the first part of the game was filled with quite bizarre decisions. At one point, a gnome and halfling from my party were throwing things at each other whilst hiding behind two large guys at a bar, essentially trying to trick them into getting into a fight. Eventually, our quest got under way, but it didn't take long before it became clear that we were a pretty lousy group of adventurers. In one battle, I used my trident (because what half-demon, half-woman paladin wouldn't want to use a trident?) to try to stab my attackers. I missed horribly, then was stabbed when I tried to move away. A moment later, my gnome friend fell over when she tried to use her rapier (which is, if you aren't familiar with gnome physiology, about the same height as the gnome), managing to attack the air effectively, but little else. In the end, our ranger character and his panther (because of course) neutralized the bad guys, so we ended up okay. As I lisped my way through the afternoon, it struck me that there's a similar vibe to this game as there is in quidditch. My original approach to the sport was one of whimsy--I was teaching a Harry Potter class a few years ago, I looked up the rules, away we went. And the lightheartedness of the sport's origins, as well as the friendliness of the players I met, kept me interested and engaged in the game. Eventually, I developed some mild talent for it, which also kept me playing, but the original draw was the Harry Potter connection. It wasn't larping, but it wasn't taking itself too seriously. (I've been away from quidditch for too long to know if its drift toward seriousness is leeching that whimsy away, though it seemed like it was headed that direction when I left.) Dungeons and Dragons is the same: I can see an angle from which the game is more enjoyable when it's played seriously, with a desire to overcome the obstacles the DM has planned, kind of like in the beginning of Stranger Things. There's an allure to that. But for someone like me, this alternative way of playing--using the mechanics to have a good time, watch personalities bounce off each other, and each player manipulating the world as best they can with their limited tools--was highly enjoyable. Part of it was the students played along well. With only one exception, the students were all interested in advancing the story, but not in the way the DM wanted us to. We played it on our own terms. For the DM, who seemed mildly entertained by it all, I think we tipped into irritation only a handful of times. That, I feel, is a small success in and of itself. Having had such a positive experience, I'm hopeful that the next time we meet we'll be able to pull in additional players and make the story even more vibrant. Maybe it's the storyteller in me, but that is the best part of the game. Though I grew up in the '80s, I don't really associate with that decade. I was seven when it ended, so most of my pop culture experiences were more '90s driven. Growing up firmly middle class, I always had enough of what I needed and more often than not enough of what I wanted, so my childhood was about as idyllic as one could hope. The tensions of the Gulf War, the Clinton Administration, and racial fault lines in the West Coast didn't really disturb my suburban upbringing. To say I was sheltered is indubitable. Even still, I heard about an evil game where kids would kill themselves when their characters died, a Satanic piece of entertainment that no good Mormon would do. At the time I first heard of it, I could only conceive of a video game, and the idea of "creating a character" was beyond what I understood a Nintendo Entertainment System could do. It wasn't until the mid- to late '90s that I really started figuring out what tabletop RPGs were, and though I never played the Satanic game that created the moral panic: Dungeons and Dragons. Because quantity of friends interested in playing any tabletop RPG was approximately one, I never got too deep into it. Nevertheless, I became familiar with the form, if not the specifics, and have really enjoyed other types of imagination-based games. So when I recently learned about the show Harmonquest, I was interested but not fully committed to checking it out. The premise is great: Use the fun of tabletop gaming to allow funny people to tell a story, then animate aspects of the imaginative experience in post-production and stream it online. Knowing that it had a language problem (which I try to limit, but sometimes...), I didn't watch anything, noting the advertisements that I came across wherever I did and letting it go at that. Then, over the weekend, I started watching the episodes. They are hilarious. There's a smoothness to them that belies the complexity of how these games are actually played, and the animation means that a lot of the effort of imagining the game (in other words, one of the ludic aspects of the format) is obviated, but on the whole, it's a fairly good representation of what's going on in tabletop RPGs. It also reminds me of the frustration of being a geek adult: Time (abundant as a child) is scarce; money (scarce as a child) is more abundant. Because I'm a teacher, that's a relative thing--particularly on the financial end--but it certainly is true that, when my wife and I ended up learning how to play Magic: The Gathering, cost of entry wasn't something we discussed. Sure, we spent a lot of money on that game, but we also really enjoyed playing with each other and other family members. The money was on entertainment that we likely would've spent on entertainment elsewhere, anyway. But we've stopped playing Magic, and part of that is because of time. We've found other ways of spending our limited time. And the possibility of forming a group that could meet to play D&D or some other form of the genre is highly unlikely. I guess it's the sad fate for the vanguard of pop culture geekdom: Loving comic books, superheroes, fantasy, and other parts of the current pop culture ephemera, seeing the success of these formats, and having--out of necessity more than desire--passed out of the time when it could be enjoyed. I'd love to take a long weekend with a couple of friends and my wife, play some disgustingly complicated board game, and binge on Mountain Dew and Cheetos in between pizza deliveries. But I can't see how that would work. Coordinating babysitters, getting everyone's schedule put together, to say nothing of knowing how to play the games? That's a fantasy if I've ever heard of one. |
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