The Gaming Outpost

Conan went to bed, after rendering me many small insults. The company gathered at the campfire, that is, the tribe looked to me to see how I took this, but I remained calm-faced so they took heart.

He was still abed, when I got up to check on the sentries, and take my morning bath in a creek. I could have solved my problem with him right then by slashing the gladius across his throat after doing a Rotating Swan Leap to get close to him.

But it might not have worked, and besides, he was not evil, just pushy, and lastly he was my guest which to my surprise counts for something with me.

After a quick bite of wild eggs fried by the communal campfire in the shade of the tower, I sought out my barbarian guest.

He stood near seven feet, was wondrously graceful, very well muscled, and spun the giant two-handed longsword of his about like an expert.

It was a preposterous weapon. The blade was a hand-width’s wide, and the whole was over seven feet from blunt tip to the pommel of the hilt. In most universes, despite his reach advantage, my gladius would be a much better choice. But thrusting did little more than annoy people or giant wild boars in this universe.

“Don’t you get tired?” I asked him from about ten feet away as he whipped through a formalized pattern. After all, his sword was at least fifteen pounds which is incredibly heavy for a sword. Two and three pounds or less is more normal.

“The true swordsman never gets tired when steel is in his hand. Not like the sorcerer with his flabby arms.” He sneered at me. I sighed, and took off my shirt.

An abundance of scars along with my martial arts training and my rugged lifestyle left very little flab.

“Now, Conan, men with this sort of weapon conquered a land a hundred days walk from side to side.” I raised the gladius, and then put it down. “But I need to learn how to use your weapon.” And so saying, I lifted up a longsword “of doom” as I privately called it which I had borrowed from one of my tribespeople.

Conan examined it and allowed that it was serviceable.

“Now if you think you have enough control over your blade to not kill me, I’d like to have some lessons.” That challenged deflected his considered idea to ‘accidentally’ kill me.

We started, and at first I was awkward, but I caught on fast. Still, I kept on trying to thrust with the weapon when I saw an opening, and I paid for it with a number of bruises, and minor cuts.

He was terrifically good, with a broad range of techniques, and a decent teacher. At the end of the day, he told me I had started as a twelve-year-old child in a barbarian tribe which could kill any normal man, and progressed to the level of a beginning raider.

Then I put down my sword, and fell over as exhaustion hit me.

“See, you not listen. While you hold steel, a swordsman fights, but let it go, and you fall down. Why you no listen to Conan?” He ridiculed me in a good-humored way as he dragged my exhausted body back to the campfire.

We had rabbits and small game birds that night, and Conan made me eat about three times what I wanted to. I suppose to replace the calories I had burned up yesterday.

The next day was more of the same, except I waited until I got to the campfire and my throne to let go of the sword.

The week came and went, and we interrupted our training to hunt for food for the tribe. I summoned the game with magic, and Conan and I killed it, and the tribespeople dragged it back, dug up roots, and cooked the whole thing.

I saw Conan looking uncomfortable. And yet he was enjoying himself vastly. I think I knew the cause; he was finding out another way of life that was better than his solitary wandering.

Finally, after a month, and the discomfort was getting the better of him, and making him snappy, and I had learned enough to be a decent fighter with the giant longsword, and I spoke to him in front of the people of the tribe at the campfire.

“Lord Conan, you have taught me well. You came here thinking me just another sorcerer to be slain, and now you see other things. I promised you a chance at a great reward if you taught me, did I not?”

He nodded.

“Well, I shall give you that chance, and another chance if you dare it.”

Poor Conan was always a sucker for a dare.

He nodded his acceptance.

At my direction, he held out his sword. I summoned a fire elemental in the midst of the flame, and bowed to it. Then I summoned an earth elemental and asked it to get me certain elements.

The young lad came forth with a wagon carrying a nine foot thick bed of charcoal which Conan plunged his sword into. Then I directed the earth elemental to place those elements into the charcoal, and then I summoned an air elemental to provide pure oxygen.

I asked the barbarian if he trusted me for this was dangerous.

The fire elemental ate into the charcoal, and flames surrounded the barbarian, but he was untouched. While his sword was still hot, I reached into the fire with long tongs made of lesser swords for this purpose, and he let go, and I welded strips of steel to the hilt to make sure that he had contact with steel that fit the local universes requirements.

And then the air elemental blew all the fire and the dust away, and Conan stood there with a gleaming sword in his hand. We tested the modern steel alloy and it cut other blades with ease, and the magic held so that he could fight all day.

He was immenselely pleased.

And then I offered him another piece of metal, if he would go and retrieve the slaves from Calt.

He accepted, and two months later with a band of barbarians in tow, he showed up to receive the gold I had promised his mercenaries which he then dismissed. And then before the others, I gave the barbarian what I had promised him.

Gold. A golden crown. And thus Conan the Barbarian became Conan the King.

Over the next year, his kingdom grew. It became a place famous for its swords, and its peacefulness, and for the fact that sorcerers were allowed to live in its lands provided they did no evil.

The other kingdoms tried to rise against him for they saw the goodness of his reign and it threatened them, but we broke them in a series of battles that added half their lands, the better half to ours.

Finally, after five years, I thought I had taught what I could, and the sorcerers were being tempted to evil by my eternal youth, and indeed these people did not need me anymore, and I was becoming a problem, a stumbling block to them, and so I left a copy of my story for the king to have read to him (since he could not read), and I followed my first instinct to the lake. There I found a gate to another universe.

And proving that this land had changed me as well, I leapt boldly into the gate with longsword in hand, and a song in my heart.

Tadeusz

  C. S. Lewis was asked whether an atheist couldn’t be just as good a person as a Christian, and he agreed that this was so; but he placed a caveat on it.  After all, he observed, the atheist and the Christian have a few very different ideas about the nature of the universe and the people who live in it.

  Bear with me; this really is about role playing.

  The Christian, Lewis observed, believes that people have the potential to live forever.  We are born and we die, but by the grace of God we can continue with Him for eternity.  In contrast, nations last a very short few centuries, maybe several millennia, and races don’t last long at all–even planets and stars have short lives compared to people.  The atheist would, of course, disagree.  To him, people are born, live a few years, and die; it is nations and races that last a long time.  Thus, Lewis concluded, the atheist sees the continuation of societies as important, and sees people as valuable only to the degree that they provide the foundation for this continuation.  People exist for the sake of society, the nation, the race.  On the other hand, the Christian sees the society, the nation, the race as transient, momentary, ephemeral, snapshots in the lives of that which really matters, the people who live on when the universe has passed away.

  There were two things I did not see in this when I first read it.  I should be excused the first, as I had never heard of role playing games back then (in 1975).  The second was just my failure to make a connection between the theoretical and the real–and interestingly is a connection I made eventually because of seeing it through the eyes of roleplaying game theory.

  The role playing game connection has to do with those basic alignment concepts that form so much of Dungeons & Dragons&trade.  Whether you agree with Lewis’ assessment of the distinction between Christian and atheist viewpoints (and although he was outspoken as each of these at different times of his life, it may be said that his observations may apply to only some atheists and some Christians), he makes a clear division of values.  There are those who believe that societies exist for the sake of the people, and those who believe that people exist for the sake of societies.  This, in a nutshell, is the core conflict on the ethical axis, the tension between those who believe in law and those who believe in chaos.  Which is more important:  the people who make up the society, or the society that is made up of people?  Do we sacrifice people to save the society, or sacrifice the society to save people?

  Societies have a lot to offer.  They are useful, even to those who value individuals more highly.  By providing structure, they let everyone know his place, his purpose, his function; in short, they can give answers to those questions that are most troublesome in life.  By creating order, they make it possible to own things with less fear of being robbed, have business and personal relationships with people in which you are less likely to be cheated or hurt, and generally to know what is expected of you and what you can in turn expect of others.  Societies inherently mean that there are rules, and that there are ways of enforcing the rules, and thus that there is discipline.  These things all contribute to making life safer and more predictable.  Threats to societies are inherently threats to the individuals within them, and there could be good reason to defend a society, even to risk life and limb to defend it.  Similarly, societies cannot exist without people, and the society thus has good reason to protect individuals generally even if we agree that the society is more important than any particular individual.  It’s not always a clear cut either/or sort of thing.  It is rather a question of the core reason behind the choice.  Do you protect society because the society is what matters, or do you protect society because individuals matter and the social order is a useful way to protect them?  Do you value individuals inherently, or do they have value because they are necessary to the continuation of society?

  In modern western democracies, the emphasis seems to be on individuals.  Our governments exist, and our armies defend them, because they keep us safe, prosperous, and free.  Internally, our courts have a strong tendency to support individuals, and particularly those in the minority, those whom society would trample in the name of a better, more coherent and unified and efficient, society.  Individuals and individualism are high on our list of values, and we make certain our governments cannot take this away from us.

  The other thing I did not see back then, though, is that twentieth century socialism was exactly the sort of philosophy to which Lewis alluded when he spoke of atheists.  These totalitarian regimes were what they were because those in power believed the nation and the people collectively were more important than any of the individuals.  They thought that the way to run a country was to teach everyone to put the country first, to work to keep the social order stable and moving, and when everyone realized that his own life was an insignificant flash in the pan compared with that something greater of which he was a part–the nation–utopia would emerge.  It would emerge because no one cared what happened to his self as long as his country was as great as it could be.

  Well, asking people to care more for their country than their self might sound like a formula for utopia to some, but it sounds like a formula for disaster to others, and it never worked.  What is interesting in connecting this back to our game concepts, however, is that this utopia, which hoped to be built on the dedicated altruistic sharing of all people in understanding that the whole was more important than any of the parts including themselves, which seemed to expect ultimately to be able to dispose of law and government as common people became self-policing, is the modern example of the ultimate value of law on the alignment chart.  Law doesn’t necessarily mean the proliferation and enforcement of strict rules; to the lawful character, the rules may in fact be superfluous, because he will do the lawful thing in the absence of the rules.  His desire is to put the preservation and well-being of society above that of individuals.  Although rules are required to enforce this among people who don’t see the inherent importance of preserving the nation or the race, the lawful recognizes that order and discipline in each individual is necessary to hold the society together through the current troubles and on into the lives of future generations.

  We can also see from this that the lawful alignment has its own internal complexities.  One of these is that it is quite possible to defend the law and challenge it at the same time.  That is, I may disagree with a particular rule, based entirely on issues that are lawful, and work to overturn that law while at the same time obeying and enforcing it purely for no reason other than that it is the law.  I might conclude that slavery of certain creatures is a bad societal structure because it creates instability in society, and so I might actively oppose the slave trade, making my opinion clear, and yet believe that to assist slave rebellions or escapes or to attack slaver caravans would be an assault on the very fabric of society; that even if this is a bad rule, it is the rule, and none of us may break the rules based on our own conscience or opinion without doing damage to society itself.  After all, if everyone did what he thought was right, society would be doomed to collapse (at least, it would appear so to the lawful) because people would not agree regarding the right thing to do until they have understood the fundamental and central importance of society.

  Another quirk of the lawful alignment is that although it tends to be the alignment of professions demanding great discipline (the samurai, kensai, and monk come to mind), it can be the core belief of people whose lives appear extremely chaotic to the observer.  In fact, someone once suggested to me that insanity was inherently chaotic, and I responded that in my understanding most of those conditions that we would label neurotic or psychotic are extremely lawful in their structure.  Even role playing game simplifications of such things are lawful:  the character is bound by particular rules that control his conduct which make it different and peculiar to those who hold different rules, such as mentally refusing to acknowledge the existence of certain creatures or objects even when they are in his presence, or reacting in fear to such a presence.  On the other side of the coin, chaotic characters can be entirely opposed to the lawful emphasis on society above the individual and still be extremely disciplined as individuals.  In this regard the wu jen is informative.  He is one of the misfits of society, often ignoring its rules and flaunting his independence from them; yet he rigidly observes his taboos, whether they mean not drinking alcohol or never sitting with his back to the west or always wearing something pink among his clothing.  Individual discipline and order is more common among lawful characters, but it is neither exclusive to them nor pervasive among them.  Even a chaotic cavalier must practice rigorously every day; he may oppose the oppressions of society, but as an individual he is dedicated to the pursuit of his craft.

  So again we find that alignment comes down to what we believe; and in this case, it is about whether the individual or the society is more important.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

World A Week: Steel

In which the verser gets the point.

I woke on a dusty and wind-blown hillside to a world of brown except for faint glints in the bright sunlight far away. Retrieving my stuff took a few minutes, and scouting out the near area for any others took a few more.

Nothing and nobody about, I decided.

Squatting down by a small stream going down what I called the back side of the hill which is to say, the opposite side from what I versed in on, I looked out over hills dotted with tough bushes, and slabs of rock. Over the hill, behind me lay a flat plain, and I think a lake in the distance.

The water tested out clear and pure, so I filled several waterskins, and took a drink right then for the best waterskin to carry water in is your own skin.

A prayer for guidance came hard, but I felt some peace about heading toward the lake. No other direction seemed as promising. My telepathy worked, barely, and my telekinesis, also just barely, and the same for pyrokinesis. Nothing else psionic worked.

So, I snapped my fingers in a quick firelighting spell, and nothing happened. Befuddled, I started to pray and cast spells at random until I found the parameters of magic in this world.

In the end, simplicity described it. No quick magics worked. No magics under a minute even had a chance, and in fact, the minute to three minute magics were harder I’d say than most worlds that allowed them. But with a bit of trepidation, I was able to summon an air elemental. The tornadic entity bobbed and wheeled in front of me waiting for a command. It would soon leave unless I gave it a task since most air elementals are not known for their steadiness of purpose or patience.

“Master Sorceror.” I heard from uphill and to my right. I spun around with my gladius held out and low. A boy, in poorly tanned goatskins, and armed with a thick knife at his waist crouched looking down with an expression of fear mixed with wonder.

He saw my sword, and fumbled loose his knife putting it on the ground in front of him. I sheathed my blade, and nodded for him to take up his weapon.

“What do you want, boy?” I asked in Middle American English which appeared to be his tongue as well.

“Only a chance to work, to serve your mightiness, to …” I waved him quiet grasping very quickly that it was one of “those” cultures where the flattering the elite was a fine art.

“Why, boy, and don’t lie to me of the radiance of my face, or the wonder of my presence. I am a sorcerer, and ill inclined to lies.”

He sat back, and then forthrightly looked in my face.

“I, my sister, and even those of my village that remain need a protector. We would die in your service as needs be.”

“Ah.” I said, and looked down at my campfire. I’d heard this story too many times before. Sometimes it is a lie, but all too often, it’s the exact truth.

“Right then, lets pack up.” I pointed at my backpack for the boy to carry it figuring to test his honesty and true willingness to help me. “Thank you for your time, spirit of the wind. Go in peace.” I said and bowed courteously to the wind which bobbed back, and then shredded itself in little gusts going hither and yon.

He looked bemused at my pouring water on the campfire, but since I was a sorcerer, apparently that allowed some eccentricities. Indeed, he started babbling about the four elements of the universe, and how I showed no favor between them thus making myself able to use fire and water. It was a neat theory to explain my actions; except for the fact that it was not true.

It also showed me to be early in this world’s timeline. “The Four Elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water” is ancient Grecian in my first world’s history.

We walked several miles, and to my surprise, the undernourished looking lad toted the backpack the whole way.

Coming over a hill, I saw an old man with a bald head, and solid white hair, and a linen tunic jump out at us with this preposterous piece of silverware. A giant claymore nearly seven feet long he brandished toward me. I batted the thing aside with the gladius that I found in my hand without even thinking about it.

Some yelling by the kid got everything calmed down, and the sentry apologized, but I merely complimented him on his bravery. Trying to be honest, I found I could not praise his swordsmanship, so I merely held my tongue.

A varied clot of twenty comprised the group. Old women and men, young children with my new friend the oldest of the lot, and those crippled by disease or swords were my group.

They told a tale of woe of how the raiders from Calt had swooped down on their village, and taken all the men not killed in the ambush in the fields and the young women of the village as slaves. I’m not fond of slavers, and while I cannot stop every evil, it falls to me to try my best even in a world which seemed beset with evils.

Still, I needed to help these people first.

They need food, and shelter, and protection from the lesser bandits they mentioned.

So, I told them of the boy’s offer, and put it to them. Serve me, and I would try to protect them, and rescue their beloved ones. Sure, I could have done it out of the kindness of my heart, but I had things they needed to do, and this would get them to do it. Besides, I don’t think they understood notions like “disinterested kindness.”, and sometimes I wondered if I did.

With a bit of discussion, and a shared feast which involved a number of secretive tests such as “accidentally” pricking my finger with a knife, and dropping a bit of salt on my head (the salt and most of the food was mine since they had hardly anything more than berries and roots.) they assured themselves that I had not clothed my demonic self in human flesh.

They agreed, and then waited for me to fix things. This would not do. I sat back, and got out my notepad, and began to sketch out some magics with some alterations according to the theories I’d been taught. I wanted massive rituals which included everybody in them. They had to be part of the solution, and not just the recipient of my bounty.

Every person went out, and brought back a rock of their choice to lay in a circle precisely measured atop a commanding, nearby hill. I’d chosen the hill because the pendulum spell for discontinuities I’d learned from somewhere, I forget where, showed it to be clean of discontinuities. The cap of the hill was formed of solid rock so it would be an excellent foundation once I bound the base of the tower with it.

We all washed in cold water, and scrubbed down with sand. Then at high midnight, I commanded them to take up their stone as they sat in a circle around the circle, and cry tears for those lost to bind the stone of their pain to the heartrock of the earth.

I’d have liked to have kept everyone up their until dawn, but they were not up to it, so instead I gave them a few hours of sleep, and we came back at dawn. The rocks chosen were all firmly melded to the hill.

So, a new dawning for peace, for justice, I cried as the sun rose, and I visualized a mighty tower rising. Stones began to rumble in past the sitting circle, and meld themselves to the stones already there, and within the space of an hour, a five story tall tower stood on the hilltop.

My body bobbed and swayed in exhaustion, and I braced my arm on the boy’s shoulder as I studied the work we had done.

It did not look exactly like I expected. It expressed optimism, and defiance of slave traders, and the pain of the oppressed. It looked great to me. After I checked it for discontinuities, and walked in and looked about, I came back out.

“Let us dedicate this tower to the Lord of Justice and Peace.” They looked baffled, but then near-visibly shrugging their shoulders they consented having the pantheists’ tolerance for new gods. So I taught them “A Mighty Fortress” by Martin Luther, and they horribly butchered it being unfamiliar with the musical style, but they loved it anyways, and I think the tower liked it too.

Curious, I turned to face the tower, and I addressed it.

“Tower?”

“Yes, sorcerer?” Rang across the hill.

“You will protect and shield these people, and those they choose as their own?”

“With my last grain of sand after I am battered by a thousand siege engines.” He/it answered fervently, and I nodded well pleased even if a bit surprised. I had created or let into the universe some sort of locus genii, a spirit of a place, but without meaning too. Maybe every building of consequence in this universe had its guardian spirit?


I spent the next two days damming a creek so as to fill a cistern in the lower floor of the tower, and spelling seeds to grow fast. The villagers brought me useful seeds, and built a bramble barrier between the crude fields, and animals and bandits. This field lay on the backside of the Tower.

Later, I started to whistle up a wind, and then stopped, and conducted the lengthier summoning of a wind elemental for the task of carrying me into the sky. About five miles away, I spotted a herd of wild boars.

The leader was of tremendous size, nearly five hundred pounds, and so I did not want to give it a fair chance, and I began to prepare my magic. However, the canny beast led his group into the deeper underbrush before I could get a spell off.

Thinking a bit, I constructed cages of poles from tree limbs, and vines that I enchanted for strength. Food placed inside them for bait (precious food too) lured the beasties back in the night hours, and I watched the herd make its way into the five cages.

The doors fell, and the rage struck fear into my heart, but I saw the cages held except for the one owned by the big boar himself. Nothing to do, but kill him, and hope for the best.

I ran over, and jabbed my gladius through his neck, and pulled it out. He looked at me stupidly, and then bawled in anger some more. So I repeated it, and it was like I scratched the monster.

“What are you doing, sorcerer? Hit it!” The boy yelled from nearby, and his grandfather came up with that ridiculous sword of his, and told his son to let the beast out. Before I could stop the insane plan, the boy did, and the granther took a whale of a strike at its neck as it came out.

So, it got really angry. I jabbed like a nurse desperate to find a vein, and the granther yelled at me to stop scratching it, and hit it like he was. It was a desperate moment with us jumping in, and jumping back, and screaming like madmen as the mortally wounded, but not yet dead beast roared about seeking to take us with it, and I fell back not upon my training, but upon ancient human instinct. Whack it with your club.

And I saw actual decent damage for the first time with my sword. After a bit, I leapt on the pig’s back intending to cut its throat, but it bucked me off, and trampled on me. This let granther break its back with a mighty cleave. And the two of them finished it off.

Then they started weeping for the poor dead sorcerer, until I sat up, and they ran off screaming. It took a bit, with me hobbling and chasing them to get them to calm down, but eventually they did, and I pointed out that I hadn’t got trampled very much before granther got the boar.

We chopped up the pig, and carried it back for a feast.

There I learned that nobody thrust with their sword. Why would you want to do that? It hardly does any damage, I was told. Perplexed a bit, because I knew a good penetration to a vital organ was probably more dangerous and immediately fatal than any old hack, I shrugged and adjusted my battle techniques.

Unfortunately, my sword, the gladius is specifically made for thrusting. But the people understood, after all, I was a sorcerer, and who ever heard of a sorcerer being good with a sword?

The next morning we fetched the pigs on a troika I made, and it took all morning despite the magic I used.

Still, that left plenty of time for the bramble bush cage to be made for the monsters. And several of the village immediately set about trying to tame the man-killers.

Once we got that finished, I ruled it was time for another feast. One pig had been a complete and murderous monster so he got the chop. I did not try to use the point of my sword this time. Instead, I let the others handle the job.

That night I sat on my “throne”, a rock chair overlooking the fire circle and my tribe, that my tribe had secretly made for me, and ate a choice piece of innards. To these people, with their lack of fat in their diet, the innards were the most prized portion.

They considered me a bit weird for wanting a steak instead, but my slice lay cooking near the fire.

Then a stranger in a bearskin kilt walked into the firelight. He looked about without being obvious about it, and then helped himself to a leg of the boar which he proceeded to chomp on as he stood by the fire.

The light showed his muscles, and his seven foot long sword, and his long, blonde hair to good advantage. My people stirred, some nervous, and some protesting.

He looked about with a wolf-like gaze, and they shut up.

The bold young boy dared to ask him why he did this.

“I see no lordly man to stop me. It is my right.” He spoke with a definite and complacent arrogance. Of course, he was better and more important than these people was his attitude.

“I am lord here. Who are you?” I said trying to be polite.

“I am Conan the Barbarian. And you are?” The challenging gaze he returned me chilled my blood, but not as much as my knowledge.

I had fallen into Mr. Howard’s fantasy where bold swordsmen cut down evil sorcerers. Since I was mostly a sorcerer here, that was a problem.

I considered how to answer in a way best suited to preempt problems when the boy answered for me.

“He is a mighty sorcerer, and not afraid of any steel!” The boy boasted.

“Really?” Conan said around a mouthful of my pig.

Great. Just great.

Tadeusz

  I discovered video games at about the same time as I discovered role playing games.  I had played and even owned some of the precursors, particularly the pong games that you could attach to your television; I had seen others in arcades, but I never had money to waste on arcade games beyond a rare splurge of a quarter on pinball.  These games were interesting, but they didn’t really grab me.  It was the home game console with changeable games (more than just tennis/hockey/handball/practice mode) that made video games exciting.  I can remember playing Atari games with our gaming group, and getting an Intellivision to expand the options.  I couldn’t say which came first, Atari or Dungeons & Dragons.  I can say that I lost most of my interest in video games.  This is in large part due to their relentless advance–by the time I had gotten good with a game, it was no longer available, and the expense of keeping up with what was current outstripped my budget.  I’m still saving up for some of those wonderful Intellivoice games, but no one has them; I have despaired of replacing the worn out controllers to make the console operational again.  Role playing games have a much longer shelf life, and as a result I’ve stayed with them and even kept on top of at least some of the new releases.

  Video games had another aspect which in some ways was a feature and in others a deterrent.  When you turned them off, they forgot all that you had done to that point.  I know that the new ones have memory cards (and even some of the old ones had that feature, if you went the route of the computer system games), but the popular ones of that time were designed such that when you turned it off and on again, you were back at the beginning of the game.  Everything that had been done, for better or worse, was undone.  There was even a button on the console, marked Reset, that did this power interruption to restart the game without requiring a complete reboot of the system, so you could clear what had been done and start over.

  I don’t know whether this influenced our role playing any, or whether it was incidental, but it seemed that for some aspects of those early games there was a similar reset button.  People would run the same adventures for different groups of players, or sometimes for different characters with the same players.  Whether these were modules purchased from publishers or home designed dungeons, they were reusable because when you started over it was as if no one had ever been through them before.

  I don’t think we ever really thought about that.  The past could be erased in an instant in our games, and replayed in a new way.

  We don’t erase the past in this series; each quarter we look back over the dozen installments that have appeared in those three months, to bring these ideas back to mind, keep them fresh, and provide a bit of historic context.  Here are the articles you might have missed this time.

131. Songs took advantage of the fact that I was a composer before I was a writer or a game designer, and drew from that famous question about whether lyrics or music come first a consideration of how system and setting interact at the development level.
132. Auspicious provided an idea for a mechanic to make good and bad luck a real part of play.
133. Power gave consideration to the interpersonal struggles that sometimes arise between people in all kinds of situations, and warned against the trouble they can cause in a gaming group.
134. Selfish was the third installment in our alignment series, nominating economist Adam Smith to be the patron saint of evil.  One reader called it brilliant; I trust others enjoyed it.
135. Challenge talked about adjusting the level of difficulty in a game to suit the abilities and preferences of the players, with thanks to Kelly Tessena for her comments on playing solitaire.
136. Haunting attempted to explore one of several worlds I’m hoping to use in convention demos, to find ways to keep it frightening.
137. We considered when and how to use Pictures both to make things clearer and to make them less clear, and when it would be better not to use them.
138. Recalling an old saying from my radio days about being “Paid in Prestige“, this article looked at the in-game reward of making characters famous and respected.
139. Freedom took us back to alignment questions with a study of chaos and what it means.  This, too, was extolled as one of the best explanations of the concept available, so I trust others can find use for it.
140. Credibility was heavily theory-oriented, with a look at some of the cutting edge work in understanding role playing games and what really identifies them.
141. Professional gave some thought to character skill improvements and how they can be presented within a game.
142. Disabilities talked about how individuals cope with their own weaknesses, and gave ideas for enhancing game experiences by considering the ways characters compensate for their own shortcomings.

  The last time we looked back, we considered why we remember the past in Memorium.  There it was suggested that games can be enhanced by recalling the dead, the history, the past that makes the world what it is.

  Of course, we can erase the past; we can replay it.  We can hit the reset button any time we like, and go back to who we were (as characters, at least) when it all began.  Sometimes we do this with our characters; more often we do it with our adventure settings.

  Yet I’d like to suggest that it might not always be the best choice.

  When I was introduced to Multiverser, there was a world associated with it in which all players up to that time had started.  For those unaware of the nature of my connection to the game, E. R. Jones had started working on it about half a decade before he met me, running it for other gamers and getting feedback from them.  Richard Lutz was probably the most influential, as he also ran games and created world ideas, including the famed Zygote Experience, but the only one of these early players I ever met was Sean Daniels, who joined a game with me one night.  I was brought in after these people were scattered to the four winds, and was asked to take the general concepts that made this game so wondrous and turn them into a system that could be published.  It was another half decade of work to put this out, but we were pleased with the results.

  The results included a book of worlds, of which NagaWorld was the centerpiece, a world E. R. Jones had imagined that was so incredibly alien that no one could possibly fail to realize they weren’t in Kansas anymore.  It was here that each of our players had started, including me, and even including E. R. Jones.

  Yet it was not exactly the same world for each of us.

  E. R. Jones entered NagaWorld as a non-player character; he was running the game, but his character arrived in that world first.  Lutz and Daniels and two other players followed him in short order.  They dug a hole in the ground, partly for shelter, and struck water.  Soon they had an underground shelter, and before they left, they left a note behind for anyone who would follow them.

  When I entered the game, I found their hole in the ground, their shelter, their water supply, tracks showing their departure, and the note they left behind.  There also was another character present at that time, a character brought in by a player who had been transferred out of the area, but whose persona remained in the game world, living in a truck the presence of which he could not explain.  I met him, and a non-player character who was keeping him company, and started to explore that world.  There were some hazards, and in response to these I started to build defenses.  The defenses turned into a city.  That’s right:  I’m the Architect.  I built Umak Tek, as a player testing the Multiverser game system.

  The interesting thing is that as this world went to paper, those details remained part of it.  We never really gave it a thought.  This was the world that had been created, in the form it had at that moment.  I suppose that most world designers would have hit the reset button, taken it all back to the beginning, cleared away the city, the shelter, the water, the tracks, all trace that anyone had ever been there, and let the new players around the world each become the first humans to set foot in this world.  We didn’t.  We expanded with a few other potential starting points, but we left our player contributions to it intact.

  One of our reviewers said that this was the among the most interesting aspects of that world:  that players could encounter the changes made by previous players.  It seems we blundered into a good thing.

  I often run the same worlds for new players; I’ve got a few that are favorites, because I know them well and they usually run smoothly.  In many of these, I do hit the reset button–if you wind up on a spaceship named The Mary Piper, they will never have heard of Shawn Kelley or Dorian Mantell or any of the many other players who have been there and done that.  On the other hand, there are other worlds in which the touch of previous players is wonderful.  My own copy of NagaWorld includes a number of changes that have been made by people like John Walker and Dorian Mantell, Jim Denaxas and Bill Friant, who played in that world and left something behind for other players to find.  I run too many people now for all of them to be included; I’m just not organized enough for that.  Yet some of the adventures my players are having today will be the history of that world for some future players who come upon it, and that will be more interesting because of it, because of the way these creative minds collaborated with mine in expanding the world as they explored it, and the fact that I did not hit the reset button.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

I’d been knocked unconscious and fallen into the teleport machine’s private bubble dimension. My opponent, Arronnette, another verser, and a serial killer who I had intended to consign to this space forever was tied up to a metal chair. He also had thumbs, ribs, and a jawbone broken, as well as being thoroughly kicked.

The damage was my doing.

We had no way out, not even by death. For the discoverer of this bubble dimension, the good, I hope, doppleganger of this evil man had discovered one oddity.

Nothing died in here. In fact, experimental animals, various other flora and fauna rapidly regenerated in this space. This had shocked the experimenter, and made him willing to accept the young assistant’s desire to be the first human on this world to be teleported.

What that meant is that this was the perfect prison for a verser. Small, and unable to escape from (although I might be able to manage by using magic to create a gate, or psi-force ripping a gate in space-time which involves massive kiloton level forces being unleashed. Of course, that supposes that high-level magic or psi skills worked here which they might not.)

I woke about the same time as Arronnette’s thumbs healed and he untied himself.

We both lurched to our feet, and circled each other learning the parmameters of our prison. Barely twenty feet across, and the space did not wrap around like in some universes. You would bump into a wall here rather than just finding yourself walking in a different direction.

I felt a sinking feeling inside as outside I tried to concentrate on him. I could be trapped in here for something that looked a lot like an eternity from the perspective of my three hundred years or so of life. And I was not sure it would be safe to experiment on finding a way out of here because the Merry Mauler would have to be incapacitated.

Otherwise he would escape and spread his evil out further into the multiverse. And I could not allow that.

The psiforce gate would maybe work, but the energies released would emulsify us, and probably deposit enough of our bodies outside the gate to have us die and move on.

And the magic gates I knew either required special circumstances like a Native American mound or a Celtic mound, or a full moon with a horn of elk and a golden bell that I did not have, or they took such a length of time that they would easily be observed and tactics prepared by my foeman.

I could always pray for a miracle, but with him looming on top of me that seemed hard to summon concentration.

Nevertheless, I did offer a small prayer, and the Merry Mauler used my moment of distraction to jump me. We fenced and studied each other’s techniques being aware of the consequences of failure.

The loser would have the winner continually beating him to cripple him, potentially for the rest of time.

And we were too evenly matched for us to want to chance that just yet. He was stronger, but less skilled than I. Evidently, he’d just acquired his cyberware, and was not really used to it yet.

I saw a notion flit across his face. Once he got used to his cyberware, why then he could attack me.

Despair filled me, but a sense of peace from above pushed back, and inspired me to stand on one side of the room facing the gate we had come in.

He stretched his arms, and pushed himself through some katas with a grin that promised me eternal pain. I prayed, but kept myself not deeply focused because he would jump me if I let myself get to deep into it.

The day passed, and we both felt hungry. He ate his food, and I nibbled at mine.

It was incredibly boring, and I wandered the halls of my memory trying to recall places that had been sucked into my amneasiac hole in my mind. Then I worked on intellectual problems, and designed a suit of armor usable by a kangaroo man since I was sure I’d been to such a world where they existed and had not solved that problem. More would not come to me.

I wondered how long this day was, and finally I checked my watch. I, we had been here at least thirty-two hours, and I felt no need of sleep.

Interesting.

And then the wall of the gate began to shimmer, and I could see the good Arronnette out of his bandages walking about with a cane. It pained me to see him injured, but the rapid progression clued me in on something.

The time ration between these two worlds must be at least ten to one. That is ten minutes passed there for every one here.

And I shook my head which was intelligible because the time flow stabilized between the two worlds so that they could see my moves. It caught their attention, but they were perplexed, and Arronnette was facing my way, but starting to become aware of something going on.

“You are never getting out of here, Arronnette. Not now, not ever. Not even in five months. You might as well close the door on your hopes.”

They read my lips while Arronnette stared at me with a mixture of hatred and perplexity. And the good scientist figured it out, I hope.

They closed the door. I hoped that they would open it in five months. I hope they understood my odd reference to be a code.

I refused to speak to the Merry Mauler when he questioned me lest I give him a clue.

And we spent the next twenty-four hours with him occasionally commenting on how much better he felt his skill at using his cyberware was becoming. Meanwhile, I worried and alternately prayed.

I think the beast began to figure out something from my too frequent glances at the gate because we had another one of our testing of defenses sessions which abruptly ended when he had taken my position so that he could watch the gate area.

But better, he seemed not to have improved in his skills at fighting.

Still I bruised an arm, which rapidly healed.

The next twenty-four hours he ran through all his food, and tried to steal mine. But he stopped when I nearly caved in his temple with a crescent kick.

After that he spent his time viciously practising.

The next twelve hours he spent telling me of all the people he had murdered in precise detail. Finally, I could take it no longer, and I started yelling at him which is what he wanted. He needed someone to fight.

I could see he felt better after our yelling match. His hands shook less, and his smile was less forced. He grinned savagely at me.

“I’m like a vampire. I draw life from other people’s pain and anger.”

So I started to preach to him. He did not appreciate that at all. It went on for some hours, and at the end he looked a bit crumpled at the edges.

So far we had been in her eighty hours without sleep, and I was definitely feeling it. Not physically, but mentally. The brain needs sleep.

I started seeing oddities at the corners of my eyes. And Arronnette started talking to himself, and jerking around in anger at the responses he was getting.

He took to screaming hysterically at me for relief, and I maintained a bland face while preparing for a life and death struggle that never materialized.

Quiet for another twelve hours as he rigorously forced himself to stay in his katas as a means to hold onto his grip. I joined him figuring I needed to learn his combat style, and it might help me, and it might spook him.

At the end of that, he looked sadly at me.

“We’re not so different, Tadeusz.” He said with wounded eyes, and I tried with every scrap of my empathy and perception to reach the battered child inside his filthy soul, but he kept insisting on doing things his way.

In the end, I saw him before my eyes kill that last bit of innocence. I think he had more in him, somewhere, but it was buried to deep for anything but an awesome working of God past even the normal miracle of new life to reach.

He’d taken a long step toward becoming soul-dead. And he grinned in a broken and mad way, happy at his success.

“When I get out of here, Tadeusz, I’ve decided to change my methods. I think a more industrial killing is in order, in honor of you. Say a hundred thousand…”

He went on describing lustfully the tortures he intended to inflict on a suffering humanity just to spite me, and I knew in that sickening moment in a deeper way how God saw Satan.

I wanted to vomit, but I dared not that moment of vulnerability. Indeed, he seemed more dangerous than before to me personally. There was an animal quickness to his movements that the ponderous Dr. Arronnette had lacked.

And I speak correctly, for the stress had shattered his mind into pieces. But none of them were decent I determined over the next twenty-four hours with the aid of some very delicate psi work.

It seemed only telepathy and empathy worked here, and those quite poorly.

It was then that I began to torment him. Harrass him, and leave him no moment of rest or respite. We had sixteen hours until the gate might open, if the other had understood correctly (and how I desperately prayed that he did), and the monster had not adequately shattered.

We fought, and disengaged, and I came back at him like a hyena. Finally, he begged me to stop, and I just asked him what his victims had said.

Provoked, beyond measure, he screamed in ear-splitting rage, and leaped straight at me. I thought I was ready for this, but still the suddenness, and my mentally dulled condition weighed me down.

I barely got a leg up in time to power-kick into his chest as he flashed straight at my throat from across the room.

He hit the far wall, and bounced twice before landing on the floor, a harsh staticy surface made out of space-time itself I reckoned.

I bounced off one wall, and landed on my feet. Then I raced back over to him, to pound on him some more, but my goal had been achieved.

Vacant eyes greeted me with an occasional gibbering. His mind was gone, and thankfully I did not have to beat him more.

The next thirty-seven minutes ground on hatefully as I asked myself if there had been any other way, and as I listened to hear a change or for a false note in his cries, but nothing.

And the clock struck. And nothing happened. I almost screamed, instead I began to weep uncontrollably.

And a minute passed, and another, and I heard Dr. Arronnette in a gentle voice say.

“Come on Tadeusz. Please hurry.”

The gate had opened two minutes late. I dove through with manic fervor not caring where I landed. And I wiggled around on the gate’s ramp to see the field close and entomb Dr. Chase Arronnette, the Merry Mauler for eternity, or as near to it as I could manage.

Still clutching a cane, but otherwise looking well, the good Arronnette helped me to a seat. Then he showed me his security precautions which were extensive to ensure that no one accidentally opened up the teleport bubble that contained his evil doppleganger in it.

And he hugged me as I tried to apologize for shooting him.


It took nearly two weeks for me to get over the worst of it. I spent a couple days talking to friends of the doctor in the mental health business, pastors and shrinks, who had high level security clearances as well.

But still, the scars of that one hundred twenty-eight hours and two minutes still burn deep in my mind.

I got a job with their military establishment which let me do pretty much whatever level of activity I felt like that day. We went over some of the new techs I had in my backpack, and I filed papers, and worked out with SpecFor teams, and gradually, about a year later, I felt truly myself again.

And I met up with Arronnette who had developed a dimension gate machine which needed a test subject. Since my stories and scientific theories were the basis of much of it, he wondered if I wanted to face my fears, and try it.

Sure. Besides, this world would always stink to me of his alternate.

I jumped through the portal, and promptly got ripped in half. At least, I’m a verser, or that would be the end of this story. But even a verser is not undying. But we do make good guinea pigs.

Another universe formed around me, and …


Tadeusz

  I think I have short arms.

  I could be wrong about that; it’s difficult to really know how any body part compares to what is normal (frustrating for some people, no doubt).  I know that I have a rather long torso; I have the same inseam as my brother, who is three or four inches shorter than I overall, so I have to make up for it somewhere.  (For anyone who perhaps does not know, the inseam is the inside length of your leg.)  Besides, I don’t fit terribly well in cars, because even though at a shade shy of six feet I’m not all that tall, my head is constantly finding the roof, and the sun visor easily blocks more of my view than it ought.  I frequently find myself hunching over at traffic lights to bring the light below the top edge of the windshield.

  Thus it could be that my arms are not really short; it’s just that as measured against my body, they seem so.  My father-in-law had proportionately long arms, but he was a very short man so I don’t know whether his arms were actually longer than mine, or whether my arms on his body would have reached just as far.  The problem of my short arms has come to my attention just lately because I have a new pair of jeans, and I can’t reach the bottoms of the pockets without bending rather awkwardly, so it’s been in my mind.

  It has also brought back to my mind a story I heard long ago of someone else with short arms, which I heard before it occurred to me that I might have short arms myself.  The story is set during those days when dueling had shifted from swords to pistols, but pistols were still fairly new.  One young man was challenged to a duel; he had short arms, and could see that he stood little chance of out-drawing his opponent.

  It will at this point help to look back through time to understand the transition that had taken place.  For generations, the sword was the honorable weapon, and in a duel men would draw their swords and fence to first blood or some similarly identifiable conclusion.  Swords, of course, were generally worn on the left (for right handed individuals), because the length of the weapon required that they be drawn across the body to get maximum advantage from the length of the arm.  If you wore your sword on your right hip, you would have significant difficulty freeing the full length of the blade from the scabbard while gripping the hilt with your right hand.

  Thus when swords began to give space to guns, the users were already accustomed to reaching across their bodies to draw the sword, and that was where they put their guns.  These are the famed cross-draw holsters, and costume from the period, such as the garb of pirates, usually shows pistols on the front of the belt angled for easy reach by the opposite hand.

  Perhaps now you’ll see the dilemma our short-armed hero had.  Reaching across his body would pose a problem.  My arms are not so short that I couldn’t manage a cross-draw holster (although if I put on any more weight, it’s going to be a problem), but if you can imagine trying to use your right hand to get your keys out of your left pocket, you might have a good idea of the matter.  He could certainly draw a gun and fire it from such a position; but he could not do it at all quickly, and against an opponent in a duel he would be facing certain death.

  Yet of course he would have to accept the duel; after all, death before dishonor, and all that.

  His father was not eager to see his son shot down in such an unfair fight; on the other hand, he, too, bought all that honor stuff of the age, so he would never suggest that his son back down from a challenge.  It was just a matter of solving the problem of drawing the gun.  Dad had an idea:  let’s move it somewhere where you can reach it.  Pistol barrels are not really that long; you can clear the holster fairly easily with them.  Let’s put the gun on your right hip, and grab it with your right hand.  Now all you have to do is pull it out, swing it up, and it’s already lined up with your adversary.  The quick-draw holster thus was invented to solve the problems of a man whose arms were a bit too short to effectively use the cross-draw design.

  The duel that inspired this never took place.  His opponent took one look at the new holster concept, and conceded.  No one could outdraw that design if they were shooting from a cross-draw position; in the time it would take to line up the shot, you would be dead.  Still, once the advantages were seen, the quick-draw holster replaced the cross-draw almost completely.

  My own short arms have not led to any such innovations.  However, there are things I do particularly to counter my own disabilities.  My vision is poor enough that if my glasses fall on the floor I might be a long time searching for them; on one occasion I spent the night on the couch waiting for someone to come downstairs and spot the elusive eyewear, for fear that in going upstairs I would step on them.  Thus I never remove my glasses without putting them immediately in one of several specific places–my night table drawer when I sleep, the counter by the sink when I shower, the pocket of my terrycloth robe when I swim.  People who have disabilities create ways of compensating.  These can be extraordinary and world-changing like the quick-draw holster; they could be boring like my careful attention to my corrective lenses.  They will be there.

  They will be there for characters, too.  Watch Matt Murdock getting ready for his day in Daredevil, as he carefully arranges his money so he can identify it by touch instead of sight (among the many tricks he uses).  In a slightly different context, Mel Gibson’s Maverick lets everyone see just how fast he can draw a gun, and so never has to demonstrate that he can’t actually hit anything with it.  When Harry Potter’s headmaster Dumbledore hired the centaur Firenze to teach divination (in the fifth installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), the class had to be moved from the tower room above the trapdoor to a ground floor classroom more accessible to him.  Smart characters use their strengths to overcome their weaknesses.  This isn’t even limited to smart characters.  Even stupid brutes are aware that they’re more likely to win an argument with their left hook than their clever insights and repartee.  We all play to our strengths, and our characters will as well.

  So apply it to your characters.  How does the dwarf compensate for the fact that he is short and stocky?  The dralasite is colorblind; what does he do to overcome this disadvantage?  The yazirian wears dark glasses during the day, because his eyes can’t adjust to the bright sunlight; does the drow elf do something similar?  Does the character have individual weaknesses that require him to do something out of the ordinary?  It could be as simple as watching his diet–I can’t eat turkey, and my best friend can’t eat most seafood; diabetics have to be careful of their sugar intake and people with gall bladder problems must watch their fats.

  These quirks can make the character interesting; done well, though, they can go beyond that to make the game more interesting.  Those compensating actions or objects can have ramifications through the game world, if given thought.  How do they impact the other player characters?  How do strangers respond?  What does it require of the character when unusual circumstances arise?  All this can complicate the story, and complications are what make stories most interesting.

  Give some consideration to these minor disabilities and simple vulnerabilities, but even more pay attention to the compensations that are required to overcome them.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

I walked down a dark road into the city. My opponent, Dr. Chase Arronnette, is a serial killer and a verser which means that ultimate punishment for his crimes evades us.

Worse, he’s managed to pin his crimes on me, and I am now a wanted man.

Hearing a car coming along the country road, I leapt the ditch and hid behind a tree as it searchlightlike headlights trailed along my side of the road, and rapidly went on leaving me alone.

I started jogging in to town at a pace that I could maintain for at least ten miles without a break.

Arronnette told me he intended to kill his doppleganger in the hospital, and take his place, and good reputation. My opponent was not much inclined to bluff, I knew from previous worlds, but he was an excellent chess player.

Again he forced me to take a dangerous move. I would have to break into a heavily guarded hospital to rescue the good man, I had put there. See, I had thought the doppleganger to be the serial killer, and so I shot him.

The run refreshed me, and I circled the hospital looking for a way in. The back door was open for smokers, and a quick sprint on light feet while a guard went for a bathroom break let me in.

I forcibly controlled my breathing as I passed a cluster of nurses with unlit cigarrettes clutched in the finely manicured hands.

Then a quick leap to poke a ceiling tile, and another leap to pull myself into the hidden space between the dropped and the true ceiling, and we were good to go.

A bit of crawling, and I came to the concrete wall of the elevator shaft. A smooth scraping, only when the elevator was in use, with my titanium nails took me half an hour to prep the circular hatch I was making.

I waited until the elevator went high, and palm-struck the disc. It popped loose, and fell with a loud ka-chunk into the bottom of the elevator.

Hopefully, people were used to loud noises from the elevator. A few more minutes, and I climbed out onto the elevator roof and started shimmying up the cable.

Instead I quickly changed my plan. I rode to a nearly top floor, and then went up as fast as I could to the top, and quickly unscrewed some bolts to let myself out of the top of the shaft.

Here I started to slowly and so carefully move. Speed was no longer of the essence. Stealth was king.

I crawled fifty feet in two hours in the ceiling tiles to make it to the doppleganger’s bed.

And yet, I was not quick enough. Arronnette, the Merry Mauler, walked in with an attending nurse. He posed as a specialist brought in from far away to look into this sad case.

And he looked up and smiled at my little peephole.

A quick nerve pressure on the nurse’s neck, and she stood immobile and unaware. I did not know the technique, but I could recognize it.

“Dr. Arronnette, I presume. Lets have a look at you.” The Merry Mauler said to the local.

And the local woke from fevered dreams to stare with horror into the face of his evil alternate.

“You are the face of all the dark deeds I imagined in my worst hours. More disgusting than I can express. Get away from me.”

“So, Taddy’s been talking. He’s watching you now, and trying to figure out how to rescue you without getting caught by the police across the room. And I don’t think you can yell loud enough with those injuries to attract attention. And if Tad stops me now, who’s going to stop me from killing some nurses later, eh?”

The Merry Mauler almost wrenched his arm out of his socket as he congratulated himself on his cleverness.

“I asked a student to bring a few things over. Keep my mind busy, I said.” And then the local raised a right hand to show two vials in his palm. Exoporine, and Kintrailyzine are interesting chemicals. You know about them? No, I thought not. Too busy killing people to actually learn some real science. Let’s just say, that unless you turn around and walk out right now, you’d never reach the door alive. And if you talk to anyone, I’ll do it anyways so you can’t use me.”

The Merry Mauler trembled in his foiled fury with his fists clenching and unclenching.

“Face it, you’re just a poor copy of me. Dumb and brutal as a club. You probably can’t even handle my teleporter, let alone the other stuff I ‘ve been dreaming up, you Stone Age brute.”

The local rubbed in the defeat with evident enjoyment. The Merry Mauler turned to take his nurse, but the local shook his head in negation. My enemy stalked out of the room quivering with fury.

Then the local started talking to me. He explained things, and I found myself nodding. It was a plan.

Dropping through the ceiling, and pausing way too long earned me a bullet in my left shoulder after the cop got his act together. Then I bowled him over, and ran out the door, and straight for the elevator which was not on that floor.

Ignoring my pain, I wrenched the doors open, and slid down on my right arm to the bottom floor. A quick step into the elevator, and an apology to some nice folks who had a kid with a broken arm, and I burst out the lobby screaming.

“I’ll be right back.”

Meanwhile Arronnette upstairs claimed to see me circling the hospital to get back inside. And I sprinted across town to the college where the guards were pulled off that to head to the hospital.

Inside the lit-up science building, I strode fully in the groove. Every footfall fell perfectly, and my eyes searched without thought, and my claws were out.

A few people saw me, and instantly dove back into their classrooms, and slammed doors. My unhindered passage down the halls took seeming moments, and then I came to the door to the Teleporter Lab.

It was running. I stepped across the hall from it, and flipped on the light, and turned on a microwave.

And the power for the building went out. One advantage locals have over versers is knowing the home ground, intimately.

Arronnette came rushing out of the lab looking to reset the power no doubt. I clotheslined him, and punched him in the kidney on the way down to the floor for him.

He landed on his side, and although it pained me, I skipped kicking him in the neck since I did not want to kill him. But I never let him have a chance.

I kicked, stomped, and otherwise mangled him as he tried to defend himself. But while he knew a good bit about combat, he knew little about fighting from on the floor. I guess he never thought himself likely to be in an inferior position.

It took nearly fifteen well-placed kicks before he stopped fighting. I hit him five more times just to be on the safe side.

I dragged his lumpy body into the science lab, and tied him down with rope to a very sturdy metal chair.

Uncertain of how much more damage he could take before dying and escaping me, and unwilling for him to fake me out, I broke his thumbs so he could not untie himself.

Then I walked next door, turned off the light. A phone call down to the basement got a circuit breaker flipped, and we were back in business.

I came back, and saw Arronnette chewing through his ropes with his teeth. So I broke his jaw.

Carefully, I brought the Teleporter online, and I saw the young guy who had volunteered to be his world’s first teleport subject appear in the extradimensional field. Funnily enough, he seemed familiar, like I already associated him with teleporting, but I put that aside since I had bigger fish to fry.

He walked out of the ghostly image of swirling lights, and took solid form in this world. And I cold-cocked him. Too bad, really, but he was loyal to the local Arronnette, and he would not believe me if I said this was an evil clone.

Then I picked up Arronnette and his chair, and toted it up the ramp toward the swirling vortex. He was heavy, and he kept throwing his weight about making it more difficult.

But I got to the top, and I was about to toss Arronnette in to the stable vortex. See the Teleport Machine lacked the power to send you anywhere. It merely transferred you to an alternate pocket dimension.

Later designs would push you further, my advisor in the hospital bed had explained.

And there as I stood at the top, I was repayed for my unkindness. The guy I cold-cocked hit me across the back of the head with something, I think a microscope. And me and Arronnette fell into the vortex.

It snapped off at the excessive mass of two large men with inbuilt cybernetics, and we were in our own private sub-dimension that measured twenty feet by fifteen feet by ten feet. And it was a very special prison, suited for versers for you could not die in this space.

But I didn’t know that or anything at the moment since I was unconscious while a serial killer strove to be free of his bonds.

Tadeusz

Tadeusz

  Standing in the narrow space between the end of the aisles and the deli counter in a small local grocery store, I watched as a small boy guided a shopping cart through that narrow passage, followed and directed by his obviously concerned mother.  I contemplated the difference between his tenuous first efforts and my own easy stunt driving through grocery stores.  Certainly some of the difference is owed to my larger size and strength; but no insignificant portion of the credit goes to practice.

  As I muse on this, my mind goes back to an observation I made about two decades ago (which I preserved in my journal, for those who recall my suggestion in Pay Attention that you keep such a thing) in connection with landscaping at the radio station at which I then worked.  A license upgrade had required the installation of four towers, and the yard and driveway were torn up completely for an extended time.  Once the construction was finished, dirt was poured over the devastation, in some places red clay and in others black humus.  It puzzled me at first, as I watched this spread across the ground.  Once it was all leveled, sod was laid atop the humus, and macadam on the clay.  Each dirt had its function in the design.  As it was being finished, I recognized that this was the right way to do it; yet I also recognized that being professional meant that the landscapers knew the right way to do it before they started, while I as an amateur could only see the advantages in hindsight.

  I was for many years a boy scout, and eventually a scout leader.  In that time I did near a thousand miles of canoeing in major trips, fifty-eight miles the shortest that I recall and the last and longest an eight-day two-hundred mile (actually, two hundred eight miles, so someone was counting) celebration of the United States bicentennial in nineteen seventy-six.  I also did at least one long hike through the Rocky Mountains.  My brother and I each had enough of the old leather Fifty Miler patches that we contemplated making wallets of them.  Yet there was one patch I had that was specific to our troop which held special significance among those who had it.  I received the Swampy Patrol Patch in recognition of the fact that on one occasion I went down with the canoe.  Many of those of us who were the most experienced white water canoeists in the troop wore this patch proudly.  My explanation was this:  having once swamped in a canoe, I understood that experience far better than I ever had from simulated swamping and discussion of the process.  I was there.  That made me a bit more confident in a canoe, because I knew first hand what could go wrong, and what it felt like when it did.

  Our games almost always include some concept of skill improvement, ways in which the characters get better at what they do.  Why, or how, characters improve at these things is rarely if ever considered.  Yet there are three closely related but distinct notions in those three anecdotes above which not only provide a logical explanation for such improvements, but at the same time offer ways to color one more aspect of the game world.

  My ability to steer a cart through a grocery store has been attributed to practice.  I’ve done it before, enough times that I know what I’m doing.  Driving, for most of us, is a good example of this.  In our first days behind the wheel, we are feeling our way through the process, looking for the accelerator and the brake, measuring how quickly and how far to turn the wheel, and looking down when we need one of the controls not already in our hands.  Over the years, we grow more comfortable, treating the car more as an extension of ourselves, to some degree, as we have come to know how hard to push the pedals, how far to turn the wheel, and where each commonly used control is on the dash or the column.  Practice makes perfect, they say; it does so because the more you have done something, the less you have to think about what you’re doing.  In this sense, practice results in skill improvement by the principle of the routine.  We do more and more of the process with less and less attention.  We don’t need to think about it when we’re within the routine aspects, as those things we will do automatically.

  Information is the factor involved in the landscaping example.  Whether they knew where to find the information or had done it this way before, the contractors knew what sort of dirt to put down, and carefully plotted their intended yard design to accommodate this before they brought in the soil.  Many skills improve because we have informed ourselves about them, whether on the level of theory or techniques.  When we started, we knew what to do; but now we understand why we do it, and that enables us to do it better.

  The swampy patrol patch was about experience.  Those of us who went down with the canoe knew something about canoeing that you couldn’t read in a book and couldn’t learn from someone else and couldn’t even really practice.  It had happened to us.  Because it had happened to us, we knew what it was like when it happened, and so were in a better position to see it coming.  So with many skills and abilities, the moment you have done something with them that you’ve never done before, or faced a problem never before faced and discovered the solution within your abilities, you’ve learned something unteachable, something experiential, that can only be truly understood by having been there and done that.

  Some games let these factors be part of character improvement.  Star Frontiers included the assumption that the character would buy instructional modules which provided new information.  Original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons combined teaching and practice in the character’s advancement process.  Some games give a chance to improve an ability by using it.  Multiverser allows all three to be factors in advancing your ability at something.  Yet even in games in which you pay your points and you get your levels, these aspects can come into play to color both the skill improvements and the use of them.  You realize that this particular lock is of a sort you just saw recently; fortunately, you’ve read how to pick it, so you have little trouble getting past it.

  Sure, the character has gotten better.  A little thought to why he got better and how he got better can flesh out who he is and what he’s doing quite nicely.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.