The Gaming Outpost

To John “Jay” Fedigan I owe much of my ability to compose music. I had studied theory, and certainly knew far more music theory than he; indeed, I played quite a few instruments, and he played only the guitar, and didn’t understand the theory and notation for the instrument terribly well when we met (at twelve years old). He, however, wrote his own songs. My efforts to write music to that point were stilted, restricted by some idea about how a song ought to be constructed that had no connection to anything except perhaps Bach chorales and church hymns, in which chords changed with each note. In essence, I apprenticed with him in the art of songwriting, and came to understand much about writing music from watching how he did it. (I mentioned him in this connection some years back, in talking about The Process of learning creative endeavors, for exactly this reason.) On top of that, he had the sort of mellow voice to which people like to listen, and he became a very good guitarist over time. We went our separate ways, largely because he attended the Catholic schools and I the public ones, so we didn’t see much of each other after a while. I always thought he was an excellent musician.

I picked up with Arthur Lee “Artie” Robbins, a very good bass guitarist as eighth graders go who also dabbled in guitar and wrote a few songs. We collaborated on quite a few compositions, and played at pre-teen parties and such for a while, and were quite good friends. Eventually, though, we split up, in this case because I and a good part of the band wanted to move into Christian rock, and Artie was Jewish. We were always close friends, though, and had a great deal of respect for each other as musicians. In fact, when the high school chorus went to Romania just before our senior year, he came along as bass guitarist to my guitar, and did some dazzling things on the instrument.

I never worked with Jim Furey. I was in voice class with him, though, and heard many of the songs he wrote. He could do things with finger picking of which Earl Scruggs probably would have been proud, and made that twelve string of his sing. Jim was strange, but everyone knew he had talent, musical ability and a comic stage presence that made him a natural performer. I remember seeing a number of Catholic Youth Organization shows in which he was featured in comic skits and songs. He had talent.

One day, when none of us had had any contact with each other for longer than we could remember, someone who was to me a complete stranger gave me a call and invited me to play in a band. He was a drummer, and he had access to sound equipment (a big deal in those days). He wanted Jay Fedigan on lead guitar and lead vocals, Jim Furey on rhythm guitar and backup vocals, Artie Robbins on bass, and me on keyboards and backup vocals. He would provide the keyboards (I played, but usually just looked for a real piano if I needed one). Of course I was eager to see what such a band of four of the best musicians I knew (perhaps immodestly including myself, but then, when a complete stranger calls and asks you to be part of a band, you figure he’s got a reason) could accomplish.

We got together. We played a few songs, and they sounded great. We talked a bit about what sorts of things we looked for in a band, what kind of equipment we had and what we needed, and where we would perform. We kicked out some of our own material for consideration, and praised each other’s work to some degree.

Then we went home, and never got together again. To this day, I am uncertain why. Everything had gone well, or so it seemed; but the drummer who had brought us all together apparently decided it was not worth pursuing further, and never called us again.

I’ve watched musicians try to create bands. There seems to be an inherent problem in the effort. Most of those who are good enough to be great have great egos, and have correspondingly great difficulties compromising their vision for the band, the songs, the arrangements–ultimately bands of the best of the best tear themselves apart, unless there is one member whose fame and skill overrides all other egos in competition. Thus the great band with three to six incredible local musicians usually dissolves into three to six mediocre bands each founded and directed by one great musician. Most of the best musicians you knew in high school didn’t make it big not because they weren’t good enough, but (among other reasons) because they couldn’t work with others who were good enough.

A character party is in many ways similar to a band. You bring together several characters who are adventurers, good at what they do. However, unless one of them is so clearly the leader that no one would question this, the party has an inherent instability: each member believes that his ideas are best, that the group should adopt his methods, follow his guidance, go his way. At least, if they are all excellent adventurers, that’s what they think.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is from this perspective unlikely. Captain Nemo and Alan Quartermain would have great difficulty working together for any length of time, as both are accustomed to being in charge, giving orders, not taking them, having people follow their lead without question, not having to follow the lead of someone else. The other members of the team are not team players. They are individuals who do what they want, not what someone tells them, because they are accustomed to the notion that their ideas are going to be the best. So as not to pick on one work, it should be noted that The Justice League America should have had similar problems, being a collection of heroes each of whom is quite capable of acting alone and has had very little practice cooperating with others. There is a reason why the All Star football team isn’t made up of all quarterbacks, and it’s more than that not all quarterbacks are good pass receivers or linemen. It may well be that the best football player on nearly every team in the league (particularly in high school) winds up the quarterback, but only the best of the quarterbacks make the All Star team and the rest of the positions are filled with players specialized in each, because the team needs people who can follow the quarterback’s direction.

I noticed with Dungeons & Dragons that eventually the player characters become lords, patriarchs, guildmasters, and other leaders of men. I wondered how, once they had castles and temples and armies and followers, they could continue getting together to go on those simple adventures from which they began. The answer is, they can’t. Maybe you can bring them together for something unusual, something particularly different and special, but those who become leaders and heroes do not make good followers thereafter, and leaders need followers.

In this connection, someone once mentioned to me that it was very difficult to have two cavalier types in the same party. There was something about the design of the class itself that encouraged rivalry, and the characters, and to a degree their players, tended to try to outdo each other. It occurred to me that I had been the party leader of a party that contained two–a samurai called Sheegoka Noar and an anti-paladin by the name of Malacon the Shining Legacy–and that it had not been a problem. Yet on reflection, there was a lot of competition between those two characters, each of whom tried to outdo the other. The great example was undoubtedly the slaying of a fleeing hobgoblin who was first skewered by the charging cavalier’s lance then sliced from it by the samurai’s katana, as each attempted to get the last of the enemy as his kill. One cannot now but help seeing John Rhys-Davies’ Gimli saying to Orlando Bloom’s Legalos regarding the downed Oliphant, “That’s still only one.” Some characters have to compete, and sometimes they have to compete for leadership. That competition can ultimately tear a party to shreds.

There are ways to mitigate this. Hierarchical party structures, in which leaders are also followers of greater leaders, can give each sufficient authority and autonomy to keep the whole functioning together. That, I think, is why my Noar and Malacon did not destroy the party, as my character, a kensai, was a strong leader of the group and gave each of them defined authority as lieutenants. That may be why Legalos and Gimli are able to work together, as there is never any questioning Aragorn’s leadership.

In the main, though, I would expect that the high-level party would go the way of the best musicians band, as each member leaves and forms his own group, in which he can be in charge because all the other members recognize his superior claim. It may well be that the best band, whether of musicians or adventurers, is that one made of all the best individuals; but the one in which those best individuals feel their talents are best recognized is the one in which no one else approaches their abilities.

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.

  It began with my youngest off on one of his incredible flights of fancy.  This time he was telling me how we could make a fortune if we could just find someone who would pay two dollars apiece for the caps that come off my Coca-cola™ bottles.  I attempted to show the practical flaws to such a scheme, but he kept looking at these as obstacles to overcome.  It all reminded me somewhat obliquely of a very funny movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, and I proceeded to summarize the central story of this film for him.

  “How do you remember so many movies, Dad?”

  The question took me aback.  Apparently my ability to recall and recount scores, perhaps hundreds, of films that I have seen over the decades was thought to be impressive.  It’s flattering when your kids see you as having extraordinary abilities; but I think it’s better for them to see that they have the same abilities themselves.  I suggested that he, also, knew many movies.  No, he didn’t think he did.  I asked if he could remember The Lion King.

  He recounted the plot to that film, including the names of several characters which I would have missed, quite well.  Could he do the same for The Little Mermaid?  With less certainty (and a name he could not recall) he did so.  Then he agreed that there were several other Disney™ and Pixar™ films he remembered, which he attempted to write off as just cartoons–but he also recognized that there were a few movies that were not cartoons, including The Last Starfighter and a number of Jackie Chan films, which he could recall and recount.  By the time he left, he was persuaded that he, too, had this ability to remember many movies he had seen.

  (On reflection, as much as I enjoy Jackie Chan films, I’m not certain I could recount very many of these; they’re fun to watch, but the stories all seem to blur together, and I often find myself in the video store holding one and trying to ask people whether we’ve seen it already.  I once heard Jackie Chan in an interview say that in his early martial arts films, plot was not terribly important, but was merely a thread to provide an excuse for the fight scenes that were the real selling point of the movies.  Even today, we don’t watch those movies for the stories, but for the stunts (and the gags), and I’m impressed that anyone can remember any of the plots specifically.)

  I don’t think that the ability to remember hundreds of movies is a terribly impressive nor even terribly useful ability; however, it is part of a larger picture about us as people.  We remember.  We remember many things, some of them important, but perhaps most of them at best trivial, any importance they have being derived from our emotional connection to them.  I remember moments from my childhood, moments from the early years of my children–Kyler saying that the trees were turning into roses one autumn, Tristan’s famous first words (Stop it!  Stop it!  Stop it!), Evan’s first solid food (sitting in his car seat sideways in the booth at Wendy’s stuffing chili in his mouth when no one was looking).  Books I’ve read, stories told by my parents, classes as far back as grade school, significant moments before that.  I remember climbing out of my crib; I remember looking through its bars at the light on the nursery bedside table.

  No one remembers everything; there are some things I remember only as dreams, recurrent dreams recalling events that had happened when I was even younger than I was when I dreamt of them, colored by my limited childhood understanding of those events.  There are things I know must have happened but cannot recall at all–I remember where I lined up outside my elementary school for third grade classes, but nothing whatsoever about the classroom or the teacher, the only grade school teacher I cannot at least vaguely image in my mind.  I don’t remember Ryan’s first words (although I’d wager his mother does), or Kyler’s first solid food.  In Ladyhawke (a movie I have seen many times and of which I can recount much even of the dialogue, with varying accuracy), Phillipe “the Mouse” Gaston passes through a tight tunnel, and remarks, “That was rather like escaping mother’s womb–God, what a memory.”  That’s certainly more than I remember, and probably that’s a good thing.  My eldest son Ryan broke his collarbone “escaping mother’s womb”, as I recall (a not uncommon injury which leads to cranky infants when untreated, but otherwise has no danger; he had to have his sleeve pinned to his shirt for a few weeks so he wouldn’t move it around too much and aggravate the shoulder).  Some things are better forgotten.  Memory is selective.  I can’t say how many movies I pick up on the shelves at Blockbuster only to have him remind me, “You saw that.  That’s the one in which–” whatever it was that should have made it stand out.  Sometimes my memory is incredible, as it was the other day when I flipped to a channel, saw Demi Moore’s face, and said, “This is Ghost” based solely on that moment’s expression.  Other times I’ll watch half an hour of a film saying, “I know I saw this; what is it?”  We don’t know what we will remember, or why we remember what we do.  In Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the entire family is stunned by the fact that Harry’s Aunt Petunia remembers what a Dementor is (the magical creatures who serve as guards at the wizard prison, who feed on the hopes of others and so subdue their charges by sucking all happiness from them) from an overheard conversation between Harry’s parents (whom she despised) years before.  Of everything she had tried to suppress, forget, and ignore, she remembered that.

  We’re here this week to remember the articles of the past quarter, and before we delve deeper into this idea, we’d better get to the business of remembering those before we forget.

144. Societies continued our sporadic examination of alignment with a look at the meaning of law, and its emphasis on nations over people.
145. Sounds Like suggested a few tricks for misleading players with names that aren’t spelled the way they sound.
146. Blanks was about finding a way to fill a game when you’re short on ideas.
147. Prepaid was an economic consideration of different ways people pay for things, what the logic is behind whether we pay before use or are billed later, and how that can be different in different worlds.
148. Moderation took us back to alignment, and the great diversity that proves to fall within the category of neutral.
149. Copying Ravel reminded us that all the advice in the world, as useful as it is, falls second to finding who we are and where our strengths lie individually.
150. Idiomatic delved again into language, this time providing a way to bring the problems of misunderstood statements into a game.
151. Weather looked at the fact that real weather systems are often strange and unexpected, and thus we need not try to make our fictional ones too rational.
152. Hospitality considered a common aspect of many ancient cultures, why it exists or doesn’t exist in various times and places, and what its ramifications are to play.
153. Du Jour started with soup, but got into a stew over non-random events that feel random.
154. Fog suggested that some combats should be confused and unclear, and that giving the players an accurate picture of everything that is happening can lead to unrealistic outcomes, while providing only fragmentary information can inspire decisions that are so much more poignant.
155. Dedication was about what are called side alignments in Dungeons & Dragons play, those part-neutral beliefs which, it is asserted, must therefore be the more strongly devoted to that one thing to which they are committed.

  We last looked back three months ago, when we considered the value of hitting, or not hitting, the Reset button in our game worlds.

  It happens that each of those titles brings back to mind the contents of the article to me; it may be that for some of you, the description does what the title does not, or even that you have to look back to read again what you know you read before.  This current article, number one hundred fifty-six, finishes three years of articles which began on June first, two thousand one.  I don’t recall them all; sometimes I’ll jot down an idea, and then in looking back realize that I’ve covered something very like that already.  Sometimes I’ll go back to read one that I’ve forgotten.

  This discussion of memory, of how much we remember and how at times it seems so random, should point us to our characters, and to the mechanics of our games.  None of us have so detailed our characters that everything they remember is on the sheet; in fact, many of the games I have played have been spread over so many sessions over so long a period of years that often I cannot remember things that my character could not have forgotten–names of people who were near and dear to him, or who tried to kill him; moments of severe pain or pleasure; great successes and great failures.  Our characters’ memories and our own rarely coincide.  Often games will have mechanics to see whether a character “knows” something about a particular aspect of play, such as a legend lore roll in D&D or an Education Level check in Multiverser.  This is simply a technique to determine whether the character ever heard the information in question, but also whether he retained that information in his mind such that he can recall it now.  Such rolls can be used at times when certain information might have been known to the character but never to the player, and when such information was mentioned during the game at some point but the player didn’t jot it down or can’t find it at the moment.  After all, what is known to your character, and what is important to him, matters little to you on Monday morning when you’re drinking that first cup of coffee, and it’s little wonder that the following Friday night you need your memory refreshed before the game can continue, even if it’s mere seconds for your character.

  The fact that memories are so spotty and so surprising can be used in other ways as well.  Characters can suddenly remember things which haven’t come to mind for years (never, as long as the player has been aware of the character).  In many games it would be appropriate for the referee to feed these bits to the player as something of which his character is suddenly reminded; more rarely, players can invent stories about how their character knows something.  Personally, I think it would be fun to have a bard in the game who every time he made a successful legend lore roll he went into some story about a professor, heavily laced with his peculiar idiosyncrasies, who talked about this in some class years ago, and what he said about it.  It’s the sort of characterization I would enjoy.

  The concern, if there is one, is that players might abuse this to solve their in-game problems by what might be termed metagame means.  That is, if every time I face a problem I create a reason why I know this solution, I’m going to spoil the fun of solving the problems (if that’s the fun).  That doesn’t mean the technique can’t be used to make the stories a lot more interesting for everyone; it only means that the players all have to agree that the game is more fun if people don’t resort to trying to use memories that way.

  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.

A world took shape around me, and I saw a sea of grass extending as far as the eye could see. A herd of buffalo stretched from horizon to horizon, and something startled what I had thought was a dark undergrowth near the river which ran between two hills of which one served as my rest, and that which had startled launched itself into the air.

Passenger pigeons in fantastic number such that they darkened the sky. I winced feeling certain I was about to be pooped on as the cloud-like mass of beating wings passed overhead.

Instead, I saw the universe distend away from me, and I fell down a long tube of indeterminate nature although it was nothing so commonplace as matter.

I landed in a box, about fifty feet cubed, made of what seemed to be a clear and hard substance. Possibly diamond windowpaning, or transparent aluminum, or ultraplexiglass, or with a snort, I thought, it could be plain old glass.

Grasses covered the bottom of the box, and the air was breathable if slightly rank.

I looked about, and did not find my tube that had brought me here, not that I expected it.

Somehow, I had been captured.

So I readied my weapons, and then spoke up.

“My name is Tadeusz. Who are you? Why did you bring me here? Where is here?”

A long pause, and I felt consideration given to my case, and so I reached out with my mind to contact them, and felt that effort get near instantly slapped down.

Irritated, I aimed my plasma cannon at the wall, but before I could fire it, a purple line of light emerged from empty air, and imprisoned my gun in a ball of energy.

So, I stalked over to the wall, and got ready to use my knife.

“An impulsive and hot-tempered creature, aren’t you?” A voice from the air said. It sounded reproving.

“So far, I don’t see why you, a potential kidnapper, get to make moral judgements on me. So again, who are you, and what are you doing?”

I felt a pause, very like an offended sniff. I crossed my arms in an exzaggerated show of patience.

“We are the Xlorg. A higher species with a great understanding of space-time. Our goal is to understand the Multiverse. In order to do this, we collect visitors from nearby universes such as the one you landed in.

You triggered a collection tube by your arrival. It took you from that universe which had no sentient life to this one, Xlorg Prime.”

“So you do this to other people?”

“Oh, yes. But we try not to damage them, and to return them to their world of origin is they desire.”

“Can you take me back to my homeworld?” I asked with sudden enthusiasm.

“No. We can take you back to where we found you. In fact, we have no idea what your home planet is like, or even what species you are.”

“I’m human, and a verser.” I said with a sigh.

The interview took nearly two hours, but the Xlorg pronounced themselves satisfied, and they updated their Multiversal Species Guide by adding Human in between Huk-til-Nak and Hundra.

Another tube took me out of my cage, and deposited me in their Lower City.

Ten million sapients from five hundred seventy-two different species, and I was the only human in the bunch. There were a number of versers, I could tell, but right at the moment, I just wanted to relax and recover.

So I found an eatery, and programmed my table to produce something edible, even if it tasted bland and odd. Tne meal was like crossing overcooked broccoli with burnt popcorn.

About half the eaters had sight shields up, and I saw the point of that. Too much alienness and the brain just refuses to cope with it. This was a continual problem for versers as we jumped from universe to universe, but especially so here.

Tired, I put up my shields after the first hour.

I did not know where to go since everything looked so bizzarre as to hurt my eyes. So I just sat at that table for several hours in a kind of emotional stasis until the Texlorican moved the shields aside, and joined me at the table.

A bit of description is in order. Ten feet tall, dark mud brown with a rough integument (I cannot call it a ‘skin’), and four arms plus a prehensile tail, and it was obviously predatory since it had spiked teeth in its head.

“Buck up, mate. You’re a verser, right?”

He spoke in a New Yawk accent.

And I looked up, suddenly gladdened.

“You’ve been to Earth?”

“Well one of them. Worked for Barnum and Bailey circus as a sideshow freak for over ten years. Lots of fun. You humans look weird with your eyes bugging out as your kind tried to figure out how I’d been faked up. Heh.”

No doubt he thought I looked funny now, but I was glad to see him. It turned out that he had a flag for a number of species in the Guidebook, and if any of them arrived, he tried to track them down, but especially so if they were versers like him.

We talked about worlds, and at one point I asked him if he had met a verser (by which I’d meant a human), and gotten a blood exchange.

He just smacked me on the shoulder.

“Bucko, you’re not thinking large enough. I’d been to nearly forty worlds before I met my first human.”

I nodded expanding my mental horizons a bit.

It turned out his species made the most glad-handingest Human politician look like an antisocial sort, and he literally had a list of friends longer than all his arms.

And he would go out of the way to help any of them day or night. I’m not sure how he coped with all that, but he did, and he enjoyed it with a gusto that broke me loose from my depression.

And soon enough, I found a job in a neighbouring universe that the Xlorg maintained a gate with. I would be a bodyguard for a reporter in a war zone.

Tadeusz
P.S. Next week is WAW: Bodyguard which follows this one up.

  Many years ago I was running an old familiar module for a Dungeons & Dragons game, and one of the players had some recollection of some of the details of the module–not enough to make it unplayable, but enough that he often had impressions about things based on distant memories, and in particular that he didn’t trust a certain cleric and his acolytes, because without any real information to that effect he believed them to be evil.

  The game took an odd turn; war was brewing, and the fort which was the party’s temporary home was readying its defenses.  Then, at a dinner held for all the leading figures of the town, someone attempted to assassinate the commander of the local militia, and although his life was saved by quick action on the part of our heroes, it opened many threads of story.

  The character run by the player who had vague memories of the module, a neutral good cleric/fighter, immediately took into custody the suspect priest and his two acolytes; working with two other members of the party, he began to interrogate them.  Not getting the answers he wanted, he resorted to threats, then torture, eventually killing the two acolytes rather painfully and sending the priest to the dungeons.

  When the dust settled, I docked experience points from the participants, particularly from the cleric, for violation of their alignments.  The player who led the charge immediately objected.  “I could see it if I were lawful good,” he said, “but I’m only neutral good.”

  But for what does neutral good stand for, if not good?

  This has been my most profitable insight into side alignments.  Although it is certainly possible to play up the neutrality, particularly if it is a druidic neutrality (for which check back on the article Moderation), in the main, side alignments are about the part that is not neutral.  Having Beneficence as the core of his values, the neutral good puts nothing above the common good of the majority; the neutral evil puts nothing above his Selfish self-interest.  The preservation of Societies is the only thing that matters to the lawful neutral, and the Freedom of individuals is the rallying cry of the chaotic neutral.  These characters define within themselves the values by which they are identified.  They are people of clear vision; they know what they believe, and seldom have trouble finding the path demanded by those Beliefs.  They are the fanatics, the people who have bright line tests of truth.  Rarely do they meet an issue they cannot reduce to a simple answer.  One thing matters only, to them.  If that one thing is implicated by the situation, the answer is clear; if it is not, the situation is irrelevant.

  My player had failed to grasp this.  He had somehow come to believe that being neutral good somehow made you less good than being lawful good.  He had failed to see that removing the question of law or chaos from the equation made the goodness aspect immeasurably more important.  He could make no excuse for evil.  He could not say that this was necessary to preserve order; he could not say that he was protecting freedom.  The only question that should have mattered to his character was what is the good thing to do, what is the most beneficent, doing the most good for the people affected?

  Could he have argued that torturing the priest would bring the greatest good to the greatest number?  I wonder that in retrospect; he did not so argue.  For years after that I held the belief that a neutral good character could not justify torture on any basis, but it might be possible to build such a justification on the demands of good reaching beyond the subject tortured.  Certainly the inquisitors, as wrong as we think they were, tortured their victims with good intentions (they believed that confession of the sinfulness of their crimes was necessary for them to receive eternal salvation, and so were attempting to encourage their charges to believe this and admit they were wrong–it had little to do with getting information from them).  Given the right fact set and the right beliefs, the dedicated fanatical believer in good could do things the rest of us would find appalling.  That is a different argument, though, from asserting that the neutral good character is somehow less dedicated to good; it asserts rather that good matters to him more.

  Side alignments have this power of fanaticism.  They are most easily brought into conflict with views to which they are not inherently opposed.  A lawful neutral and a neutral good may seem to us to be in agreement about many things, but they are both uncompromising in those things about which they disagree.  Their differences divide them far more than their agreements can overcome.  Even those whose views agree in part–what we call the corner alignments–are viewed by them as compromising, lacking vision, wishy-washy.

  The picture I have painted here is strident and stark; it is of a type of person most of us would find difficult.  It is necessary to understand the side alignments that we see this aspect of them.  The persons who hold them can seem reasonable; the presentation of these beliefs can be subdued, soft-pedaled, relaxed.  They are the same beliefs.  The person who quietly accepts that capitalism is the only economic system and doesn’t say much about it until challenged is just as firm in his beliefs as the one who will start arguments in response to any suggestion that others are not perfectly persuaded of that view, but both are equally immovable in their faith.  So, too, there are many characters whose fanaticism is not evident, but whose decisions will always find their basis in one principle, one which never is negotiable.  That is the nature of the side alignments, and the issue they bring to play.

  That fanaticism will not always express itself the same way.  Each fanatic can apply his own nuances to this.  In one game, there was a chaotic neutral character who broke ranks, disobeyed party leaders, and engaged a clearly superior opponent because he would not permit a slave caravan to pass even where slaving was a lawful business.  That same game hosted a chaotic neutral attorney, whose philosophy was that every citizen had rights that needed to be championed, and any authority who attempted to oppose those rights had to be challenged.  He once argued to Dagda (head of the Celtic pantheon) that the druid who had abandoned his calling to become a paladin had not rejected the quest for balance, but had recognized that the balance had been so far tipped toward chaos and evil that only paragons of law and good could offset that.  He did so because of a fixed belief that everyone had the right to his own choices, however foolish they might seem to anyone else.  Both of those characters were fanaticism in action–exemplars of the values of chaos unsullied by conflict.  Each applied it within his own parameters.

  Exploiting the issues is in large part up to the players; as situations arise, it is they who must grasp how a person who holds those beliefs would respond.  At the same time, it is at these moments when we are most interested in what the character is thinking, why he does what he does.  Side alignments in some ways provide the best opportunities for external conflicts, situations in which the character is at odds with the world because of moral and ethical disagreements.

  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.

The wind whipped across the sandy plain, and I winced as sand stung my face. Fortunately, that was the only part of my body that was exposed. I was covered head to toe, in the style of a devout Muslim girl, but less to blend in and more to protect myself from the sand and the sun. I’m a quarter Irish on my dad’s side and part Swedish on my mom’s, which means that I inherited pale skin that burns to a crisp the instant the sun touches it. The folds of my clothing also hid several weapons, weapons I hoped I wouldn’t need.

I’d never been sent out to help pick up another verser before, and I was desperately hoping that he or she won’t put up a fight. When someone verses into this world, they get a choice. They can work with us, or they can head to the next world, by dying. I understand the rationale behind that, and even agree with it to some extent. People who don’t age, some of whom are hundreds of years old, who often possess magic or psionics or advanced tech skills, and who are willing to take risks because they know death isn’t the end for them, well, they can be a dangerous weapon. I’d rather have someone sent on to the next universe than find them working against me. Still, I didn’t like the idea of actually being the one to pull the trigger.

“Why did he have to land in the middle of the Sahara desert?” I muttered. We kept moving closer, using the scriff tracker to judge his position. Finally, he was visible, a little shape among the sand dunes. Through my binoculars, I took a quick look at him. He looked young, probably my age, with a complexion even paler than mine. He was wearing a t-shirt too, and I shuddered sympathetically at what the sand and sun must have been doing to that delicate skin. His brown hair was short, like a buzz cut that had grown out a bit, and….oh, God. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.

“Nikita, what’s wrong?” Python asked. For a moment, I remained frozen, staring through the binoculars. As he turned around, I got a glance at his face. Even from this distance, there was instant recognition.

“I know him,” I whispered. I took a shaky breath to calm my racing thoughts. I thought I had finally made myself forget about the boyfriend I’d left behind in my home world, but seeing him now brought everything back. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. He was here; maybe we’d get a second chance.

“This is going to be a liability, isn’t it?” Iguana asked. “If he won’t go with us, you won’t be able to take him out.”

That thought made me sick to my stomach. “No,” I replied. “There’s no way I could….but he won’t fight us.” I knew Matt; there was no way that would happen. I wasn’t even going to consider the possibility.

We got closer, close enough to see him without the use of the binoculars, and finally we made our presence known. I heard the click of a gun, and my heart almost stopped. Why is it that I can have a gun pointed at me and not flinch, but the idea of a gun pointed at him made me cringe?

From beside me, I heard the words, “”Don’t move. I know what you are, and I have no qualms about sending you on to your next world if that’s what you’d prefer. You are surrounded. My boss wants to have a word with you. If you come with us there won’t be any trouble.” These, I remember, were the exact same words Sergeant White said to me a long time ago, in the middle of the jungle, when I first versed into this world.

As soon as he finished, I chimed in, “Matt, is that you? It’s me, Kelly. It’s okay; we’re the good guys. I know this isn’t a real friendly welcome into this world, but, well, you’ll understand in a little bit why it’s necessary.” I knew I was babbling, and I could hear the tremor in my voice; apparenlty, I was nervous.

He has a blank look on his face for a minute. “Kelly? Do I know you? Oh, that’s right. You’re a friend of Matt Miller’s, right? But what are you doing here?”

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. How could he not know me? Then I realized, he was Matt, but not my Matt. An alternate version, one to whom I was just an acquaintance.

“Yeah,” I said numbly. “A friend of Matt’s.” I was dimly aware of hearing Matt agree to come quietly, and the chopper arrived to pick us up.

On the ride back, one of the guys asked, “You okay, Nikita?” I just nodded. Matt gave me an odd look, and I realized I should explain to him that I’m not known as Kelly Tessena here, but as Nikita Ivanova. If he was anything like *my* Matt, he might even recognize where I got the name. And I did want to talk to him, get to know him, even if he wasn’t my Matt. Right now, though, I had to look away from him, or I knew I was going to start crying. I’ve always felt a little awkward being the only female in the Verser Project, and I certainly wasn’t going to let myself get all emotional now. I just needed to keep breathing, keep from looking at him, and I could let myself cry when I got home.

  Many years ago I read a rather unfortunate true story; it may illustrate something useful for games, although that would be little consolation to those involved.

Police in a metropolitan area were responding to a burglary; someone had robbed a store.  Arriving moments after the alarm sounded, they looked and saw someone running down the street.  They called to the man to halt, but he did not stop, nor turn back, nor acknowledge that he heard them.

  One of the officers ran after the fleeing suspect, and in a moment caught up with him, grabbing him by the collar to try to bring him down.  The man began reaching into his pocket.  The other officer, watching from a short distance, shouted, “Look out, he’s got a gun!” then proceeded to fire a warning shot into the air.  The first officer heard the shot, and, thinking that he had been fired upon, drew his own weapon and fatally shot the suspect.

  The man they had brought down was trying to pull from his pocket a card on which was printed that he was deaf and mute.  It seems, in reconstructing the events, that he was trying to catch a bus.  Whether he was aware that anything at all had happened at that store is unknown, but it would be foolishly redundant to say that he did not hear the police telling him to stop, nor know why he was being accosted from behind.

  It was an honest mistake, certainly.  It is difficult to find where the police went wrong.  A man running away from the scene of a crime moments after it occurred would of course be suspicious, and the more so if he refused to acknowledge a police order to stop.  A suspect reaching into his pocket when seized by an officer could well be looking for a weapon, a gun or perhaps a knife.  In the midst of melee, who can tell with certainty from what direction a nearby shot sounded?  It was all a series of misunderstandings, a serious comedy of errors, which left one innocent man dead.  Often mistakes are made, and sometimes apologizing for them is not enough.

  That’s a horrible story.  Why did I even tell it?

  Frequently in our games, everyone knows exactly what’s going on around them.  It is all described with perfect clarity.  You know who was shot and who was hit.  Yet in life things are frequently much less clear.

  Let’s tell this story two different ways.  Here is the way it would be told in most games; the player character is one of the policemen, but the others are all non-player characters.

You and your partner have arrived at the scene of the crime; the window of the jewelry store is broken, and as you hop out of the car you see a man running down the street.

I call out for him to stop.

He is still running, ignoring you.

I’ll run after him; can I catch him?

You catch up with him easily enough.  You grab him and try to force him to stop.  Then your partner shouts that he has a gun, and fires a shot into the air.

Do I see a gun?

No, but the man seems to be trying to get something out of his pocket.

What is it?

It’s a card; it identifies the man as a deaf-mute.

Dang, we got the wrong guy.  I try to apologize to him and let him go.

  The entire encounter hinged on the fact that you knew where the shot originated.  Now let’s tell it again.

You and your partner have arrived at the scene of the crime; the window of the jewelry store is broken, and as you hop out of the car you see a man running down the street.

I call out for him to stop.

He is still running, ignoring you.

I’ll run after him; can I catch him?

You catch up with him easily enough.  You grab him and try to force him to stop.  Then your partner shouts that he has a gun, and you hear a shot but you aren’t hit.  What do you do?

  Suddenly it’s not so clear what you are going to do.  That shot might have killed you; you don’t have time to ask questions about what’s happening.  You might well pull the gun and shoot him, only then to discover what we know, that there was no gun.

  Soldiers speak of the fog of war.  In battles from the dawn of gunpowder through the beginning of the twentieth century, this was a very real part of combat, as the smoke from gunpowder filled the field and obscured everyone’s vision.  Even before explosives were in common use, battle was a moment of confusion, in which it was easy to become disoriented, to find yourself retreating when you thought you were advancing, fighting your friends instead of your foes, charging toward the wrong objective.  Even since the development of smokeless powder, mistakes have been made as disoriented troops attacked their own allies, particularly as night battles have become increasingly common.  Yet if you pause to orient yourself, you can easily become a casualty, or at least lose the initiative, the momentum, the opportunity, letting victory slip through your fingers for the sake of caution.

  Some battles are simple enough, clear and uncomplicated; a duel between two people seldom becomes so confused that they don’t know who they are fighting.  The red coats of the British army may have marked them as visible targets, but it probably went a long way to assuring that they recognized each other on the field.  On the other hand, sometimes the characters will not have the same clarity of vision in the situation, and at those times the referee may want to begin limiting the information given.  Limited information can lead to confusion, and confusion can lead to the kinds of realistic, perhaps tragic, results that often do happen in life and death situations.

  I must recommend an article by Charles Franklin, Keeping Their Heads Down, in the second issue of The Way, the Truth, and the Dice, in which he suggests ways to bring some of the effects of this aspect of battle into play.

  Give some thought to what the player characters actually can know about the fight; make the players make decisions based on the fragments of information that are reasonably available to their characters.  The results may be surprising.

  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 woke, standing up, in my new universe, and saw as I stumbled that I stood in a harvested cornfield. The shucks were already bundled up in little towers dotting the multi-acred field, and in the distance, I could see a line of trees serving as a windbreak, and that led the eye to a powerline with telephone poles.

I set out that way since the poles might well be on a road, and they would definitely lead to some sort of civilization.

A small road, of dusted brown tarvey, walked alongside the powerlines, and I followed it for nearly three miles until I saw a white farmhouse on the right.

Looking it over, I saw an internal combustion tractor, power lines (of course), a transformer to step the power level down, chickens running loose, hogs penned up, and a barn where chickens laid eggs in more factory-like conditions.

I checked my legs, and sure enough found small insects, I’m not sure what variety dotting my pants and even a few attached to my skin and bulging away. Chicken feed. The free-rangers were there to keep down the blood-suckers.

There was no satellite dish, and there was a huge antenna above the house. This all gave me a good idea of the tech level. Probably about 1970′s America, at a guess.

And the fact that the house was by itself with the nearest other house at least three miles away by straight travel over the fields led me to assume 1)Very harsh and effective law enforcement or 2)The homeowner had a gun.

See, if neither of these was true then this house was easy prey for bandits. And few people spend the effort to build a two-story white clapboarded house complete with three outbuildings so as to serve as a kind of Criminal Full Employment Act.

I walked up to the front screen door of the porch, and knocked.

“We don’t have any work.” A mature female voice laden with authority, either a chief cook or the housemistress, called from inside past the screened in porch, and the open front door.

“Not wanting any, ma’am.” I called back.

She flustered out, apologetic. Human, I was glad to see, since my assumptions only made sense with dealing with humans or something close to that.

“I’m so sorry. Won’t you come in. I thought you were one of them. And we already have three workers as it is. Can’t afford anymore.”

Her face was worn, but strong, and stil held some of the atractiveness that no doubt had made her the recipient of a couple of proposals of marriage. But now, she looked more capable than beautiful.

She took me into her kitchen, while offering me milk, coffee, a place to stay, and a chance to wash my dusty clothes, and this sudden burst of hospitality seemed odd compared to her usual off-putting attitude now that she thought I wasn’t one of Them.

And around her red-white checked tablecloth of her kitchen table as she got me a big glass of milk, sat Them as they ate lunch.

Three aliens, and I don’t mean pitiful human refugees from the avarice and misgovernment so common in Humanity’s leaders. No these three, of separate species, came from beyond the Solar System.

The Blikten was tall, willowy, and solid blue, and it looked the most human. Then it reached an arm around its glass, hung a left at the salt and pepper and bent up to snag a biscuit. My stomach turned over. There’s just something about the Blikten, they look so human, but actually the other two are closer genetically to human than they are.

The other two were a Parra, which I’d seen in multiple universes, and indeed met them in my first universe as a verser. They were short, furred with bold, bright colors, and shaped and sized rather like a penguin.

They were avians, like the other species at the table who looked like he really wanted to perch on the back of the chair rather than stand on it.

The Starflock, I’ve met less, but in each universe, they’ve been in space so long that they call themselves after space instead of their original species name, and they have only the vaguest sort of legends of their pre-space history. One academician I talked to (and they do strongly tend to be scholarly sorts) thought they had been in space for over ten thousand years.

He was two feet tall with long legs of bone,ligament, and scale, and a plump football shaped body with a modest neck, and bright, shiny eyes, and a black beak about four inches long. Some barbarian tribes of this species, I’d heard would sharpen their beaks to make daggers of them, but his was merely being used to crack nuts while a flickering tongue wormed the nutmeat out with speed and delicacy.

And then my hostess turned and saw the Blikten retreating its snaking arm through the obstacle course. And she lit into the alien demanding the food be returned, and “proper table manners be observed if you want to stay in my house.”

I frowned, and the housemistress drew me aside to the parlor so that I did not have to eat around the aliens. Her face was flushed, and her eyes wide.

And she patted her chest as she sank into a chair with her dishcloth in her left hand.

“I don’t know if I can take much more of this. Ever since Frank went into the hospital, they’ve gotten more and more disrespectful, especially that Blikten hussy with her vest and pants. Not decent, I tell you, not decent. And we need to keep working on the farm to pay the bills. Frank always used to handle the aliens. He had the touch for it.”

I pondered things, and decided that I might well have been sent here to help this lady out, and maybe the aliens as well. It bothered me that I should see three star-faring species serving as farmhands on a low-tech Earth. It made me wonder what was going on.

“Perhaps I can help, ma’am. I’m not all that familiar with farming, but I have met a few aliens in my day, ” My tone of voice let it be known that it was more than a few. “And I’m pretty handy. Give me a place to stay, and some food, and I’ll see what I can do for a while.”

“Well, of course, I will. You’re human. Twouldn’t be right to just cast you out on the road.”

She looked more relaxed, and less likely to have some sort of physical collapse now.

I gathered from her a list of projects that needed doing. A daily list and a more long-term list was what I got after politely forcing her to be logical, at least in a way that made sense to me.

Then I went to find the aliens who were waiting on the front porch steps. The Blikten guiltily started up from sunning in the grass.

“I’m the new foreman, for now. We’ve got a lot of work to do, so we’ll try to work together.”

They introduced themselves to me by their English names which were Bob, Lucy, and Jack for the Parra, the Blikten, and the Starflock.

They called me “Mr. T”.

We cleaned out the granary which had rotted corn kernels in a film over the base, and then poured the kernels from their temporary storage in a giant hopper truck. The Parra was their translator for difficult terms since the Parra are natural mimics.

And so we got the corn picker hooked up behind the tractor, and set out for the ‘second field’ across the road which was getting toward over-ripe, and if we wanted to save it from being consigned to the cheaper grade of animal food, it needed to be harvested and shucked and stored soon.

We worked in the heat of the day, and I instantly found that the air conditioner on the picker was broken, and the same with the tractor. I’m not sure why the two weren’t combined into one; perhaps another decade of economic expansion and problem-solving and that would be commonplace.

But it got hot, and the three males wilted a bit, but the Blikten was enjoying herself. She went so far as to roll up the windows to “get properly baked between the bones.”

She had a lot of bones, mostly the same type, vertebrae. There was not a single long bone in her body. So she looked humanoid, but could move like a snake.

It got later, and we still had only a fourth of the field done, and I could tell by the glances cast my way that they were looking forward to quitting. At the same time, the housemistress had made it clear we needed to do all we could do of the field.

So I called them together, and laid it out for them.

“We need your help, but I’m pretty sure this is not what you signed on for. If you do keep on working today and hard tommorrow then that should do this field, and save it for the benefit of Corn Flake eaters everywhere. Otherwise its hog food. I do not know what I can offer you, but I will try to be fair.”

“Trust a human; help a human, after the way they treat us?” The Blikten was militantly opposed, and I could definitely see her point. They had already worked hard today, and that scene during the lunch must have grated on the Bliktens’ touchy nature.

“I won’t have you fired whatever you decide.”

That did it. The Parra and the Starflockian began to talk their cohort around suggesting that I was an honorable person, and they really should help. After all, the humans, offered them a waystation, and there was no right to demand such.

Still the Blikten refused until the Starflockian said something harsh and very quick to her.

We worked until nightfall, and I put tarps over the equipment to protect them from dew. This last did not make my host happy.

But as I stumbled through the late dinner, I told her that we would have to cut some corners, and I simply did not have time to creepy-crawl at one mile per hour the whole assembly back in to the barn tonight, and back out in the morning.

She was a bit of a perfectionist, to say the least, and she did not like it, but she accepted my logic, and worried about thieves. So we chained the local dog, Rover, to the tractor where he barked for nearly two hours as we tried to sleep.

Early the next morning, we were rousted out, and a large meal was scarfed down, and away we went. The Blikten and the Parra handled the tractor-picker combo which shocked them a bit since evidently they were used to a human being nearby, but I thought they had shown they knew more what they were doing than I did, yesterday, and they had gotten more skilled.

So I and the Starflock began running the shucker, and dumping the resulting golden kernels into the giant hopper.

I asked the Starflockian in Galactic Standard what was going on at the farm.

He was startled to hear me speak in something that sounded vaguely familiar, so I tried several other galactic languages without success. In the end, we went back to English, but he appreciated the effort.

“Mr. T, pardon my saying this, but you are an odd human. If I did not know better, I would say you had cyberware.”

I thought about it. Maybe Earth had low tech, but not necessarily this universe? So I mentally flipped on my cyberware, and it worked.

I just grinned, and grabbed a two hundred pound bag of grain since we had overfilled the hopper with the last, and were finishing up with large, plastic wire, woven bags, and I slung the bag up onto the hopper back which was above my head.

The Starflockian flinched a bit, and I asked him why.

“Your teeth display human. I know intellectually it is meant as a sign of good humor, but predators out of memory and into legend ate my people with such teeth.”

“Like the way, the Blikten freaked out the housemistress with her arm wiggles?”

“Indeed. I spoke most strongly to the Blikten about that. She is quite militant, and ungrateful, but I think she will not cause further problems.”

“What is her beef? I mean her problem?”

“She feels oppressed to be limited to human ways. But I reminded her of a bit of ancient history. Near two thousand years ago, some of my people were fleeing a supernova, and they came to the Blikten homeworld, and sought refuge. This was granted, but the Blikten forced my people to ‘be improved’ so we could be flexible like them. Most of those ‘improved’ died soon.
She has little ground to complain of mistreatment when her worst oppression is that she cannot twist her arms like she would like.”

“Still, we need to try to accomodate each other. However, I’ll have to admit that bothered me too, when I saw it.”

We went back to work, and dumped the grain in the grainery, and then headed back after a quick glass of warm water to work some more before lunch.

Lunch came and the Blikten was particularly annoying. She was being deliberately provocative, but I could deal with her oddities better than the hostess who excused herself.

I was not sure what to do. There was a genuine problem here of social incompatibility. And then I got an idea.

I woke up the Starflockian, and told it to him.

“Can you make a list of things which annoy each species, and another list of those that bother each other, and finally a third list of things that drive each other nuts, and then we can try to figure out what is reasonable to allow, and what we cannot.”

The Starflockian blinked.

“All right. I’ll get to it in the morning. I will say that being woken out of a sound sleep fits on my bother list.”

I blushed in the night, and mumbled a quick apology while he stepped off back to his cot.

We worked over it the next day, as my team caught up on the chores such as cleaning out the pigpen. That is me, and the Starflockian worked on it. Then we showed it to the Parra who had some good ideas.

Lastly, I waited to lunch to show it to the two ladies. They were not impressed. And they both started complaining.

“Look. The vest and the pants are needed. Blikten breathe through little holes in their chests. wearing a dress would cause her to suffocate.

And for you snaking biscuits or acting like you are about to is not neccessary. Quit trying to yank our chain just to be annoying.”

They did not like that either although the housemistress was a little more subdued since she did not really want to kill her Blikten farmhand.

So I laid it out for them.

“Look you two. Quit squabbling. You’re annoying the men of the this house. There’s your point of unity. You’re acting like clucking hens.”

That did not go over very well at all.

And they both started to get up from the table.

So I shouted. The crockery rattled.

“Sit down. Look here. You either accept my terms, or I and these two others are walking. You can take care of this farm on your own. And you, Miss Blue, whatever you are running from is still out there, and you need hospitality so get over yourself, both of you.” And then I paused. “Right now.” I added in a very soft voice.

Peace and tranquility did not exactly reign, but we got rid of most of the annoyances and time-wasting fights. The Blikten stopped snagging biscuits, and the humans stopped smiling with their teeth, and nobody complained if they saw the Blikten sunning herself on the road flattened like a thoroughly driven over roadkill, and the Starflockian got to perch on the top of a chair which brought great relief to him.

And then I talked to the houselady of the need for more workers, and she complained of lack of money, but I pointed to the money to be gained.

So we hired on more workers as they came. I eventually saw one arrive.

‘pop’, and a Drivnat with its eight legs, mobile fringe, and covering shell which was swaddled in dozens of layers of garments appeared in the front yard. The Drivnat were freaky even for me.

“How did you get here?”

“Interstellar teleportation. Is this planet always this cold?”

Seeing as it was ninety degrees Fahrenheit, I mentioned that it often got colder.

Later, I saw the Parra make his leave from behind a crowd of about a dozen workers. He appeared, and then a few minutes later reappeared in the same spot, and then two minutes later the same, and one minute, and then thirty seconds, and it worked down to where he was flickering in place.

Then he waved goodbye, and a chorus of nine different species bid him farewell. And he was gone.

As I got to understand it, their teleportation worked like this. They teleported to other planets in the same solar system behind a protective forcescreen, and in so doing they worked their way around the Sun, and each orbit built up “teleportive velocity” which could be transformed into “teleportive distance”.

So after building speed, the Parra was now arriving in another star system.

Finally, I asked them why?

They did not tell everyone being not entirely trusting, but their had been two great empires in space. One fell, and in the resulting chaos, bandits, pirates, and thugs flourished. Now the other empire was moving slowly, since it was an empire, and they are often slow, to correct the situation and restore law and order. But in the meantime, anyone with a bit of wealth was hopping a spaceship out of the area. The migrant workers, dependent upon the teleport net, were being forced to flee to avoid being robbed or beaten.

And Earth was a good waypost to some really nice solar systems about ten hundred lightyears away.

They did not think Earth was in danger. It was inside the boundaries of the stable empire after all.

I was curious, and asked if I could take a ride. So we did, and there was my problem. You needed to be attuned to the teleport net in order to use it, and I had never been so ‘attuned’.

So my atoms got blasted from here to Alpha Centauri.

Tadeusz