The Gaming Outpost

  Thirteen months and fifty-six articles ago I noted in Treats that there was one chance in seven that the publication of some article in a regular weekly series would land on any given date.  (There were, of course, a lot of caveats to that.  It excludes those days that are tied not to the numerical calendar but to the geometric one.  As long as this series is published on Fridays, it will never fall on Easter or Mother’s Day, nor on any of the holidays relegated to any other specific day of the week.  It also happens that there are other impossibilities thanks to the effects of leap year, but I don’t quite understand what these are.)  Yet I was still surprised a few weeks back when I was writing Home that the publication of this article would land on this date.  November twenty-six probably means very little to most of you, but it happens that on this date in nineteen seventy-six–a year in which it was also on a Friday–I got married.

  One man regards one day above another, another regards every day the same, the apostle tells us in one of his letters.  Then he instructs, Let each be thoroughly convinced in his own mind.  In general, I fall into that second category.  I don’t think much of my birthday, find holidays rather burdensome much of the time, and even forget what day of the week it is unless I keep focused on it.  Yet there is something special about this date, such that even if I don’t realize it is this date, I know the date to be important.

  You could argue that the date is important for me to remember because there will be trouble if I forget it; and certainly my wife earnestly hopes and expects that I will think of some way to make the day special for her.  Yet why does she want that, but to know that I think the day is special, which in turn tells her that she is still special to me?  If what matters to me is only that peace prevail (which is often a significant motivating factor in everyone’s life) then the day becomes a chore, a unique date on which I must remember to do something that will make it appear that the day is special.  This suggests to me that wives who make a fuss over a forgotten anniversary may be working against their own true best interests.  You will increase the probability that the next year’s special day will be remembered, but will have altered the reason for the remembrance.  For my part, though, it is the day itself that has become special, for some completely irrational reason.  (After all, calendars are an artificial means of measuring years and seasons, and the notion that today is somehow the same day as the day on which we were married involves quite a few completely unsupportable assumptions.)  November twenty-sixth matters to me.

  I can tell myself it’s absurd.  Indeed it is absurd.  Yet the date makes a difference.

  From this I wonder whether there truly is anyone for whom no days have any meaning at all.  Perhaps if you did not have a calendar, there would be no way to identify a day; even so, just as my wife and I sometimes recognize the appearance of the trees in the late spring as recalling that look which they displayed when we first started going places together (and knew that we were just good friends), I suspect that without a calendar I would be remembering this time of year, as the harvest has ended and the cold is moving in following the Hunter’s Moon, as the leaves lose what is left of their color and abandon their trees, the time when we were married.  Besides, although there have been years when I gave her something very special, there have been other years when I could not buy her so much as a single rose, a small box of chocolates, or a card.  The day is not less special because we could not afford to celebrate it.

  There is a woman I don’t really know, but who comes up in news of the lives of people I do know fairly regularly.  Her husband died a dozen years ago, in the middle of this month.  For several days she was not at work, even now, so many years later.  She remembers.  This time of year is special for her, too, but not in a good way.  She cannot help but remember the date.  My wife remembers the day her father died; she, though, remembers quite a few dates, so that’s not so surprising.

  Perhaps we are all superstitious, or sentimental, or nostalgic.  It is difficult to put a finger on exactly what it is that makes even the most calendar-challenged among us recognize and in some sense revere at least one particular day somewhere in the year.  It is usually a very personal matter, some event that comes to mind often, but particularly around its own anniversary.

  Probably most of you have seen the character questionnaires that are sometimes used to flesh out the personality of your game persona.  I’ve never used them myself, but I’ve seen a few that were interesting.  It strikes me that this could be a question on such a personality profile.  What one day or time of year always has a significant impact on your character?  What happened at that time, or why does it have this effect on him?  How does he feel at this time?  It would say something not only about the character’s history, but about his emotions, his values, his interests, in short about who he is.

  It would also give him a personal celebration within the game world.  It might be a day of mourning, or a day of rejoicing, or one of quiet contemplation or renewed effort.  It could be treated as having immediate special effects on the character, such as revitalizing him for the coming year.  It could become the centerpiece of character growth and interaction, as the other player characters come better to know and understand their comrade through the revelation of his own joys or pains, and as they share something of their own past with him.

  Finally, such personal holidays add a flavor to the game that makes it the players’ own world.  When this column celebrated its first anniversary, we considered Celebrations, what we celebrated and how.  The list of imaginary Holidays for Imaginary Worlds has moved since then, but is still available.  Such holidays for the world or the nation or the local town add wonderful color to the game.  To add personal observances to the mix enriches play in many ways.

  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.

Sometime years ago when space travel was still fascinating to most people, NASA announced it had created a space pen, a writing implement which astronauts could use to make notes on paper while in space.

For most of us, this doesn’t sound at all problematic or interesting. We pick up a pen and write with it, and it works. What’s the big deal? We little realize how much of the technology involved in the pens we use is dependent on being used in this environment. Ink is fed to the point usually by gravity, less commonly by internal pressure opposed by atmospheric pressure. Once the wet ink is on the paper, it dries by evaporation, liquids in the ink dispersing into the surrounding air to leave the pigments staining the surface of the paper. These are some of the aspects of how pens work that would be very different without the familiar surroundings for which they were designed. NASA felt that it needed a writing implement that would work without reference to the environmental conditions in which it was used (as long as it could survive those conditions). They spent a substantial sum of money on achieving this goal, and were proud enough of their accomplishment that they made a news bulletin of it.

The Russian space agency responded with muted congratulations. They indicated admiration for this remarkable achievement, but said that they had already solved all those problems and provided their cosmonauts with a writing implement that wrote effectively on most writing surfaces in any conditions they had yet encountered in space. They used pencils.

Whether you use space pens, charcoal pencils, styli, word processors, or some incredibly advanced technology the like of which I have not yet imagined, one of the key bits of advice I have been giving to role playing game players and referees alike for nearing a quarter of a century is to write everything down. The more that you commit to paper, the easier it is to verify and recall the facts of the shared imagined space we call the game world. The very act of play changes that world; knowing what it was, how and when it changed, and what it became may all be very important, and writing it down is the surest means of remembering it.

You may think you will remember it all; but there is already so much to remember. Have you never wished you had some sort of extended memory device, like a disk drive, that you could plug into your brain to store extra information and recall it at will? That’s exactly what the pencil is: it is a means of storing information outside the active memory circuits of your brain for detailed recall at a future time. No one remembers everything, even if some are gifted with the ability to recall all of specific types of information. You shouldn’t have to remember everything. As Doctor Henry Jones Senior said to his son in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember it.” That which we have put to paper we can reliably recall to memory when we need it, without fear it will be forgotten or corrupted.

For example, how many of the articles from this past quarter can you remember, off the top of your head? How many come back with a bit of prodding from this list?

170. Flag Captures picked up our consideration of adventure designs with thoughts on a non-linear model for a quest for a single object whose location is known but for which several paths are possible.
171. Preservatives talked about the problems inherent in keeping food fresh over long journeys, and how this can come into play in a game.
172. Hordes provided a few shortcuts to creating large numbers of creatures for use in major battles and wars.
173. Treasure Hunts provided a second model for quest-type adventures, a considerably more linear type in which the adventurers followed the trail of clues to reach the end.
174. Architecture considered the impact of local conditions and requirements on the appearance of the buildings in our imaginary cities and towns, considering building materials, weather conditions, and other factors.
175. McGuffin is a word coined by suspense master Alfred Hitchcock to define that object in any story which everyone in the story wants, and thus which motivates them. This article discussed the kinds of motivations that drive quests, specifically, and how to connect them to McGuffins.
176. Most of us form judgements of others based on first Impressions. Although I object to this, I confess to falling into it at times myself. I also recognize that it is rather universal that people do make such judgements by appearances and gossip, and that our characters should sometimes face the complications of such prejudices.
177. Wars picked up from Hordes, providing several techniques for running mass combats that avoid the problems of tracking the motion of each one of several hundred combatants.
178. Scavenger Hunts were yet one more approach to quests, a particularly non-linear model in which the quest has multiple objects in different known or unknown places, and the heroes must locate and gather all of these to succeed.
179. Designs asked the question of how to help someone else with a setting when it doesn’t fit your view of how things work, and suggested the answer lay in asking the right questions.
180. Wisdom gave a glance at how to play a character who is wiser than you are. It considered some techniques that don’t work well, but also provided some ideas that do.
181. Home is where the heart is, or so they say. This somewhat whimsical moment considered whether adventurers ever do find home.

Three months ago we took a similar backwards glance at what we’d written, and talked about Dreams in the process. How much of what we said do you remember?

I will admit that I do not remember all of the one hundred eighty-one articles in this series that precede this one. Sometimes the name of an article will bring it back to me; sometimes I have to read the introductory blurb for it. Once in a while I actually have to reread an old article to remember what it was about. With each new idea, I scan through old pages to assure myself that I’m not copying what I’ve already written, and that if I’ve addressed this subject before I am at least adding something to it now. My memory does not retain all that I have already said and done. I have games running in many different worlds for many different people, and the details of all of these are not always completely retained, particularly when the currents of the river of life carry us apart for months or years at a time. My notes are usually sufficient to recover most of these when we return to the table, even though my memories are not.

It is said that C. S. Lewis had what was then called a photographic and now an eidetic memory. His library had shelves on four walls, floor to ceiling. His secretary, Walter Hooper, would select a book from those shelves, identifying it only by which wall, which shelf, and how many from the end, then pick a page by number. Lewis could recite the page. However, if Hooper copied text from one of Lewis’ own books and read it aloud to him, he would not recognize it even as familiar. None of us remembers everything. That’s why we write it down.

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.

  From my earliest memory through my preteens we lived in the same house.  I’m given to understand that I lived somewhere else briefly upon birth, but I do not remember remembering such a place even in my Dreams and think I have not seen pictures of it.  I vaguely recall my mother pointing to a tall apartment building as we sped along some major artery in the New York metropolis and saying something about us having lived there once, but the outside certainly did not look familiar and I could form no image of the inside.  Since my earliest memories recall looking through the bars of my crib, and that was at the house, I must have been too young to remember more about that apartment than the faces of my parents.  In my mind, the house on Brookside Drive in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, was home.  I can still give you the street address, phone number, and zip code.

  Home was a place where nightlights were superfluous.  I could walk from any bedroom to the bathroom in complete darkness, and put my hand on the light switch without turning my head toward it.  I not only knew how many steps were in each staircase, but had such a perfect internalized understanding of where they were, how high was each riser and how deep each platform, that I never worried about missing a step as I raced up or especially down them in a cacophonous drum roll of feet which probably took years off my mother’s life.  Over time, places that had been mysterious dark corners became friendly hideouts, whether the crawlspaces alongside the upstairs bedroom, the space under the basement stairs, or the access behind the furnace.  I could even walk the woods behind the house at night; I remember finding my way through to the other side and back the first time.

  We left that house when I was a mere dozen years old.

  The new house had been built for us; that is, my parents found it while it was under construction, and made several alterations to the plans to suit their hopes for a home.  I was not there long.  In six years I left for college, making day trips home on weekends at first and then vanishing only to visit on longer vacations.  I married before I was out of school, and never again lived there.  Looking back, this never felt so much like home as that house on Brookside Drive.  The stairs were not so familiar nor so friendly, and although my pounding racing feet on them were undoubtedly louder in my teen years than they had been in my younger days, they were never as confident.  My brother and I rearranged our bedroom furniture several times, always to the distress of my mother who liked none of our ideas, in an attempt to make this new bedroom feel as roomy as the upstairs enclave we had shared before.  We didn’t spend much time in that room, however, as we were always on the move as high school kids, and there wasn’t much to do there besides the homework we generally avoided and the sleep for which we had too little time.

  Yet parts of this house became home.  I created a work area in the basement, a place where I could write my songs and repair my electronic musical equipment.  I frequently withdrew there when I was home, as it had become my space where I could have a free hand.  My mother, who expected our bedrooms to be spotless and our desks clear when not in use, recognized the hopelessness of trying to impose any order or neatness on the dozen foot-high piles of papers and the makeshift trays and shelves of miscellaneous parts which covered the several pieces of furniture impressed into my service–an out-of-service kitchen table, a desk, a file cabinet, a large table whose intended function I cannot now fathom, and the several boards ramped between these to increase both the surface area on top and the storage space beneath.  I put posters on the walls above these tables (it was not permitted that we would secure anything to our bedroom walls, as it would mar the surface), and moved a piano into the space, piece by piece over a year or so.

  Only the piano remains in the basement; my youngest brother took over the rest of the space upon my departure, and the furnishings were scattered into other services.  The bedroom, meanwhile, sports a layout preferred by my parents.  I sleep in it when I visit them, but it is not much like being home.  The familiarity of the surroundings (I can still walk to the bathroom in the dark) compensates only partially for the bed I have outgrown and which is no longer comfortable, and the sense of displacement I have there.  It does not have that feeling of being in my own room.

  Of course, it has been some thirty years since I was eighteen; that’s five times as many years that I have not lived there as that I lived there.  I sometimes wonder whether the old Brookside Drive house would feel more like home.  Some say you can’t go home again, because the things that made home home are no longer there.  Perhaps there is some truth to that.

  There were a flurry of places we tried to call home in the first years of our marriage.  Three were apartments in private homes, one a small rented house whose structural integrity might have been dubious.  I have a somewhat nostalgic feeling for these places.  The one house has since been demolished and replaced by something prefabricated.  If I had untold riches, I would probably waste a substantial amount buying up properties familiar to me.  I have fond memories of times spent in the house my maternal great grandfather built at twelve twelve Raymond Street in Schenectady, early in the last century, and the one a few blocks from my boyhood home in which my closest cousins were raised, and the one that was my father’s boyhood home on the edge of Sardis, Mississippi, where I spent bits of two or perhaps three summers.  All of those properties have passed out of the family now, and I feel like bits of my larger home are gradually slipping away.  However, we eventually finagled a place of our own, a place we made home for fifteen years during which five children were born.

  That particular story has a sad ending, and we had to say farewell to that house.  For a couple of years we were adrift; then we landed in the new house.

  There is a sense in which the new house became home immediately; there was a lot to love about it.  Of course, it took time before I could find the bathroom in the dark, and I’m not certain I do know the exact number of stairs to the basement despite frequent treks to the laundry and larder therein.  Yet it does not so much feel like home–at least, not in the sense that it all feels like the place I belong.  There are places within the house that are comfortable; my office is reminiscent in feel and appearance, although not in size or layout, of that basement space I once created.

  Yet as I recently crawled into bed next to my wife of nearing thirty years (our twenty-eighth anniversary is two weeks away), I realized that now it is not the place that makes it home, but her.  I remember now some time ago when she observed that we had been married for more years than we had been single before that, and it is almost as difficult to remember that milestone as it is to remember life before her.  Oh, familiarity of place is important, the knowing how to find the bathroom in the dark, the feel of the mattress and the fluff of the pillow, the personal space of my own office.  Yet somehow none of it would be home without her, and almost anywhere could be home if we were both there.

  As I started this article I was wondering what makes a house a home, and how our characters, most of whom are vagabonds and vagrants for at least part of their careers, ever get that feeling that means being home.  I conclude that I don’t have that answer, and maybe some of those characters never can know that feeling, never can go home, never can recognize home in a new place.  Finding your way home is something special, and not everyone does so in life or in fiction.

  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.

  This often comes up in discussions of role playing games; it is certainly a problem no matter how it is approached.  It has to do with the fact that in attempting to model characters who are different from ourselves as players, we rate them with in-game values representing their abilities, and some of those abilities have much to do with what we might think are the personalities of the characters themselves.  For example, if a character is listed as having a certain charisma, but the player’s interpersonal skills are significantly different from that, how do you play the character, and how do you handle in-game character interactions?  There are similar problems when a player of ordinary intelligence is suddenly playing a genius.  Yet it goes both ways:  particularly charismatic or intelligent players sometimes have greater difficulty figuring out how to play dull or dumb characters than their less-gifted player counterparts have pretending to be dashing and bright.

  I suppose I should come back to this; I think I’ve treated on the problems related to intelligence and perhaps charisma before.  This time, though, I’m looking at the matter of playing a wise character.  None of us are so wise as we wish we were, and few of us are so wise as we pretend to be.  When we are pretending to be someone wiser than ourselves, how do we make it work as a credible fictional character?

  I’ve run a number of characters who were taken to be wise by the other players; it’s not really that easy, but perhaps there are some ways to approach it that are helpful.

  In my bathroom drawer at the moment I have a book that is a collection of witty aphorisms and well-stated thoughts.  It must not be a very good book.  Whenever I leave a good book in that drawer, my wife will begin reading it and take it with her, and I’ll be without reading material.  Only this aphorisms book, a printout of Aristotle’s Poetics, and a copy of Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer have survived her interests in recent days.  Thus there are probably better collections of quotes out there, and I won’t bother you with the name of this one.  However, reading it has reminded me that I once attempted to play a wise character by collecting such words of wisdom and using them in play.  It didn’t work at all.  I’d like to tell you that it was a good idea that encountered a few minor snags, but in truth the problems seemed insurmountable.

  The first problem was simply finding good quotes that could be dropped in the file and used at need.  A good quote had to say something wise, and it had to say it in a way that sounded at least clever; at the same time, it couldn’t be familiar.  No one was going to think my character particularly wise if he spouted the familiar sayings of Poor Richard’s Almanac, or those aphorisms everyone knows, no matter how pithy or apropos.  Merely spouting familiar aphorisms such as Look before you leap or Two heads are better than one would sound trite pretty quickly.  Thus I was on a bit of a scavenger hunt to gather as many words of wisdom no one had ever heard that were worth repeating as I could.  This was particularly challenging, because if they’re worth repeating, they’ve probably been repeated, and that would ultimately make them familiar.  So getting the quotes was a major obstacle.

  More difficult, however, was using the quotes.  Somehow I had to find a way to organize these such that in any situation I could find and recite one of these wonderful words of wisdom that was appropriate to the situation and helped the characters make better choices.  I never managed to do that.  Like The Scarlet Pimpernel, I found I suffered from the equivalent of carriage wit:  he said that whenever he was publicly insulted, he could always devise the perfectly devastating retort in the carriage on the way home from the party.  Situations would arise and pass before I had a chance to think about what to say; the clever quotes I could remember never fit anything that happened to us.

  To use aphorisms as a substitute for wisdom, you would have to be so versed in them that they came naturally to mind when situations arose.  Frankly, there are better things to memorize, in my experience.  In social situations, you’ll have more opportunities to quote Ogden Nash poems and Lewis Carroll witticisms and, dare I say it, Monty Python gags than wise proverbs.  Unless you already have that sort of familiarity with such sayings, it’s a lot of effort for a small return on the investment–and if you already know all these words of wisdom, chances are that your gaming group has heard them all by now (that is, from you) and isn’t going to think much of your character repeating them.

  So that would seem to be one way not to portray the wise man.  I suppose you could try the I Ching or fortune cookie approach, collecting a large number of somewhat vague one-line esoteric statements and choosing one at random to spout at each opportunity.  This may make you sound like some religious seer, but it’s unlikely to create the impression of wisdom, since nothing you say will be particularly relevant to anything happening in the game.  I knew someone in high school who sometimes approached people and made a statement that was completely incomprehensible; I don’t know where he got it, but I more recently heard Alan Arkin use the exact same string of nonsense in a movie:

Arkin:  In my country we have an old saying:  Ishkidividi, Ishkidivirn.

Other character:  Oh.  What does that mean?

Arkin:  No one knows.  It’s a very old saying.

That’s how a random aphorisms approach feels most of the time.  If anyone has found a way to use words of wisdom as a technique for making a character seem wise in play, I’d love to hear about it.

  Of course, as a referee, one thing that enabled me to play my characters as seemingly wise is the fact that I knew things the players did not.  Thus once the players latched on to the fact that a particular character was intended to be wise, they also recognized that his words would point them in the right direction more often than not.  I wouldn’t tell them what was going to happen, of course; rather, I would alert them to possibilities, and they would take that advice seriously.

  Even though that particular approach relies on player knowledge of a special sort, there are a number of aspects to bringing it alive in play.

  One bit that helps in creating the impression of wisdom is the ability to ask important questions.  This takes a bit of practice, perhaps even a bit of personal wisdom, but if you as a player can look at the situation and the plans or proposals of your fellows and raise questions about them, this in itself is at least perceived as wise.  Socrates was often presented as a teacher who made almost no statements, but always asked questions; today we refer to the Socratic Method as a mode of teaching in which the teacher asks questions and leaves the students to find the answers.  It’s quite popular in law schools.  On one occasion, my property professor asked a question and took an answer from one of the hands that immediately shot up.  Many hands shot up after than answer, and another answer was taken, and another.  The bell rang.  The professor took three more answers.  He then said, “One of those answers is correct,” and dismissed the class.  I don’t know if he knew the answer; but it made him seem quite wise as he let us struggle with the questions.

  Related to asking questions, wise people advise caution.  Certainly there are wonderful sayings along the line of Strike while the iron is hot and He who hesitates is lost, calling us to action and even haste; but nine out of ten times the wise word is to stop, look, and listen before proceeding into whatever lies ahead.  The character who advises caution and consideration before action will seem wise.

  Somewhere I read a cute sign that said, Warning:  please be sure brain is in motion before engaging tongue.  One of the best ways to preserve the impression that a character is wise is to keep quiet when he doesn’t have something wise to say.  My character Thuliar used this to great effect.  He, a half-elf ranger/cleric, was almost always in the company of his companion Guljor, a gnome fighter/illusionist.  Guljor talked incessantly, leaping from subject to subject like fleas on a griddle and spitting out a hundred eighty words per minute.  Thuliar, on the other hand, spoke slowly, quietly, deliberately, and rarely.  One night when I shifted to Thuliar’s voice, the player who played the party leader suddenly told everyone else to be quiet; he didn’t want to miss anything important Thuliar said, and he had come to recognize that Thuliar didn’t say anything unless it was important.

  There are other traits that seem to connect with wisdom.  Wise people tend to be observant at some level.  Some notice the little things people do, some understand human motivations, and some see the big picture.  That’s harder to emulate; you almost need to have that ability yourself to make it viable in play.  However, if you’re not the referee, perhaps you can make a deal with the referee to treat your particular wisdom as including one of these aspects.  Thus if you have the ability to understand people, tell the referee that your wisdom entitles you to know something about what this person is likely to do; if it’s the broad picture you see, ask him how your character would see the current events in their relationship with everything else that has happened.  A character can sometimes lift a far greater weight than the player because of his strength score.  Why shouldn’t a player have the advantage of seeing things more clearly because his character’s wisdom is high?  It may require stepping out of character, but are you really in character at all if you’re not seeing what your character would see, or understanding it as he would?

  Of course, sometimes being the wise one merely means not doing stupid things.  One of the unattributed aphorisms in that book says Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.  Most of us know stupid things when we do them, and we do them anyway.  Teach yourself at least to restrain your character when you want him to do stupid things, and suddenly he will seem a great deal wiser to everyone.  If you want to do foolish things, get yourself a second character like a blustery fighter or a conniving thief, and use your wise character to scold him for his foolishness, and to express exasperation with his antics.  Having such a foil in the party will reflect well on you, even if you play both sides.

  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.