I’m back at the hospital. Surely you remember it–the same hospital in which I found myself when we talked about Stitches seventy articles back. Indeed, it is the same boy who has brought me here, the one who brought me here so many years before when he fell off the bed, and again when he sliced his hand trying to get into that plastic package (the one I said ought to have the Consumer Product Safety Commission label, Warning: Cannot Be Opened). This time he has broken his leg, just above the ankle, jumping on a trampoline. He’d have walked to the car if we’d let him; in fact, I suppose he did, although he leaned heavily on several people who kept trying to convince him to let us carry him. It’s a nasty break, which will keep him here for a few days while they schedule surgery and make sure they’ve got it put back together right. Meanwhile, I spend most of the night sitting in the waiting area of the emergency department by myself. His mother (the nurse) and his girlfriend (the hand holder) both came, and they trump me for visitor passes. Mercifully I brought something to read (I expected that my part would be driving and sitting by myself); the details of the injury will come to me later.
It is those details, as they come to me, that catch my attention. The doctor, the nurses, even the girlfriend speak of what they saw on the X-ray, of efforts to turn the limb to try to align the bones, of the pain the boy refuses to acknowledge. As I hear, I cringe. A shiver runs down my spine, and an involuntary quake passes through my body. I can’t listen to this; I can’t talk about it.
Don’t misunderstand. I’ve been in the midst of my share of emergencies, medical and otherwise. You can’t have children and not rush to hospitals once in a while. When it’s happening, I manage to maintain my calm, and execute the proper procedures within my knowledge and ability. I have no trouble doing it. I just can’t talk about it.
As I muse on this, it occurs to me that probably I could never have been a doctor. Even with the shield of technical terminology to defend against thinking about what is really happening, the thoughts of injured and infected body parts is not something I can handle. I worked my way around high school biology to avoid slicing up small animals, precisely for this reason; and I managed to take a college biology class which was more about issues than organisms. Helping my wife through nursing school, I managed to memorize the twelve cranial nerves, to grasp what little was known of the disease process of Alzheimer’s, to understand nursing practice–but it was always theoretical. I can sit still as they stick a needle in my arm, but I can’t listen to my wife wax eloquent about finding the veins from which to draw the blood without cringing. I know quite a bit about medicine; but I can’t discuss it in practical terms.
I’ve often heard it said that you can do anything you decide you want to do. I’m going to tell you it isn’t true. Over the course of my life, I’ve learned that there are a lot of things I can’t do. A large part of success in life seems to stem from recognizing what you can do, and figuring out how to use those abilities effectively while staying clear of the things you can’t do.
What came out of this, apart from some personal insights, was a thought about character abilities. Going back to early days of Dungeons & Dragons™, many players complained about classes, about the requirement that their characters were specialists. Why can’t you have a clever thief who does a lot of magic and fights as well as the king’s best knight? Why can’t your wizard use a sword? Without defending the detail, let me suggest that the concept reflects not merely something of the milieu (which it certainly does) but something of the nature of people. There will always be things I can’t do, whether because I lack the talents or for other reasons. Indiana Jones can’t handle snakes; for his father, it was rats. There were rats, there, Dad, was enough to tell the elderly amateur archaeologist that he would not have liked to be present when his theory was proved true.
Most games miss this. One set of skills might cost a character more than another, as being more difficult for an individual of their background and abilities, but in the end they can learn whatever they want to learn, be whatever they want to be. Perhaps that’s necessary for heroic play; but not all of our play is intended to create such dynamic heroes, and that which doesn’t often falls into the same mold. We don’t want to limit the expression of a character concept, so we fail to create ordinary human limitations on the characters we devise.
Some games do provide a way to build such flaws into your character. In the gaming world, they’re called disads, short for disadvantages. Yet the resounding complaint is that these things never make a difference in play, but are instead used to build stronger characters by spending the points gained from such minor troubles on major improvements. Thus the character has dandruff and is afraid of spiders, but has incredible combat abilities. The disadvantages never matter.
The best answer to this problem is that referees need to observe the disadvantages and weaknesses their players’ characters take. As someone has said, any player who takes a disadvantage is in theory asking that play move that direction so it will become involved. The tracker knows you went this way because he follows the dandruff, or the genetic examination of the dead skin you dropped behind is going to give your identity to the villain–and your only route of escape is through the lair of the giant spiders. If you’ve got limitations, they should be part of the play at some point.
After all, a good part of the challenge of real life is overcoming your limitations. There is every reason to think that the drama of a good game can similarly reflect this kind of struggle.
In life, I’m a generalist; in games, I tend to push my characters toward generalization as much as the game allows. Yet I think it’s valuable to include in character concept those humanizing factors, those limitations, that are best expressed in the words, I can’t do that. It’s more realistic, even when it feels restrictive. All of us who are old enough have found something in life that we can’t do. Accepting that our characters, like us, can’t do some things gives them a dimension many otherwise lack.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
