The Gaming Outpost

I have very recently gotten into GURPS. I didn’t do so for the rules, which are the pinnacle of pragmatism and quite boring. Rather, it was the wealth of sourcebooks on such a variety of disparate topics that drew me in. I’ve been reading a lot of GURPS products and one thing truly stands out:

GURPS is fantastically egalitarian.

Being blind is worth 50 points. But, if you’re blind and have a compartmentalized mind, you’re back on equal footing with everyone else. One hundred points means everyone’s the same. Now, there are two ways to look at this. The first it that it’s a game, one in which play balance is important. Everyone must be equal or it won’t be “fair.” All the players in the group must be at the same power level or one of the PC’s might dominate and push the others out of the action. The second, and far more interesting, is that this represents an attempt to accurately portray reality. GURPS mentions several times that it is a “realistic” system. It isn’t fantastic or cinematic. It is realistic and that assumes close ties to reality. So, why is character creation so very zero sum?

Pointing out trends is always difficult because the case can usually be made for so many exceptions that the statement has to be quickly retracted. However, I’m going to bow to my own broadly generalizing nature and point out a trend as I perceive it: In the Beginning, as they say, dice created the character. Roll 3d6, add ‘em up, and put the results in the slots. This means that a party could be made up of one character with two 18′s, two 15′s, a 14, and an 11; and another with not a single stat above 12. But that’s just the way things were. You dealt with what you got.

Things are different now. Most RPG’s released in the present day take a point-based approach to character generation. If one believes there has been a level of progress made in the field, the reason for this switch must be called into question. If point-based is the almost unilaterally preferred method, it must have perceived advantages. Why is it better to have mathematically imposed equality across the board?

Because the truth is self-evident: All men are created equal. Right? They have to be, right? If they aren’t, it becomes possible (and easy) to cast a doubtful eye on those around you. Roleplaying games are representational. As such, they are not simulations brought into being with the hard tools of the natural sciences. They are a product of our own (un)conscious ideology. They are the way we want the world to work.

I’m not a big guy. I’m thin; I always have been and I always will be. There’s no football career in my future. I like to think I’m pretty smart but I’m not one of the greatest minds of my generation or anything. The more I think about it, the less I think the total of my advantages and disadvantages, high attributes and low, even out to zero. Just like I find it difficult to believe anyone’s do. That’s not the way the world is. Some people are simply smarter than others in ways that have nothing to do with “application of potential” or other educational buzzwords. And, if I were paralyzed from the hairline down, I doubt I’d take seriously any argument that stated I was equivalent to those more mobile people around me because I could read extra fast or remember pi to thousands of digits or empathically communicate with beavers.

Last week, I started playing in a small D&D campaign, the first of that particular game I’ve participated in since sixth grade. My character, a halfling detective named Lott, is, at least on paper, a product of the random character creation method. I rolled for each attribute and set them down in the order they came. I was fortunate enough to end up with an eighteen in dexterity, a benefit for rogues, but the rest of my stats are mediocre at best. It makes sense that way. The DM gave me the option of distributing some set number of points between my attributes but I opted to go with the traditional method. It somehow seemed more realistic.

When I wrote my article about themes of race in Dungeons & Dragons, readers jumped on me for reading too much into the text. D&D is, after all, just a game. It’s meant to be fun. There’s nothing “meaningful” about it. But if that were really true, there wouldn’t be much fun in studying any form of popular culture. Why bother with film criticism? They’re just movies, just excuses to waste a couple hours eating popcorn. The reason’s an easy one: popular culture is our culture. It’s us. It’s what we like, what we believe, who we are, and provides glimpses of where we’re going. Roleplaying games are popular culture.

What, then, is the importance of this shift from random characters to the more rounded edges of the point-based systems we see today? Political correctness. We are an “All Men Are Created Equal” society. In recent years, this has come more to the forefront. For the most part, one can call it progress. We are more accepting; there is less prejudice (although it obviously still exists). But political correctness also causes a great deal of problems. Witness the recent banning of To Kill a Mockingbird from a school because its themes might make (some) students uncomfortable. There are plenty of other examples just like that one.

I can hear the question: What does this have to do with roleplaying games? Just think about it for a while. Think about why we are so fond of our character points. Think about why we criticize random characters as somehow not as sophisticated. Sure, we accept them, but only if they’re part of a game like Dungeons & Dragons, a game that already has a reputation for being “behind the times.” If we, as modern gamers, aren’t concerned with power gaming, if we focus instead on the story and the characters, why do we feel the need to smear all differences to zero?

Let’s now turn our attention to superheroes. First order of business: What exactly do they have to do with the Internet? A simple answer would be “They both are things geeks are into.” Being a geek myself, I can testify to the validity of this response. However, there is more subtlety to the connection than that. There exists a second possible answer, namely the fact that both share a theme of nicknames, of handles, of code names, of making up new identities and keeping the “real” ones secret. No one can perhaps explain it better than Professor X, the smartest of telepathic mutants:

“But these aren’t nicknames, Storm. You’ve just been rebaptized as a post-human being. It’s an idea Magneto and I devised once upon a time: a name which describes your own skills and personality as opposed to those of a long-dead ancestor.”¹

But notice the slight difference between the idea of secret identities (so prevalent with superheroes of the Golden and Silver Ages²), and what Professor X is talking about. And compare it to the summary of the arguments against doing away with handles in the Gaming Outpost forums. This is not about secrets. This has nothing to do with hiding anything. This is a look into the birth of the post-human and, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, the Internet is the Star Trek Genesis Planet for bringing it about. Take this same idea from another angle:

Morro: Honestly, I find the fundamental conceit of post-human culture fascinating. We’re talking the wholesale adoption of classical mythology as a driving meme. I think post-humans embrace mythic thought as a coping mechanism. The problem is: they remail [sic] unaware of any hidden damage they can cause. Any myth can be broken down to a series of mythemes; relational structures that question human origin and purpose. A series of primal existential questions.³

The above quote serves to further elaborate the point made my Professor X—or, rather, Charles Xavier:⁴ Not only is there a need to rename to get away from “long-dead ancestors,” but there also exists a certain level of the “coping mechanism” Morro mentions. The superheroes, for whatever reasons, are not content with who they are. Changing their names is one way to deal with this. And that leads quite nicely into the central argument of this essay:

This all must tie together somehow. Superheroes, the Internet, names, and post-humans. It’s a lot of what could be described as “disparate topics” packed into a few short paragraphs. The point is this: For human beings, as linguistic creatures, identity is formed and driven by the linguistic tether, by that thing that links us, as physical objects, as animals, to the greater system of language as a whole. Lacan claimed that tether was the pronoun “I”. However, his analysis is slightly off. Ask any kid who’s filled out Madlibs—possibly the greatest instructional tool for grammar ever slipped past children’s defensives—what a pronoun is and he’ll answer, “Something that takes the place of a noun.” So, if the “I” is the center of consciousness, what noun is it taking the place of? The answer is the name. The name is who we are. It is what gives us a place in language. It is the personal signifier for which each of us is the signified. It is the method of our presence.

That is where the Internet comes in. With it, it brings superheroes as an effective analogy, as a spoonful of sugar. The Internet is the first place where communication can happen without any reminder of the physical. Talking is face-to-face. Telephones carry the voice. Even written letters have the ghost of the physical (as the market for autographs proves). But on the Internet, there is no connection between the speaker and the spoken. To fall to a cliché, you can be whoever you want to be. There is no body (nobody?) holding you to a specific identity. Like the code names of superheroes, you can give yourself a new moniker and change along with it. That is why the readers of the Gaming Outpost objected so strongly when the threat of having handles taken away was presented: they felt their identities were at stake. They would suddenly have to go back to being who they always had been and would no longer be able to claim the escape, the coping mechanism, of the Internet. By shifting names, they had shifted their tethers to the linguistic system and, effectively, rebaptized themselves as post-human blanks, ready to be pressed into whatever mold each individual saw fit. This then becomes a possible reason for much of the behavior that takes place online. It also can be used to explain why the Internet is packed with the type of content it is—namely, so much pornography.

The Internet is identity without the physical and, consequently, identity without consequences. And what a strange, looping identity it is. If the name is the center of consciousness by providing something for the pronoun “I” to replace, then the users of handles on the Internet have removed or changed that name. They have taken the stability out from under the I. They are, in a sense, unmaking themselves. Let us briefly turn back to the quote from “The Monarchy” given above. The part already presented was the first volley in a conversation between two United Nations employees, Morro and Bay. This very short introduction closes with the remainder of that conversation:

Bay: Listen. If I’m understanding this, you’re saying post-human culture’s far more rooted in existential subtext than it appears. Doesn’t that seem kinda, I dunno, post-modern and depressing?

Morro: Uh-huh. And that’s not the worst part. When’s the last time anything post-modern had a happy ending?

Notes

1. Millar, Mark (writer). “Ultimate X-Men”, Vol. 1, Issue 1. Marvel Comics. 2000.
2. I lack hard numbers to prove it, but there appears to be a clear trend away from the notion of secret identities in modern comics. Superheroes still use code names and costumes, but they seem to care little if people know who they are. The exception that proves the rule is Batman, a character so caught up in the notion of keeping his identity secret that Bruce Wayne and Batman have become two separate identities entirely. In the one-shot “Ego”, they even go so far as to fight each other.
3. Young, Doselle (writer). “The Monarchy”, Issue 2. WildStorm Productions. June 2001.
4. Although, I must admit that the quote is also included simply because it is so very neat. I am always attempting to demonstrate the maturity of comic books, to show how much they have grown up since the days of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and including a quote like this is just one more blow in the fight against public perception. Pardon me my vices.

Schism from Memento Mori Theatricks

36 pages / $5.95

On the one hand, there’s nothing particularly new in Schism. It’s got psychics, secret organizations, nifty powers, lost humanity, and lots of movie quotes. No new players dropped into this game will feel particularly lost in the setting. It is, in the end, your basic “paranormals on the fringes of society” tale.

But that’s if you ask for the fifty-word overview. The beauty of Schism rests in the details. With this short sourcebook for Ron Edward’s Sorcerer RPG, Jared Sorensen of Memento Mori Theatricks gives us another installment in the continuing trend of “post-X” books. You can see post-superheroes at work in comics with titles like The Authority or The Monarchy. Unknown Armies is a post-wizards RPG. There is an element of awareness present, like the authors are comfortable with the fact that they are playing with firmly established conventions. It’s just how far they can push those conventions that becomes important.

Schism very loosely tells the story of psychic characters, called psychogens. They have powers (selected from a pretty standard bunch including Blast, Float, Freeze, Hunch, Spy, etc.) for whatever reason (there are several possibilities given), join up with a Cabal (an miscellaneous organization), and try to live with plight of their lives. Then it starts to turn things around. “But what if these powers did exist? What if instead of benign gifts from ‘above’ they were horrible, debilitating illnesses?” Sorensen writes at the beginning of chapter one. It’s obvious he’s been reading Unknown Armies (a game he acknowledges in the designer notes at the end). Like the adepts of UA, the psychogens of Schism aren’t necessarily thrilled to be able to walk through walls or possess someone else’s mind. Sure, being what they are lets them do neat stuff, but it comes with a price, one that, in what I think is the best part of Schism, is dictated during character creation.

Every character has a Humanity stat. When this reaches zero (having high powers decreases it, for example), the PC has one more adventure before he dies. His death has already been written about by the player during character creation and it is now up to that character to make sure that he goes out having accomplished something. If you can pull it off, you regain your lost Humanity just before death.

“Dying with Humanity means that your character’s life had some kind of meaning…that it wasn’t all in vain. That in spite of everything, he made the right choice when it was most important. In the end, the character can act heroically. He can make a difference. He can define his own reality rather than simply accept the reality of others.”

Yesterday, Gareth-Michael Skarka’s column dealt with the issue of lack of diversity in gaming. He was quite vocal in his dislike of the near total dominance of fantasy and fantasy elements in role-playing. For the most part, I agree with him. The same situation exists in the field of comic books. Superheroes easily control over ninety percent of the market. Myself, I can’t stand them. I think superheroes look silly, have dumb names, and take up space on shelves that could go to much more interesting works.

But…

Sometimes they work. Sometimes it is possible for a good writer to do something with the genre that makes it worth reading. Warren Ellis’ and Mark Millar’s run on The Authority is one example. Ellis’ Planetary is another. And Joe Casey’s Wild Cats, while not as good, carries some of the same themes. (Those three titles are under the WildStorm label, which seems to be the place for post-superheroes.) All of these operate by taking the core element of the genre-super powers-and staying “true” to only that. In the end, this can function as a far more potent attack on the stagnance and boredom of superheroes than simply ignoring them.

Schism does much the same thing. Psychic powers are, to be honest, exactly the same thing as magic spells. Psychers and wizards are often indistinguishable. So, by employing psi instead of the arcane, one does little to remove fantasy from the work. What we have in this game is a bunch of curse mages. And, in just over thirty pages, Schism doesn’t provide many of the hard details usually found in a campaign setting. It is made clear in the beginning that the city in which the game takes place should remain vague and unnamed. All of the Cabals talked about are presented as examples. What we are left with is a core of psychic powers wrapped in nothing tangible, the effect of which is to bring into striking clarity the nature of the game. There is no way to pass off the psychogens and their capabilities as tangible or as a piece of a larger whole. They take on such a focus that they become fully realized in a way that is impossible with, for instance, the D&D Psionics Handbook. Psychogens in Schism are not tools for adventure. They are like Heidegger’s Being instead of the more granular beings. They function as the entire universe, the totality of the game. The very openness of the game casts the protagonists in intense relief and the face that the death scene is already written only serves to heighten this awareness. Characters in Schism have an endpoint. They will die. And unlike, say, Call of Cthulhu, this death isn’t some inevitable dread. It’s more of a solution, a way to make better a system that has gone wrong.

There are people out there who aren’t going to like Schism. First, it’s a PDF, which doesn’t have quite the same “feel” as a printed book. Second, the artwork, while passable, won’t be drawing short inhalations of awe. While I didn’t come across any typos, there are some formatting mistakes and one movie quote that shows up twice. But those are little details and, due to the nature of the format, easy to fix.

Additionally, this is a sourcebook, not a stand-alone product. However, I’ve never read Sorcerer and had no trouble understanding what Schism was talking about. Some of the specific mechanics require the original rules but the vast majority of it is generic enough to be ported to any system you want.

Schism can be called post-roleplaying. Even if you don’t play it, it is worth reading as a carefully constructed look at what makes this genre and is a work that will enhance anyone’s appreciation for what roleplaying games can be.

Next week: Part 2 of “Surfing in Spandex”

Not too long ago I was talking with a friend of mine (Mark Winokur, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Movies, Flicks, and Film, an excellent book you should all rush out and buy immediately) about his next project. He had professed an interest in role-playing games and wanted to do a chapter on them as part of a larger work on race and class in popular culture. Jokingly, I responded, “You’re in luck, Mark. Those are the second and third chapters of the D&D Player’s Handbook.”

Now I’ve got to beat him to it. I’ve got to discuss the issues of race and class (culture, gender, etc.) as they pertain to those funny little games we all spend so much of our time playing. But there’s a problem. I have this idea of what I want to say but I find myself lacking the ability to fully articulate it. To hopefully solve this, I’m going to just start writing and see where it gets me. Here goes…

By and large, role-playing games paint a very politically correct, modern, and “enlightened” view of class and race differences. That is to say, they generally reduce them to zero. For example, when was the last time you came across an RPG that had something in the character creation rules along the lines of “male characters have one additional strength while female characters have one additional agility?” They do exist, yes, but they are by far the exception to the rule. Simply put, RPG’s stay far away from gender inconsistencies and, quite often, point out that they are doing so. Now, does this mean that they are providing an inaccurate representation of reality? Maybe. I don’t want to get into that particular issue because I know I’ll end up pissing off someone and for very little gain. I think it is safe to say that there are differences—physically, at least—between the genders when one steps back to broad, demographic levels.

What is interesting is that, while they are so good about keeping the sexes on equal footing, RPG’s love to show us how different the races are. Orcs are dumber than humans. Elves are more agile than dwarves. And so on and so on until you reach the absurd levels of, say, the Forgotten Realms. Now, I do realize that we’re talking completely different species here. Goblins are goblins, not some subset of humans. And so it’s okay to make them weaker or faster or less intelligent. Because they’re not the same. But try pulling the same thing with humans. Imagine a cyberpunk game, for example. It’s 2044 and there are no dwarves. During character creation, you pick what nationality your character claims. And, upon turning to the first page of the Nationalities chapter, you’re confronted with a huge list of, for lack of a better term, stereotypes. Asians get +1 Intelligence. Norwegians get +1 Strength. And it goes on like that. Chances are, it’ll strike you as odd, even as being in slightly poor taste, especially for those nationalities that get hit with a bunch of penalties. I would agree completely with that reaction. Such a chart would be, quite bluntly, racist. But when disguised as different types of elves, it all somehow becomes okay.

Science fiction has always served as a way take important—and current—issues and present them in surroundings that make discussion of them easier. Want to deal with religion without offending sensibilities? Make your story take place in a far future society and change the names of the god(s). It’s a technique that’s been used for as long as people have been writing literature. Shakespeare had some not-so-nice things to say about the royalty sponsoring his plays. The solution was to set the stories in far away times or other (barbaric) countries so the nobility could watch and say, “Look at those horrible, backwards people. It’s a good thing we English are beyond that.”

Role-playing games are doing exactly the same thing except they’re coming at it from the other direction. We know the world operates in a certain way. But we’d (unconsciously) like it to be something else. As animals, there are reactions and attitudes that function within us that we like to think we’ve “grown out of.” Most importantly for this discussion, there is a dislike and distrust of the Other. Intellectually, we are able to act against this and not attack each person we see who doesn’t look like us. However, that animal aspect is still there in some respect and it pops up every now and then. Does this make each and every one of us a racist or bigot? No. But the unconscious is often much more complex than we would like it to be and those ideas pushed out of the conscious mind will frequently show up there. So, while most of us are disgusted by the KKK members on Jerry Springer who talk about how inferior all those races are, we are perfectly content to break open some fantasy RPG and read paragraphs and pages explaining how the northern halflings are fine folk, if a little slow, and the southern halfling are artistically minded and much smarter than their cousins on the other side of those mountains. It’s just fantasy, after all.

I realize that the above has the potential of sounding like a condemnation of role-playing games as subconsciously racist propaganda. That is not my intention. I’ve never been a fan of the trend towards politicizing every last piece of popular culture, of trying to figure out what hidden meaning there is in the fact that the cartoon kid on the back of the Cheerios box is white while the kid on the back of Lucky Charms is black, or any of the other ridiculous details one can delve into if the inclination strikes. RPG’s are games and should be looked at as such. However, they are a very specific kind of game, on that directly involves the players on a level exceedingly more intimate than Monopoly or Final Fantasy VIII. RPG’s are tools for creating worlds, worlds built entirely of our own minds. As such, they present an interesting method of insight into us.

Next week, part one of a series about names, identity, the Gaming Outpost, and even superheroes. Also, I’ll have a review of Schism from Memento Mori Theatricks.

I don’t know what I’m going to talk about. For a column, that could be something of a problem. Here I’ve decided to write roughly a thousands words a week and I’ve spent the last few minutes looking at the white heading on the blue background of my notebook’s screen: Symbolic Order. At least I know what I want to call this thing. And maybe that’s as good a place as any to start.

I chose the title for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, the words sound cool. There’s something neat about them, some hint of hidden meaning, of playing with concepts, and everything else that makes the postmodern side of me say, “oohhhh.” Second, it’s a wonderful concept. The symbolic order. If you’re not up on your Jacques Lacan, look it up; you’re in for some cool–if demanding–reading. It’s the trinity of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. When taken as a whole, these three become reality. Or, at least, reality as we, being linguistically bound beings, are capable of experiencing it. To oversimplify, the Imaginary is images, the Symbolic is language, and the Real is That Which Cannot Be Said, lending it some odd sort of Cthulhu-esque significance.

But what does any of this have to do with gaming?

Lots.

I’ve been into role-playing games since fifth grade. As an eleven year old, I would sit with my friend on this strange little rusty metal box in the back corner of the playground at recess. We’d have the contents of the red D&D basic box spread out in front of us, complete with the cheap dice you had to color in with a crayon. He was always the DM and our adventures primarily consisted of me playing a thief (a preference that persists to this day) wandering through dungeons my friend was insistent I map out at every step of the way. I wasn’t for mapping then, I’m still not today, but he was very firm in this. I went along so as not to jeopardize any wealth–or pretty barmaids–my character might accumulate.

I like to think that I’ve grown as a role-player in the eleven years following those lunchtime games. I’ve certainly acquired a large enough collection and spent enough money to lay some claim to forward momentum. During that time, I’ve developed a real love for this hobby and have begun to explore it from a non-fan (to coin a probably inappropriate term) standpoint. I’ve started to dig into role-playing as something more than a fun way to hang out with friends. To study it, I guess, in much the same way movies and literature are studied. And that’s where the symbolic order comes in.

I firmly believe reality is language. The world is text. However, it can be a difficult thing to explain to people or to get them to even consider as a possibility. After all, it’s a frightening concept. I was at a philosophy discussion two weeks ago and the moderator had chosen the topic: certainty and doubt. We were arguing about the definition of belief (for the purposes of somehow equating certainty with belief) and one woman threw up her hands and said, “This is all just semantics.” I nodded and told her that everything is semantics. She brushed me off, shook her head, said, “I don’t believe that.” Which was an interesting response in light of the topic at hand. But the point is, she didn’t (couldn’t?) believe that reality is language. Perhaps if only given a model…

Role-playing games. They are reality as language and language as reality. Characters are symbols on paper. Worlds are descriptions from the mouths of game masters. Everything is spoken or written. There is nothing to see or touch or hear (disregarding handouts, miniatures, background music, and other such periphery add-ons). Role-playing is a perfect demonstration of the symbolic order in action. The Imaginary and the Symbolic are the spoken words, the marks on the paper, the numbers on the dice. The Real is everything else, everything filled in by the players’ minds. Everything left unsaid. Reality, real outside-of-game reality, works the same way. But I won’t bother getting into that because I’d probably bore and/or alienate (most of) my audience.

So that’s why I’m calling this column “Symbolic Order.” Because it fits. Which begs an important question: What, exactly, is this column about? Well, to be honest, a bunch of things, gentle reader. First and foremost, it’ll delve into role-playing games at what I’ll refer to as “a deeper level.” RPG’s fascinate me and I plan to bang at them a bit with all these poststructuralist theories I’m so very fond of. I’ll do Derridian readings of Dungeons & Dragons. I’ll apply Lacan to the process of GMing. I’ll look at Freud in relation to Vampire: The Masquerade. In short, I’ll have fun and I’m hoping you will as well.

Also, this column will, on a non-regular basis, contain reviews of Products Worth Paying For. To be honest, this industry produces a lot of crap. But it also births a considerable wealth of high quality, interesting, and desirable publications. I’ll talk about those. I won’t talk about games that don’t fit that category because, well, it doesn’t seem worth the time. I’m a picky and demanding bastard, so you can be sure any products that show up in this column are at least of some very high percentile. I can’t guarantee that your tastes will run parallel to mine but I can say that I’ll do my best to seek out the gems hitting a store near you.

Lastly, Symbolic Order may go off in strange directions occasionally. (Being the editor means I can get away with that. Just kidding.) This being the Gaming Outpost, I shall do my best to stick to that topic. However, gaming is undeniably huge. Because it is, on a very base level, a simulation of reality, anything that fits under the umbrella of that term is valid in a column about gaming. I can’t give any more details than that at this moment but I do have one related-to-gaming-but-tangentially-so column written, so you should get a better idea of what I’m talking about soon.

Okay, so I’ve hit my thousand-word limit. I hope the above serves as a good introduction.

Next week: Race and Class and (maybe) some reviews.