Episode 10: Even More Trouble (or, What Snaps Your Disbelief Suspenders?)

This week, I’m getting in Trouble.

You see, this week, we’re going to talk about women. And whenever you talk about women, there’s Trouble a brewin’.

But before we get to the unfair sex (that’s Wilde’s term, not mine), let’s spend a moment or two talking about two very important things to remember when designing a game world: disbelief suspenders and gimmes.

Imagine yourself in a movie theater. Imagine yourself watching a movie about people who play roleplaying games. Imagine for a moment that the actors, playing Dungeons & Dragons (the only roleplaying game as far as Hollywood is concerned) are talking and one of them says:

“Gee, I almost ran out of Armor Class! I’m glad you made my Saving Throw!”

Every gamer in the audience suddenly jolts in his seat, almost as if he’s been struck. A few of them even cry out.

What just happened?

Everybody who knows anything about gaming just had their disbelief suspenders snapped.

I’m sure we all know about “suspension of disbelief”, so “disbelief suspenders” should be an easy one to figure out. Whenever someone in a film, book or television show says or does something that makes you suddenly realize that you know more than the actor playing the “expert” on TV, you suddenly feel a sharp pain against your chest because someone just reached out, grabbed hold of the suspenders that hold up your disbelief and let go.

Ouch!

It happens to my buddy Dave all the time. Dave’s a cop. Whenever he watches cop shows, he sees cops walk into dangerous situations with their guns drawn and he just flinches.

Last week, I talked about Trouble.

“Why the hell does he have his gun pointed at the ceiling?” he exclaims, holding his chest for the pain. “What’s he gonna do? Shoot the roof?”

Dave then goes on to explain that cops (here in LA, anyway) are trained to keep their guns at eye level at all times. They never raise the muzzle up. Ever. So, when he sees LA cops do that on TV, it just hurts. I got the same bug from Dave, so now whenever I see it, I feel the snap on my chest.

Now, my wife’s disbelief suspenders have got a lot of give. She loves horror films — good or bad. Much to my chagrin, we’re off to see STAB — no, it ain’t BATS, it’s STAB — for better or worse. Her disbelief suspenders are pretty loose. She’s got a great policy about stuff like this: “If a film asks me to accept one premise and they stay within the boundaries of that one premise, we’ll get along just fine.” Face/Off was a great example of that. If you could buy the tech they were using, everything else works. If you couldn’t buy it, then it doesn’t.

And when you do buy it, even when it should snap those suspenders until you get welts, that’s called a “gimme”. The surgery in Face/Off is a gimme. Light sabers are a gimme. Star Trek is so full of gimmes that… well, I just better stop right there.

To be plain, a gimme is when you (the author) say to your audience, “Look. I know this doesn’t work, but just pretend it does for a couple of hours.”

The problem is, everyone’s suspenders are different. Some people buy warp speed. Some people buy stargates. Some people buy a waifish blonde chick can kick the hell out of hellspawn demon vampires. Everybody’s different, and that means everybody’s suspenders are different.

And that means, you have to be very careful with your gimmes. Ask the audience to accept too many of them, and you lose ‘em. Asking them to accept even one is risky.

Don’t believe me?

Ask Lucas about metachlorians. And, no, I don’t care how they’re spelled. They snap my suspenders.

So. Disbelief suspenders and gimmes. Two very important things to consider when designing a game world.

Now let’s talk about one of the biggest gimmes in fantasy world design.

Women.

* * *

ORKWORLD

has just entered the iron age, but barely. That means it puts it right around 300 — 200 B.C. Now, consider the cultures right ‘round those times. Consider how they treated their women.

Women are property. Sometimes they’re even less than that.

Now, as a game designer developing my fantasy world, I have to consider how to treat Ork women in such a way that it doesn’t make people’s suspenders snap. How many gimmes can I get away with?

I mean, realistically, Ork women should hold the same kind of positions that women do in their contemporary cultures. The Vikings treat their women like property. The Celts do the same. The Romans don’t allow their women to vote because they’re not real people. Many of the Native American cultures lock their women away a few days a month because they’re “dirty”. And let’s not talk about how the Japanese and Chinese are treating their women. That kind of behavior borders on deplorable.

So. How do we treat women in ORKWORLD?

I’ll tell you how we do it: with a whole lot of gimmes.

Fortunately, gamers are very accepting of “woman gimmes”. It’s easy for gamers to accept dragons soaring through the sky — even though those five thousand pound dragons have absolutely no right being in the sky, no matter their wingspan. It’s easy for gamers to accept magic — even though the magic presented in RPGs has no right working with the metaphysics explained in those game books. It’s also easy for gamers to accept a culture that treats women and men as equals — even though such a culture has never existed in the history of mankind.

(Now I’ve done it. Somebody [notice I was gender inspecific] with an anthropology degree is going to write me up and say, “Hah! Wick doesn’t know what he’s talking about! He’s full of crap! There is a culture that doesn’t give a flying turd about gender and treats its men and women equally. Well, we’ll have to see. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t. But the fact of the matter is, if there’s such a culture, it’s the exception and not the norm. The exception proves the rule. Anyway, back to the column.)

(And if you think this was a rant, you should have seen the five paragraphs I wrote about how many people believe “B.C.” stands for “Before Christ” and “A.D.” stands for “After Death”. I deleted those paragraphs for your sake. You can thank me by sending the checks to Gaming Outpost. Make sure to spell my name right.)

The problem with all of this is (finally, he gets to the point) that my suspenders snap when I see a pseudo-culture that doesn’t deal with this problem. Whenever I see that Elves treat their women exactly the same as their men, my suspenders snap. That isn’t a real culture. In fact, that’s a lazy culture. That’s someone who didn’t want to deal with the problem, so they shunted it off. Ignored it. Pretended it wasn’t there.

Well, I’m not going to do that with ORKWORLD. I can’t do it. The reason? I spent too much time in Rokugan.

* * *

The Japanese word for “dilemma” contains two characters. One is “dangerous”. The other is “opportunity”.

Creating a pseudo-culture for a roleplaying game is filled with dilemmas. Women are the biggest one. Here’s how I’m going to handle women in Ork culture.

(Before we begin, all spellings for Ork words are phonetic for your convenience.)

First off, let’s talk a little about the structure of Ork culture. Ork culture is a matriarchy. The women are in charge. Why? Because only women can make babies. That’s magic. Real magic. The biggest magic. Making life.

By the way, Ork males haven’t figured out that they have anything to do with making babies. They think the goddess comes down into an Ork woman and gives her a baby. That little discovery — or, the Ork’s lack of discovery of it — has a great impact on their culture. Watch.

Each Ork family, called a “krath”, has only one Mother, called “Orkay”. The Orkay has a number of male warriors to protect her and the family. Some of those warriors are part of her… harem. Remember what Ork males haven’t figured out yet. That means there is no Ork word for “father”. Only mother.

The rest of the family works. They serve as farmers, copper and bronze smiths (most Orks haven’t figured out iron yet, something we’ll explore in a future episode), or carpenters.

So, an Ork tribe looks something like this:

1 Ork Mother

10-20 Ork Warriors

50-100 Ork Workers

Anywhere from ten to twenty Ork tribes make up a clan. We’ll talk about clan hierarchy later.

* * *

When an Ork is born, the baby is not recognized as male or female. It is simply “child”. The Ork word is “flug”. Ork childhood lasts three years. By that time, they’ve grown to five feet tall with wide shoulders and a full mouth of teeth. They’ve also shown signs of male or female genitalia. That means they’re ready for initiation.

The bard of the Clan chief shows up to each tribe with his painted up warriors. He gathers up the warriors of each tribe and they go from household to household, snatching up boys. The boys run to their mother, screaming in fear for the angry gods that have come to collect him. The mother clings to her child, screaming at the gods, begging them not to take her child.

But she’s in on the trick. She knows what’s up. She’s pretending. Why?

Because when you and I are children, the closest thing we come to God is our parents. Our parents feed us, protect us, hold us when the thunder comes.

When the gods come, not even mother can protect you.

The boys are gathered up and taken into a cave. The boys see, by torch light, horrible pictures drawn on the walls. Pictures of monsters and angry, hungry gods. The gods tell the boys to build a fire. Then, they tell the boys to sit in a circle around the fire and keep each other awake. If any of them falls asleep, they will all be killed. All they’re given to eat are mushrooms.

Yes, those kind of mushrooms.

And for three days, the boys sit around that fire, eating mushrooms, trying to stay awake.

For three days.

If they make it, they’re Orks.

If they don’t, they’re corpses.

Orks that succeed are then allowed to sleep. When they awaken, they are told secret stories that only male Orks know. They’re also told they are brothers. They’ve survived a horrible ordeal, and now nothing can drive them apart. Nothing.

The boys are then brought down into the lower levels of the cave. And that’s where they meet the newly initiated female…

* * *

Little girls undergo a slightly different initiation ceremony. Instead of going into the cave in groups, females are brought down one by one. They go to a deeper part of the cave (symbolic in it’s own way). There, they are surrounded by darkness and they eat the mushrooms as well. Then, they wait for the Goddess.

Ork mythology teaches that all Orks are born from the Goddess. During her initiation ceremony, the Goddess comes to her and tells her a secret. This secret she must never share with anyone else in the world. It is this secret that gives her the power to give birth.

Then, when she’s learned her secret, she meets with the boys who just became men. She meets them as the incarnation of the goddess.

“This is the mother you must protect,” the Ork Gods tell the newly made men. “Protect her well.”

Still disoriented from the experience (and high on the drugs), the Orks don’t see a woman, they see the Goddess. They have a profound experience that no other person in the world can even begin to understand.

And together, that little group goes out into the world to create their own tribe. They inherit workers from their respective families and build houses, farms and walls to protect the mother.

The mother chooses warriors to come to her bed and she makes babies. By the way, Ork males do not “share” the bed. The bed belongs to the mother.

And that’s the basis for Ork culture.

Of course, this kind of situation causes problems. But we’ll deal with those next week.

* * *

By the way, go see Fight Club.

Right. The. Hell. Now.

If you have already, go see it again. It’s very different viewing when you’ve seen it once before. Those of you who know the language I’m talking know what I mean.

Take care.

And go hug your mom.