Stupid PC Tricks: Religion

This has probably never happened in your game.

Forum D00d: There are no gods in the real world to correct worshipers on theological matters.  At least not ones that talk to their worshipers on a regular basis and can be reached for answers with a spell.  One of the best examples of how a god would act is in the Old Testament. Look at how jealous and wrathful Jehovah is, smiting people left and right for not worshiping him correctly or just because he feels like sometimes. There couldn't be various different factions of Lathander fighting, because he would smite all the ones that were wrong.

Another common shibboleth of gamers is this one: that there's One True Religion, everyone's in lockstep, there are no doctrinal differences, and God's in everyone's grille, all the time.

The answer above is certainly the answer many gamers give, when asked why there isn't an Orthodox Church of Rinanni and a Reformed Church of Rinanni and the Ride On Queen Rinanni Altanian Full Gospel Ministry of Love and Blowjobs.

And for those game settings where the Gods are in the ears of every priest, every day, to make sure they don't use bananas in the sacred feast instead of canonical mangoes, or that the vestments are made of linen not cotton, and that all matters of parish governance stem from parish councils instead of central bishoprics, fair enough.

Is your game setting one of those?  Mine isn't.  I've seen very few that were.  Seriously, how many of you have ever played a religiously-oriented character where the deity speaks in your ear, "You're doing it wrong" ...?  Even if you discount that real world religious adherents also claim that their god/s are real, and also claim divine revelation as the backing for their POVs, how many GMs actually smite players for alignment/faith dissension, and how many players put up with the ones who do?  Especially in the D&D of latter days, when clerics can get powers from frigging philosophical concepts (because, you know, we can't actually expect gamers to handle doctrine or dogma), I'm thinking there's enormous scope for the niggling differences to which schismatics cling.

I mean seriously: take the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church.  For the great majority of the history of the two faiths, they disagreed on just three things: who was in charge, whether priests could get laid, and whether parishioners could get divorced.  Countless wars between Shia and Sunni Islamists have spilled countless blood, the chief difference between which has to do with who Mohammed's successor was, 1400 years ago.  A number of Christian sects have the exact same doctrine and practices, but differ only over issues of church governance, and are otherwise at daggers drawn, because of course the Methodists and the Presbyterians always have hated one another, world without end, amen.

(Take a small town I lived in for a few years.  Want to talk about religious wars?  The three leading churches were all Roman Catholic.  The buildings were all within a couple hundred yards of one another.  What did they all hate one another over, and how could there possibly be three separate Catholic parishes clustered together, in a village of no more than four thousand people?  Well, one was the Polish church, and one was the French church, and one was the catchall church for all the other ethnic groups.  That was all she wrote.  And toss in that the village had an Episcopal church, a Congregational church, a Baptist church, and a Unitarian church ... each and every one within five minutes walk of one another.  Heck, four of those churches were at the same intersection.  Yikes.)

I can easily see a case for even heavy interventionist settings where the Gods don't worry about the small stuff ... any more than they smite clerics for each little niggling transgression.  They turn their attention to Fighting Chaos or Thou Shalt Not Lie! or Kill All The Set worshippers and leave their bodies to rot! ... and can't be assed to worry about whether or not the creed of faith includes "And on this we stake our immortal souls," or on the acceptable degree of iconography in local parishes, or whether you wear a yellow versus a pink sash on the high holy day, or whether that high holy day is celebrated on the 5th of Girithim or on the first Waterday of Girithim.

Stupid PC Tricks

 Just by way of random silliness for the week, rather than one of the serious posts I’m halfway through writing, I bring you ... STUPID PC TRICKS.

No, this isn’t a list of idiotic things I’ve seen characters do.  (The majority of these were perpetrated by just one player, and I may post that one day.)  It’s a list of idiotic gaming shibboleths that just keep rolling along, decade after decade, without a lick of sense behind them.

* 10' foot poles: Seriously?  Alright, I have an experiment for you.  Just for the sake of argument, folks, go grab a 10' length of PVC tubing from your local hardware store.  Try walking around with it for an hour.  Now try walking with it indoors.  Now get a group of a half-dozen people to do the same.  Now hope that someone has a video camera handy, because you'd score a hundred thousand YouTube hits in a day with that comedy gold.  Whether it was Gygax or Arneson who was the one to think up the notion that one could carry one of these things underground I have no idea, but you have to wonder if either of them had ever held a 10' long piece of hardwood in their lives, never mind in confined quarters.

THAT is a 10' pole.  Go ahead.  Strap it to your back in a dungeon.  I dare you.

* Speaking of dungeons ... dungeon mapping.  Yeah, right.  So ... who’s going hands-free in the dungeon and balancing a writing desk, inkwell and quill, scribbling and blotching on a piece of skittering parchment in indifferent lighting conditions, where you can't readily erase or correct your mistakes.  How long does it take to set that stuff down and get out your weapons in a tussle, and how likely is it that nothing disturbs the desk?  Speaking of likely, I’ve another exercise for you.  Go outside to the nearest intersection.  Now draw that intersection on paper.  Now go back inside and compare your drawing to (say) Google Maps.  You were only off the mark by 5 degrees, say?  That’s pretty good!  Want to guess how many five-degree errors it will take to make your dungeon map completely screwed up?  Not very many.

* Giant packloads.  Third experiment of the day: take a backpack.  Stuff it as full of books as it will fit.  Hoist that on your back.  Do some exercises, jog some, move around.  Pretty heavy and unwieldy, isn’t it?  That packload you’re toting is only 25 lbs, about.  Seriously.  I agree that the military trains with 50 lb loads, but while that’s feasible for thirty soldiers going into a battle with a few minutes to prepare -- and oh, by the way, how they're fighting is NOT leaping about and swinging swords -- it just is not feasible for a small party that gets ambushed and needs to react in *seconds*.  (Never mind that low-tech camping gear is a good deal heavier than similar stuff is today.  Nylon vs canvas, plastic vs hardwood, titanium vs iron, rayon vs hemp, synthetics vs wool, concentrate vs ...)

Tidbits: Three Tips

Challenged on a forum to come up with our top three tips to newbies and grognards alike, this was my response:

 

My first rule is common to both groups:  We should all be in this to have fun.  This isn't a job, it isn't a chore, it isn't a war, and no one should be forcing you to do it.  If you're not having fun, something is wrong, and you need to address that.  If worst comes to worst, a popular catchphrase is "No gaming is better than bad gaming."

For newbies:

2)  Try new styles out.  There are so many systems, styles, milieus and genres out there.  Don't fall into the common trap of thinking that the Only Way You Can Play The Game is exactly like your first group does it; that's like sitting down at a poker game and getting mad that the rules aren't exactly like blackjack.

3)  Be someone interested in learning the rules of the system you play.  A lot of players don't, and they not only place a lot of burden on the GM, but they slow down play for their fellow players in constantly having to be prodded and reminded of things.  As with any other field of human endeavor, you get out of something what you put into it.

For experienced players:

2) Be true to (and aware of) yourself.  Play the games you like, not the ones you don't because you've been browbeaten into it.  Recognize the styles and milieus you can handle, how frequently you can play, how long you like sessions to be, how much digression and socializing you want.  Not knowing your own limitations ends in trouble.

3)  This is a cooperative exercise; tabletop, for the most part, is a consensus-driven game.  A player who designs a character wildly at odds with the others, a player who wants to freelance all the time, a player who doesn’t want to get on board with the milieu or the setting, these are pains in the ass for all around them.  There are RPGs out there for rugged individualists who don’t want to act in lockstep with others: we call them MMORPGs and LARPs.

Dating Advice = Gaming Advice?

One of my guilty pleasures is following advice columns: Miss Manners, Ask Amy, the Love Letters column in the Boston Globe, Carolyn Hax, Dear Prudence, a fair number over the years.  (And half the fun are the ones with comment sections; the peanut gallery for Love Letters is especially raucous!)

One is a column by a chap named Harris O’Malley (doctornerdlove.com), whose particular specialty is dating/relationship advice as directed to geek/nerd subcultures.  He’s got a particularly pithy, jocular style, and advice I wish I’d had 40+ years ago, so as to have dodged some bad decisions and notions.  An example is one of his standards: to wit, it’s not that Nice Guys Finish Last, or that women really get off on Bad Boys treating them poorly.  It’s that while the Nice Guys are moping in silence, hoping against hope that their virtue will be rewarded -- without them ever sticking a toe in the water -- the Bad Boys aren’t hesitating to actually ask the women out.  Using their words.  Unambiguously.  Go figure.

You may be asking yourself, by now, what the merry hell this has to do with tabletop gaming?

Simple.  Just read on, and I’ll run some bulletpoints of the good Doctor’s standard lines:

1) Stop Taking Advice From People Who Hate The Folks You Want to Date: Something O’Malley riffs on a fair bit is the incel crowd, especially on places like Reddit.  To quote: “The appeal ... isn’t advice so much as catharsis. It’s about having people tell you what you want to hear while also yelling at the folks who stubbornly insist on dating people who aren’t you. So much of the advice is a tell, revealing their own fears, angers and insecurities.”

And doesn’t this apply to gaming forums, in spades?  Posters are screaming constantly, inflating minor misunderstandings to cause celebres, debates to rage wars, and disputes to “Gaming is ruined forever!!!”  Every issue needs to be war to the knife.  A game system that doesn’t reflect your every prejudice and preference is worthless and needs to be discarded.  Paizo putting a couple LGBT NPCs in with a hundred straight NPCs means that they’re taking over!!  How dare WotC make racial alignment optional??? 

It's not actually "discussion." It's baying at the moon.  No one needs to fall into their rabbit holes.  Beyond that, the Internet being the Internet, controversy drives page views.  Start a thread titled "I Like D&D" on a popular forum, and it'll get a dozen laconic responses and peter out in three days.  Start one called "Only Losers and Scum Like D&D," and that'll be a hundred posts deep in four hours flat, rage on for weeks, and provoke permabans.

2) Know What You Want (And Own It): To quote O’Malley, “A smaller pool that consists entirely of folks who want what you want is far better than a huge pool of people who don’t. The former means that you’re dating people who crave the things you have to offer. The latter is a series of bad first dates and frustration for everybody.”

This is likewise one of my common riffs, if applied to gaming; I’m a staunch partisan of the premise that no gaming is better than bad gaming.  I’ll compromise on the things that don’t much matter to me, one way or another, but not on the things that really do.  At my age, I’ve had my fill of settling. 

Does that mean I have a smaller pool of potential players?  Yes.  Yes it does.  But it also means I have far fewer false starts, people who don't click with my style, people whose style I don't want at my table.  Especially with gaming going online, though, that pool is FAR larger than it ever was before.  One of my current players lives in Croatia; one lives in Germany.  I've never met them in the flesh and likely never will.

3) Embrace Honesty and Clarity: “We all have a tendency to assume that we’re all reading from the same handbook and playing by the same set of rules. It’s all too easy to think that our understanding of the rules and definitions of terms are not only the correct ones, but that they’re universal ... If you want dating to suck less, then you need to focus on clarity and mutual understanding. In fact, you may need to do so to the point of bluntness and beating someone about the head and shoulders with a clue-by-four. In practice, this means saying what you actually mean in a clear and understandable manner, rather than talking around it or using colorful but confusing or misleading language. If you’re saying “yes” to something but what you say doesn’t actually include the words “yes”, “I agree”, “let’s do that” or something equally clear, you’re going to run the risk of being misunderstood ... Somebody who dodges direct questions or won’t give you a straight answer has a vested reason to prefer confusion to clarity, and it’s never in your benefit.”

A long bit of quoting there, but once again, remove dating from that, substitute gaming, and this remains very sound advice.  Beyond that, a common feedback O’Malley gets from people asking for his advice is that if they are clear about their wants, needs and dislikes, they’ll scare people off.  To which O’Malley’s common response is: good!  Because, he feels, someone who just isn’t into the things you are is self-selecting out of your dating pool.  Do you want to date a heavy drinker if you’re a teetotaler?  Do you want to date someone who desperately wants children if you desperately don’t?  Do you want to date a rabid red-stater if you’re a rabid blue-stater, or vice versa?  Not unless you’re planning to waste that person’s time and yours for something that won’t end well.

And the same thing applies to gaming.  If you just can’t handle hack-and-slash, be honest about it.  If you absolutely have to play D&D 5th or bust, be honest about it.  If the thought of gaming over Discord leaves you cold, don't agree to it.  If you hate the thought of being in the same gaming group with That Guy, don't sign off on it.  Don’t be afraid to advocate for your must-haves/can’t handles.  Don’t be afraid to walk if you don’t get an answer you can hack.  There's always another table.  There are always people looking for games/GMs on Reddit or Discord.  There's your local FLGS, your local gaming convention, your local college gaming club.

4) Take People As They Are (Instead of Getting Mad For Who They Aren’t): “Part of dating means accepting people as they actually are, rather than trying to mold them to your expectations. It doesn’t matter how universal you think your expectations are, nor how much better things would be for them if they would act just the way you want them to.  Letting your expectations overrule their reality is a recipe for conflict and heartbreak ... Demanding that they stop being who they are for you is a bad idea and – spoiler alert – it never works anyway ... You don’t get to force them to change. And if you can’t accept it or respect it… well, hey you know where the door is.”

And this is the corollary to #3.  Something to which O'Malley alludes is the danger of assumptions: that what you're used to is the only way to go, that the mores and practices of your social group are universal standards.  This is far more prevalent in gaming circles: so many of us play in small, insular groups, taught by our friends, with a hazy grasp of the printed rules, going by the houserules and customs of the band.  At my table, PvP is a mortal sin; at many others, backstabbing is standard operating procedure.  Romance is a common element of gameplay at my table; at many others, well, I've posted about that one.  I get very frosted if a player gets it into his head that I'm the enemy; at a number of tables, the players who don't recognize that the GM is out to get them are fools.

Something that often crops up on gaming forums are people who are just plain mad at those chowderheads who Just Won’t Game The Way I Want.  They won’t read the rules, or they won’t give me face time, or they won’t try the Great New Game I Just Bought, or they just won’t play the way I want them to play, on and on and on.

And one just gets the idea that they’re just waiting for a bunch of strangers on the Internet to agree with them, so they can whirl in righteous vindication at their gaming group, and cry out “SEE?!?”

Spoiler alert: it never works anyway.

Tidbits: Game Of Thrones

And in another one of my rants from the forums ...

(ForumDood: Of course, the TV version decided to at least double the apparent size of it, AND make it scalable by random men with no particular training or experience scaling sheer ice walls of ridiculous height (LOL). Of course, the TV show also likes to show impossible castle/tower/city heights of crazy exaggerated height. "The throne room is a day's climb up...")

Well, but think about it.  If you follow Game Of Thrones, you just have to take suspension of disbelief and kick it into the holler.  Railroad very obviously didn't give a damn about logistics, distances, common sense or a lot of things.  

Gives a damn about the T-shirt sales, though, I bet!

They march gigantic armies across continental distances without giving the slightest thought to how long that actually takes or the logistics train one needs.  They have twenty guys actually capture and HOLD Winterfell, even when that force could be rolled by local peasants with hunting bows and grain flails and Northerners aren't described as being cowardly bunnies.  Why the North needs to conquer King's Landing (thousands of miles from their center of supply) is never adequately explained, when they just need to hold the Neck.  There's not enough game in all that ice and snow to feed Mance Rayder's army, not by a factor of 50.  100 grain wagons a day to alleviate the hunger in King's Landing?  Never mind the distance from Dorne to KL (which makes the notion absurd on the face), a city that size polishes off five hundred tons of food per day.  (And a little slip of a 10-year-old who's just had her ribcage caved in takes out an undead giant?  The Mother of All Critical Hits, to be sure.)

And OMG, the Wall.  I would cheerfully undertake to defend the Wall with 200 guys against the massed armies of all the world.  They can starve below while we drink tea and play pinochle, because that's a formidable technical climb for expert mountaineers (and where in the merry hell did the wildlings get that expertise AND the steel crampons?), and with the level of exhaustion that would involve, one ten-year-old with a good head for heights and a baseball bat could deal with everyone who made it in a quarter-mile's worth of wall.

Tidbits III: Convert-sations

This may just be me, but I've never considered converting supplements to the system I use from a system I don’t the horrible, barely-possible chore a lot of gamers think it needs to be.

I'm not a RPG rookie, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to pick up a game, thumb through the rules, and figure out quickly enough what means what.  "Might 80" means you're a strong dude, "6th Circle" means you can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan, "Evocation of Violet Tumescence" appears to be the system's list of temporal spells, and "21 XYW" means you're an outstanding fireballing pitcher with control issues ...

(Oh, wait, I just lapsed into APBA baseball speak.  Anyway ...)

Converting this isn't tough.  I know, in GURPS, what a strong dude looks like: he's got ST of 13-15.  I know what someone who can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan looks like; we're talking maybe 350-400 pts.  I know how to make up a wizard with a good command of temporal spells; that'd be a dozen Gate spells, say.

(Alright, I might need to take some time to replicate a 21 XYW pitcher.  Hrm.  The guy led the league in ERA that season by a giant whopping margin, as well as strikeouts/inning, but he also led the league in wild pitches by nearly twice as many as the 2nd worst.  In short, you're screwed if he hits you with a thrown missile, but he's not the most accurate guy in the world.)

I refuse, and always have refused, to worry about whether I get the equivalencies "exactly" right.  The guy who wrote the original supplement isn't running the adventure, I am.  If the original NPC could beat down three starting characters in that system 75% of the time (not that anyone's particularly run the numbers), and the eventual NPC in my system could do it 50% of the time, who's to know, and who's to care?

What would be my favorite setting?

One that feels genuine.  I got tired decades ago of the JRRT-standard Shining City In A Sea Of Empty that seemed so beloved of setting designers: you just cannot have glittering civilizations that give way to hostile wilderlands and howling orc hordes a bow shot from the capital's walls.  I don't want a terrifying war fleet without the maritime infrastructure to support it, or jackbooted legions without the secure farmlands to feed them, or hundred thousand person cities in the middle of a desert with no particular sources of food, water or trade.  I don’t need Good! Vs! Evil! to be the motivating factor behind every international, intraurban or internecine dispute; good old human motivations will do nicely.                   

One that isn't set up as a Potemkin front for the care and feeding of PCs. If there are five wizards in town, they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the PCs to put in enchantment orders.  I'm happy to see one working for the Baroness, one working for the town's richest merchant, one playing communications relay for the national military, and one being a drunkard no one with alternatives trusts any more.  (The fifth one can fit them into her schedule, sure, if they pay her enough to bump the waiting list down a bit.  They're cool with her being an earth specialist whose work is mostly in creating and shaping stone, right?)  If it's a 500-person town, there isn't unlimited gold available to buy the party's loot, and the townsfolk are only interested in buying things they can actually use.  Why would the local knight want to empty his treasury to buy that magic sword?  He's got a perfectly good one already, and he's got bills to pay, retainers to feed and the annual taxes to cough up.

One that isn't set up as a Potemkin front to oppose the PCs:  The party was trying to break into this three-story building that housed a jeweler.  Not someone who stashed the Crown Jewels, not a great enchanter, just a small-town jeweler.  And there were no windows or chimneys in the building.  No magics for light or air circulation.  No explanation as to where the smoke from lamps went.  No windows-but-heavily-barred.  No rhyme or reason, no sense to it.  No rationale beyond "haha, this building is designed to thwart PCs and force them to do a frontal assault during business hours."  (You may safely conclude that I was done with the campaign after that session.)

One with detail work in the right places.  I don't need the full gamut of combat stats and skills for the twenty lead figures in the royal court -- what are the party's chances of dueling the palace chamberlain, unless she’s really the Big Bad?  I don’t need a trap on every chest and every cabinet in every room of the palace -- good grief, the chambermaids and scullions will all be wiped out by Saturday -- and I don’t need detailed maps of the dwellings of the blacksmith and the chandler and the apothecary.  Put that work into the NPCs (and the items) with whom the party interacts at that level.

One where “it’s magic” isn’t the blanket excuse for everything. You won’t let me snuff the Big Bad or whack out her minions with no more effort than a snap of my fingers just because I say “I’m the hero,” would you?
 

Tidbits II: We Were Gamers Once, And Young ...

Spring 1979: While I’d been GMing solo sessions with my younger brother Mike since the previous year, my first actual campaign started later.  I didn’t start keeping my famously insanely detailed records until March of 1981.  But the timeline involved my high school classmate Laurey starting school at UMass-Amherst at the end of January 1979, and shortly thereafter I visited her out there, and we and our fellow high school classmate Marilyn got into a startup Empire of the Petal Throne game GMed by the guy across the hall from Laurey.  So ... I’m thinking this couldn’t be earlier than May 1979, the point where Laurey and Marilyn would be back home in Plymouth County for the summer.

I'd picked up City State of the Invincible Overlord and the Judges Guild core Wilderlands package; that's what I used to start.  Right from the beginning, though, I wasn't satisfied with the dungeon fantasy flavor of Random Stuff Randomly Strewn, or with the Wilderlands/JRRT standard of oases of high civilization in the middle of howling wildernesses, with orc hordes in bowshot of every town's walls.  The pen went flying fast.  (I still use the Wilderland maps as the underlying basis for my world, even heavily edited, but only out of decades of inertia; I'd create my own if starting from scratch.)

The dramatis personae, in no particular order.

My first players were high school classmates of mine: Laurey, Mal and Jackie were in my graduating class, Rick was in the next one, and we'd all been in the chorus together.  My younger brother Mike (an avid sword-and-planet reader who was a class behind Rick) made the fifth player.  Mike played Korak, a barbarian firmly in the Conan mode and with a Conanesque future; Rick played Valthor, a more Norse-style barbarian; Jackie played Alexandra the priestess; Laurey played Seka the courtesan-mage; and Marilyn played Linden the stick jock.  Classic Howard/Leiber style early RPG play, really, that was 70s gaming for you. (This also set a significant pattern for my whole gaming career; note that this was a majority-female group.  Save for a single semester at my first college's gaming club's sessions, I would never not have at least one woman at my table.  That was decidedly NOT 70s gaming standard, and it was a while before I realized that this was not merely unusual but highly so.)

I wish I remembered what the first adventure was.  (Likely it was pedestrian enough by my present-day standards that I'd cringe in retrospect.)  I do remember that I set the table with the weary party, walking on a dust-clouded road, heading for the great gate of one of the mightiest cities ever founded ...  I ran a couple of the JG published scenarios early on -- Dark Tower, Thieves of Badabaskor -- as well as a homebrew dungeon or two, and the CSO remained the home base of the party for a couple of years.

Early on, though, I got geopolitical, but that's a tale for another time ...

* * * * * * * * * *

The crew shook out fairly fast.  Mike, Rick and Laurey were in my campaigns for years, but Jackie was my first encounter with the Gamer Girlfriend stereotype; she played pretty much because the rest of us were, and she dropped the hobby like a hot potato when she and Rick split up soon after.  Marilyn was the root cause for my abandonment of random gen and journey to variant homebrew; she hated playing anything but wizards, went along only grudgingly with the STR 18 DEX 16 fighter-type she rolled up (unfortunately, I hadn't yet wrapped my head around RAW being a suggestion, not a mandate, and I cajoled her unwillingly into it), and ditched her for greener pastures soon enough.  She was only an intermittent player thereafter.  

That being said, our gang was heavily dominated by graduates from Silver Lake.  Of my first fifteen players only four weren’t high school classmates of mine: the aforementioned EPT GM and another UMass player of his (both of whom lived in the Boston area), and Rick’s martial arts teacher and his wife.  We wound up playing a lot of our games in the teacher’s home through to the end of 1981.

By 1982, Laurey and I fell out over my dating my future first wife, and Rick went career Navy  around the same time.  Mike was an occasional player for years to come, and was a regular as late as 1987; his final curtain call was in 1989, at a massive run that involved seventeen past and then-present players, and I needed two assistant GMs just to handle it.

It's odd how this underscores the longevity of my current group.  My wife and another player, Todd, have been gaming with me since 2003, and they're the youngsters of the bunch.  Andrew's been gaming with me with some breaks since 1990.  Dave's been gaming with me (with likewise some breaks) since 1987.

 But that, too, is a tale for another time ...

OMG! the SJWs! -- an immodest rant

"To find a scapegoat is to be spared, for the moment, any necessity for further examination of the facts or further thought."  -- Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday (1940)

We now interrupt your usual gaming blog for a rant.

I used to be active on a lively RPG forum; made a couple thousand posts, over several years.  It had light moderation – unlike the extremely and capriciously heavy-handed RPG.net, the leading one by volume – but a relatively sensible base of participants.  Unfortunately, it ceased to be sensible, and when it went off the deep end, I just got too disgusted to continue.

I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of the acronym, but SJWs – so-called “Social Justice Warriors” – occupy the imaginations of a great many Reddit and Twitter warriors, redhatters and MAGA-heads the Internet over, and their putative depredations are seized upon in obsessive frenzies as presaging (if not actively bringing about) the downfall of civilization.

Now yes: there are excesses.  Always have been.  Always will be.  However liberal I am, I am a white, male, Irish Bostonian raised Catholic in the 1960s.  The city in which I lived for the first ten years of my life was so vanilla that I was all of five years old before I saw my first black person.  I had no idea what a “queer” was, except that it was something Very Bad, and only exceeded on the scale of Badness by a “Commie queer.”  (Whatever that was.)  It is impossible for the canalization of the culture in which I was raised to have had no effect on me, deep down.

So I am faintly irritated by gender-neutral pronouns.  I think “defunding” the police would prove disastrous (not the least which that it gives the red-hatters a dandy political club).  The degree you could call me “woke” has its limits, and furthermore I don’t feel the need to apologize for being in the demographic I’m in any more than anyone else ought to feel like a second-class citizen for theirs.  I'm not enthusiastic about verbal "safe spaces," and I think "trigger warnings" are arrant nonsense.  I don't believe in Original Sin, even when committed by people of my gender or skin color.

But when I see a topic from the site owner titled “SJWs Declare All Fantasy Settings Bigoted,” my blood starts to boil, and however non-woke the statement “For Chrissake grow a pair!” is, that’s the one in my thoughts.  I’m not going to recap that sordid topic, but what set the idjit off was a tweet from no one in particular stating “Stop making fantasy settings consisting of clearly defined borders between ethnostates.”

Fair enough.  That’s an opinion, anyway.  I’ve certainly given mine on dozens of topics in this blog, and often strongly worded.  And if some cementhead went off and claimed that I’ve “Declared All Fantasy Settings” pretty much anything, in consequence, I’d think he was a lunatic.  Had I wanted to debate the subject -- which had gotten far, far out of hand by the time I read it -- I might have pointed out that the great majority of fantasy settings, in point of fact, do not abound with ethnic states, and that I haven't seen many maps with hard and fast internationally recognized borders.  I might have pointed out that the tweeter's further explanation opined that hard-and-fast national borders are an artifact of post-Napoleonic Europe (and how about we ask a Ukrainian or the citizen of any nation abutting China how sacred THOSE are, these days?), and that she made no actual assertions about bigotry.

Too late for common sense, in any event.  The day I saw that topic was the last day I was active on that site.  Unfortunately, this kind of Chicken Littleing is all too common in the blogosphere, however much it’s common for a red-hatter to shriek "OMG there's a SJW out there who said something I don't like, they must be stopped, America's freedoms are at threat, ahhhh!!!!"

About the worst example I can recall, though, ugh.  Several years ago, see, Paizo (the company that puts out the Pathfinder products, for those few unaware) decided they’d be a leetle bit more inclusive.  So in two of the books, among the quite literally hundreds of gamebooks they put out, they tossed in a couple of explicitly gay NPCs.  No Depraved Villain, no caricature, no La Cage Aux Folles over-the-top description, just folks.

And the Internet went BERSERK.

Dozens of forums.  Hundreds of topics.  Tens of thousands of posts.  All in a hurricane of angst over how the SJWs were pushing the GAY AGENDA!  And it meant that the gays were TAKING OVER!!!  And it just left me bewildered.  Excuse me?  How many gaming products have there been in the nearly half-century of the hobby?  How many explicitly hetero NPCs?  A hundred thousand?  A million?  Heaven knows; I surely don’t.

But I know this much: claiming that increasing the ratio of explicitly non-hetero NPCs in gamebooks to one-thousandth of one percent constitutes pushing ANYthing?  That isn’t merely lunacy.  That’s tin-foil-hat-to-thwart-the-Jewish-orbital-mind-control-lasers lunacy.

(And what is, dare I ask, the “gay agenda?”  Beyond “hey, we exist, and golly, wouldn’t it be swell if in our escapism every rare once in a while we ran into people who looked and acted like us, because 100% horny hetero male teenager Frazettaland is kinda boring?”)

Anyway, deconstructing the fury of people when concepts they don’t like seep into their echo chambers has been done hundreds of times over by people smarter and more eloquent than I am: no need to batter you over the head with my fumblings.  

But I’ll say this much: don’t want LGBT NPCs in your gaming?  Don’t have them.  Want to have national borders based on race?  Meh, whatever.  Want your gameworld to resemble Frank Frazetta, circa 1975, where manly men rule the roost and the only characteristic of a Gurrrrl to which any he-man need pay attention is her cup size?  Keep that garbage the hell out of my own gaming, but whatever, suit yourself.  

See, for some odd reason, even if someone around his or her own gaming table uses elements or settings which I wouldn’t use myself or which conflict with my own views or beliefs, it doesn’t concern me.  Nor does it affect me.  Nor does it frighten me.  Gaming will not be doomed, the black helicopters won’t land in front of my home, and Big Brother isn’t staring out of my monitor at me.

And in like fashion, they're not coming for the cementheads either.  Something I will never, ever understand in my gut is what the reactionaries are so afraid of -- so much so that it's not merely that they don't want LGBT NPCs in their games, that they don't want female NPCs to be anything other than one-dimensional eye candy in subordinate roles, that they don't want race relations to be anything beyond the lawfulgood guys being able to kick the chaoticevil swarthy guys around: it's that it's intolerable to them that anyone else play differently, themselves.

Granted, so-called "Badwrongfun" is endemic in this hobby, but damn.  Why do the reactionaries need a scapegoat THIS badly?

Story vs Setting!

Something one runs into a fair bit in Internet discussions is using fictional works in compare-and-contrasts with gaming settings and setting design.  A hallmark of such discussions is a bizarre tendency of people to try to justify this element or that.  The twists and turns folks would make to concoct rationales to explain (for instance) the utterly implausible astrophysics of Joss Whedon’s Firefly setting were a wonder to behold.  For some odd reason, few of them listened to Whedon’s own explanation – “Science makes my head hurt.”

A very simple principle is at work: the goal of an author isn't to provide a RPG scenario, it's to tell a good story.
 

"So how do we load those 80 ton rocks again?"

We can all agree, I believe, that Lord of the Rings comes up more often than any other fictional work in terms of compare-and-contrast.  This always amuses me, because there's no frigging way in Hell any tabletop group would follow that script:

* Let me get this straight: you're putting together a party of nine questers upon which the fate of the world rests.  So you pick the best wizard available, check, and the best outdoorsman alive, check, and three other pretty dern good warriors, check.  And then you saddle them with four 1st level types with no skills to speak of save for eating and smoking, each of whom is as big as your average seven year old?  FAIL.

* And, being stuck with the useless little worms, you're tolerating them being in battlelines?  FAIL.

* What do you mean, you're worried about one of the high level types getting uppity and seizing the Ring if the hobbits aren't along?  (Quite leaving it unsaid that the easiest way to seize the Ring is to disembowel the Ringwearer, from behind preferably.)  And in general, we don’t want the Ringbearer – or anyone else – putting the damn thing on?  Ever?  Great.  Got some smiths there, Elrond?  Awesome.  Seal the Ring into a 2" cube of iron.  Can't be worn, can't be seen directly, less corrupting, can toss the sucker into the Sammath Naur all the same.  It's not that it'd weigh any more than Sam's collection of cook pots.  (A shade over two pounds, actually.)

* By the way, if you're going to be sneaky and create a diversion, do it from the damn start.  You never have Aragorn with the party to begin with.  You send him straight to Gondor, wearing an ersatz One Ring on his finger, and claiming to be the new Ringlord.  What, it isn't as if Sauron wasn't going to plaster Minas Tirith anyway.

* Of course, it might not get that far, because if Sauron's not a complete idiot, he doesn't have the Nazgul riding around hissing "Bagginssss ... ?" at local farmers.  He has them ramrodding every orc in the Misty Mountains to turn the Shire into a smoking desert to find that sucker, because he knows it's his point-failure source, and that's the War of the Ring right there.  (Yeah, yeah, I know.  Sauron is arrogant and all of that.  But he's not a complete idiot -- look at him using cat's paws like Angmar and misdirection like "The Necromancer."  He knows it's possible for him to lose, big.  His boss did.  HE did.  Twice, even.  Airy complacency makes no sense.)

* But if you don’t, and you follow the script somewhat, well.  At some point, the survivors of your party have two options:

    (1) “Okay, guys.  The McGuffin that the fate of the world hinges on is across the river there, with two pretty unskilled hobbits.  They’re still in line of sight of us, and we’ve got a couple boats left.  Those are the guys we need to shepherd and save. And hey, there's no opposition to fight through over there.  Let’s go.”

    (2) “Okay, guys.  There are two more hobbits out there, in the hands of a freaking company of pretty tough orcs.  Other than we’ve been traveling together for a while, we have to concede they’re not remotely important in the grand scheme of things.  And the orcs have a considerable head start on us.  (Y'know, the orcs that outnumber us about thirty to one, and whom we'd have to wax to get the hobbits back.)  But let’s go anyway.”

    You know, and I know, that not one party in twenty would go for #2.

And so on.  But JRRT wasn't concerned with the same things tabletop GMs are.  He didn't give a damn about niche protection.  He didn't give a damn that he had demi-gods and newbies in the same group.  He didn't give a damn about giving his PCs equal face time.  His bad guys and NPCs were there to further the plot, not to act logically, in their own best interests, or naturally.  His good guys didn't have a third-person omniscient perspective.  Everyone interacted with one another, spoke to one another, as he saw fit.  As a world designer, Tolkien was a derned good philologist.

The same can be said of most fictional works.  (Well, perhaps not the philology part.)  David Eddings’ Belgariad?  His parties faff around all the time, often ignoring or flouting any previous character development or their professed strategies of the previous chapter/scene, just so Eddings can get in some snappy one-liners.  Baroness Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel to a close parallel of Silver Age supers, where the good guys won with deuced good British pluck, planning and luck, and almost no one ever seriously considered slitting the bad guys' throats.  (Having read all thirteen SP books, I'm struck by the fact that Orczy played out the events that bequeathed the word "terrorist" to our language, punctuated by years of violent convulsion and warfare, without depicting a single on-screen violent death.)  Marion Zimmer Bradley only late in her career bothered much with consistency -- and only then under the heavy pressure of her vocal fanbase -- having written in a prior afterword that she was far more interested in the immediate narrative needs of her plot than in agonizing over a ride from Arilinn to Hali requiring four hours in one book and four days in another.  Examining all the ways the Potterverse makes little sense is a field of literary exegesis all its own, and the rebuttal that JK Rowling was more interested in writing entertaining children's books than in creating a milieu which would survive being picked apart of hundreds of thousands of nitpicking adults tends to fall on deaf fanfic ears.

But still, people try.  You can explain until you’re blue in the face that the approximate weight of those massive stone blocks those trebuchets were launching in Return of the King would be over ten times heavier than the heaviest projectiles ever fired out of the largest 20th century artillery ever built ... and about five hundred times heavier than the heaviest projectiles fired out of the largest trebuchets ever built on Earth.  “Peter Jackson just wanted a cool visual” doesn’t seem to penetrate.

X-Cards

 “I’d like your help. Your help to make this game fun for everyone. If anything makes anyone uncomfortable in any way… just lift this card up, or simply tap it. You don’t have to explain why. It doesn't matter why. When we lift or tap this card, we simply edit out anything X-Carded. And if there is ever an issue, anyone can call for a break and we can talk privately. I know it sounds funny but it will help us play amazing games together and usually I’m the one who uses the X-card to help take care of myself. Please help make this game fun for everyone. Thank you!"

The X-Card has been a thing in the hobby for a number of years now.  Coming into vogue during convention runs, where a bunch of strangers get together for a Session Zero-less game under time constraints, it’s also a very controversial subject.  It works pretty much as described above: flash the card, the group is compelled to change an element, change the subject, fade to black, whatever.  I’m among the ones who don’t care for the concept.

I have always had an unusual number of female players, about a third of my player base over the years.  To my certain knowledge, a third of them were sexually assaulted/molested.  So I avoid rape tropes, beyond the abstract. A close friend of my wife's hanged himself on the main bridge in her hometown, so I avoid dwelling on hanging people.

But this is a hobby that involves a whopping lot of depictions of violence.  There's racism, and the whole spectrum of man's inhumanity to man.  A player who really does have "triggers" so deep that he or she's likely to freak out at their mere depiction around a gaming table has a responsibility to talk it over with the GM in advance.  Similarly, such players ought not be indulging in convention runs or one-shots, or if so need to pick out genres less likely to prove burdensome.  A Toon, an original Star Trek game, Golden Age supers, 1930s pulp, those are genres less likely to run into some of those problems.  

(While coming into others: Thirties pulp, run straight, isn't for those seeking to avoid casual and pervasive racism.  Or other elements: the times I've played Thirties pulp, some of the other players were baffled by my playing a chain smoker -- I'm very down on cigarettes as a filthy habit.  But, said I, look at movies set in the era.  Take the bar scenes in Casablanca -- two-thirds of the people on screen are holding cigarettes.)

Further, my wife’s take: she’s a special needs teacher who deals routinely with traumatized children.  (And we’re not talking “Oooh, I get squicked out at the subject of violence” kids.  We’re talking about kids who’ve been sexually assaulted from infancy, or kids who get smacked around by their abusive parents.  THAT kind.  The ones for whom violence is felt considerably more close to home than the sanitized kill-em-and-take-their-stuff one finds around gaming tables.)

She doesn’t have any use for X-cards.  She echoes that it is the responsibility of players who feel their traumas are so deep they cannot abide their depiction around a gaming table to be selective in their gaming.  She also says that squicked out players can just take a walk or choose that time for a bathroom break, that it strikes her as a very easily abused mechanic, that people with such traumas shouldn’t be gaming with strangers, and should hold Session Zero discussions.

There've been times, in the adventures I present, where PCs have found the severed heads of NPCs of whom they were fond. There've been times when the cute 8 year old died horribly.  There've been times when everyone in the sympathetic village has died of disease.  Like any other dramatist, I know and use the power of pathos, where and as I feel appropriate.  I would never think to question anyone who needs a more G-rated campaign for their escapism.  Never.  But they do need to find a table other than mine.

And my final thoughts are these:

* First off, it’s lazy.  People using such a mechanic aren’t attempting to mitigate their issues.  They’re not seeking out sympathetic GMs, or sympathetic genres, or – heck – avoiding the hobby altogether.  They don’t have to use their words (and this in a hobby utterly, entirely dependent on words).  And they’re unlikely to be seeking the professional help they really do need if their traumas bubble that hotly on the surface.  I am neither a therapist nor a psychologist: I can be compassionate, but tabletop gaming is not remotely the venue for a support group.

* Secondly, it’s aggressively abusive, as a lot of the “safe space/trigger warning" theorizing is: it allows one person to dictate the content of discourse for many.  That one person’s desire (however flighty or mild) to avoid mention or exploration of a particular subject automatically, unilaterally and without question or recourse vetoes everyone else’s interest (however strong or compelling) in doing so.

* Never mind being aggressively abusive; the concept is ripe for malicious abuse.  I've been spending time in online gaming forums since the mid-80s on GEnie.  Before then, since 1980 in the APAs.  Before then, on plain hack sessions in university clubs.  I've been listening for almost the entire history of the hobby, and I doubt I could guess the number of horror stories I've heard about How This Jerk Ruined Our Game For No Good Reason to the nearest hundred. (Quite aside from that my personal experience, from tabletop to MMORPGs to LARPs, is that there are a lot of malicious powertrippers out there who just love ruining things for others, for the sheer love of smashing.)  And now people want to give those jerks the unilateral power to disrupt gameplay, without even the fig leaf of needing to explain themselves?  Ulp. 

* Fear and discomfort are part of many genres and play styles.  Horror doesn't exist without it.  The whole gamut of White Wolf games become mere kill-em-and-take-their-stuff without it.  These are environments their adherents seek out, willingly and gladly.  (And oh, by the bye, how many of you would be enthused about someone using an X-Card to wave off combat, on the grounds that it's messy and icky and violent?  No?  Well, now.  Why ever not?)

* Finally, I don’t entirely buy it.  I have a strong phobia: a near-paralytic fear of falling.  It's been high school since I've climbed a tree as much as a couple dozen feet.  I’m white knuckled just driving up a mountain, on a graded, paved autoroad.  The bravest thing I’ve ever done?  I’ve done rescues in howling winter storms.  I’ve been between warring parties in a drive-by shooting.  I’ve been in knife fights.  But the real bravest thing I ever did was during a college party on the roof.  One gal was drunk out of her mind and dancing on the parapet, five stories above Huntington Avenue.  I was the only sober one up there, and I went over to drag her off.  The last ten feet, I was on my hands and knees, because I couldn’t force myself to stand.  (Probably if I hadn’t had a huge crush on her, I might not have been able to do it at all.)

But I’m a grown-ass adult.  I can withstand a GM talking about us climbing a mountain.  I can roleplay a mariner clinging to a topmast.  I’m not actually there, and I don’t actually see it, and even though the mere subject has me breathing shallowly and quickly – remembering that terrified young guy pulling Di off the parapet, 41 years ago – I don’t need to shut down the screen and play solitaire instead.

And if I just couldn’t mitigate it, couldn’t control those images, felt them so strongly that a casual mention of heights had me shaking ... then I’d be in serious therapy right now, and likely avoiding such a potentially damaging hobby as RPGs.

Gaming With Kids

As is often the case, a forum discussion provoked this post.  This one involved people being creeped out by a GM of the original poster’s acquaintance including a couple 12-year-olds, neither being family members of his, in his campaign.

It’s not that society's "OMG but the CHILDREN!!!!!!" riff is getting surreal, it's that it hit surreal quite some time ago. Swear to God, I met a woman who bragged – bragged! – out loud to me that she had never yet failed in avoiding leaving her husband alone with their five-year-old daughter. Heaven knows how she failed to pick up on the shock and revulsion on my face that she would just assume her husband was a pedo-in-the-making, or if she had genuine evidence to believe he was, that she was still living with her children under a roof with him.

To me, the true creepiness and perversion is in the automatic presumption that the only reason a grown man could possibly have anything to do with a minor is for sexual purposes. If that's what any of you believe, I ask you to examine in yourselves why you're so obsessed with underage sexuality that this is the first thing you'd conclude, and to seek psychological help for your unhealthy obsession at once.  (This is my polite way of calling you an obsessed moonbat.)

Now alright – I know teenagers can be annoying, quite aside from the simple fear that having a teenager at your table would provoke the aforementioned obsessed moonbats into siccing the cops on you.

For my part, I’ve had teenagers at my table, and yes, well after college days, thanks. I'd take a player of any age who demonstrated to me a certain level of maturity, the ability to handle mature themes and a willingness to meet my regular schedule of pretty much all-day-Saturday on 2nd and 4th weeks. For the record, the most recent two players I bounced for immaturity were both in their 40s, and the oldest players in their groups at the time.

I have an anecdote. My college chorus allows alumni to sing in it, and I did, until moving back to western Massachusetts.  Six years ago, with an interim conductor, the situation was scrambled enough that I wound up as interim tenor section leader for the semester.  (I expect that they found the presence of a veteran greybeard who’d been with NUCS on and off since the 1970s comforting.) The vice-president invited all the other officers and section leaders to her place one night for a planning session and get-to-know-one-another evening, which wound up being silver-haired me – I was 49 at the time – and four young ladies. During the course of our chatting, the topic veered off onto dating, and one of the ladies mentioned her dismay at having a 30-something guy asking her out.

This was the point where I remarked, quietly, that my wife was 18 years younger than I am.

In the brief moment where all four gazed at me like shocked owls, one cleared her throat and asked, "What do you TALK about?" To which I answered that, well, you're all nearly thirty years younger than I am. What do we have in common, and what are we talking about?

Now leaving aside my cacklefest a couple years later when the original speaker, by then an alum herself and still with the chorus, admitted to me that she was dating a 35 year old guy – whom, happily, she married this past spring – I stand by my own statement. There is something deeply disturbing to me in the automatic presumptions that there is no way a grown man can be friends with a teenager without rubbing the front of his pants, that all grown men are might-be-perverted animals who can't be trusted, and that adults and children couldn't possibly have anything in common, any common ground or any reason to talk to one another civilly and socially.

And that includes sharing in this wonderful hobby.  Because, think about it: two of the original D&D players were children.  How old was Ernie Gygax at those first games ... 13? 14?  And Elise Gygax was his younger sister.  No one suggested, then or subsequently, that Gary Gygax was a sicko for that.

Honestly, some people need a reality check.

My Pet Hates

We all have system elements that drive us nuts, and some that just plain drive us away from the table.  By way of further informing my dear readers (as Miss Manners would phrase it) of my gaming philosophy, here are mine:

Absolute Dealbreakers (I won't touch a game or a campaign with these elements, ever)

Alignment. The single stupidest, most insidious and by far most mismanaged concept ever foisted onto RPGs. Screw you, Gygax.
   
PvP. For every person energized by backstabbing and screwing his fellow players (and somehow, these people are overwhelmingly the screwers as opposed to the screwees), there's a gaming group that's been broken up over it. This is the most unforgivable sin in my own campaigns, always has been, always will be.

Hack-and-slash. Look, if all I want are tactical situations, I'll play a wargame. Heck, I'll play a console game – the graphics are a lot better and I don't have to shave, wash or travel to play one. I'm a roleplayer, sorry.

Random chargen. Think Monopoly would ever have gotten off the ground if you got to roll 3d6 x $100 for starting cash? Is there any other type of game other than RPGs where players start out with wildly disparate levels of ability or resources?

High mortality rate. I get attached to my characters, and I want to develop them. If they're just cardboard cutouts with a life expectancy of three game sessions, what's the point? (See Hack-and-slash, above.)

Lack of credible realism. I like gritty, realistic games. If you don't know your shit, or it's not reflected in your game, you really don't want me as a player. Trust me on this one.

Dungeons. It's no longer 1975. We don't use Trash-80s for computers any more, and we stopped listening to disco, and Earth Shoes are antiques, and the polyester leisure suits are all in landfills now. Why the pluperfect hell do these crapfests still exist?

Skills that work. The last time my wife and I attempted d20, she damn near erupted in frustration having failed nine straight First Aid rolls.  Look, if the sailor you hired has only a 50% chance to tie a knot, you're going to throw the incompetent loser overboard.

Jackass/agenda.  I refused to have anything to do with a game written by a fellow who got onto my Ignore list on a prominent Internet gaming forum almost twelve years ago, and who defines "arrogant, obnoxious prick" to me.


Probably Not. (I won't automatically rule these out, but they're huge strikes)

Character classes. Sorry, I don't need a label. Give me a point based system and I can decide for myself what skills I get, thanks.

Levels. Sorry, I don't need to train all at once at some artificial point, and furthermore have an arbitrary basket of arbitrary skills improve. Give me a point based system and I can decide for myself when and what to train, thanks.

All-male groups. Quite aside from that I like women around, an all-male group has a significantly higher chance of having a number of elements I don't like.  I can do without testosterone poisoning at my age.

Horror. It isn't that I hate the genre, per se – although it's no favorite of mine – it's that I don't think RPGs convey horror well.

Silly. I don't do that style well either. Slapstick isn't my cup of tea.

Fire and forget spells. It goes to figure that of all the magic systems in fiction, Gygax would have to copy the one author (Jack Vance) who used a fire-and-forget system. Screw you twice, Gygax.

Lack of walkovers. Sometimes the players make all the right guesses or have all the right luck. I want my decisions, skills and actions to have a material effect on gameplay. I don't want scenarios to be artificially prolonged just because the GM decided they ought to be and nerf anything that interferes with his timetable.

Overforced narration. Hello, there, we're the players, not you, Mr. or Ms. GM. If you want to do nothing but to tell stories, there are coffee houses and bardic circles that cater to that. If it's that you'd rather play yourself, go for it; I'll trade seats with you.

Over the top skill lists. You're seriously telling me I have to take skills in Abacus and Soldering and Isometrics on top of Merchant and Electronics and Fitness?

PDF only. I'm an old fashioned chap who likes a printed book in my hands. I've absolutely no problem with the outfits with PDF options, but if I can't order a bound hardcopy, I'm unlikely to use it.

BS having nothing to do with gameplay. I'm disinterested in the several pages of turgid twaddle by a gamewriter desperate to prove he can really write fiction, honest! I don't need two dozen pages full page color stills and character writeups of the cinematic party of the licensed property. I don't need a fifth of the book taken up by artwork and graphics. Since I am not six years old nor suffer from ADD, I'm capable of reading a book without dozens of (allegedly) pretty pictures to break up the text.

Major sections missing. If your game is missing a character sheet and an index, it's incomplete. If your SF game (say) lacks space combat rules, it's incomplete. I am disinterested in the excuses why ... especially since games missing such sections always seem to have plenty of the aforementioned art and fiction. The only reasons not to include such glaringly obvious sections involve carelessness, laziness, incompetence or obstinacy, none of which bode well for the rest of your rules.

"Fate" points. I don't want to handwave success, I want to earn it. I don't want a Get Out of Jail Free card any time anything bad happens to my character, I want to suck it up and deal with it.

Impenetrable jargon. I don't need some obscure polysyllabic term for every ability and game mechanic. (Yeah, WoD, I'm talking to you.) It's not even so much as needing a copy of Webster's handy to translate the terms during play ... if doing so does you no good, that's a large headache.

Half-assed attempts to emulate a skill-based system with a class-based system. Call them demi-classes, "Prestige" classes, what have you, but the end result is a system far harder to learn and far slower to play, if a GM has to flip through a splatbook every time you try something offbeat.

Lack of "light" options. I like crunch. I like a good bit of crunch ... but not nearly as much as I did, once upon a time. If a system crashes in ruin when you handwave modifiers or don't use every picky rule, I'm less interested.

So-called "social combat."  ... in most cases Just Another Combat System with the serial numbers filed off.  Look, we already have systems with tactical choice, CRTs and all those trappings.

Filler proliferation.  It's good that production values have increased.  It's bad that a lot of it is wastepaper.  I don't need a fifth of my book (and the count is that high) taken up with inch-wide decorative borders, full-page illos, long fiction sections and suchlike crap.  How about you chop the 50 pages that sucks up, just give me rules, and reduce the price of the book accordingly?

Watermarks/fonts.  I don't need fancy backgrounds on every page.  I don't need bizarre fonts, tiny type, or brown-colored print.  Don't worry so much about PDF thieves; worry about me not buying your stuff in the first place, because I can't read the damn thing.  A lot (daresay, the majority) of your customers aren't 20 years old any more, y'know.

Splatbooks.  Look. I know why they exist: so companies can make more money.  I don't even disagree with the principle.  It's the results I deplore ... that far from optional for those who love crunch, they've become essential; that they shoehorn New Stuff in whether it fits or not; that said New Stuff often conflicts -- and often badly -- with the core system, and more often than not was poorly playtested; that they provoke a rules armsrace for Ever And Ever More New Stuff; that the end result is a massive rewrite of the system to disavow much of the New Stuff, whereupon the whole cycle begins anew.  (Only without a large faction of players who declare Rewrite 2.0 to be suckass, and who insist on sticking with the “original” rules.)

New For The Sake Of New. The hobby's been around for approaching half a century.  There is very little conceivable that no one's thought of before.  Most of which IS "new" is in fact some old idea dressed up.  A particular pet peeve of mine is baroque combinations and types of dice resolution mechanics.  Look, it's a randomizer.  It's not revolutionary, it's not new, and it doesn't make any game stand out as Uniquely Kewl. 

Playing child characters

So I’ve stumbled onto a discussion regarding playing child characters, and as usual, I’ve some thoughts on the matter.  And it’s been a couple weeks since I’ve had a good rant, so ...

There are obviously gamers who hate the concept like poison, and they’ve some ammunition.  Some have – or claim to have, anyway – encountered players who insist on baby-voices suitable for a barely articulate two-year-old.  Some profess incredulity that children could make viable adventurers.  Some profess deep personal discomfort in portraying children, and some mutter darkly about pedophilia.  So let’s take the objections piecemeal:

* First, let’s examine whether this dings our suspension of disbelief.   The notion that 11- or 12-year-olds are somehow completely incapable is very much an artifact of Western culture of the last century.  Before child labor and compulsory education laws took hold, children that young routinely worked on farms, in factories, hours as long and hard as any adult.  Were they as physically capable as adults?  Of course not ... but they worked to the extent of their skill and strength.  Indeed, the impetus of child labor laws in America came from factory owners preferring to hire such youngsters for clearing jams and making repairs on equipment in crevices and crannies into which larger adults couldn’t squeeze – tasks which sometimes resulted in those children being maimed or killed.

For other things?  How about marriage?  I just cracked open my 1946 almanac – decades into the “kids can’t do anything” haze.  In 1945, there was not a state in the United States where a sixteen year old girl couldn’t get married at will.  In twelve states, boys under 16 could get married.  In nine states, children under 14 could get married.

But on the battlefield?  As it happens, children as young as eight served as “volunteers” on European navies through the very end of the Age of Sail, and 12-year-old midshipmen were officers in the chain of command who as a matter of course led grown men in battle.  The last living combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, enlisted at 14 and saw action at 15.  At age 14, the great future shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu led his first army at the Siege of Terabe.  The youngest Hero of the Soviet Union, partisan Zinaida Portnova, was 17.  The youngest Medal of Honor winner, drummer boy Willie Johnson, was 11 at the battle for which he won his award.  In more recent times?  Heck, Wikipedia even has an article on the subject of child soldiers.

Obviously the concepts of labor, the military and marriage in previous times revolved around "Can you do the job?" rather than around an arbitrary age minimum.

But okay, okay, This Is Fantasy, right?  You know, the trump card response that’s supposed to signify that it's okay to ignore real life?

Fair enough.  So let’s talk about fantasy.  Shall we start with Disney?  If I started firing off the top of my head on Disney movies alone featuring pre-teens in high-impact adventures, I think I could go twenty deep without pausing to breathe. Heck, does as little as a third of Disney's entire live action output feature young protagonists?  My wife, who’s on a multi-year quest to see every feature length film Disney ever produced (as of 2014, over 400 of them), thinks that’s seriously lowballing it.  She thinks it’s as much as half.

And that ignores the dinosaur rampaging all over the premises.  The best selling literary series of all time – it’s only been outsold by the Bible – begins by focusing its attention on the exploits of pre-teen adventurers in a world where magic is real.  Many millions more than will ever hear of D&D have cheerfully bought in to the concept that Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and friends are not only credible fantasy adventurers, not only routinely outsmart the grownups, but can compete in battle against adult Bad Guys ... and win.  To claim that the concept is inconceivable is, well, moronic.

* How about a couple other points?  That people use baby talk in playing kids?  Sheesh.  You know, I’ve seen a lot of people who roleplayed paladins as dimwitted thugs-in-plate.  I’ve seen a lot of people who roleplayed dwarfs as nothing beyond dumb and greedy.  I’ve seen idiot fighters, supercilious elves, cowardly mages and every other poorly played stereotype under the sun.  Somehow our games still include these roles, however much some folks suck at roleplaying.

That being said, I don't imagine the children most people want to play are four-year-olds. I imagine they're more often preteens, who are quite capable of tying their shoes and feeding themselves without mommy's supervision.

That some folks are very uncomfortable with the thought of playing children?  Great: then don’t play one.  (Oh, it’s that you’re uncomfortable with me playing a child?  Back to the "Special Snowflake" nonsense that anything you don't care for is something no one should ever play?  Too.  Damn.  Bad.  I don’t recall giving you a veto.  I'm going to play whatever I feel like playing, and I'm sure as hell not going to ask your permission before I do.)

* The pedophilia thing?  Deep breath time.

It's one of the great cognitive dissonances of the roleplaying world that it's considered acceptable to fulfill your fantasies about being a mass serial killer, a torturer, a batterer, a Satan worshiper and seventeen kinds of racial supremacist around a gaming table, but pretty much anything having to do with sexual matters is completely out of bounds. Don't get it. Never have gotten it.

Never mind that, though ... let's be serious. How many of you have EVER seen a campaign, EVER, in which ANY player has sought to indulge in screwing eight year olds? I've been doing this for 35 years now, played tabletop, online, freeform, LARPs, MMORPGs, and I've not only never seen it, I've never had a credible report from someone I trusted of the same.

Now I agree that in today's hyperparanoid environment, in which "OMG Something Might Happen!!!!!" is SOP, and in which a mother of my acquaintance bragged -- bragged! -- to my face that she'd never yet left her five-year-old alone with her husband, the kid's father – because, of course, of that sickening and depraved fallacy of What All Men Want Do To Kids – there are idiots who'd jump to that conclusion.  But c'mon. Aren't we all grownups here? Don't we have some measure of common sense?  What forces us to cater to the unbalanced paranoids among us?

To wrap up this long rant ... so, yes: if your campaign is set in the Western world in the 21st century, full-time child adventurers might be a reasonable suspension of disbelief issue.  (Although no one, I expect, seems to have told the fans of Spy Kids, The Sarah Jane Adventures, The Incredibles ...)  If it's set in any other venue, time period or milieu, it's no more reasonable than to freak out that a campaign has slavery, pandemic plagues, human sacrifice, genocide, institutionalized racism, or any such element that the West has seen off within its own borders.

Of course these roles aren't for everyone; I doubt they'd be for many people.  So what?

Tidbits: Logic ≠ Tactics

Eh, a couple short rants, while I'm at it ...

Logic doesn't necessarily equal tactics; we don't all play our PCs as if they were game board pieces.

I think back to all the years I played in a boffer fantasy LARP. My character was a national leader and the game's most powerful ritual magician, and furthermore was played by a fellow who was 42 years old in my final season, with badly deteriorating knees and wrists, and the second oldest player in the whole game.

It was strategically stupid for me to be on the front lines. I could've directed traffic far better from a safe rear position, and reserved my powerful strategic spells for cool, considered uses. I am not ten feet tall, and couldn't see over battlelines to know where each and every good guy was, at each and every moment, and how best to aid him. The fog of war worked on me as much as on anyone.

But there were considerations. It was important for people to see me out there, taking the same risks as they were, doing the same things they did. Folks are less likely to complain about hardships if they see someone much older than they are doing the same things.

And I really didn't want to be a REMF. I wanted to buckle some swashes and get out there and fight, and even if my wrists couldn't handle heavy fighting any more, I could still use a bow.

So why should I play any differently in tabletop? My characters have motivations that might not be cool and considered, and drive my actions in directions a chess master might not select.

R-E-A-L-I-S-M: The Hated Word

"Realism" is one of the dirtiest words in RPG Internet discussions.  Has been for years.  D&D fanboys are especially touchy where it's concerned (understandably so, given D&D), as well as the various pedants huffily proclaiming that "fantasy" CAN'T be "realistic," and that we ought to be using "verisimilitude" or "emulation" instead.

(Whatever.  "Realism" is the word in common use.  When I addressed a condolence card to a friend who lives in the state southeast of mine, I didn't address it to "The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."  I mailed it to Rhode Island.  If you can't work with terms in popular circulation, the heck with it.)

So by this point I have a sticky response to the issue, which originates from a RPGnet discussion several years ago.  To wit:

Forum D00D: I think the real question here is, "why do you consider the mechanics nonsense"? We're talking an imaginary dwarf, with 100 imaginary hit points, falling off an imaginary cliff, taking damage that is, also, imaginary. If the designer finds it desirable that a character could fall off a cliff and survive, it will be so. If not, for whatever reason, it will not be. (The first mention of "but it's not REALISTIC!" gets you kicked. This is all *imaginary*, remember?)

If I had a dime for every time I've heard this over the last couple decades, I could pay all the bills this month.

Well, yes, it's all imaginary.  So why use cliffs, or indeed any recognizable terrain at all?  Why not adventure in big fluffy masses of amorphia?  Or just teleport to anywhere we want to go, and imagine it to be anything convenient to us?

Why should we use perfectly recognizable medieval weaponry?  It's imaginary, isn't it?  Don't limit yourself, hit the enemy with your kerfluffmezoz or your wheezimithuzit!

And since it doesn't have to make sense, we don't need to have these pesky movement rules, besides which we all want to be Matrixy and John Woo-esque, don't we?  Tell your DM that you're running through the air and phasing right through every intervening tree and foe to hit the Big Bad with your wheezimithuzit, and better yet you're doing it before he cut down your friend, because since it's all imaginary we don't have to use linear time either.

No, I don't care that I rolled a "miss."  Skill progression is one of those boring "realism" things, and I don't believe in it.  Let's just imagine that I hit the Big Bad whenever I need to, and for twenty-five hundred d8 of damage, too.  Encumbrance is boringly realistic too, so I’m ignoring it, and I’d rather imagine that my snazzy quilted vest protected me like the glacis armor on a T-72, please.

Alright, show of hands.  Why don’t we play our RPGs that way?

It’s called suspension of disbelief. We put our games into recognizable settings that mimic real life.  We use swords in fantasy games because we have the expectation that such milieus use swords, and those swords do the relative damage of a sword instead of the damage of a 155mm mortar shell because that is our expectation too.  Our fantasy characters wear tunics and cloaks, live in walled cities or sacred groves, and scale ramparts where the force of gravity pulls us downward, not pushes us up.  We have an expectation of how fast we can walk, how far we can ride, and how long we can sail.  All these expectations are founded in -- wait for it -- reality.

To the degree we ignore these things, just because, we lose touch with suspension of disbelief.  If the ten-foot-tall Big Bad hits a peon with his greatsword, we expect the peon to be in a world of hurt; we don’t expect the sword to bounce off.  If the party wizard shoots a fireball at the orcs’ wooden stockade, we expect that it might catch fire; we don’t expect the wall to grow flowers instead. 

And if an armored dwarf takes a gainer off of a hundred foot sheer drop, we expect to find a soggy mass at the base of the cliff.  We sure as hell don't expect a dwarf boinging around like a rubber ball, happily warbling, "Bumbles bounce!"

That there are a great many gamers who want their rule systems to reflect reality, rather than ignore it -- so that we find ourselves constantly sidetracked as to issues of WHY suchandsuch doesn't make sense, or because the GM has to explain how come the dwarf isn't a soggy mass -- ought be a surprise to no one.

Why is it such a surprise to you?

The 800-lb Elephant: Romance at the table

There’ve been a couple recent forum threads – and many others over the years – where some posters not only stated that their games don’t involve romance, relationships or any manner of sexuality, not only stated that they’re disinterested in such elements, but went on to express their incredulity that anyone else was and their dismay that any references to the same appeared in published adventure scenarios.

I don't understand this.  For my part, I've been involved in romantic plotlines from the beginning; my very first character, back in 1978, wound up in a politically advantageous marriage with the daughter of a high government official. I've had four PCs married to the characters of other players. (We won't mention the number of marriages and relationships I've had in LARPs and MMORPGs. I can't count that high.)

From the other side of the dice, a great deal of plot has stemmed from romantic entanglements. In my most recent groups, the only PC in one who wasn't romantically involved was a priest of a faith that preaches rigid monogamy. In the second, two PC aristocrats married each other to preempt their families from dynastic shenanigans.  A key element in my wife's one-on-one sessions is the need to keep her young daughter relatively free of the risk of assassination.

A “distraction to the plot,” as many of the antis claim?  Heck, any kind of roleplaying is. Characterization involves ties, bonds, limitations, phobias ... all that can get in the way of a mission. Why, people might be moved by a NPC's pleadings and act other than coldly or logically!

Damn, that leaves out likes, dislikes and character quirks, too. That moron who always insists on wearing red screws up the pattern-disruptive outfit. The fellow who likes cheap tobacco always smells of it, and that can tip off guard dogs. So you want to fight "honorably," blah blah blah ... screw that, just go and do the guy from behind, less risky that way.  Every last little quirk is someone demanding some distracting center-stage time – even if it's but moments – to light up her pipe, recite a prayer over the bodies of the fallen, scritch his cat, grab her favorite pizza or read a few pages from a trashy novel during a lull on the stakeout.  Ego stroking drama queens, the lot of them.  Right?

In gaming groups mature enough to handle the subject (which I agree many aren't), romance is another aspect of the human condition, just as valid for PCs to explore and roleplay as any other. Strange though this might seem to some, not all campaigns are about nothing but the tactical resolution of problems set before the team.

You might ask, "What's the point of having a PC belong to a guild, if it'll only result in trouble - they want help, your status is imperiled, the chapterhouse burns down and they want money from you?" Why bother with the PC having a family, when family members only drag you down in like fashion? Why belong to a church, which only restricts your actions and movements, except in so far as your setting requires it to get clerical aid? Why be a military veteran, because the only time your ex-mates will ever show up is when they're in trouble? Why have neighborhood ties, because getting to know the kindly old priestess at St. Taria's or the tomato seller on the corner just means you're getting sucked into their problems?

And why is it that these questions generally aren't asked, not with one tenth the frequency of angry questions about "Why bother with SOs?" Why is it that ties and plothooks involving PCs are so much more tolerated when the dreaded "R" word isn't a factor?

Simple.

We have a hobby with deeply misogynistic roots: one that stretched back to a day where rooms full of men and boys played wargames with lead miniatures. The games that stemmed from those were overwhelmingly based around tactical, statistical combat and nothing but.  The problems set before the group to solve were dungeons, involving nothing beyond problem solving, tactical acumen, outguessing the Dungeon Master and dice luck.  Players who could tell you in great detail that they "were" 8th level Lawful Good clerics with Wisdom 17, 36 hit points, Bracers of Wondrous Awesomeness and +3 Maces of Big Bad Smiting gave you blank looks when asked to name their hometowns, describe the clothing they wore or to expound on the doctrine of their deities ... when they'd bothered to name their deities at all, not always the case. The notion that roleplaying = acting wasn't common; third person "My character tells the NPC to back off" modes of speech were.

Quite aside from women not being welcome in that world – what stereotype of female players dominated the first decade of the hobby as heavily as the GM's Girlfriend, generally bored, mocked as incompetent and always marginalized? – romance and sexuality weren't either. Oh, sure, a lot of groups regularly patronized the local brothel ... along with locker room grunts and grins, and the dropping of a requisite few gold pieces. All suitably off-stage, with the (inevitably Frazettaesque-female) courtesans never seen or described, let alone named, extant only as part of some peculiar backslapping ritual affirming its participants as Manly Men.

And to a bunch of 14-year-old boys sitting around the table, clutching their dice, each concerned that they've never been laid and worried that they never will be, I'm willing to give a pass. But for everyone else?

Leaving aside those for whom gaming isn't roleplaying, and is solely about tactics, is there any more reason for sniggering than with any other type of plot, if you have a group not comprised of adolescent boys? Alright, let's get the 800 lb elephant out in the open and admit the secret fear lurking in the hearts of many gamers: that the (invariably male) PC having a serious relationship with the NPC (run by the invariably male GM) will carry a whiff of homosexuality.

(I'm quite serene with my stereotyping, because the number of these complaints coming from female players, with the exception of the I'm Freaking Tired Of His PC/NPC Trying To Get Into My Bodice riff, is about 1/100th those from male players.)

How to get past this, that's a question for which I don't have answers beyond an admittedly pompous and patronizing hope that more gamers just plain grow up.