Late Monday Gunday

Yeah, sorry about yesterday. I know I should have done some blogging, but I had to wake up much earlier than usual and the entire day was crappy, so by the time evening rolled around I was all "At this point I just want to kill things with my Blood Elf Warlock."

However, last night I had a gun-related dream that y'all might find interesting, because I dreamed I had my first negligent discharge.

In my dream, I was in my kitchen, and I was holstering my pistol (no, I don't know why I had the pistol out). I know for a fact that I had my index finger completely off the gun, because 1) I have to do that to holster it and 2) I could feel my hand position in this dream. And then, somehow, I think I missed the holster, and then the gun went off.

I say "the gun went off" because my immediate reaction in the dream was "Bullshit, no way!"

To be more specific, it went like this:

1. Gun goes off, bullet strikes linoleum floor, fragments of floor hit my calf muscle (I was wearing short) and that stung like an SOB. 
2. First thought was "Shit, I just had an ND!"
3. Second thought was "Bullshit, no way! My finger was COMPLETELY OFF the pistol!"
4. Third thought was "Wait, don't most people who ND immediately think it's not possible and/or it's not their fault? Maybe it IS my fault?"
5. Then I investigated and literally found no reason whatsoever that could have made my dream-pistol fire. My finger was still off the frame, there was nothing on my clothes for the trigger to catch on, etc. It just literally "went off by itself". 
6. Regardless, I was still really really embarrassed by this, because I've been carrying since early summer 2013 and I've never had an ND and that's a point of pride for me. I thought "I wonder what my friends will think of me now?"
7. I was SO RELIEVED when I woke up this morning and my gun hadn't been fired and there wasn't a hole in the kitchen linoleum. 

Prior to this, the only gun dreams I've had have been the occasional "Ah crap someone wants to hurt me, I guess I need to shoot them now" scenarios and then I pull and pull and pull on the trigger and the dude is getting closer and the trigger is apparently miles away from breaking. I attributed this mostly to worries that I wasn't confident in my abilities, and that I needed more practice and more training. 

This dream, though, is a first. I wonder what it's trying to tell me? If I had legit screwed up, I could see it being a cautionary message of "You're getting sloppy, Erin, and you're going to make a mistake if you aren't careful."  But I very very very clearly remember my trigger finger fully extended and not touching my dream pistol at all. 

So what does this mean?

[AFHOTWTTGS] Apparently I'm An Elitist

These days, the majority of my roleplaying seems to be done through World of Warcraft. Since you're all readers of Erin's you'll have an inkling of how this works - or do I need to remind you about Silence Do-Good, hmm? People investing heavily into characterising their MMO characters, using the chatboxes and emote commands to form dialogue and describe actions beyond the game's purview, deploying its roll command to form primitive (or in some cases needlessly elaborate) rule sets (I'm not even joking - someone once ran one that was based on rolling prime numbers on a percentile die...).

From WoW-RP I have a) developed my distaste for mechanics that can't be subsumed into a single die roll, more or less, b) learned that in Sweden, roleplaying is apparently much more freeform and less concerned with making things 'fair' through elaborate granularity, and c) come to harbour some unbecoming thoughts about the imaginative limitations of my peers.

Now, let's establish something here; this isn't about smug superiority. This isn't me looking down from my ivory tower, scoffing at the peons scruffling in the dirt below: I have done all of the things I'm about to lambast in my time, when I was first starting out with tabletop and later with MMO roleplaying. This isn't an excuse for me to feel like I'm better than people, this is an excuse for me to pontificate about how our experiences of gaming define it.

In the comments to last week's post, Toastrider raised the very salient point that sometimes people limit the kinds of things they put in their RPGs, the kind of approaches they take in constructing and running their games - like Shiny and his creating a dungeon with only two monsters in it, for instance, or the RP event I went to last week which... well.

The actual roleplaying was limited to making speeches, listening to speeches, or rolling a d100 to see whether we'd have to type a miss, a hit that killed one goon, or two, or three - typage that went by in a flash, uncared for, as people just wanted to get to the next round. There were about twenty-five people there. There was a lot of speechmaking, and a charge into a fortress. There was a small army of goons inside and a big bad doing magic stuff while making more speeches. Someone lost their patience and charged the big bad, there was a huge magical kablammo with a 70% chance of scrobbling us on the spot, and that's about the time that I got bored, rejoiced at failing my roll, and just left quietly, thankful that the character I'd attended on was fairly disposable.

The thing is that it felt like raiding. Twenty-five people, someone losing their patience and getting us all killed, a lot of standing about listening to stock villain cliches and seeing reading descriptions of special effects extravaganzas... and I didn't even get any Valour Points for my trouble. If I'd wanted to raid I'd have queued for a raid; I'd expected my roleplaying time to offer me something that the game itself wouldn't. And... people liked it.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it isn't that people's expectations were formed by the medium - if roleplaying in an MMO has some, well, MMO-ish qualities. If you're exposed to this kind of experience over and over and over again, often before discovering the roleplaying element of the game, then maybe it's no surprise that you come to replicate it when you start to define your own narratives set in Azeroth. As far as you know, that's how the world works, right?

It's not like I'm having a go. I started off doing things like this. It was very much like the early tabletop RP I ran - GM-centric, preoccupied with d100 rolls, chiefly concerned with splatting dudes, and full of self-indulgent descriptions, although I like to think I offered people a bit more than "roll to see how many goblins you kill and describe it in a paragraph that nobody will bother to read because they've been waiting ten minutes to find out what they can do next." I just don't see how people can be content with doing that time after time. You... surely you might as well just raid?

Apparently, though, only elitists ask this sort of question. Le shrug.