[AFTHOTWTTGS] Character Generation: the First Hurdle

I want you to imagine something for me, dear readers (both of you).

I want you to imagine, if you can, that you have no passionate interest in pretending to be an elf, or a vampire, or a space mercenary, or - le sigh - a squeaky cartoon pony. You're sort of aware that these things exist - you've seen The Hobbit or Only Lovers Left Alive or Guardians of the Galaxy (and as an aside, doesn't that look like a lovely little palate-cleanser? Also insert obvious commentary on bald blue space pirate Karen Gillan, "another sensual massage, Pirate Queen?", yadda yadda yah) or some resurrected apparently-for-children show which I honestly did try to watch once but didn't gel with me in the slightest.

(I'm not even joking. I'm sure that Friendship is, indeed, Magic, but when I say 'it physically hurt me to watch it', that's not fanboy rhetoric; I found the animation style and the sound of the theme music and the voices viscerally off in the same way that I find spoiled chicken not only inedible but repulsive - "do not put this in you, get this out of your environment". It's nothing personal, I swear. Anyway, back to RPGs.)

You might be interested in roleplaying because you have a slightly geekier friend who's into it, and you sort of like board games, and you figure it might or might not pass a few wet weekends in November, and so you agree to sit down and play for a bit - and someone hands you this piece of paper and the first thing you have to do when playing a game is, effectively, fill out an application form.

Think about it. You must fill in these boxes, declare these aspects of your 'self', complete the paperwork in order to start playing a game. I know board games have set-up time, some more so than others, but come on - filling out forms?

If I weren't already predisposed to roleplaying from having started shortly after my age hit double figures, i.e. before filling in application forms and doing sums and documenting my use of resources became the blight on my life that it is today, I wouldn't touch that shit with a standard-issue ten-foot pole. The first stage in playing an RPG is something which, to 'straight' adults, to adults not already locked into this stuff, is associated with work - often busywork, or the soul-sapping state of unemployment.

Over the years I've seen several ways of working around this big stick-in-the-craw opening... thing.

With my old Vampire group (which had a gamer or two, but where the common interest was 'theatre and art and stories and stuff about vampires' rather than 'playing games'), the workaround was to sell it as part of a theatrical process - you workshop the characters before you get into devising the story, and part of that is deciding what sort of person they are and what they can and can't do.

Quite often, the two-part nature of New World of Darkness gaming comes to my aid. Devise a human first, get a feel on a person you want to be, then play them for a bit, then apply your supernatural template. Yes, I'm aware that that might mean you don't get the full range of choice about where your Merits and freebie points and suchlike go, but we're talking about new players, and 'straights' to boot. I don't think optimisation is half the issue that entitlement and 'following the rules' are - again, the idea that the rules are guidelines and it's OK for only one person to know what's going on and you have to trust that person not to fuck you over just because are often quite challenging to people who are coming to these games in adulthood.

Sometimes, character generation is super-streamlined. Fighting Fantasy and Backsword and Buckler (my favourite of the OSR systems largely because its magic is elegant and low level and also because that whole Elizabethan-Lovecraft thing is very much my jam) both have character creation that can be over and done with in a few minutes per person. I like that.

What my mate Chris (who's a very good GM for someone who isn't me) does is to start you off in media res - you pick things like Nature/Demeanour, Virtue/Vice, race/class/alignment, and then accumulate your stats based on the choices you make during the first session. He drops you into a situation - someone's following you home - and if you whip round with a weapon in hand, he quietly assumes that combat will be your first recourse and advises you to put some points into combat stats and skills. If you turn and challenge them verbally, social stuff. If you try to lose them in the maze of streets, intellectual stuff. You get the idea. It works quite well, and it's my standard choice for experienced groups of roleplayers who know each other quite well...

... but right now, I'm gearing up to run Mage for a couple of journeyman tabletoppers, an experienced MMO-roleplayer who's never touched a d10 in her life, and a full-bore geek who, while roleplay-positive, is also quite difficult to focus and about as disinclined to paperwork as I am. Two pairs of players know each other well; I know all the players (one pair less well); we have no idea if we're going to get on as people who do a thing together.

For once, I'm feeling like the paperwork might be a blessing. It gives us a chance to sit around a table and get a feeling for the other players in the prospective group, become used to each other and comfortable with each other or at least over the initial awkwardness. And I suppose it gives me an idea for who their characters are, and what they're capable of, and what will be appropriate challenges for them (very important, I think, with Mage, where lacklustre adversary design results in something that can almost be handwaved away). Yet it still feels... dull, this asking people to fill out forms before they can play a game. You'd have trouble selling me on that, these days.

I'll let you know how it works out.

Insanity is a hallmark of my tribe

Sorry for completely missing yesterday, folks. This is storm season in Florida, and when that combines with my allergies it equals sinuses that don't equalize, meaning that every time a pressure front comes in or goes out I get terrible headaches deep within my skull. Yesterday's was particularly nasty: it woke me up (always an auspicious start), wouldn't budge no matter how much Advil I threw at it, and lasted for 12+ hours -- most of which were spent in bed as I tried to sleep away the pain.

You know you are a frequent headache sufferer when you read an article on trepanation and think, "Yes, drilling a hole in my head to relieve painful pressure DOES seem like a good idea right now, thank you."

Anyway, on to lighter fare.  This exchange happened on our sooper-seekrit BCP chat channel and it seemed too good not to share with everyone:

(We were talking about approving new members and how we haven't had to boot anyone)

Chaplain Tim: Pretty tame bunch that's willing to sit around and watch us work.

David Blackard: Hahahaha! maybe if we had someone in the group who was good at getting various and sundry folk excited, it would be more lively!!!

Me: (starting trouble as I am wont to do) Well, I suppose I could be FLAGRANTLY out and queer... would that help?

"Prepping and Preening: Which combat boots are best for flouncing off dramatically?"
"Post-apocalypse Pedicures!"
"Bartering after SHTF: How many .22LR cartridges to the blowjob?"

(Then everyone else started to join in)

Lokidude: "Which camo pattern gives the best curves?"

David: "Limp-wristing your pistol: Which caliber is best?"

Tim: "Why you shouldn't use KY to lube your firearms"

There were even some contributions from BCP group members once I posted this conversation: 

Steven:  Glitter - awesome accessory, and how it can ruin your stealth movement ....

Travis: Does my Glock need a butt plug?

Travis won the internet with that comment.


(DOES your Glock need a butt plug?  I've no idea. But I plugged mine early on with one of these and haven't regretted it. The dust and grime stay out, and it forms a graceful curve with the Pearce Grip magazine floorplate.)

SHTFriday: 4th of July Preparedness

Yeah, you may call me a buzzkill, but trust me on this:  nothing makes you feel more like a rock star than being able to go "Relax, I got this" when something goes wrong at a party.

Why, in my Get-Home Bag I not only carry Advil and Alleve, but I also carry Tylenol for those people who can't take Advil  AND I also have chewable aspirin, both for children and for potential heart-attack victims.

Go to Blue Collar Prepping to read my article. 

I do so enjoy watching SJWs eat each other...

... so I'm just going to sprinkle some steak sauce here in my own inimitable style and then just walk away:

#YesAllWomen

(For those who are confused. #YesAllWomen is "a Twitter hashtag and social media campaign in which users share examples or stories of misogyny and violence against women." If wishing death upon someone just because she hunts and you don't like it isn't advocating violence against women, then I don't know what is.)

Salem Watches a Movie – Transformers: Age of Extinction

     I'd like to start by stating up front that this is still a terrible movie. Despite anything I may say below that sounds like a positive, there's not enough to redeem this from the depths of flawed film-making.

[Spoilers lie ahead for whatever passes for a plot]

      I've been a fan of Transformers since I was a little kid. Even when I was living overseas, watching the meager selection of Saturday morning cartoons on the one English-language channel in Germany, the Armed Forces Network (AFN), I would sit inches from the screen, drinking in the adventures of Optimus Prime and the hidden war between giant robots, wondering why Megatron never executed Starscream, why Thundercracker and Mirage never just abandoned the war and struck out on their own, and why there were so goddamn many humans around.

      I was psyched when I heard there was going to be a live action film. I was even OK with the character models. Sure, they aren't the blocky beefcakes of the original designs, but I can't really see the G1 robots translating well into live-action anyway. They'd be horribly stiff and inflexible. Sure, the 'bayformers' look a little like a pile of scrap parts, but you can see how they could unfold from a car or truck into the spiky humanoids that they are. But then I saw the films. I saw Shia Lebouf shouting insensibly. I saw attempts at dumb humor that would be more at home in one of Adam Sandler's cash-grab joke films. I saw how half the films were nothing but humans shouting at each other, and the scripts were paper-thin. For three films, I endured this. I kept coming back for those brief scenes where robots were beating the lubricant out of each other.

      I've heard people say that Age of Extinction is the worst Transformers film to date. I humbly disagree. I almost couldn't tell that this was a Michael Bay film. All of his trademarks are absent, or scaled down to a shocking degree. There was no comedy racist robot. There were no sweeping beauty shots of US Military hardware. Only a single amateur gynecology shot. No Shia Lebouf screaming incoherently. No humping dogs, annoying parents, or terrible over- or under-acting from actors that have no place in the movie. There weren't even any robots peeing on humans or climbing structures with their wrecking-ball scrotums on display.

      Shia's been replaced my Mark Wahlberg, who is an infinitely better actor and character, an absent-minded inventor and robotics expert, lending a believable affinity to his willing alliance with the fugitive Autobots. Megan Fox and not-Megan Fox's part is filled by the much more talented Nicola Peltz, playing Wahlberg's daughter (and caretaker). Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci (who seems to be delivering Shia's cringe-worthy lines with much more quality gusto) chew up the scenery as the human adversaries. Rounding out the humans are Li Bingbing and Sophia Myles, who I cannot remember the names of either of their characters, but they really could have been consolidated into one more effective character. Then there's the kinda creepy "Irish" (with an accent veering into 'Straya territory) rally driver/boyfriend to Wahlberg's 17 year old daughter, carrying a Romeo & Juliet statute card in his wallet.

      But enough about the humans. This time around, it really felt like they were making a movie about giant robots, as you'll see much fewer scenes that are just humans, and the ones you do see are much shorter and less often. Optimus Prime gets much more characterization, lending a feel of instability and hints of PTSD, with his first line upon awakening being “I'LL KILL YOU ALL.” This is a damaged soldier. The other robots get plenty of character, too, now that the movie doesn't focus on Shia and Bumblebee. John Goodman's Hound is a hilariously inept old soldier, who spends the entire movie expending ammo and dropping spare guns. Crosshairs is basically Robot Jason Statham, a grizzled British 'bot with a trenchcoat made of Corvette body panels. Drift is... well, Drift is Drift. I've never liked Drift. He's a recent addition to the comics which just screamed painfully weaboo. And he has a stupid samurai helmet for a face. He did get a good line, though, upon encountering the Dinobots, “I thought he was just going to turn into a giant car..”

Crosshairs: Robot Jason Statham, and best part of the movie

      Speaking of Dinobots, I understand that if they had been introduced early in the film, most of the threat of the enemies would have been nullfied. They're gigantic and awesome, but really only show up in the last half hour of a film that's already 2 hours and 45 minutes long. They look brilliant, and it was good to see them, but damn they weren't there long.

      The robot threats this time around are bounty hunter Lockdown and the human-built Galvatron. Lockdown has gotten some really great representations in the animated series in the last few years, and turns out to be probably the best mechanized antagonist the series has had. Twice in the film he faced off against Prime, and could have taken him both times in a fair fight. And his face turns into a giant sniper rifle. Galvatron, on the other hand, is wasted, looks kinda silly, and suffers from probably the worst part of the entire film. The transformation animation of the human-constructed robots consists of breaking into a cloud of tiny blocks and reconstituting into robots. It looks like a crude placeholder animation for the actual transformation and its very, very jarringly out of place.

      All in all, this is, while still a bad movie, far and away better than the previous films. There's the seeds of an interesting story that are planted here about a creator race of mechanized beings that terraformed the Earth and built the Autobots and Decepticons. The story of this film was, almost beat for beat, a better retelling of the first movie, and it mostly discards everything from the first films save the Battle of Chicago. A 15-minute montage of robot fights from the previous film probably could have benefited the finished product, making it rely even less on the previous movies and rounding it out to an even 3 hours (because, hey, why not?). In the end, it is still a Michael Bay film, just less of one, and it tries to do waaay too much over way too long of a run-time, but I will stand by my statement that this is still the best live-action Transformers film to date.

[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.

Wrestling with ghosts

That's how I feel these days, like I'm trying to grab a hold of something intangible.

Remember how a while back I wrote about how your preps should be in service to you instead of you being in service to your preps?  Well, lately I've been feeling like I'm in service to this blog instead of my blog being in service to me, and I don't really know how to fix that.

I just feel like I'm not being as creative as I once was, and I feel constrained by something that once was an outlet for creativity. I used to be zany and creative and Discordian and now I'm not, and that bugs me.

I just feel like I am so busy blogging  just to maintain my blog schedule that I no longer write for the pleasure of writing. I feel like I haven't been creative in months, and I haven't touched my novel in a couple years now.

It's like I'm so busy being a blogger that I have no time to be a writer, which is deeply ironic because I started this blog specifically to get back into the habit of writing and to be an outlet for creativity, and now it feels like I'm shackled to it instead.

And then I see people who manage to be both bloggers AND writers and frankly, it makes me jealous. I don't begrudge them their success but it makes me wonder "Why can't I do that?"  and it makes me feel a failure that I can't.

I know that something needs to change, but I don't know what or how or why. I don't plan to walk away from this blog, so you can stop worrying, but I wish I could recapture that spark I had. I don't hear the creative voices in my head any more. I've lost the divine madness, and I miss it.

I don't know how to fix it and I don't want to walk away from everything I've built in a vain attempt to "find myself" or recapture that bottled lightning. I know something is wrong and it distresses me that I don't even know where to begin fixing it. 

I'm not really going anywhere with this. I'm just venting out loud as I flail in frustration and hopefully stumble towards a solution. 

Thanks for listening.