A Window, A Light...

Christ, I know. And I intend to post again today, even. Like I said, I've had these thoughts floating around for a while and I haven't done anything with them, I'm not running a game, and Exalted is getting a new edition. So, you know, whatever, man. 

Also, my last mechanics post was pretty unhinged. Like, LJ got an idea dump and it wasn't exactly coherent. This is still going to be really long. This is everything I have on Martial Arts in Exalted right now from what I want to do to exactly why I'm proposing it as a hack. It's under the cut. 
( Exalted Martial Arts Game Notes )

For a writer to feel guilty about taking the time to write is certain death. Or, it is if you allow it to get to you. That's my problem on a daily basis, no matter what else I'm doing, there's something else I should be doing instead. I don't have a regular job so, qed, I am wasting space. 

Last night, before our Burning Wheel game by Skype, I said that I had recently realized that I have large sections of my day with UNDEFINED stamped on them in big letters, which isn't to say that I don't attempt to put them to use, but I don't have anything I'm required to slot into them. I could, if I were so disposed, take the painstaking effort I've already bent to the service of various WoD gaming and attempt to formulate a pitch.

Today, I got a text message from Katie saying that everyone had been called into a meeting with the staff at the dental office. Little puts the chill of fear into your heart quite like an unscheduled, mass office meeting. This morning, we were looking over our finances and, while things will be fine, this upcoming week things are going to be a little tight. We both know that we can't afford to be a no-income household even for another month. I've been looking for work, but I've been more selective in my searching. It's been invaluable, recently, to have someone who's home all day with us having to handle problems with plumbing, vet appointments, helping our neighbor with her pets, and our bio-hazard of a crawlspace, so Katie hasn't exactly been clamoring for me to find work immediately. Since much of the immediate troubles are over, my UNDEFINED sections of my days have been growing, and my guilt regarding writing as an investment of my time had been lessening.  

The terror of the idea of suddenly being without the income that had just started to become reliable kind of barreled me right the fuck over. Writing this is mostly kind of giving shape to that fear and letting myself try to formulate a game plan and allow me to continue writing. 

For the time being, I'm going to stay focused and finish what I'm currently working on, and then I'm going to pick my next one. 

I've got about 10 minutes here, maybe a few minutes from time to time later on in the day. This'll be fragmented, but I still want to shout out to my friends here, really quick.

Like usual, every day is busy even when nothing in particular is scheduled. This weekend we, Katie and I, went to dinner at Katie's parent's place and I didn't do much with mine unless you count a 30 minute phone call with mom. I'm running my nWoD game again, and it's still only Katie that's playing, and that's as much a matter of general oppertunity as it is of interest since we haven't really gotten anyone else into it despite my occasional radar-like sweeps of the general friend populace to make sure. The actual play document for the King of Limbs campaign is now about 19 pages, I suppose, though and the game itself is just starting to heat up with the initial introductions more or less being over with.

I haven't had time to do more Exalted stuff or really much of anything else, but when I have a few spare moments I usually open up one or two documents on Google Docs and add some stuff, do some writing, or otherwise just screw around with some ideas.

Fantasy General is actually pretty much wrapped up. I'm literally on the last battle. It's pretty exciting, especially for a hex-grid turn-based war game! Will I do a review of it like I've done of pretty much every other game I've finished in the last year or so? Yeah, actually. Why not? It'll be novel. Or nostolgic. Stay tuned.

Because I've been so quiet, I actually have a lot to go over and in some detail but even after work, I've got a Burning Wheel session this evening. As much as I'm looking foward to that, it's going to truncate my efforts to post here for the time being, so I'll see what I can do. This is assuming, hubris-bound poster that I am, that you are interested in reading what I have to write but if I don't, then the entire illusion really does fall apart, don't it?

What do you do if you love your character but don't like the game they're in? I deal with that pretty often - often enough that you hear about it, too. When I was talking to Brent, another player and myself were asked by all assembled why I continued to play even though at this point, all I had were complaints. I know that it's personal, is why. Because I said I'd sit down and if I leave, it'll be taken as personal slight, and I just don't need that on my plate. At this point, I'm not even sure if it'd be wrong to say it was personal, because my ire is becoming so. But the game is winding down, I like the other players and the character dynamics, and I like playing my character - or at least I used to, before role playing at all had been considered worse then a waste of our ST's time.

This is what happens when, intentionally or not, the gaming environment turns into what's basically an abusive relationship. 

How does that happen? 

Number One : Make it personal. Players who have questions, reservations, or problems with something in the game have a problem with you. If they don't like the game, they don't like you. Questioning a ruling or pointing out a rule is undermining your authority. 

Why Does This Suck? : This is one of the big ones. If everyone is always having a good time, then there doesn't appear to be a problem. In fact, it may never appear that there's a problem, but what's happening is if people know that you'll take it personally if they speak up about something they're not happy with, they may just not say anything at all and all that resentment tends to fester. 

How to tell if it's happening. : Do you have arguments when there's a disagreement about gaming in general? Do you actually get mad? Is there a right answer for every question? Then there's a pretty good chance you're taking criticism a little too personally. Alternatively, if nobody ever has any problems or issues at all, or nobody ever talks about your game afterwards, there's a good change they're afraid to talk to you about it or feel it's not worth the trouble. If, when someone does, it becomes a huge deal that takes up a lot of time, it may not be just the player. I mean, it might. You should ask the other players for their honest opinion about you, and ask what the problem players beef is.

How do we fix it? : Take a step back. Take a really good look at your player dynamics. Are they quiet a lot? If there's a discussion, and you weigh in, do they ever voice an opinion? How do you actually feel? What happens if someone wants to break out a rule book and double check something? Do you feel offended or slighted? Once this starts, it can be difficult for players to trust you again. If you suspect this is the case, try to listen to their opinions and be fair. It's not all about you - they're here to have fun, too. If there's a problem with a ruling, maybe ask the group what they feel is fair in general. You might get a good compromise or consensus.

Number Two : You're the ST/GM/DM and you're pretty miserable.

Why does this suck? : Well, you're unhappy. You should be having a good time, too. And besides, an unhappy ST makes for unhappy players. Work gets deferred, the game might be half-assed, or you can take it out on your players in other ways. 

How to tell if it's happening? : Are you tired before you're about to run? Do you often put off making the game in order to do other stuff? Do you resent your players for asking you to run? Do you feel too harried, or feel like your players are running you through the ringer? You could probably be getting more out of this.

How do we fix it? : Well, lots of things can make you frustrated. For me when I was running Mage, it was a number of things, and I wasn't honest with myself about it for a while and eventually ended up resenting some of my players. So, first of all, if you're not excited about running for whatever reason, step back and be honest with yourself. Are you running too often? You may need more time to come up with a game and still have time for other things in your life. Maybe spread the sessions out a little. Did the game turn into something that you didn't expect? The game my players wanted to play wasn't the game I wanted to run, and in the end, I stopped doing anything at all. You might need to talk to your players and see if you can make compromises in the game style - occasionally run some themes and then others. In the end, if you can't be happy running the game, you might need to step down. 

Number Three : You're railroading.

Why does this suck? : It depends, to be honest. Some players are perfectly happy going from plot point to plot point. As I've heard it said, sometimes a railroad is fine if the landscape is great and the accouterments aboard the train are pleasant. The harder you stick to the railroad, though, the less agency your players have, and that can be frustrating. If they're a bunch of nuclear powered murder machines with a solar powered spaceship, for example, and you get cross when they fight back against some muggers you wrote into the script, they're probably going to be pretty befuddled. 

How to tell if it's happening. : Look at your game. If your players do something you don't expect, what do you do? It takes a lot more effort to run a game that might potentially go off the rails, so if you don't have anything planned, do you try to put them back on? Does it get a little ridiculous? Do you get frustrated when players don't take your plot hooks or try to do something you didn't expect? If you chew out your players for going off topic, spending time role-playing, or trying to get them 'on task', you might be railroading them. 

How do we prevent it or fix it? : Hard work. First, ask your players what they want to do a little ahead of time. Like, what kind of game they're interested in and what their characters would intend on doing. You can fill in empty spots of your game that way, so you're not caught as off guard. Have some pre-generated characters written up in broad templates so that they can take a role in the story should you need someone on short notice. Be clear about what kind of game you'd like to be running and make sure everyone's on board in the beginning so you're not trying to force one game while players obliviously go in the direction they'd prefer, and be willing to flesh out your game environment a little ahead of time so there's actually terrain to walk around in. 

Many players are perfectly happy to take ST cues about which direction to go in, as long as it seems interesting and fun. If you and they are on the same page before things ever start, then you're already going in the right direction. Instead of a railroad, try to imagine it as a highway with an off road vehicle. It might get rough once you're off the well-paved road, but at least there's somewhere to drive and the players are equipped to deal with it. 

Now, as for my character, I still don't know. I'm not nuts about the story the ST wrote but I want to do something for my PC where I can explore her character a little bit. I wanted a little more freedom in story and I didn't get it. Well, it's actually a joke in our group how little I actually get to play, even, so you might imagine how I feel but it's gotten to the point where the whole group's staring off into space while we're spoken at. I know nobody cares about my PC, but I might go ahead and write some stuff for her just so that I can retire her with a little bit of dignity.

I'm fine with Thanksgiving, since it's always been just a day for me to go over and see what my dads side of the family is up to. Uncles, aunts, and cousins or whatnot. My uncle puts on a good spread, and we talk about some stuff, but nobody has to fly anywhere for the holiday or anything like that, and the whole event is pretty low key. I've gone on the record in the past with not really liking holidays, anymore, but I do enjoy dinner, so it's hard to go wrong.

I ran a one person WoD mortal game on Wednesday as kind of an introductory game for a horror campaign. Katie's playing at the moment, and we might have as many as three people (my preferred amount) playing in a few weeks, but for now we're kind of running on one.

Since I've spent a lot of time complaining, it's time to see if I can put what I've learned to good use. I know that I've been just as hard on myself as I have been on others, so I was nervous when I began the session but felt pretty good about it about an hour in.

There was a moment when Harry, the PC, was informed that the person he was doing a photo shoot of an area for has been completely incommunicado for several days, which indicated that he wasn't ignoring just him, but everyone and someone else had been assigned out of hand to replace the contact. Since there was a photo shoot the day of, and Harry had the location information, he had two reasonable choices - just go to the shoot and do his thing or contact the new person in charge and re-verify.

Harry chose the latter, and woke up a university college professor on a Saturday morning. I realized that the professor probably wouldn't realize that there was a shoot today, since he hadn't been supervising the photography or the staffing, so he wouldn't be expecting a call. I didn't really have any idea who this guy was, to be honest, he was just a name on a paper - a tertiary contact.

Did I mention that I hadn't really planned the first game? I just kind of made a character up on the spot.

Likewise, I hadn't planned on most of the game. I knew that the contact had been largely missing for over a week, but hadn't really given a lot of thought to how people reacted to that. What do people do when an un-tenured college professor who's known for a sharp mind and overall reliability and diligence goes missing? Well, probably fire him, but word was a little slow in getting around. His TA, I figured, had taken over for a lot of his duties and everyone else just assumed he was suddenly bogged down. I just knew I had to get that information across but still have something to do for this game.

I was later asked what would happen if the other professor wasn't contacted, and I thought for a second and said, "Well, he didn't know he was taking over for the duties of Prof. Parker, so he wouldn't ever have shown up; neither he nor the administration had the schedule for the shoot. The history grad students would have, since they were the grunt work for this project and already knew, so you'd have shown up and they'd be the only ones there with only a vague idea of what you were supposed to do. You probably would have had to do it without anyone else but them."

And then I realized why it was so tiring to run this game, even though it was pretty light. I was literally creating the entire game on the fly as a staging point for the parts of the game I had notes for. Whew.

There's never enough time even if you're extremely diligent and on the ball so I guess it's easy to imagine how I would be looking at my short term to-do list and still notice that I'm going to come up lacking something by the end of the day. I mean, I feel like that every day. I'm just saying there's a good reason for it.

I did end up finishing Dragon Age II. It's better then Dragon Age : Origins, which was a fine game in its own right, but it's not without its own quirks, problems, and attendant issues. I'd prefer to talk about that tomorrow in its own separate post.

Obviously, you're still seeing the Occupy stuff on the news, the internet, or really anywhere you opt to look. Step one, if you'd have asked me, is to get your voice hear. Occupy the media, if you will. You can't really even begin to start speaking until you get someones attention. As far as that goes, I think there has already been a lot of people speaking to the accusations that the Occupy groups are unclear or simply have nothing substantial to say, but other rebukes to that aside, you're really not going to get thousands of people across the nation, not to mention the globe, without having - if not one specific issue - a broad base of issues that fall under a general heading of 'inequality'. I don't know if I have a lot to say about it specifically, anymore, except to continue to voice my support, but I'll let you know if something concrete comes up.

Briefly, our Exalted game continues to run. Unlike Occupy, I have a lot to say about this, but I'm trying to determine if any of it is actually new and if any of it is actually useful. One thing I can say in definite terms is that one of the problems I've mentioned in the past, which I've mentally dubbed 'The Tyranny of an Agenda' continues to dominate the game. We're in such a rush to get 'through the game' that a lot of the individual bits are actually just washed out.

By way of example, there was a zombie uprising in a town spread by illness. We actually saved villagers in a montage of all the fucking things and didn't roll any dice at all in order to do it. I rolled to pilot our airship and actually had our ST turn to look at me and go, "What are you doing?"
"Rolling to see how well you pilot the airship."
"There's no need." and then he told us what we did to rescue the few survivors who we unceremoniously dumped into an adjacent field. The only attention they received was the coin I insisted I give them - an act that was not just ignored by the ST, but by our entire group. We then went to a show down with a characters old mentor where nothing happened but us receiving a part of a prophecy that showed us something our old characters had done several years ago in a plot point that had yet to occur in this game.

Result of a 5 hour game? Nothing happened at all. There was one dice roll that had any effect. Let me tell you that this was not a fun game. It wasn't a game at all. The end.

There, looks like you got a rant anyhow. I apologize, but I guess I needed to get that frustration off my chest. I literally could have not showed up and asked for a recap when we were done and had exactly as much of an effect on the proceedings. It feels like I'm playing the character in a JRPG who gets left on the airship while the others players do stuff and my guess is I feel like that because it is literally what happens every single game.

I'm pretty self-conscious about venting, even on my own LJ - a place online that's basically synonymous with angsty complaints about things that nobody else cares about. So let's let that be, and move on.

I added Dragon Age : Awakening to the list of completed games a few days ago, which should free up a little time to devote to other things, like a convention costume and some writing I'm really close to completing. Katie's pressing me to begin Dragon Age II, but that's probably not going to happen until October. I had buckled and paid something like 15 bucks for some downloadable content - The Stone Prisoner, I guess. I really wasn't impressed.

I got one new dungeon and a character that I didn't need. Katie really liked it, so I know that there are people out there that are enthusiastic about this stuff, but I felt a little cheated. Awakening, on the other hand, was plenty of fun. I guess I played it for about 12 or 14 hours, and you can get through it in 10, but I felt for about the same amount of money that it was a much better deal. Generally, I feel like Bioware's been hitting its marks, even though I know I'm coming late to these parties and weighing in on things that people have already hashed out for ages now.

It's unlikely that I'll play it again, but I'll probably talk about it at least once more after I've thought about it for a little while.

So, I've been thinking about gaming for a while. Exalted, Changeling, running games, and playing in them. I've hit a block where I feel like writing my opinions on this stuff, no matter how much I think about it, is just totally spurious. I've always personally felt like role-playing can be a really great experience; it's not exactly like writing a text, but it's a form of telling a story and playing a game that's smashed together into something that's not just greater then the sum of its parts, but almost becomes something related but different then either of those things. Paying as close attention to role-playing as I did to writing feels natural to me, but these days I don't know if I'm really doing anything more then complaining and when we've got a world as fucked as we do now, I feel like as much relief as it can afford me, it might be so much misdirected effort.

First, I'm going to borrow a meme that I've seen crop up. asimaiyat and q99 both posted it, and it makes me a little happy, so Post a comment, and I will reply with one or two reasons why I think you're great. In return, you have to post this same meme on your blog and comment for other people.

You don't have to post it if you don't want to. I can't enforce that.

Lots of little shit, not too much specific gaming shit. My Revised Burning Wheel books are in, so now I've got the Monster Burner and the Magic Burner. I don't really even know if I need these, but I wasn't really going to have another chance and I think they're excellent books. I skipped the Adventure Burner. I feel pretty confident in running if I need to run. My four Wrath of God cards came in for Magic : the Gathering, as well. They weren't very expensive at all because, I think, they're really not the be all and end all of the environments they're legal in. They are excellent, though, for the kind of casual Vintage or Legacy formats they're legal in. When you're just bumming around and flipping cards, wiping the board for 2WW is still great.

I've been really busy at the Bistro. This whole business is currently wrapped up. We had kind of an underground get together where we played Rock Band on the Bistro televisions while hitting the remaining stock up with some friends and Frank's liquor distributor (who sang Dio's 'Rainbow in the Dark' for additional epicness). The Jenna got to stand on the bar surface like she'd always wanted to sing Rock Band and the rest of us finally got to play video games on bar big screens while drinking free beer.

And on Friday, we ended up taking the remaining stock back in to the apartment, so it looks like we robbed a fucking liquor store. I'm not even playing. We have boxes of opened and unopened liquor and wine bottles just sitting wherever. I have absolutely no desire even to pretend to start in on that.

Actually, I've made huge cutbacks in my drinking. It's just become terribly boring and I don't even really like being drunk, now that I think of it. I guess I haven't stopped drinking in total, but it's almost down to the same level as my dessert or soda consumption which, if you know me, is pretty low indeed.

In the middle of a rant, a few weeks ago, Brent asked me why, if I have so many issues with the way my ST runs games, I bother to actually attend them.

"The games are a lot of fun." I said. " I just love complaining." Which is partially true - about complaining, I mean. It's not that I love complaining about friends, but I do like talking about gaming, and when I'm not extolling the virtue of something I'm usually in the mood to tear something to pieces. Changeling, for example, is a game I adore from fluff to mechanics, which didn't stop me from lambasting things as minor as the Autumn Courts mantles or the Contracts which, in my opinion, are the most lackluster part of the book.

So. That said, we both know I love Exalted, and I loved last Mondays game which, as I've stated, is run by the very same Frank. So now that my enthusiasm's been made known, let's get in to how I'm engaging this experience system and what shit I'm being forced to put up with in order to do so.

Brent and I are still getting a chuckle out of the incredulity our noble ST exibited with the prospect that my character was built with abilities and skills at rank 5. My explanation for him is the same as it is for you; that when you have hundreds of flashy toys to play with, with their own unique powers, it's really hard to get excited about adding one dot to an already prodigious dice pool. At the point where you're flying around Creation in magic tornado, have a condo in Heaven, and harness the stars themselves to cast blessings by imploring mechanical spiders that weave the plot of the world, getting a little better at dodging doesn't usually count as character development.

And that's the rub, actually. Because on Monday, we got a very solid chunk of experience, but it's still going to be another game before anyone has enough to buy even one Charm. When Charms cost 10, and level 5 on a favored skill costs 9, they're basically on par. And if you want to buy that pinnacle Charm, that requires Martial Arts 5 or whatever, then you're waiting two games providing you get all your exp. When you're buying ability 5, now you're waiting 4 games. 

There. That's it. Paying way, way more for less and it's not waiting twice as long after paying more to get the exact same result - this isn't character development. Character development is coming to respect a teammate even when you hate them. Character development is allowing love to blossom in a dead heart. It's admitting your hubris after your plans have come to ruin. That other stuff? It's ignoring the system at the expense of your self.

What I'm saying isn't that someone has to develop perfect system mastery. And if it makes way more sense to build, mechanically, a character that is slightly inferior in the long term because that's the best manifestation of that character's reality, then that's great. But I do balk, slightly, to be told I'm doing it wrong when I pay attention to the mechanics and plan accordingly. This is fun for me. And playing Panahon ng Kamusmusan, Age of Innocence, aka Amor Agbayani, Chosen of Serenity is fun for me. So yeah, I'm min-maxing. I'm minimizing my frustration with the system and I'm maximizing my fusking fun. So sue me.

The weekend is pretty much over all ready, making it feel ridiculously short. I spent most of my Sunday playing Persona 4 after a late Saturday. Frank's bistro had a trial opening, where they decided to open the doors at 5 PM to the public, but with no fanfare except having told friends and family. The result of the opening was a nearly immediately packed joint - the bar filled up with friends, but the restaurant end pretty much had someone in every table until the end of the night. My assumption is that's good.

On an unrelated note, I really like this : 
www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/michael-ceras-must-see-list
I don't have any verification that's legit, but that's the kind of list I'd imagine Michael Cera would write up. Also, maybe it's just me, but I really like him. I see that he gets a lot of hate from people, or maybe they're just burned out on his characters, but I've never had a problem.

Before I went out to the opening yesterday, I stopped by Gamestop to see what they had in the way of PS2 games and walked out with the last PS2 Guilty Gear game and Shadow of the Colossus. There are a few things going on in that last sentence, though, that interest me.

It may be that you recall a debacle based on Roger Ebert and his opinions of video games and their status as art. (His opinion : They arn't.) After a certain amount of brou-ha-ha in that blog circle and online in general, he eventually replied with this : 
blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html
I don't really believe in 'high art' except as a social construct, and the definition that I do apply is actually pretty encompassing. (Anything intentionally created in order to provoke a response.) Colossus is one of those landmark games I've heard about but never played. Ever since I heard how great it was, I had regretted not buying it when I saw it sitting in the bargain bin at Best Buy for 8 bucks.

There are many measures of quality in art, and I'm looking forward to observing them in Shadow of the Colossus.

More recently, Jerry Holkins, aka 'Tycho' of Penny Arcade fame posted the following :
www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/25/ - Words and Their Meanings, relating to customer status and the used game market. Gamestop is far and away one of the most easily recognized names in used gaming, and in this area, the Slackers chain is kind of similar. I use Gamestop in a similar way that I use Amazon; basically in the pursuit of games that are no longer in production. Most of my game purchases fall along those lines, actually. I don't know the last game I bought that was recent at the time of purchase. Probably Nights 2, for the Wii, and like all my Wii purchases, it was a gift for someone else. Even my PS3 purchases are me playing catch-up.

In many ways, this makes me exempt from the whole discussion, but it still made me think. The stance that Jerry and Mike took wasn't that used game purchases should be illegal, but that when you're buying used, you're not buying new. And if you're not buying new, then your dollars are going to someone that's not the developers. I think that requesting full serviceability from games that one purchases used is something you can do, but not something you can demand. I think that his stance on gaming purchase is reasonable, given who he is, what he does, and who he's around. He ends his post with, " You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction."

For most people, I'd write that off, but Holkins is someone with a very precise grasp on the written word. I feel that, given the nature of the blog here, one could easily substitute the word 'books' for 'games', though, and we reach a point where many people could feel strongly about the argument. Which is true, for what it's worth. The closer you are to the people that produce these things that we consume, the more involved your perspective becomes. He revists the issue in the next post (here @ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/27/ ) and I think he does himself a disservice by setting aside the issue as a whole in exchange for this one point. However, he does ask the correct questions when he says " Yes, I'm giving somebody money when I buy used. Is that sufficient? What is the end result, and what systems am I sustaining by doing so?"

These are actually questions that can be answered, in that systems are sustained and there is a certain quantity of money that a company will require in order to be sustainable. There isn't really an ethics question to be answered here, simply a matter of what agenda you're perusing and what cause you'd like to support or, in many cases, a matter of complete indifference to the system as a whole. The agenda in this case is the pocket book and convenience.

While the question can be answered if one's in a mind to do so, I feel that it's eventually moot. Clients like Steam allow games to be downloaded directly to desktop, which is a very, very efficient thing. As a connection to the internet is almost ubiquitous at this point, and as it circumvents the issue in general, while allowing the price on games to come down (which might increase the number of purchases, actually, which would be the whole point), we might be able to sidestep the issue entirely.  At this point, buying new from stores is giving the bulk of our money to those institutions - in fact, all of it, when it's the stores that pay the development companies. I don't believe we're giving money to the developers at all by buying new, but we do influence their paycheck.