Meditating on How I Play the Game

Having read JB’s thoughts on the matter and some of the rants that inspired his post, I want to share some of my thoughts, but not in a philosophical, ranty kind of way. Like others, I find the video that started off this whole series of posts to be rather a waste of time and largely mistaken. To explain how, I want to tell the stories of several seminal moments in my experience as someone who plays RPGs:

Moment the First

When I was a wee high-school baby, I was introduced through some of my older friends to a cigarette smoking college student who wanted to start running a D&D campaign. The premise was simple. He showed us a map of where our characters were and asked us what we wanted to do. I remember how eye-opening it was to be at the steering wheel of the campaign: “You mean this whole campaign can be about us trying to hunt down and kill that blue dragon you told us about!? YES!” And, indeed that was the entirety of the campaign.

It was also the first and last time I played a Chaotic Evil character. While I remember the campaign fondly, I do not remember my fellow players that way. Since all the players knew my character was Chaotic Evil (and therefore a threat, although what kind of danger they expected out of a 1st level Illusionist, I don’t know) and therefore they were always trying to kill my character. The DM, however, always had my back. Even when I blatantly explained how my actions were rather Chaotic and Evil, he always made the players explain to him how their characters would know. When they failed (because I was VERY careful that my actions could be interpreted as helpful) the DM would disallow every attempt to kill me off.

In other words, the DM did a really good job of being a DM. He gave us a bunch of freedom to do whatever we wanted within his world, but very strictly enforced parameters around that freedom. There were certain things that were just not going to happen (like using player knowledge to screw with other players at the table). This actually made the freedom we had as players more valuable. For example, I knew I could get away with certain CE-like acts because the DM made sure that players couldn’t abuse their player knowledge and, in a way, I think he enjoyed how much I toed the line so that being CE never actually overtly hurt the party.

Moment the Second

Like many players in the 90s I played a lot of White Wolf products, and believe it or not I really appreciated these games. They actually taught me a lot about how to play a game. When my friends approached me about playing Vampire for the first time, for some odd reason they wanted me to be the…was it Storyteller? is that what they called the Referee/DM/GM? The reason I say odd, is because I rarely sat in the DM’s chair when we played. In retrospect, it might have been the few times I ran Call of Cthulhu one-shots that inspired them to ask me to take the reigns of a horror-themed RPG.

If I am honest, I rather didn’t waste a lot of time reading up on “how to play” essays littered throughout the industry. I learned by doing and this was the first real opportunity I had to put into practice what I had learned from my experience in Moment the First. I presented my players with a world: Boston. I informed them of that world through their various clans and then dropped a McGuffin into the whole mess where everybody wanted the McGuffin for different reasons. I then allowed my players to do what they wanted to do (within the parameters set by the game and by the setting).

In many ways, it was one of the more thoroughly satisfying campaigns I have ever been a part of, because I was surprised every time we played. My players refused to be predictable and as a consequence, my world had to react in ways I never imagined. It all culminated in a rousing three-way battle in the middle of Cambridge which left the players catching their breath in disbelief that they had actually survived. The best part: one of the players decided that it was in the best interest of everybody that the McGuffin be destroyed. I remember the player asking me if he could talk to me in private, because he wasn’t really sure that what he wanted to do was allowed. When I said, “Sure, why not?” I saw in him myself when that cigarette smoking DM asked our party what we wanted do to. He suddenly realized how much power he had over his own character and the campaign. The reaction around the table when the McGuffin shattered to pieces was one of the best moments I have ever had at an RPG table. I wasn’t responsible for that reaction, but I set up the freedom and the parameters for its possibility. I have been trying to duplicate this atmosphere for my players ever since and every campaign has a moment just like this, where my world interacts with a group of players that have taken the reigns of the campaign to create something that I could never manufacture on my own, even if I tried.

Moment the Third

In another White Wolf campaign, the group I played with decided to give Mage a try. We all toiled over character creation and painstakingly crafted the characters we all thought we wanted to play. Then our Storyteller? Referee? did something rather surprising that we all found shockingly fun: once he had introduced the fundamentals of the campaign, he handed us our characters’ counter-parts in the Technocracy. I ended up with a chick in a wheelchair. At first we all were not very happy, but then as we started to play we all realized that playing these characters that we had nothing to do with the creation of was actually more fun than playing our actual characters. I had no time invested in this character at all so I seized upon some of the things I saw on the character sheet and began playing her personality to the hilt without any fear of having this character die or be harmed or of even being liked. Other players followed suit and we soon found ourselves clicking as party, playing off of each other and outdoing ourselves when we had those carefully crafted characters we spent so much time creating. We were actually disappointed when we had to go back to our own characters.

Playing wheelchair chick made me realize that unfettered creativity isn’t all that creative. Left to our own devices, we human beings are kind of boring. When we start putting limiters on where we start with our creativity, whether those limits are playing a character we had nothing to do with creating, using random tables, rolling attributes in order, using only the Fiend Folio or Monster Manual II, using B/X or the original three LBBs as a starting point or whatever, the choices we make are going to surprise us and lead down paths we would never have thought of otherwise. This was yet another example of complete freedom within a set of strict parameters that just exploded with creativity and good fun. I have used random tables ever since.

Moment the Fourth

I will end with a bad experience. It was the first time I played D&D 3.5 with a DM that pretty much resembled the fellow in the video that started this mass spilling of virtual ink. Our party found ourselves in a time-crunch. We couldn’t retreat for fear of the evil we had uncovered getting away and becoming more powerful. So we pressed forward through the dungeon we were in despite not being prepared in the way 3.5 expects its players to be. When we got to the boss fight, it should have been a TPK. We couldn’t afford to retreat, but we couldn’t do damage at a rate that would allow us to survive the encounter. In fact, my character was completely incapable of doing any damage. I was out of spells and was only good as a meat shield. When the DM realized the situation, he started fudging die rolls and inexplicably changed tactics so that our party could actually start doing the kind of damage we needed to do in order to survive.

I actually felt cheated. My character should have died and I was robbed of a(n in)glorious death. We missed an opportunity as a group to re-think our party make-up and the way in which we approached the campaign to start anew and having to deal with all of the consequences of our previous party’s failure. Instead, we were all slaves of the story. The campaign never really recovered for me, but the upside is that it created an opening for me to introduce this group of players to Labyrinth Lord and the Lost Colonies were born. Although I have been sore tempted to fudge a die roll now and then, I have done my best to keep myself honest by rolling all my dice in the open ever since. As a consequence, even when those die rolls have resulted in the death of a beloved character, I have never felt cheated.

Saintly Saturday: Sts. Peter and Paul

Today is the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, paramount of the Apostles. Normally, I would write a brief summary of the life of these two great men; however, we know so much about them from the Gospels and from the letters that they have written to us, I find it difficult to write any kind of summary other than to invite everyone to re-read (or read for the first time) those very same letters that each man has left us.

Of all of these letters, the Orthodox Church reads a pericope from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. In it, he highlights the various ways that he has suffered for Christ:

Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.

Though I do not even pretend to see these things in the same ballpark, I am reminded of the various and sundry ways that RPG players have shared our stories of the trials, tribulations and even deaths of our characters from all of the campaigns we have played through the years. I and others have often mused about the lethality of older editions of D&D (as well as a number of games that the OSR has spawned).

One might be tempted to ask, therefore, why would one even want to play a game in which character death seems almost inevitable? To answer that question, let me share with you the musings of St. John Chrysostom on the very pericope the Orthodox Church reads today:

For this is the brilliant victory, this is the Church’s trophy, thus is the Devil overthrown when we suffer injury. For when we suffer, he is taken captive; and himself suffers harm, when he would fain inflict it on us. And this happened in Paul’s case also; and the more he plied him with perils, the more was he defeated.

While most spectacularly understood in context of the lives of the apostles (who all, with the exception of St. John the Evangalist, were martyred), this quote of St. John Chrysostom does speak to one of the reasons why RPGs are so appealing — especially to me and especially the older editions of D&D and their clones.

Whether a metaphor for (Christian) Civilization vs. the (Demonic) Wilderness or humanity vs. death, RPGs allow us to stand in defiance of our own inevitable death. We get to die a thousand deaths, struggling to survive against all odds and have fun doing it.

To my mind, the reason that it is so much fun, despite the ever-present possibility that my character will come to some grisly end deep in the darkest part of the Wilderness or Underworld, is that the criteria of victory has nothing to do with anyone but we who play the game.

In the same way that Christ’s victory (His crucifixion) seems like foolishness to the world, what constitutes victory in an RPG is not written into any game mechanic, rule or even expectation. Victory is simply defined by how I, or anyone one who plays the game, wants to define victory. And sometimes, that even means a gloriously brutal death somewhere deep in the Wilderness or Underground.

Saintly Saturday: The Presentation of Our Lord and Savior in the Temple

Today is one of the Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church: The Presentation of Our Lord and Savior in the Temple. This comes from the second chapter of Luke where Christ fulfills the Law (found in Exodus) by being presented forty days after His birth at the Temple as the first born son with a sacrifice of two turtledoves or two pigeons.

Waiting for Him is the elder Symeon, who had been moved by the Holy Spirit to be at the Temple that day. Upon seeing the Christ child, he takes Him in his arms and cries out:

Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel. — Luke 2:29-32

This story gets really interesting if one looks into the hagiography of Symeon. He was an Alexandrian Jew who was born over three centuries before Christ and was one of the scholars gathered together to do the Spetuagint Greek translation of the OT. When he came to Isaiah 7:14, he did not want to translate the key part of this verse as the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son. As he was about to write maiden in place of the word virgin an angel stopped his hand and declared that he should not die until he saw this prophecy fulfilled.

In other words, when Christ arrives at the Temple forty days after His birth, Symeon has been alive for over three hundred years and when he says, “Lord now let your servant depart in peace” he is asking God to finally allow Him to die.

In fantasy, prophecy is one of those tropes that I do not care for. This is in large part due to the fact that it fails to understand the real purpose of prophecy, which is the revelation of God. I also dislike it because it is lazy storytelling that largely removes free will from the equation.

Due to the fact that RPGs (especially the way that I prefer to play them) are largely dependent upon player choice, prophecy is not something I have ever seen work well in the context of an RPG. One of two things is likely to happen: the campaign gets railroaded into fulfilling the prophecy (thus begging the question, why is this an RPG game and not short story, novella or novel?) or the character in question does something (like dying) so that the prophecy proves to be false.

A far more productive use of prophecy within the context of an RPG is that found in the historical context of the prophets: they were warning the people of God about the consequences of their behavior. If you continue to ignore God (and the fact that you are made to become like Him), bad things are gonna happen.

This does two things: 1) it honors the true purpose of prophecy — it reveals the characteristics of God that we can aspire to be like; 2) it honors human freedom — there is no coercion when you tell a child that if you touch a hot burner on the stove, you will be burned. This use, of course, assumes you are interested in including the kind of theology into the hobby that I am.

Even so, the aspect of this story that interests me the most is the idea of an NPC who cannot die, but rather than seek ways to exploit it (as the various flavors of undead are want to do), this person is seeking out the circumstances in which they can die. Due to the simple fact that this undeath is not being exploited, such a character is obviously trying to either undo some wrong or seeking out a specific kind of good.

This makes for a potentially fascinating interaction with PCs who are normally obsessed with not only not dying, but exploiting the various powers granted them through experience and adventuring. It turns a lot of gaming (and life) assumptions on their ear and challenges everyone to look at the game (and life) from a different perspective. Not to mention the fact that such an NPC would make an absolutely fascinating patron, because once the criteria of what this person needs accomplished is known, a direct interaction with the NPC is not actually necessary. Thus, whenever circumstances come up that might fit the criteria, the PCs are given a choice — do we make a side-trek to help the patron on our own or do we do what we really want to do and continue to potentially doom this person to what he or she perceives as a curse? What happens when those opportunities are ignored?

This is the kind of NPC that has the potential to be a catalyst for players making interesting choices that result in great gaming sessions — something the fantasy trope of prophecy never can.

Lost Colonies Session 55

This is a session that actually happened prior to my resent bouts of health issues, so you will excuse me if this is brief and lacking in a lot of detail. I had originally delayed writing about it because it was one of those highly emotional sessions that I had not yet come to terms with.

After playing a key role in the Battle of Redwraith, the players decided that ridding the area of the rogue slaad and his unit of giant frog cavalry was the highest priority of all the various things they could do next. They tracked the unit back to the Black Tower and the now wide open portal. It was at this point that they got greedy and paid for it.

Rather than focus on the task at hand, the party wanted to use spells like Detect Magic and Locate Object in order to find any thing of interest from the sea of dead bodies that now littered the landscape. The only problem was that the spell casters came prepared for battle, not detection. It was therefore decided to camp in order to get a different set of spells ready to scour the bodies for treasure.

During the night, a basilisk found its way through the portal. Two party members, including Ahkmed, failed their saving throws and were turned to stone. The creature was eventually felled, but everyone at the table realized that of the core group of characters that had been played at the table for the last several years, only Dn. Swibish remained.

It was decided that Hornet — Ahkmed’s Living Sword — would leave the group in search of a mage of great enough power to cast Stone to Flesh or otherwise find a cure for the petrified state of the two characters. In the mean time, the party buried the two six feet under, using the logic that this was the best way to preserve the two in the long term until such time that they could be cured.

This meant that two players had no characters to play, the party was in pursuit of a monster and was in the middle of nowhere with no easy access to NPCs or other simple ways to get new PCs integrated into the group. It was at this point that my players came up with their own creative solution to the problem. One rolled up an elf, the other rolled up a cleric — but they requested that the latter be an elf trained by the now retired Dn. Goram.

As you might recall, I struggled with the idea of allowing elves to be clerics when the party started various building projects in the Elflands. I was rather ambivalent about the idea — but my players so enthusiastically embraced the concept that I just couldn’t say no.

As a result, the two new characters are elves sent by Dn. Goram to find the party in order to bring them back to the Elflands on urgent business. They came by giant eagle (something Dn. Goram has access to) and we had a fun complication as well as new characters added to the party.

The session ended with several harrowing combats as the party pursued the rogue slaad into the depths underneath the Black Tower. The party found themselves slightly out of their depth, but with coordination and creative play, they managed to wriggle out of a pair of possible TPKs.

The session, therefore, began with a serious loss and ended with a very real high brought on by surviving a pair of battles that the party probably had no business getting into in the first place. I hated to loose Ahkmed, but his death only made the survival of the party at the end of the session that much sweeter. It is one of the things that I love about old-school play. The death of a character — even a high level one — can actually make a session better.

Now, only if our busy summer schedules can allow us to get together again to play, I can get back in the swing of things.

Lost Colonies Session 49

I have not had a very good couple of weeks in terms of gaming. I’ve been ill, the Pathfinder campaign I am playing in hit a major speed bump which probably should have resulted in PCs killing each other and when we re-started the Lost Colonies campaign, the session ended with one of my favorite PCs permanently biting the dust. Though I am an advocate of lethality in my games, I do not necessarily relish in killing off PCs, particularly ones that have had a large impact on my campaign world.

When we last left the party, they had managed to escape certain death in the Brainlasher City by jumping through an inter-dimensional portal which they then managed to destroy. Unfortunately, they found themselves deep beneath the earth in one of the lower levels of the campaign’s megadungeon.

As the party explored, they came upon what amounted to a drug factory. Fungus was being grown and processed to create a highly addictive additive to food stuff that had been shipped across the inter-dimensional portal to help keep the Brain Lasher’s slave population under control. The party efficiently moved through this section, cleared it and then destroyed the facilities (though not without Raine, the party Thief, getting herself addicted).

As they continued to explore, they found the lair of the creatures responsible for the production — toad men. They talked their way into the lair and met with their leader. Unfortunately, the players made a miscalculation and revealed that they were an enemy of a toad men ally and a big fight ensued. Things went rather well for the party until a demon showed up. At this point, Hamlen realized that several party members were unable to have any real effect upon the fight, so he went toe-to-toe with the demon so that the rest of the party could escape.

Considering, he did extremely well — so much so that the party was eventually able to finish it off. In the end, it came down to an initiative roll. Sadly, the demon won and Hamlen was slain. Dn. Goram cast a Speak with Dead spell to determine his final wishes. He distributed his goods among the rest of the party and, being satisfied with his life and his death asked not to be raised.

As I said, this is how the session ended, and (at least for me) was a real downer. I really liked Hamlen and what he had become for my campaign. His death may very well have long term consequences, if for no other reason than I want his influence to continue.

Saintly Saturday: St. Barbara

Today is the Feast of St. Barbara the Great Martyr of Heliopolis. She was the daughter of a wealthy pagan named Dioscorus. While building a bath house, he was called away. Taking advantage of this absence, she instructed the workers to add a third window to the project (in order to honor the Trinity). She also traced a cross on one of the walls. Miraculously, the cross was deeply etched into the stone as if by an iron chisel. Later, the waters of the bathhouse were said to have healing properties. When her father found out what she had done and why, he beat her brutally, tried to starve her and finally turned her over to the prefect. When further beating failed to turn her away from Christ, Dioscorus beheaded his own daughter.

What interests me about this story is today's entry in the Synaxarion (meaning the gathering of the Saints):

On the fourth of this month we commemorate the contest of the holy Great Martyr Barbara and her fellow Martyr Juliana.

Juliana was a Christian so moved by St. Barbara's endurance in the face of torture that she started to berate those doing the beatings. She joined Barbara in her struggles and martyrdom.

As I go back over all the various games and campaigns I have played throughout the last several decades, I remember deaths of characters just as much, if not more, than successes. Just as in life, in RPGs there are such things as good deaths and memorable deaths. I've meditated on this before, but it is worth saying again: Character death is a vital part of the game. If we take it away (via any number of methods) we cheapen the whole experience. Let me give you an example:

When I was in high school, the group I usually gamed with started a summer D&D campaign that I look back on with great fondness. It was one of the few times I got to play a magic-user and their were 11 players consistently at the table — yes, eleven players. We slowly discovered that all the strange and deadly occurrences happening around our home base were actually the lead elements of a massive demonic army that was breaking down the planar barriers between our world and one of the levels of the Abyss. Along the way, we had a recurring nemesis that kept harassing us on our various quests — an anti-paladin. It was highly entertaining, because we knew we couldn't go toe-to-toe with him, but there were enough of us that if we used unorthodox strategies we could live to fight another day. These strategies inevitably would result in the anti-paladin losing his newly acquired magic sword — most of which ended up being destroyed one way or another.

When it came to the climactic battle as the party tried to close the portal that would allow the main force of the demonic army to step into our world, we met up with the anti-paladin for that last time. We didn't have time to fight the anti-paladin and close the portal. So, one of my friends decided to go toe-to-toe in order to allow the rest of the party enough time to close the portal. He did so expecting to die a glorious death and was thrilled when the blow that felled his character was a natural '20' with a vorpal blade. His death bought us enough time to deal with the portal and the anti-paladin. A good death indeed.

However, when the dust settled, the DM granted everyone a boon for succeeding in saving the world. My friend's character was raised and this actually upset him. It rendered his sacrifice meaningless. Shortly thereafter, the campaign died.

Personally, I think the most memorable character death I ever had (outside the hilarity of one-shot Paranoia games) was a guy who got enough powers-that-be angry with him (he was a revolutionary) that he got himself assassinated.

I'd like to hear some other stories of good character deaths. What's your favorite?

When Games Aren't Enough

This has been one of the worst weeks of my life. My son Gabriel died inside his mother's womb. The ordeal only begins with the horrifying news that your child has died. You still have to go to the hospital, to the delivery ward and give birth to a corpse. Then you come face to face with how fragile life really is, and at how inadequate and powerless you really are. Politics, economics, nationality, philosophy, etc. are meaningless when you see your child taken away before you ever get to know them.

The only that thing makes any sense at all is Christ. It is for this very reason that He came. He took on our humanity, went to the cross with it, to the tomb with it, resurrected with it, ascended into heaven with it and now sits at the right hand of the Father in glory with it. By sharing in our nature in such an intimate way, we are now able to share in His nature. Our humanity sits at the right hand of the Father in glory, our nature is sharing in God's eternity. In Christ, we have eternal life. In Christ, Gabriel's broken form has hope and life.

In a way, this is why I write this blog. All things humanity does is rendered meaningless in death, including (and especially) this game we play; however, I allow Christ into every aspect of my life, including the way I play D&D. Through Him, even something as frivolous as rolling a d20 can bring hope. Playing D&D cannot be an escape from the reality my son is dead, but it can be an expression of my faith in Christ's words, "Let the little children come to Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Luke 18:16).

May Gabriel's memory be eternal.

The Sting of Death

Recently, I was flipping through Moldvay's Basic D&D and was stunned at how many creatures were listed in the monster section that, by today's standards, are way beyond the ability of the 1st-3rd level scope of the book. In fact, the average hit dice of monsters listed is 3+1. Therefore, there is an underlying assumption that low level characters are going to be outclassed and over their heads. Thus, death will occur unless the players (not characters) figure out a way to survive long enough to advance a few levels. In other words, your character's status as a hero is earned, not assumed, and marked by your ability as a player, not something inherent to the character through the game system.

Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way. What value is getting a character to higher levels when every encounter is tailored toward your character's abilities and his survival is assumed? Over the years I've played in a lot of games and I've seen and experienced a lot of character death. Just surviving was thrilling, especially when it came to encounters that our characters had no business being in. It is those encounters I remember most fondly. For example:

In an outdoor campaign, where the party represented a scout troop of a mercenary army on the front line of enemy occupied territory, our party would constantly be confronted with monsters far beyond our ability to fight. However, the goal was not to kick butt and take names. The goal was to survive long enough to get the information back to HQ. Every now and then, however, we had to fight. The worst of these was when the party was third or fourth level and not one of us had a magic weapon. A young maiden was being sacrificed and one of the primary participants was a demon that could not be damaged by normal weapons. We quickly huddled, came up with a plan, executed said plan and got away with the girl. Because death was a real part of the game, all of us knew that when we got away with the girl, we really got away — it was our skill as players that succeeded and not the benevolence of a kind GM.

In D&D, death gives value because it makes everything else a victory. Yet, every attempt to fix the problems of 3.5 that I have come across lists 1st level character vulnerability as an issue. This trend began with the Dark Sun setting, where beginning characters were bumped up to 3rd level because the world was "just too dangerous."

Do we fear death so much? In my lifetime, I have seen our culture's focus on youth become an obsession. The retirement home industry is on the upswing as the baby boomers age and we yearn to segregate them from the rest of society so that we aren't continually reminded of our own mortality.

In contrast, Christians get to quote St. Paul from 1 Corinthians 15:55, "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" Death has been trampled down by Christ on the cross. We do not fear death. Our saints are celebrated on the day they die. Death is transformative, for both those who die and those who remain. Death is an adventure.

In a strange way, older versions of D&D express this attitude toward death — they are comfortable with death. We remember the ways our characters die — both glorious and embarrassing. Adventures can spring up out of character death and entire campaigns can take on new scopes. I remember entire adventures taking place as we tried to get the materials necessary to resurrect or reincarnate fallen characters. I remember a Half-Elf that got reincarnated as a Hobgoblin — a wonderful opportunity for role-playing and soul searching.

Death has power only if you give it power.