GM Philosophy: Playstyle Matters

When starting a new D&D game, there are many things you want to get new players on the same page with, and other entries in this series have addressed several of them.  But perhaps one of the most important is to figure out what style of game you want to play.  Now, there are many different ways to categorize style of play, but I’ve come up with one that I think will make sense to everyone: you can either play a Conan-style game, or a Game-of-Thrones-style game, or a Lord-of-the-Rings style game.^*

Now, to fully understand what those different styles mean in concrete terms, we should discuss what D&D’s fifth edition (affectionately known as 5e) calls the “Three Pillars of Adventure.”  From their online basic rules:

Adventurers can try to do anything their players can imagine, but it can be helpful to talk about their activities in three broad categories: exploration, social interaction, and combat.

Exploration includes both the adventurers’ movement through the world and their interaction with objects and situations that require their attention. Exploration is the give-and-take of the players describing what they want their characters to do, and the Dungeon Master telling the players what happens as a result. On a large scale, that might involve the characters spending a day crossing a rolling plain or an hour making their way through caverns underground. On the smallest scale, it could mean one character pulling a lever in a dungeon room to see what happens.

Social interaction features the adventurers talking to someone (or something) else. It might mean demanding that a captured scout reveal the secret entrance to the goblin lair, getting information from a rescued prisoner, pleading for mercy from an orc chieftain, or persuading a talkative magic mirror to show a distant location to the adventurers.  ...

Combat ... involves characters and other creatures swinging weapons, casting spells, maneuvering for position, and so on—all in an effort to defeat their opponents, whether that means killing every enemy, taking captives, or forcing a rout. ...  Even in the context of a pitched battle, there’s still plenty of opportunity for adventurers to attempt wacky stunts like surfing down a flight of stairs on a shield, to examine the environment (perhaps by pulling a mysterious lever), and to interact with other creatures, including allies, enemies, and neutral parties.

This explicit distinction between the three different aspects of roleplaying is new for 5e.  Previous editions (and a majority of other PnP RPGs, for that matter) have been all about combat.  It’s a bit refreshing to see the other “pillars” get some love, especially if you believe as I do that roleplaying is storytelling: a good story needs some good fights, sure, but a string of constant battles glued together minimally with various other bits does not a story make.  You need a balance of all three.  But of course you can lean one way or another (or another) pretty hard.  Which brings us to the 3 styles.

A Conan-style game is all about killing things.  Recall your fondest memories of the archetypal barbarian: Conan fighting a giant serpent, Conan holding back hordes of wild Picts single-handedly, Conan using a giant sword to lop off a wizard’s head.  Oh, sure: there’s a few other bits as well—sometimes you have to fool some guards in order to get into the wizard’s tower to lop off his head, and sometimes you have to survive the dangers of the swamp where the fell beast lurks—but, generally speaking, Conan wanders around, kills things, and takes their stuff.  It’s just what he does.

Contrariwise, a Game-of-Thrones-style game is all about politics.  Think about the most iconic Westeros moments: Littlefinger saying to Ned Stark “I did warn you not to trust me,” Tyrian talking himself out of the dungeon in the Eyrie, Cersei consistently crushing her enemies without ever having to stab a single person.  Again, there will be aspects that don’t involve interaction (duels with Kingslayers, wandering around the frozen tundra beyond a giant ice wall), but mostly it’s about diplomacy, treachery, and manipulation.

Then you have the Lord-of-the-Rings style, where you know there’s going to be an epic quest with many obstacles to overcome.  The big set pieces here are things like the chase through the Mines of Moria, Sam and Frodo trying to sneak past entire armies of orcs in Mordor without being seen, or Aragorn’s amazing tracking of Merry and Pippin.  In a Lord-of-the-Rings-style game, you’re certainly going to have to fight a giant spider or two, and you may have to talk some walking trees into helping you take down an evil wizard, but mostly it’s going to be about the journey and all the challenges you face along the way.

Now, one thing to note here is that each of these has a different balance among the three pillars.  For instance, say we rated the amount of each pillar in each style of game on a scale of 1 – 5.  A fully Conan-style game might be rated: Combat 5, Exploration 2, Interaction 1.  And a Game-of-Thrones-style might be: Interaction 5, Combat 3, Exploration 2.  Whereas a Lord-of-the-Rings-style might be: Exploration 4, Combat 3, Interaction 2.  At least those might be the numbers if we were trying to emulate the trope namers as closely as possible.  But of course we’re not locked into those numbers: each pillar is like a dial, and we can turn it up or down.  So, if we wanted to play a Conan-style game but with a lot more social interaction, we could change it to Combat 5 / Interaction 3 / Exploration 2.  Or say we wanted to play Lord-of-the-Rings-style but we also want to kill things more than anything else—just crank the combat up to 11, so to speak, and get Combat 5 / Exploration 4 / Interaction 2.

But now I hear you thinking, “wait a minute ... I thought a focus on combat was what defined the Conan-style.  If we crank up the combat dial on Lord-of-the-Rings-style all the way, haven’t we just turned it into a Conan-style game?”  No, not at all.  Because the focus on the different pillars turns out to be just a characteristic of the various styles; what actually defines the styles runs deeper.  The tales of Conan are a series of disconnected adventures.  Robert E. Howard once wrote:

In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.

So a Conan-style game is basically just a set of adventures whose only connection are the lead characters.  Now, they won’t “skip about” the way Conan stories do—they’ll happen in chronological order, and the characters will grow stronger and more deadly as the campaign progresses.  So, if the characters can be said to have any goal at all, it would only be personal growth: to gradually become better and better at what they do, which is mostly killing things in the classic Conan style, but could be exploration or even interaction, if we’ve twiddled the dials.

Contrast that with the Game-of-Thrones-style, where the characters have very definite goals that revolve around gaining more power and respect and influence (which is what politics is all about, really).  Most of the characters tend to do that through social interaction—Tyrian, Varys, Littlefinger, Cersei ... even Daenerys becomes quite an astute political animal as the story progresses.  Jon Snow is probably the only real exception to this rule, and even he has to learn to navigate the political waters of the Night’s Watch.  So the goals of the characters in this style of game are to gain more and more importance, eventually perhaps becoming rulers of their own kingdoms.  (Some early D&D games often focussed on this style, particularly settings like Birthright.)  Though this is most commonly achieved through interaction, you could imagine a campaign where characters amassed military might and conquered their kingdoms, or carved them out of untamed wilderness.

And the defining characteristic of a Lord-of-the-Rings-style game is the quest to defeat evil: in this type of campaign, you are assured to have an evil artifact to destroy, or an evil sorcerer to slay—or preferably both, as Frodo and the Fellowship do.  While Frodo and Sam work on getting the Ring into Mount Doom, Aragorn and Gandalf lead the main forces to Sauron’s door to confront him.  (Although note that the combat aspects of this latter confrontation are downplayed even there.)  There may be other stories along the way—one could convincingly argue that that’s exactly what The Hobbit is—but overall the entire campaign is going to seem like one overarcing storyline when you look back on it.  And that will be true even if you had to mostly kill things to defeat the great evil, or if you just had to talk it to death.

So, when we first decide to sit down and play D&D, one of the first things I want everyone to agree on is what style we’re going to play.  Are we going to go with the Conan-style, having a series of mostly disconnected adventures, probably focussed on killing things and amassing treasure?  Or perhaps we want a Game-of-Thrones-style campaign, focussing on rising to the upper echelons of nobility and perhaps even acheiving godhood, almost certainly with lots of political maneuvering and finessing?  Or would we rather see a Lord-of-the-Rings style epic quest, no doubt including solving puzzles or even crimes, wandering through or taming nature, and avoiding traps set by long-lost civilizations?  All of these things can be fun, but if we’re not all on the same page, some of us are going to be bored, and eventually disappointed.  At the very least we can set the expectations of the players appropriately: you may think constantly wandering around killing everything you encounter is boring,^** but you can’t complain as much about it if you had your chance to opt out at the beginning but agreed, however reluctantly.

Thus, playstyle matters.  It matters because roleplaying is storytelling, and it happens to be shared storytelling, and all the storytellers need to be on the same page.  Otherwise we end up like those stories crafted by grade-schoolers, where each person gets to contribute a single line to the story, and the whole thing ends up being a schizophrenic mess as each narrator tries to wrest control back and force the story to go in the direction they had envisioned.  In the end, those exercises rarely produce good stories.  Because the participants didn’t agree beforehand on what type of story they were telling.  In the case of D&D, you know you’ve already agreed to a fantasy story.  But there are still several different kinds of stories that fall under that rubric, and we need to choose one.

Because, once all the players are aiming in the same direction, the net effect will be magical.

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* The fact that these are the top 3 things I mentioned as likely being in everyone’s shared experience (when talking about how roleplaying is storytelling) is no accident.

** This practice, by the way, is sometimes derogatorily referred to as being a party of ”murderhobos.”

Down with the sickness

I had a post planned, and even started, for you this week, but the gods of plague and infection have descended upon our house, and 2 of 3 of our human children (and 1 of 3 of our feline children) are now under their sway.  After 3 days of cleaning up a number of bodily fluids (and no end in sight, if I’m to be honest), it just doesn’t seem practical that I’m going to be able to complete and polish a full post.  So, sorry for the delay, and please tune in again next week.  You know, except for the part where you shouldn’t be reading this blog at all.  But, aside from that: come back next week.  I’ll have a proper post then.

Salsatic Vibrato V

"Love's a Big Witch Doctor"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

There are several mixes I reach for when I’m feeling happy.  But Salsatic Vibrato is almost certainly the one I reach for most often.  As such, it’s one that I’m always looking to expand on.  Here’s the latest installment.

For any mix that achieves a volume five or higher, you’re looking for the same thing: a good balance of the artists you hear from every volume, bring back some old favorites that you heard from once or twice then never again, and of course bring in some new blood to keep things fresh.  Salsatic Vibrato V does a pretty good of achieving this goal, if I do say so myself.

For the solid favorites, we of course could not do one of these without Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, who gave us 7 songs on the previous four volumes, so of course they’re back for two more.  Having thoroughly mined my favorite album of theirs,¹ I’m still exploring the rest of their catalog, including returning to This Beautiful Life for “I’m Not Sleeping,” which is, despite its title, not even remotely somnolent, and going for the first time to Save My Soul, their album of New-Orleans-inspired music.  This latter album is quite possibly my least favorite outing of theirs, but even a “bad” BBVD album is still pretty damned good, and “You Know You Wrong” is a rollicking, fun tune that I couldn’t pass up.  Eight to the Bar didn’t show up until volume III, but they’ve put in a strong showing since then, with three songs in two volmes.  This time I stray for the first time past their best, Behind the Eight Ball, to bring you “Calling All Ickeroos!” You probably don’t know what an ickeroo is.  Go listen to the song; you’ll work it out.  Similarly, Lee Press-On and the Nails showed up in volume III and have been with us ever since.  For this volume I chose one of their most upbeat tunes: “Enjoy Yourself.” This is an old jazz standard, first showing up in 1949 performed by Guy Lombardo, and later covered by various people from Louis Prima to Bing Crosby.  LPN’s version is a pretty great one, and very emblematic of what makes them perfect for ths mix.  Plus it’s one of their few songs where it’s not either Lee or his lovely wife Leslie singing, but rather both.

Not really a “returning” artist, Lou Bega is actually pretty standard for this mix, although we did miss him last time out.  But now he’s back with opener “I Got a Girl,” which does a great job of setting the mood for the rest of the volume.  In the properly returning category, you may remember we hit the soundtrack to Swing way back on volume II.  Well, now Lisa Stansfield is back again with “Ain’t What You Do,” another old standard, this time all the way from 1939, once sung by Ella Fitzgerald (among others).  Stansfield’s version is upbeat and appropriately brassy.  And Koop we haven’t heard from since they named volume III for us, but they’re back as well.  “Summer Sun” is off their second album, Waltz for Koop, which is perhaps slightly less jazzy and more electro than the excellent Koop Islands, but also a bit more upbeat overall.  “Sun” is another fantasic Yukimi Nagano vocal,² just as bright and invigorating as its name implies.  Meanwhile, we haven’t heard from Royal Crown Revue since volume II, mostly because they’re low on my personal list of retro-swing favorites.³  But they get a good one every now and again, and “Trapped (in the Web of Love)” is pretty hip.  (And, as an added bonus, it provides our volume title.)  Finally, ska greats Madness are back again with their magnificent mostly-instrumental “One Step Beyond.” Despite basically having only 3 words,⁴ “One Step Beyond” is an awesome track, fully worthy of inclusion here.

When it comes to new artists, the real find here is Brass Action.  A Vancouver-based ska band, I first heard them in the very good movie Horns, based on the excellent book of the same name.⁵  “The Devil Down Below” (which is the song used in the movie, for obvious reasons) is a simply amazing powerhouse track that transcends the power-ska label and becomes something greater.  “Chicken House,” their track on the second half of the volume, is not as strong (few things are), but it’s a solid effort that really helps elevate the long run of ska tunes.

In the unsurprising category, we need some electro-swing, no?  Instead of Caravan Palace, I went with Austrian electronica artist Parov Stelar’s best effort in that vein, “Jimmy’s Gang.” It’s a bright, poppy instrumental that really highlights that subgenre.  It’s also no shock to see Meaghan Smith here finally: after hearing her on Moonside by Riverlight, Sirenexiv Cola, and Slithy Toves, we surely knew that all that brass had to lead her here eventually.  “If You Asked Me” is one of the most upbeat tracks off the insanely good Cricket’s Orchestra and works perfectly between LPN and BBVD.

Probably the best part about this volume, though, is the combination of two runs, glued together by Combustible Edison’s half-minute instrumental break, another short piece from the Four Rooms soundtrack.⁶  The first, shorter, run is only two songs, but two songs of great jazzy-hip-hop.  First we have our centerpiece, the classic “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” by Us3.  Released within a year of Digable Planets’ “Cool Like Dat” and of a very similar style,⁷ some people think of “Cantaloop” as a bit of a rip-off.  But it was the (slightly) bigger hit, and, honestly, I just like it better.⁸  I follow that up with Mocean Worker, another artist I discovered via LittleBigPlanet.⁹  The son of a well-known jazz and R&B producer,¹⁰ Mocean Worker (“mocean” rhymes with “ocean,” by the way) is a DJ who is probably just as famous for doing remixes as for putting out original work.  Almost all of the latter is instrumental, and “Swagger” is my absolute favorite: infectious, groovy in the fullest sense of the word, and just happy-making.

Then, after the bridge, we kick off a 4-song ska run, which makes this the most ska-drenched volume yet.¹¹  We kick it off with the hardy power-ska of the Interrupters, who seem to be desperately trying to resurrect the glory days of the subgenre, headed by acts like Rancid and Goldfinger, some 15 years later.  “Take Back the Power” is easily their best, and it’ll reach out and grab ya by the throat.  Then on through the Madness tune and finishing up with the second Brass Action tune.

And then we have “2-6-5-8-0,” which leads me to ruminate on the vast difference an ocean can make.  On one side of the Atlantic, Kim Wilde is known as a one-hit wonder for her undeniably catchy “Kids in America.” On the other, she’s something of a mega-pop star, with 25 hits in Britain’s top 50 (17 in the top 40 in the 80’s alone), several #1 songs in France, and top 10 hits in Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia.  She got a Brit Award (Britain’s Grammy) in 1983, and holds the record for most charted British female solo act.¹²  Her debut Kim Wilde is actually quite a good album, unlike some of those release in the 80’s which are 80% filler and 20% pop hit.  I’ve owned it, off and on, for probably 20 years or more.  Not one of my all-time favorites, but a nice listen nonetheless.  The track I’m using here has a kickin’ brass section and an almost (but not quite) ska feel that nevertheless earns its penultimate spot in this volume’s ska run.

Salsatic Vibrato V
[ Love's a Big Witch Doctor ]

“I Got a Girl” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“Ain't What You Do” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Enjoy Yourself” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“If You Asked Me” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“You Know You Wrong” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Save My Soul
“The Devil Down Below” by the Brass Action, off Making Waves
“Calling All Ickeroos!” by Eight to the Bar, off Calling All Ickeroos
“Flame Is Love” by the Presidents of the United States of America, off These Are the Good Times People
“Heard Somebody Cry” by Oingo Boingo, off Dead Man's Party
“Weird to Be Back” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” by Us3, off Hand on the Torch
“Swagger” by Mocean Worker, off Candygram for Mowo!
“The Earthly Diana” by Combustible Edison, off Four Rooms [Soundtrack]
“Take Back the Power” by the Interrupters, off The Interrupters
“One Step Beyond” by Madness, off Complete Madness [Compilation]
“2-6-5-8-0” by Kim Wilde, off Kim Wilde
“Chicken House” by the Brass Action, off Making Waves
“Jimmy's Gang” by Parov Stelar, off The Princess
“Summer Sun” by Koop, off Waltz for Koop
“I'm Not Sleepin'” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off This Beautiful Life
“Trapped (In the Web of Love)” by Royal Crown Revue, off Walk on Fire
“Shining Star” by Earth, Wind & Fire, off Greatest Hits [Compilation]

Total:  22 tracks,  75:23

Leading into our centerpiece is a three-song run of fairly unexpected candidates.  “Brass” doesn’t immediately spring to mind when you think of the Presidents of the United States of America—who are most well known for hardcore silliness, like “Lump” and “Peaches”—but “Flame Is Love” is a major departure for them that lands squarely in this mix’s bailiwick: it’s a kickass tune with plenty of brassy joy to go around.  Then we have Oingo Boingo, who often feature brass in their tunes, but are still not often suitable for this mix.¹³  “Heard Somebody Cry,” off their ferociously good album Dead Man’s Party, is probably a bit of a stretch here, but it’s upbeat enough, and plus I really like it.  Finally, Firewater, who we’ve seen on such wildly different mixes as Slithy Toves and Porchwell Firetime, can do brassy and upbeat with the best of ’em, and this one (“Weird to Be Back”) is pretty damned good.

Our closer this time is a genre I haven’t mined before, I don’t think: funk.  Not sure why it took me so long to get around to it, but, if you’re looking for happy, brass-oriented music, you eventually have to come to Earth, Wind & Fire, and so we have.  EW&F have quite a few tracks that would work well, but I decided to start simple, with “Shining Star.” It’s an upbeat tune with a positive message, and I figured that was a perfect way to close this one out.

Next time around, it think it’s finally time to release my most hard-edged, uptempo mix ever.

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato IV

Salsatic Vibrato VI ⇒

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1 That was Americana Deluxe, you may recall.

2 Nagano sang background on “Forces ... Darling” from volume III of this mix as well as lead on “Come to Me,” which we saw on Moonside by Riverlight.

3 Although they’re very popular in general within that community.  I often say that they’re the most popular retro-swing band that the general public has never heard of.

4 “Basically” is a word which here means “not counting the silly spoken-word intro.”

5 In the book, Iggy Perrish’s brother plays trumpet for a late-night show’s band; in the movie, apparently, he plays trumpet for the Brass Action.

6 We saw two others of those on Phantasma Chorale I.

7 I suppose movies aren’t the only things that sometimes come in pairs.

8 Which is not to say that we’ll never see Digable Planets show up on this mix, because, most likely, we will.

9 Although we haven’t gotten around to him on Paradoxically Sized World yet.  But we will.  In the fullness of time.

10 Well, well-known if you’re in the biz anyway.

11 Which hopefully makes up for the lack of Latin influence this time out: there’s nothing even salsa-adjacent on this particular volume.  Sorry if that was your favorite part.  We’ll get back to it next volume.  Promise.

12 All info from her Wikipedia article.

13 So far we’ve only heard them on Totally Different Head, due to their strong new wave tendencies.

Heart Too Full

We’re just 11 days shy of being 3 years on from the last time I wrote about my middle child’s heart condition.  Today I’m revisiting the topic because we just got some news from his doctor.  In that last post, I wrote:

The doctors estimated that my son’s heart wouldn’t last much more than a week with the stenosis.  With the regurgitation, it could last years, perhaps even decades.

It could last that long ... but perhaps it won’t.  ... your stress level goes through six-month cycles of peaking to insane levels because you dread that this time is the time when they’ll finally tell you he needs the surgery.

Well, it seems that time is drawing nearer.

That previous post was spurred by the occasion of the Smaller Animal’s first treadmill test.  This week he had his third or fourth (I’m starting to lose track, honestly).  Then he was 8; now he’s 11.  On the plus side, he finally got up to 4.2mph at a 16% grade, for the first time ever, and he still did not have trouble breathing.  When the nurse asked him why he stopped, he said his legs just got tired, which of course happens to everyone.  However, his blood pressure reading were a bit scary.  Prior to the test, he clocked in at 120 over 60, which is perfectly normal ... for a 30-year-old man.  For someone his age, it’s a bit high, although I didn’t really register that until the doctor mentioned it the following day.  But I couldn’t miss the fact that, just after the test, he was reading 112 over 38.  Now, let me stress that I’ve seen a lot of blood pressure readings in my life—not as many as someone in the actual medical profession, of course, but many more than the average, non-medical person.  I did time in the ER as part of my EMT training when I was (much) younger, and, when you’re the low man on the totem pole in the ER, taking people’s blood pressures is about all they let you do.  So I took a lot of blood pressures then, and I’ve observed a lot (in my family, I’m generally the person forced to go along because my mother taught me to speak medicalese).¹  And, in all those blood pressures, I never saw a diastolic reading² that low.  Hell, I wasn’t even really aware it ever went that low.  After resting on the table while they did the ECG,³ he registered 102 over 50, which was an improvement, but still I was mildly troubled about that 38.

As it turns out, his doctors were too.  The following day, his pediatric cardiologist called us and let us know that it was time for us to start talking to cardiac surgeons.  Just talking, mind you: it’s still possible they might say that, at his age, they’d prefer to wait before scheduling the surgery.  But it’s also possible that they might say that the risk of waiting outweighs the risk of doing the surgery sooner.  And I could go on and talk more about the advances in cardiac catheterization,⁴ or the details of the Ross procedure, but you’ll just have to go back and review that last post, if you haven’t already.  Right now I’m having difficulty focussing on the technical issues, even though that’s what I generally prefer to do.  The technical issues of medicine are something I can get my brain around.  My mother always wanted me to be a doctor—even though that’s primarily because her father wanted to have a boy who grew up to be a doctor and I just inherited the vicarious lifeplans—and I seriously considered it for a good deal of my early adult life.  But though I found it interesting, I didn’t have the passion for it that I would need to push me through medical school, and residency, and that whole grueling process.  But I understood the basics of it just fine, and I never minded the blood or other bodily fluids, and I always thought the idea of cutting people open and rooting around inside them was not at all gross but utterly fascinating, so the mechanics of medicine is something I understand and am comfortable with and usually try to focus on.  But sometimes it’s difficult.

When our middle child was born, we had about 48 hours to just relax and be happy with him, until the whole heart issue blew up, metaphorically speaking, and took over our lives for the next several weeks.  And then it was okay again—well, as okay as it can be, with something like that hanging over your head, but surprisingly you really can put it out of your mind and get on with life.  Which we did, for the next neary eleven years, until this week.  Now it’s very difficult not to fall back into that time of feeling like you don’t know what will happen, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you don’t know how life will keep going, and you’re just afraid.

I suppose it’s possible to look at it like it’s crueler this way: if anything happens to him during the surgery, we will all be much more devastated than we would have been if we’d lost him early, as devastating as that would have been.  But back then he was mostly potential: there is a very visceral connection that you feel to your child which forms as you watch them being born, and you know instantly that you would die for them even though they’re just this sort of messy, uncoordinated, chubby, crying blob of trouble and poop and lost sleep at this point.  But you sense the potential nonetheless ... you know that, one day, this will be a fully-formed human being with their own opinions and distastes and joys, and they will look up at you, and they will resent you sometimes, and they will be embarrassed by you sometimes, and they will be royally pissed at you sometimes, but in many ways—the most important ways—you will be their everything, and they will be yours.  You sense that ... but it’s just a feeling.  By the time you’ve had them hanging around for 11 years, the potential is realized.  There’s no more wondering who they’ll turn out to be: by now, you have a really good idea.  You know their faults, and their weaknesses, and their stubborn streaks.  And you know their power, and their strength, and their love.  This child, I’ve played Rescue Heroes and Imaginext with, and LittleBigPlanet, and The Legend of Zelda, and Heroscape, and D&D.  I’ve watched him put together complex creations out of Legos, and Magna-Tiles, and blocks in Minecraft, and those electronic projects where you snap components on the board and make the fan turn on, or the speaker buzz, or the light bulb light up.  I’ve seen him off to summer camp,⁵ off to work with horses, off to ride roller coasters, off to swim in the ocean and countless pools.  I’ve slept with him snuggled up under me, and I’ve groaned as he continued to climb up into my lap long after he was way too big for that.  I’ve introduced him to Red Dwarf and Dinosaurs and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and even The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.  Today I hid 12 eggs for him that he had a hell of a time finding and then I hugged him and didn’t have to bend down at all, because in another year or so he’ll be just as tall as I am.

So while one might argue that it’s crueler this way, I instead choose to look at it differently: I’m lucky to have had what I’ve gotten so far.  If the universe or whatever higher power runs it continues to bless me, I’ll continue to be lucky and I’ll have even more experiences that I will treasure.  But, no matter what happens, I’ve had 11 years of amazing interaction with an amazing kid who has enriched my life, and the lives of all of us here in this family, and I couldn’t imagine having missed out on that.

The next few weeks and months may end up being a scary time for us.  I can’t say for sure how everyone will get through it.  However, I’m personally going to try—difficult as it may be, I’m going to try very hard—to concentrate on all the ways that my life is better because of my son, and how lucky I’ve been to know him.  That will be my focus, if I can manage it.  And there’s a lot of it to contemplate.

__________

1 Not The Mother, that is, but my own mother, who was a nurse (and CPR instructor) for most of her adult life.

2 The diastolic is the second number.  The first number is the systolic.

3 That’s the echocardiogram, which you may recall from last post.

4 We will also be talking with a specialist in that along with the surgeons.

5 We are lucky enough to live in the area served by Camp del Corazon, a summer camp specifically for kids with heart conditions that is staffed in part by pediatric cardiologists.

Saladosity, Part 8: Some Condiments, You Just Want to Buy

[This is the eighth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


In our quest to make the perfect salads, there’s still more shopping to do.  When it comes to condiments, we’re going to make a lot of them ourselves: mayonnaise, pickle relish, and most of the actual salad dressings.  But that doesn’t mean we’re going to make everything from scratch.  Remember: our #1 goal is to make making salads easy.  So if I tell you that you have to start growing your own mustard seed or whatever, that’s not easy.  So we’re going to make things ourselves where it’s simple to do so, and/or where it’s easier than trying to find quality condiments in your local store.  Where that’s not feasible, though, we will not hesitate one whit to just buy the stuff.  We’re eating good, and we’re eating simple.  Buying a few premade items is not going to endanger that.

Salad Dressings

Yes, there are actually a (very) few salad dressings that I like to buy intead of make.  Specifically, two: a feta cheese dressing, and a Tuscan dressing.

Now, both of these come from my local Trader Joe’s,^* and they are (not at all coincidentally) the only two dressings that I’ve found there that have neither 1) soybean oil, nor 2) any added sweeteners.  If you’re avoiding dairy due to strict paleo/Whole30-ness, then the feta cheese dressing is out.  The Tuscan, however, should be good for all the nutritional tribes.

Now, remember I said  last time that, if you buy bleu cheese crumbles, you don’t actually need bleu cheese dressing?  This was a little bit of a white lie: you don’t need a dressing which is bleu cheese specifically, but what you do still need is a dressing which is creamy, and not strongly flavored so it won’t compete with the natural piquancy of the bleu cheese.  TJ’s feta dressing is exactly that.  You could try other varieties—I think a ranch would be too much, plus you’re never going to find ranch dressing without added sugars, but there could well be other options at your disposal.  Mainly you just want no crappy soybean oil, and hopefully no sugar (in any of its myriad forms).  TJ’s feta dressing has olive oil and canola oil (not the best, but better than soybean, corn, or peanut), and no sweeteners at all.  It doesn’t taste strongly of feta either, despite the name, and it’s a perfect complement for a bleu cheese salad.

Tuscan dressing, on the other hand, is just a slight step up from Italian (meaning it’s not much more than oil and vinegar).  The oil in this case is sunflower (good) “and/or” canola (less good, but still not awful).  The vinegar is balsamic.  And the “step up” is tomatoes and “spices” that edge it more towards tasting a bit like Worcestershire sauce, or maybe steak sauce without the sweetness.  It’s very tart, in fact, so I advise you use it in small quantities, which means it has a built-in mechanism to keep you from overindulging.  And, if you’re in the calorie-counter tribe, it’s only 50 calories per tablespoon, so that works out well all ‘round.  When we make our Tuscan salad, I’ll show you how to balance out that tartness in a very pleasant way.

Mustard

You know, mustard is some kind of friggin’ miracle food.  It contains no sugar, no carbs, and no fat; brown mustard has 5 calories per teaspoon and yellow mustard has zero.  At least that what my mustard bottles tell me—and guess where I bought ’em?—and, if yours are telling you a different story, toss ’em out and go shoppping for better options.  On top of all that, it’s seriously yummy, and it helps things emulsify (crucial when we get around to making our own mayonnaise).  About the only thing even remotely objectionable is that some forms of brown mustard (dijon, poupon, etc) may contain white wine, which some nutritional tribes (e.g. Whole30) may prohibit.  But that’s easy enough to work around.

You will need yellow mustard for sure, and brown mustard probably.  My particular yellow mustard happens to be organic, but I’m not sure I can taste the difference there, honestly.  But I don’t think there even is a non-organic version, and it’s still cheap enough, so why not?  My choice of brown mustard happens not to have any wine, but honestly I wouldn’t care if it did—that’s one of the Whole30 precepts that I tossed out the window a long time ago.

Ketchup

Now, the first thing I learned about ketchup when I started this whole journey was that it’s impossible to make ketchup without adding something to sweeten it.  If you don’t add some form of sugar, you just end up with thinned out tomato sauce, which is definitively not ketchup.  If you happen to be really seriously into Whole30, you’re probably already aware that there’s a company out there that makes ketchup using dates, which, being fruit and technically not an added “sweetener,” makes it Whole30-safe.  I’ve never tried it, but then I’m not that seriously into Whole30, so your mileage may vary.  You can also try making your own ketchup, but trust me when I tell you that it is a) a huge pain in the ass, and b) never ends up tasting particularly like ketchup.  As far as I’m concerned, ketchup springs into existence at some magical spring, probably underneath Teresa Heinz Kerry’s house.  Just buy the stuff.  Buy only the stuff that’s made with “organic cold-pressed raw cane juice” or whatever if you must, but honestly: it won’t make that much difference.

We’re going to use ketchup to make a version of a Thousand Islands dressing, and that is literally it.  Other than that, I never touch the stuff.  But Thousand Islands is pretty crucial for many things, particularly chef’s salad.

Vinegar

Now, many people absolutely adore vinegar.  I am not one of them.  For many years, I was convinced that I hated all vinegar.  Red wine vinegar I really don’t like, and apple cider vinegar I detest.  Balsamic vinegar I tolerate, but I’m not a huge fan.  However, I recognize that some recipes really need vinegar, both for its acidic qualities and its sour tang.  And I eventually discovered that white wine vinegar is pretty decent ... I’m not about to start drinking it straight or anything, but it’ll be a crucial component for at least one of our dressings.

The white wine vinegar I buy is called “white balsamic,” which I find oxymoronic.  Also its cheap price leads me to distrust the “balsamic” part, which I believe got thrown in there just to make it sound fancy.  The ingredient list is nice and short, but it’s not organic.  Still very good though.

Honey

When it comes to honey, what you really should be doing is buying local.  Find a farm or something like that nearby that sells honey made by local bees from local flowers.  Many people believe that eating local honey helps boost your immune system, but, even if you don’t buy that, it’s still a valid point that you should be helping to keep your local apiaries solvent, who in turn keep colonies of bees thriving, and I don’t think there’s very many people who actually think the recent decreases in bee populations are a good thing.

We have a local place that both bottles their own honey and also gets some varities imported, so they have a great selection.  You can even go there and do a honey-tasting.  Different kinds of honey absolutely taste different, so experiment to find out what works for you.

For our purposes, we’re going to use it to make our own honey mustard dressing.  For the most part, the crap that you have been buying—probably to give to your kids for their chicken nuggets—is not very good.  If you’ve found anything that tastes good (like, say, Ken’s), then it’s full of crap (like, say, soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup, which are the first two ingredients on that delicious bottle of Ken’s).  Contrariwise, if you found anything whose ingredient list delighted you, you almost certainly were insanely disappointed by the underwhelming taste (like, say, the Sprouts store brand).  Well, as it turns out, making your own honey mustard is not so hard, plus you get to tweak it: perhaps you like yours sweeter, or tangier, or creamier, or whatever.

So start by buying yourself some nice honey.  I prefer a sweeter variety for this purpose: perhaps an orange blossom, or a nice clover.  But get whatever you personally like.



Next time, we’ll finish  up the refrigerated portion of our shopping.

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* You may recall that I’m pretty much a walking TJ’s commercial.

Birthday movie reviews

It’s the second (and final, obvioiusly) installment of our March birthday season, so you won’t get a proper post from me.  But I thought I would treat you to a few brief reviews of my cinematic adventures for the weekend.  Without further ado, here’s my

Reviews of Movies for 5-Year-Olds

The Secret Life of Pets  We saw this back when it first became available to rent from Amazon, and both my then-4-year-old and my then 10-year-old watched it nearly continuously until our 48-hour rental was up.  So naturally we had to buy it for the little one for her birthday.  So naturally we had to watch it again.

I have to say it held up pretty well on second viewing: a lot of these sorts of movies don’t.  But I still laughed in several spots, even though I knew what was coming.  Good voice talents, good animation, interesting storyline.  I object to a bit of species-ism—you know exactly which breed of dog every canine is, but all the lizards are some weird amalgam of whatever saurian traits the animators felt like that day—but that’s a minor nitpick.  There’s really only one musical break, and it’s so highly amusing that I let it slide.  Gidget (voiced by the ever-funny Jenny Slate) is my girl’s new hero, and she not only got the DVD but also a physical manifestation of the sassy buttkicker.

Birthday girl’s review: I liked it.

Sing  So let me stress right up front that I despise musicals.  The vast majority of even the best Disney movies are just very short stories with lots of extended bathroom breaks.  So I was a little leery of this one.  However, interestingly enough, Sing is not really a musical.  A musical is a movie where people randomly break into song for no discernable reason.  However, Sing is about a singing contest, so every single time someone broke into song in it, there was a perfectly logical reason for it.  That said, it is true that not all the music was interesting to me—I don’t particularly care for Katy Perry, or Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift—but there was enough to keep me mildly entertained: Frank Sinatra is tolerable, and I don’t hate Elton John.  And the punky stuff sung by Scarlett Johansson’s porcupine was pretty decent.  I found it weird that, of the five main singing animals in the film, four were voiced by actors, not singers (and the fifth was a singer that I personally had never heard of), and a bit disappointing that all of them were very extremely white.  But the story was engaging, the emotional notes were fairly restrained, and the acting was good, even Matthew McConaughey.  I felt some of the comedy was a bit over-the-top, but it was passable.

Birthday girl’s review: I liked it also.

The Boss Baby  Finally, the one movie we actually trekked out to the theater to see: Boss Baby was easily the best of the bunch.  Perhaps it was just that I wasn’t particuarly expecting much, but I really enjoyed it.  The commercials make it appear to be pretty much a one-joke movie, but it really wove a lot of different elements together and presented a story that was funny, fantastical, a bit of a caper story, and surprisingly touching at the end.  Also, no musical breaks, which is always a plus.  The voice acting was also the best of the three.  Alec Baldwin has this reputation for being a giant pain in the ass to work with, but I always find his comedy roles to be so good ... I mean, how much of a douchebag can he be and still be that funny?  Okay, sure: most of his funniness comes from overplaying douchebag characters, but, even if he’s only playing himself over and over again, at least he can laugh at himself, right?  Also, the unheard-of voice actor doing that Ian McKellan impression was spot on.  I really enjoyed that alarm clock.

Birthday girl’s review: I also liked it.  I liked everything that we watched!

Bonus review  The birthday girl also specifically wanted me to mention “the demons.”  This weekend she embarked on a rewatch of Crazyhead.  Which I definitely do not recommend you let your 5-year-old watch, just on general principle, but perhaps yours is as precocious and atypical as mine.  My little girl particularly digs kickass women taking down monsters with equal parts funny and creepy, such as the new version of Ghostbusters (which is another thing she watches over and over again), and Crazyhead certainly hits that note.  I can hardly wait to introdue her to Buffy.  So, while you might not want to let your kids watch it, you might find it pretty enjoyable for your own viewing.  And she specifically asked me to mention it, so now I have.


Next week, back to our regularly scheduled blogcast.

Numeric Driftwood III

"Shadows Fall So Blue"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Our third volume of music to drift off to dreamland to doesn’t stray too far from the template set in the previous two volumes ... which I think we can construe as a good thing.  Just as before, we’re hearing from Anjey Satori, Kitaro, and the Angels of Venice—who provide our opener this time around, “Awake Inside a Dream”—although only one track each this volume.  David Darling also returns from volume II, this time with the title track off his even mellower album Cello Blue.  And while our first volume had Siouxise singing the song that Kaa sings to Mowgli in Disney’s Jungle Book, this volume sees Better Midler give us a take on the song Dumbo’s mother sings to him in Dumbo.  And, in one final echo of volume II, this volume also ends with two consecutive vocal tracks: “Baby Mine” is followed by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s uncharacterically soporific “Sleep Tight.” It’s a nice way to end: two pretty lullabies to help make sure you’re solidly somnolent.

But this volume also brings us a lot of new artists, including some of my favorite albums to drift off to.  Enigma finally makes an appearance here, with “Callas Went Away,” which is probably the most restful of the tunes off their classic debut album MCMXC a.D. The rest of that album is good, no doubt, but it’s not as apt to actually put you to sleep as what I generally look for in this mix.  Another of my favorite albums to just chill out with is the soundtrack from Twin Peaks, by Angelo Badalamenti, with occasional vocals from Julee Cruise, such as the track I’m using here, “Into the Night.” “Into the Night” is a curious tune, because while it’s super-mellow for 95% of its just-under-5-minutes’ running time, it does have an unexpected crescendo towards the end which might actually wake you up if you’re not expecting it.  That’s probably the reason it took so long to land on this mix, to be honest.  But, in the end, I felt that that one moment couldn’t completely negate its appropriateness here.  Besides: once you know it’s there, it rapidly loses its power to shake up your consciousness.  And, if nothing else, I put it fairly early in the tracklist so there’s a decent chance you’re not quite asleep yet.  Plus it handily provides our volume title, so it’s sort of crucial to the volume.

Another of my favorite mellow bands is the Blue Nile.  Like Enigma, most of their music is relaxing but not quite sleep-inducing, but every now and again they hit the jackpot.  While “From a Late Night Train” has a gentle, pining quality that almost qualifies it for Wisty Mysteria,¹ it’s also soothing in a strange way that I can’t fully describe.  It makes a nice transition into our middle stretch, and also means that there’s four fully vocal tracks, as well as two others with a few breathy, whispered words,² which is a new record for this mix.

There’s also more proper new age on this volume than on previous installments—perhaps even more than on any other mix volume I’ve done so far.  Besides Kitaro and Satori, who we can definitively say are new age, and Angels of Venice, who we might dabble with describing as “neoclassical” before admitting that, yeah, they’re pretty new-age-y, we also have Anugama, Torben Thøger, and Hilary Stagg, who form a 4-song block with David Darling wedged firmly in the middle.³  Anugama we’ve heard from before, on Shadowfall Equinox; he’s a German musician who spent many years in Asia absorbing meditative music.  “Shaku Sunset” is a perfect example of that influence: it has a gentle East Asian feel, and fades away into the chirping of crickets, which transitions beautifully into “Cello Blue,” which kicks off with chirping birds.  The overall effect is that of a pre-dawn morning.  Then “Cello Blue”‘s chirping birds flow into the babbling brook of “A Wonderful Place.” Torben Thoger is a Danish composer and filmmaker; most of his work I find a little too new-age-y, but “A Wonderful Place” is really beautiful, even though at over 13 minutes, it’s the longest track on this mix (or, again, quite possibly on any of my mixes).  But I make special allowances here: this type of music is one of the few places where very long tracks can actually serve the purpose well.⁴  But assuming you’re still awake after nearly 13½ minutes of the calming soundtrack that accompanies the running water, that fades nicely into the sublime harp of Stagg.  Hilary Stagg was an electrician inspired to take up the harp after attending a concert by Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider, and he soon created a unique harp style that combines electrical amplification and lucid dreaming.  Again, Stagg is often way too new age for my tastes, but “Drifting Toward a Dream” is a pretty perfect example of how good he can be when he’s on.

Numeric Driftwood III
[ Shadows Fall So Blue ]

“Awake Inside a Dream” by Angels of Venice, off Awake Inside a Dream
“The Mist” by Kitaro, off India
“Night Surround” by Anjey Satori, off For Relaxation
“Into the Night” by Angelo Badalamenti, off Twin Peaks [Soundtrack]
“From a Late Night Train” by the Blue Nile, off Hats
“Callas Went Away” by Enigma, off MCMXC a.D.
“Shaku Sunset” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“Cello Blue” by David Darling, off Cello Blue
“A Wonderful Place” by Torben Thøger, off Akasha
“Drifting Toward a Dream” by Hilary Stagg, off Dream Spiral
“Floating On” by Koushik, off Out My Window ⁵
“Grace” by Beth Quist, off Silver
“Baby Mine” by Bette Midler, off Beaches [Soundtrack]
“Sleep Tight” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off This Beautiful Life

Total:  14 tracks,  76:57

Which only leaves us with two tracks.  Beth Quist we’ve seen before on other mixes,⁶ but this is her first appearance here.  “Grace” is a track off her first album, Silver, and exemplifies what make her great: middle-Eastern-influenced music, and her wordless vocals are just another instrument, and one with magnificent range.  This is more relaxing than most of her œuvre, which is of course why it fits in so nicely here.

And leading into Quist is a short bridge from Indian-Canadian electronica artist Koushik.  “Floating On”⁷ is exactly what it says on the tin: a short, floating melody that carries us gracefully from the transcendent harp of Stagg to the otherworldly voice of Quist.

Next time, we’ll wake back up with another installment of getting down to brass tactics.

⇐ Numeric Driftwood II

Numeric Driftwood IV ⇒

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1 A mix which we shall come to in the fullness of time, of course.

2 That would be the Enigma, of course, and the Angels of Venice track, perhaps a bit surprisingly.

3 And we could probably describe Darling as new age too, if we’re being honest.

4 The other place being Shadowfall Equinox.

5 On some versions of this album, including the one I’m linking you to, “Floating On” is listed as “Flying On.” But it’s the same song.

6 On Smokelit Flashback IV and V, as well as Sirenexiv Cola I and Paradoxically Sized World IV.

7 Or, on some versions of Out My Window, “Flying On.”

GM Philosophy: Roleplaying Is Storytelling

So having talked at some length about why I play D&D, this post may seem somewhat repetitive,¹ but it really is the linchpin of my GM philosophy.  See, the whole issue stems from the fact that, while almost all games that you’ve ever played before are competitive, D&D is not.  It’s cooperative.  This leads many people to wonder: so what is the point?  Every game—even a cooperative one—must have an object or goal.  That’s what tells you what to do in order to improve your performance.  You need some sort of yardstick to measure yourself against.  If you’re not striving to outdo your fellow players, then what exactly are you striving towards?

Different people have come up with different answers to that question, and, while none of those answers are wrong, it is true that the members of any given gaming group need to aim at the same target.  That is: it’s okay for different groups to have different goals, even though they’re all playing the same game, but within a single group, everybody needs to be on the same page, or the game doesn’t work (or at least doesn’t work very well).  So let’s look at a few of the options and see what the pros and cons are.

For some people, it’s simple escapism.  In this model, playing D&D is much like going to a movie: you get to step out of the real world for a bit and live in a more exciting place.  But the problem with that is that a movie is a passive experience.  If you’re doing it properly, you’re just absorbing the story that someone else has built for you.  D&D needs to be more active than that—you must be a participant, not merely an observer.

Other people take the view that D&D itself doesn’t have any one objective, but rather that it’s a game like Fluxx,² where the objective for each game is different, and may even change mid-game.  And I’ll agree that each individual adventure or campaign should have a goal, and it’s good to recognize that, but I think this view misses the bigger picture.  D&D is not just a collection of various disconnected campaigns: there is a common thread that ties them all together.

Some people treat D&D like fantasy dinner theater, and use it to show off their acting chops.  This is a particularly tricky one to address, because it’s absolutely true that you need to inhabit another person.  And sometimes would-be actors can make excellent D&D players.  But the analogy is not perfect: acting is about taking an existing character and bringing it to life by the way you move and speak.  D&D is about inventing a character from scratch, and detailing their adventures.  It’s much closer to writing a play than it is to starring in one.  And players don’t have to act to do that, and shouldn’t be made to feel inferior if they can’t or don’t want to.

But the most insidious one of all is when people just can’t help themselves and try to inject an element of competition into it.  Sometimes this manifests as a competition among the players—my character can do more damage per hit than yours! oh, yeah, well my character can run faster, jump farther, and climb better than yours! yeah, but you both suck more than me, because my character can take the most damage without going down—and that’s what leads to min/max-ing and munchkinism.  Sometimes instead the game becomes a showdown between players and GM: the latter tries to kill everyone, while the former try to dispatch all enemies thrown at them so quickly that the GM goes “awwww.”  But neither of those strategies makes for a good story—the one is a pointless tragedy and the other lacks any tension or drama.

For me (and the many other roleplayers who share my views), roleplaying is storytelling.  The object of the game is to create a magnificient, shared story.  A story requires many things: an interesting setting, a plot filled with action and tension, and most of all great characters.  The players will each provide one character, who will be a co-protagonist, and the GM will provide the supporting cast, the background characters, and of course the antagonists.  Each person brings to the table a certain amount of shared experience—these days, it’s a safe bet that we’ve all seen or read The Lord of the Rings, and probably Game of Thrones, and probably experienced some form of Conan,³ and probably played some version of The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.  Each person will also bring some amount of idiosyncratic experience—some of us will have seen Brotherhood of the Wolf, or Willow, and others won’t; some of us will have read Imajica, or the Magic Kingdom of Landover series, and some won’t; some will have played one or more of the Elder Scrolls games, or one of the Zork games, and some won’t; some will have read The Sandman, or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and some won’t.  All these influences will mesh, and cross-pollinate, and together we will forge a story that will be even more amazing than all of these others, because it will be our story.

And we will tell these stories.  We’ll tell them to each other, years from now, to remember the good times.  We’ll tell them to our friends and family, although for the most part they won’t appreciate them.  And, most amazing of all, we will tell them to utter strangers that we’re meeting for the first time, and who we just happened to discover also play, or used to play, pen-n-paper roleplaying games, and they will tell us their stories, and we will laugh, and we will gasp, and we will congratulate each other on the ingenuity of our characters, and the luck and the skill of our party, and the incredible nature of our stories.  Any person, of any age, from any culture: once you find that you both have roleplayed, the stories will begin to flow, like magic.

Which is appropriate, because D&D is a fantasy game, so if you happen to be playing D&D, as opposed to one of the many other fine PnP RPGs out there, you’re going to be building a fantasy story.  Oh, sure: there will probably be elements of sci-fi, and horror, and perhaps even historical drama, but primarily it’s a fantasy genre, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Fantasy traditionally has excellent villains, both of the blacker-than-black and decidedly-gray varieties, depending on your tastes.  It allows for physical heroism, quick wits, political maneuvering, camaraderie and romance and betrayal, the amassment of truly magnificent levels of power by some characters, and yet the saving of the day by perfectly ordinary folks with no aspirations to grandeur who just had the fortitude and the courage to step up and do the right thing.  Plus you get to stab things with your sword and sling magic spells around—what’s not to love?

So this will be an epic story, and all we have to do to make it so and keep it so is follow a few simple rules.  We build epic and interesting characters.  We make sure that those characters only die when it’s dramatically appropriate.  We make sure that everyone has an equal stake in the story so it doesn’t get sabotaged by pointless competition.  And we make sure that everything we do—everything we have our characters do, to be more precise—makes logical sense.  Simple example: some gaming groups will say, if player X can’t make it to the game tonight, we’ll just say their character disappears for this session and reappears next time.  I can’t go along with that.  Why not?  Simple: it borks the story.  If you were reading a book, and it was getting good, and then the author wrote:

When the party awoke the next morning, Hafnir was gone.  His animal companion and all his magical items were also missing, although his share of the food and supplies remained behind.  “Oh, well,” shrugged Delea.  “I guess we’ll see him later.  Now let’s finish tracking down those orcs!”

I think you would find this somewhat infuriating, because not only does it make no logical sense that a character simply disappeared right in the middle of things, but it makes even less sense that his beloved companions of lo these many months would simply ignore his absence.  It would ruin the story for you.  In my games, if a player can’t make it, they have to accept whatever fate befalls their character.  We might keep them around and let another player run the character, we might have them knocked unconscious the first chance we get and just lug their comatose body around, or I might have them kidnapped and held for ransom just to keep things interesting.  But, however we handle it, it will make sense in the context of the ongoing story.⁴

The other important mechanical consequence of treating roleplaying as storytelling is my attitude towards balance.  Some D&D players are obsessed with balance.  This class is overpowered, they’ll say.  This class is mechanically weak and no one will ever want to play it.  This multiclass combination could only possibly appeal to munchkins—in fact, I have read people online claiming that all multiclassing is a sign of powergaming.  This is bollocks.  As a player, I love multiclassing, because I have weird, atypical ideas for characters, and multiclassing is often the best (and sometimes only) way to achieve that.  As a GM, I cut way back on the chances that you will use multiclassing—or homebrew classes/races/weapons/whatever, or just plain special requests to bend the rules—to min/max by demanding more detailed backstories for the characters.  If your backstory supports your crazy combination of things, then your GM supports it too.  Everything has to make a certain amount of sense, yes, but let’s not ignore the Rule of Cool.  Remember: we’re trying to tell an awesome story here.  I’m not going to let you have massive amounts of HP at first level or anything, but if you want to have a magic weapon when you first start out, perhaps because it’s a bequest from your father, who was killed in the Great Goblin Wars, I’m not gonna say “no” to that.  I might give you a penalty to use it until the weapon “warms up” to you or somesuch, because balance should never be ignored entirely, but as a GM my general rule is “don’t say ‘no’; say ‘yes, but ...’”

In fact, nothing I ever tell you as a GM should ever be construed as meaning “no.”  If you say “my character will be a dwarven sailor,” and I say “in this world, all dwarves are terrified of water,” that doesn’t mean you have to abandon your character concept.  It just means you’re going to have to work extra hard to come up with a reason why they exist.  Perhaps they weren’t actually raised by dwarves.  Perhaps they were blessed as a baby by a naiad.  Perhaps, as a child, they fell into the ocean, and their family was sure they were lost forever, but then they were saved by a mermaid.  Go crazy: your creativity will be rewarded.  Likewise, if you say “my character will try to jump over the chasm,” and I say, “you don’t think that’s a good idea: it looks like it’s too far,” that also doesn’t mean you can’t make the attempt.  I’m just trying to gently talk you out of something which may get you killed.⁵  But, hey: if you really have to try it, that’s your business.  I’m not gonna stop you.  ‘Cause it will probably make the adventure more interesting, whether you succeed against all odds, or whether you fall and your companions have to figure out how to rescue your broken and battered body.

And, you know what?  Either way it goes, it’ll make a great story.

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1 In fact, I’ve lifted whole sentences from that previous post.  Please forgive me for that, but I don’t want to rewrite something that sounded perfect the first time around just to avoid charges of self-plagiarism.

2 Or, to a lesser extent, like my other great passion: Heroscape.

3 Be it the original short stories by Robert E. Howard, the authorized fan-fiction of people like L. Sprague de Camp, the comics by Thomas and Buscema, the movies starring Schwarzenegger, or one of the many videogames.  Conan is truly a cross-media barbarian.

4 Also, the player will not be nervous about their character, because they are confident in the power of our shared story: everyone in the group wants the best—which generally means the most interesting—things for every character.

5 Okay, not permanently killed, since I don’t kill characters.  But really really messed up.

More quotes for our time

I had really hoped to get you a full post this week—I even started on one already—but the tyranny of the birthday weekend has other plans for me.  For now, I’ll give you another quickie quotes post.

Amongst the great quotables, everyone knows Voltaire and Mark Twain, Confucius and Ghandi.  Most know Will Rogers and Oscar Wilde, Ambrose Bierce and Dave Barry.  But not enough people know H. L. Mencken.

Ever heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial?  Well, Mencken is the one who named it.  He was an American newspaperman and author who was most prolific during the period of World War I to World War II, but many of his quotes ring true today with a foresight that is almost eerie.

Of course, he was not a perfect man, as no historical figure is.  As his Wikipedia article is quick to point out, he was extremely racist, and he once wrote “war is a good thing.”  He also didn’t believe in populism and was quite a big fan of Ayn Rand.  Which makes it all the more curious to me that his words are such a clear indictment of our current president, who it seems he probably would have personally thought well of.  For instance, he once noted:

It is [a politician’s] business to get and hold his job at all costs.  If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths.  His ear is ever close to the ground.

    — H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926

Of course, one could argue that Trump doesn’t have much truck with embracing truths, new or otherwise.  However, it is true that Trump has an amazing ability to tap into people’s fears: economic fears, xenophobic fears, isolationist fears.  And, of course, Mencken has a comment for us on that too:

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

    — H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918

Again, this is highly amusing, given Mencken’s personal views: one could easily imagine that he would have been fully in favor of, say, bans on refugees.  But PolitiFact rates the commonly touted opposition statistic that your chances of being killed by a refugee are 1 in 3.6 billion as “mostly true,” primarily because the statement should more properly be considered to be “your chances of being killed on American soil by a refugee in an act of terrorism are 1 in 3.64 billion per year.”  Still pretty low.  And, while it’s true that the study this is based on excludes the 3 people that died in the Boston Marathon bombings because those perpetrators were not refugees but rather their family has been granted political asylum—an admittedly nitpicky distinction—it’s still a wash because the only people that the study could identify as having been killed by terrorist refugees were 3 people killed prior to the 1980 Refugee Act, which radically increased how hard it is to get refugee status.^*  So I think it’s safe to call this fear of refugees, which is being masterfully played on by Trump and many other politicians, as imaginary.  As Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu pointed out when he originally trotted out this statistic, your chances of being struck by lightning twice is 1 in 9 million.  You know, just for comparison purposes.

Given the recent WikiLeaks dump on the CIA’s ability to turn your televsion into a listening device, I found this one pretty spot-on as well:

Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.

    — H. L. Mencken, 1920

Ah, if all we had to worry about were letter-openers.  Those were truly the good ol’ days.


I’ll leave you with that thought for this week.  Next week I hope to have a more regular post.

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* Also, classifying those incidents as “terrorism” is a bit dicey, and 2 of the 3 people killed weren’t American, although they were on American soil at the time.