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.

A quick quote

Partially due to the prior craziness of this month not having completely abated yet, partially due to a somewhat exhausting trip to Disneyland this week, and partially due to coming into our March birthday season, there’s no time for a full post this week.  However, I will give you a partial post by sharing one of my many favorite quotes.

When it comes to non-fiction television, there are only a few shows that I regularly watch:

• The Daily Show (with Trevor Noah)
• @Midnight (with Chris Hardwick)
• The Late Show (with Stephen Colbert)
• Last Week Tonight (with John Oliver)
• Full Frontal (with Samantha Bee)

That’s it.  No reality TV, no sports, no cooking shows,^* no travel shows, no talk shows, no hard news ... outside of the occasional nature documentary or science show with my kids, there ain’t nothing else.  And you can see the pattern here: these are all shows where I can find out what’s going on in the world, but they make me laugh at it instead of depressing the hell out of me.

Of course, the first 3 of these also have guests: often celebrities of some type or other—actors, directors, musicians, politicians, sports stars—but sometimes less well-known folks, like lesser-known authors, activists, historians, political commentators, or journalists.  I have an interesting take on the celebrities,^** but the other guests are usually more intriguing.  They’re typically people I’ve never heard of before (unless they were previously guests on one of the other shows), and they often have really interesting stories, which they have a few minutes to spit out on the air in ultra-condensed form, and sometimes they say very cool things.  Here’s a quick example.

Wes Moore is a fellow that Wikipedia describes as “an American author, social entrepreneur, producer, political analyst, and decorated US Army officer.”  The man has done a veritable shitload of things in his less-than-40 years on the planet, and he’s quite an impressive guest on a show like those I mention above: knowledgeable, articulate, and passionate.  On February 4th of 2015, Jon Stewart interviewed him on The Daily Show.  You can watch the entire clip on the Internet if you like,^*** but for purposes of this quick post I want to just mention one thing he said:

Every day you’re doing what you’re not passionate about, you become extraordinarily ordinary.

    — Wes Moore, quoting a mentor of his

As I sometimes do when I hear a quote worthy of capturing, I had to stop (in this case, pause the DVR) and digest that for a minute, then back up and transcribe it, going over and over it several times to make sure I had it down exactly.  ‘Cause that’s just damned inspiring.  I have tried to focus my life on doing things that I’m passionate about, and I hope I’ve managed to instill that in my children as well.  But I have never been able to say what Wes Moore said so succinctly or clearly: don’t waste your time on things you’re not passionate about.  Don’t even bother.  Because that’s how you fade into obscurity, and perhaps even worse: that’s how you deprive the world of your talent.  I thank Mr. Moore for sharing his wisdom with me.

Which I’ve now passed on to you, in case you missed it the first time around.  Hopefully it will inspire you as it has me.  Until next week, go out and do something you’re passionate about.  I plan to as well.

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* I used to watch Good Eats, but it’s not on any more.  And Iron Chef, in most all of its incarnations.  But I gave up on cooking shows.

** Which is probably worthy of its own blog post someday.

*** And if you can stand to deal with Comedy Central’s horrible player, which generally I can’t.

Penumbral Phosphorescence I

"And Death Scourged Her" [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.

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.] My mixes get started in various ways.  Often I just hear a song that reminds me of another song, and I start to build a mix around it.  Sometimes I “split” a mix: I realize that several songs that I’ve slotted into one mix actually have a character all their own which is slightly distinct from the original.  And sometimes I just wake up and go “hey! why don’t have a mix for ... ?” And several months ago I realized I didn’t have a mix of goth music. Now, I’m not a huge goth fan, but I do enjoy it quite a bit, and I have plenty of goth music lying around ... more than enough to make a mix out of.  In fact, this mix will have no trouble growing to multiple volumes if I want it to.  And yet I’d never sat down and made a goth mix.  Obviously it was time to correct that. Now, many people have the impression that goth music is slow, and depressing, and perhaps a bit creepy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Oh, sure: some goth is all that.  The occasional song or three on pretty much every goth album ever made is exactly that.  But an album is generally 8 – 12 songs ... so if no more than 25% or so of goth music is the moody dirges that most people associate with the genre, then what is the other 75%? It’s surprisingly high-energy, as it turns out.  The first-wave goth bands, like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, and Bauhaus, came out of the punk movement.  The second-wave goth bands, like Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, and Fields of the Nephilim, eventually led to goth-metal.  Much of modern goth, like Faith and the Muse and the later Clan of Xymox work, has strong ties to industrial.  As a result, goth can be hard-edged, danceable, or simply finger-snapping sing-along.  Now, don’t get me wrong: it still has to drip with atmosphere, have a certain lyrical darkness, play with some discordancy or minor chords.  If it didn’t do that, it wouldn’t be proper goth.  But if you’re looking for slow and foreboding, this is not the mix for that.¹  This mix showcases music which is dark, but also has a certain, shimmering light in it, like bioluminescent fungi and insects in a cave ... Sometimes the lyrics here are stereotypically goth.  They’re about night, and the moon, and madness, and post-nuclear wastelands.  Or they have Wiccan themes: our volume title is from the spoken-word intro to Unto Ash’s “Der Letzte Ritter,”² which in turn quotes a Wiccan legend called “The Descent of the Goddess”:

And she knelt, and Death scourged her, and she cried: “I feel the pangs of love.”³

Or this passage from Faith and the Muse’s “Sovereign,” which also has a very Wiccan feel to it:

In the presence of a moment divine,
As the shadows gather at the shrine,
We retreat and advance
In the spell of the dance,
Familiars all
Tonight.

At the other end of the spectrum, Fad Gadget’s “Collapsing New People” seems to be a not-so-subtle dig at goth culture:

Exaggerate the scar tissue
Wounds that never heal
Takes hours of preparation
To get that wasted look

But I think the main thing we forget is that “gothic horror” came well after “gothic art,” and in particular “gothic architecture.” The primary characteristic of anything “goth” must first and foremost be a sense of drama and spectacle.  If that drama and spectacle is obssessed with death, then so much the better, but it’s really the scope and gravitas that is crucial. For this opening volume, I’ve made some obvious choices, although picking the right song from an obvious artist is often tough.  For Siouxsie, I chose “Cities in Dust,” although of course “Spellbound” would also have been an excellent choice.  But honestly I just like “Cities in Dust” better: it has a shimmery quality that I feel epitomizes the mood of this mix.  For Sisters of Mercy, “This Corrosion” would have been the obvious choice,⁴ but in the end I went with “Black Planet,” which just seemed to fit better in this set.  For Bauhaus, I suppose most people would have gone with “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” but I’ve always liked “Silent Hedges” better.  The Mission offers lots of great choices, but I stuck with what was probably their biggest hit, “Wasteland,” which opens with Wayne Hussey’s nearly whispered “I still believe in God, but God no longer believes in me” (and if that doesn’t sum up goth in one sentence, I don’t know what would).  Faith and the Muse’s rollicking “Sovereign” was also a no-brainer.  And for the Cure I didn’t even hesitate: it had to be “Three Imaginary Boys.” Yes, yes: “Fascination Street,” and “One Hundred Years,” and even “A Forest.”⁵  But “Three Imaginary Boys” has the echoey vocals and creeping menace that project a dark fever-dream, and though the tempo is fairly slow throughout, there’s quite a jarring guitar break that shows that goth isn’t wimpy, which is rather the point of this mix. Of course, the term “goth” is often used interchangeably with “darkwave,” but I reserve the latter term for the more ethereal, dreampop-influenced bands that we’ve mostly seen so far on Smokelit Flashback and Shadowfall Equinox: Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Falling You, Love Spirals Downwards, and so forth.  Still, darkwave has something to offer here.  Unto Ashes is ostensibly a darkwave band, although “Der Letzte Ritter” is a bit more energetic than their usual fare.  One might describe Canadian/American duo Desire as darkwave, I suppose, but I find “Under Your Spell” to be closer to witchhouse.⁶  That is, it has strong electronica roots, but still retains a nice darkness that makes it work well here.  Cocteau Twins is of course the quintessential dreampop band, but their first album, Garlands, is pretty solidly goth: I consider it evidence that dreampop forked off from goth in the first place, and darkwave is just an attempt to bring dreampop back to its roots.  “Wax and Wane” is not a high-energy song, exactly, but it’s pretty high-energy for the Cocteaus.  Then we have Carol Tatum, the mastermind of Angels of Venice, which is primarily a neoclassical/new age act.  Here she solicits Seraphim Shock’s lead singer Charles Edward⁷ to produce a strange fusion, of which I think “Primitive Kiss” is the absolute best.  And of course one of the first bands to be called “darkwave” at all was Xymox, who so far we’ve only seen on Shadowfall Equinox.  And, when they go by that name, they are indeed far too mellow for this mix.  But their original moniker was Clan of Xymox, which they returned to after their darkwave phase, also returning to a more proper gothic sound.  “Hail Mary” is a fairly late effort from them, but it’s the sort of tune that builds beautifully and really grows on you: the more I hear it, the more I feel that gothic sense of melodrama.  It’s an excellent closer for this volume. There’s also some connection between goth and synthpop/new wave.  With Sympathy, the debut from Ministry, who would eventually come to epitomize the sound of goth-adjacent industrial, was a solidly synthpop effort.  Now, Alain Jourgensen has often said that that’s only because the label remixed it into something he now wishes to disavow.  But I’ve listened to this album many times, and I tell you straight: if this album weren’t synthpop, it wouldn’t be industrial—it would be goth.  I mean, come on! it’s got red roses and black-painted fingernails right on the cover.  In terms of early Ministry, some people might prefer “Every Day Is Halloween,” but I think “Effigy” is pretty spot on here.  And of course it’s hard to get synthpoppier than Depeche Mode.  One of the smoothest transitions on this volume⁸ is from “Wasteland” to “Fly on the Windscreen.” While Depeche Mode certainly isn’t a goth band, some of their music has goth leanings, and in my opinion they have one album which is pretty solidly goth, back to front: Black Celebration.  “Fly on the Windscreen” is pretty much their all-time gothiest, and I couldn’t resist putting it here.  Plus, like I say: it flows so beautifully off the end of the Mission that often you don’t notice you’ve transitioned from the one song to the next until you hear Dave Gahan’s vocals kick in. For more proper new wave, it’s tough to beat Fad Gadget.  I loved “Collapsing New People” when I first heard it, back on WHFS while I was living in DC.  But I never knew who sang it.  I recently stumbled upon Fad Gadget completely by accident and rediscovered this lost classic, which I now gift to you.  In more general alt-rock terms, Jesus and Mary Chain isn’t really a goth band, but their excellent album Darklands is pretty goth-inspired, and the title track works nicely here.  And of course Peter Murphy is goth royalty, having fronted Bauhaus for its original, highly influential run, as well as for all its subsequent reunions.  I think the amazing Deep is the closest Murphy gets to recreating Bauhaus, and I went with the unreleased “Seven Veils” as an excellent example of a more powerful track that still oozes goth atmosphere.

Penumbral Phosphorescence I
[ And Death Scourged Her ]

“Der Letzte Ritter” by Unto Ashes, off Moon Oppose Moon
“Sovereign” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“Primitive Kiss” by Carol Tatum, off Ancient Delirium
“In the Wake of Adversity” by Dead Can Dance, off Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
“Black Planet” by the Sisters of Mercy, off First and Last and Always
“Under Your Spell” by Desire, off II
“Collapsing New People” by Fad Gadget, off Gag
“Effigy (I'm Not An)” by Ministry, off With Sympathy
“Wasteland” by the Mission, off Godʼs Own Medicine
“Fly on the Windscreen (final)” by Depeche Mode, off Black Celebration
“Seven Veils” by Peter Murphy, off Deep
“Pretty” by the Cranberries, off Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?
“Three Imaginary Boys” by the Cure, off Boys Don't Cry
“Silent Hedges” by Bauhaus, off The Sky's Gone Out
“Wax and Wane” by Cocteau Twins, off Garlands
“Darklands” by the Jesus and Mary Chain, off Darklands
“Cities in Dust” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Tinderbox
“Hail Mary” by Clan of Xymox, off In Love We Trust

Total:  18 tracks,  79:17

In the “unlikely candidates” category, there’s really only one real stretch here: “Pretty” by the Cranberries.  It’s not really a goth tune, but it has a certain darkness that I find irresistible, as well that shimmering quality I’ve been trying to capture here, so it ended up on this mix quite early, even though I kept looking at as if I were playing a game of “one of these things is not like the others.” And, finally, I don’t think you can put together a list of songs anywhere near the category of goth without featuring at least one tune from Dead Can Dance.  That band is not goth at all: it’s primarly a dreampop-worldmusic fusion.  And yet there is an undeniable goth energy in many of DCD’s albums, as evidenced by the fact that every Dead Can Dance tribute album⁹ is full of darkwave and goth-metal artists.  Of course, as a proper dreampop band, much of DCD’s output is far too mellow for this mix.  But they do have a song every now and again which pulses with a dark energy that makes it perfect for this mix.  “In the Wake of Adversity,” which sees Brendan Perry sing:

Hey, Patrice, don’t cry;
They’ve no reason to harm you at all.
They don’t realize
That the angels surround you with light.

was too good not to include here. Next time, we’ll return once more to the halls of Morpheus.

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1 There certainly are mixes for that, of course, some of which we’ve already seen and some which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

2 Which is German for “The Last Knight.” Most of the song is in German, but the intro is in English.

3 As with all sacred texts, the exact wording of this passage varies depending on the source.  Most versions I’ve read phrase it as “Death scourged her tenderly.”

4 And it will definitely show up on volume II, unless I steal it for another mix first.

5 The last of which will almost certainly be featured on volume II.

6 A subgenre we’ll no doubt hear more from on volume II.

7 I’m not a huge fan of Seraphim Shock, but there’s a decent chance we’ll see them on future volumes.

8 And probably in the top 10 for any volume on any of my mixes, really.

9 Such as The Lotus Eaters or The Carnival Within.

The weather, she is a-changin'

This has been a difficult week on several fronts, and I’m unfortunately running behind on quite a few things I oughtn’t be.  So I’m going to take a week off from pretending like you’re ignoring my advice and reading this blog anyway.  If you notice, that’ll just be a bonus.

In the meantime, something you could do instead would be to ponder how California has gone, seemingly without transition, from drought to flooding.  I mean, obviously “global warming” is a hoax, because snow is still a thing that happens.  But I think it’s fair to say that the climate is definitely changing ...

Perl blog post #54

Today I’ve posted an update on a couple of my CPAN modules over on my Other Blog.  While it is somewhat technical in the later paragraphs—even including some actual code this time!—it also includes some introductory paragraphs where I ramble on about my tendency to be distracted easily and how I probably have ADHD and I probably won’t even make it to the end of this.  So you may wish to at least read the first few bits and then tune out once you feel like it got too technogeeky and your brain checked out.  And then you can feel just like I do when I get tired of my latest project.

But after that you’re on your own.  Okay, I’ll give you one minor suggestion: I did just finish Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell on Netflix, and I quite recommend it.  Eddie Marsan and Marc Warren alone would make it worthwhile, but the remainder of the cast, plus an excellent adaption of Susanna Clarke’s riveting story, makes it unmissable.  Just my 2¢ worth.

A Lifelong Quest

This is not exactly a technology post, and it’s not exactly a gaming post, and it’s not exactly a (personal) history post, but in a way it’s all of those things rolled into one.  Let me start by telling you a little story.

When I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years old, our family got a new computer: a Commodore 64, which was, at that time, state of the art.  I always thought that we bought it specifically for me, but my father corrected me a few years back, telling me that he originally bought it for himself, but he couldn’t really figure out how to work it, so he figured he’d see if I had any better luck.  I did, as it turned out, and it was the beginning of my programming career.  I think that pretty much anything you do as a career (as opposed to just a job) has to start out with you doing something for fun.  Otherwise you’re just in it for the paycheck.

The first program I ever wrote (which was in BASIC) looked like this:

10 PRINT “MY NAME”
20 GOTO 10

The second program I ever wrote was a D&D character generator.

Now, I tell you this story to let you know exactly how long I’ve been trying to program a D&D character sheet.  My obsession has carried me across 35 years of technology, and it’s driven many of my decisions as to what to learn.  I quickly learned I had to give up on BASIC (too slow), so I taught myself assembly.¹  I dove very deep into the formula languages of first Lotus 1-2-3, then Excel, and now Google Sheets, so that I could do spreadsheet-based character sheets, and I taught myself VBA when that wasn’t enough, and now I’m almost sort of proficient in Javascript for the same reason.²  The first database I ever learned—dBase III, that would have been—I didn’t learn for the purpose of making character sheets, but it was the thought that it might be used for that purpose that drove me ever deeper into the language.  Same with SQL.  I’ve done very little GUI programming, but most of what little I have done—Delphi, and wxWindows, and Django, and Gantry—was mined for what it could teach me about how to make interfaces for D&D players.  I’ve written DSLs for dice-rolling, and extensions to Template Toolkit, and I even tried to write a “better” spreadsheet in Perl once, all so I could program the perfect character sheet.  If I ever get around to writing my SQL-language-extension, which will probably be done in Perl 6, one of the first things I’ll do with it is integrate classes with DB tables for aspects of D&D characters.

And, the sad part is, I’ve been doing this over and over again for 35 years, and it’s never worked properly.  There are a myriad of reasons for this.  A character sheet is a huge quantity of interrelated numbers with complex interdependencies, which make it almost perfect to render as a spreadsheet.  But the rules are just baroque and irregular enough to make it a breeze for the first 50% and practically impossible for the last 25%.  Contrariwise, the amount of dependent recalculation means that it’s a giant pain in the ass to do in a general programming language, unless you fancy trying to reinvent the spreadsheet wheel.³  The amount of data that needs to be stored, as well as the number of set operations necessary, mean that a database solution (such as SQL) is pretty attractive, for certain aspects.  But trying to do that much recalculation in a database language is even more terrifying than trying to do it in Perl or C++, and most of the parts Excel can’t handle, SQL is even worse at.

The thing that makes a database application or language really attractive, though, is the place where spreadsheets really fall down: separation of code and data.  If I write a program in a general language, I have code and then, elsewhere, I have data.⁴  In a database application, the line may be a bit blurrier, but the separation is there, and the proof is, I can give you updated code, and that doesn’t change your data a whit.  Not so with spreadsheets.  With those, the code and the data are one piece.  If I give you an updated spreadsheet, it comes with its own data (which is always blank).  But say you’ve already got a character sheet: it’s full of your data—you know, for your character.  Hell, the reason you wanted the upgrade in the first place was no doubt that you found a bug in my code, or maybe I just added a new feature that you really need.  But now there’s no way for you to migrate that data out of the old sheet and into the new.

Now start multiplying that problem.  If you’re a D&D player, you probably have lots of characters.  And how many people are using this spreadsheet thingy anyways?  My very first fully functional Excel spreadsheet was only used for one character each by 3 players (i.e. the 3 players in that particular campaign I was running)—and myself as the GM, of course—and it was a nightmare every time I updated the sheet.  A D&D character is not a huge amount of data, especially not when compared to big data or even the database of a middling-sized business, but it’s also pretty much nothing but data.  You don’t want to have to re-enter all of it every time I fix a bug.  To use the appropriate technobabble, this is a separation of concerns issue, and more specifically having to do with the separation of code vs data.  Of course, it’s quite fashionable these days (among technogeeks, anyway) to argue that code and data are the same thing, but I can only suppose that the people making those arguments never had to release code updates to users.⁵  I only had three users and I was going crazy trying to figure out how to separate my code from my data.

(To delve a bit deeper into the technical side of the problem, what I really want is for someone to invent a spreadsheet that’s actually just an interface into a database.  The spreadsheet programmer “ties” certain cells to certain columns of certain tables in the database, and the spreadsheet user is only allowed to enter data into those specific cells.  There could be multiple rows in the spreadsheet, corresponding to multiple rows in the table, and it would be easy to add a new one.  Sorting or filtering the rows wouldn’t affect the underlying data.  The database back-end might need some tweaking as well—what if the user enters a formula into a data cell instead of a constant?—but ideally it could use a standard datastore such as MySQL.  Somebody get on inventing this right away, please.  I don’t ask for any financial consideration for the idea ... just make sure I’m your first beta tester.)

But the problems with realizing the perfect computerized character sheet aren’t all technical.  A lot of it has to do with house rules.  If you’re not familiar with D&D, this may not make sense.  You may think house rules are simple little things, like getting cash when you land on Free Parking in Monopoly.  But RPGs (of which D&D is the grandaddy of them all) have a whole different relationship to house rules.  House rules can change anything, at any time, and the rulebooks actively encourage you to use them.  “GM fiat” is a well-entrenched concept, and that includes pretty much everything involved in character creation.  2nd edition D&D said only humans could be paladins, but many GMs threw that rule out.  3rd edition said multiclassed characters had to take an experience point penalty, but a lot of groups never enforced that.  What if a GM wants to change the value of some bonus granted by some feature? what if they want to raise the maxima for something? or lift the restrictions on something else?  What if they want to change the frequency of something, like feats gained, or ability score increases?

The complexity—but, more importantly, the prevalence—of house rules is death on a character sheet program.  In a fundamental way, programming is codifying rules, and if the rules aren’t fixed ...  Even when I’m noodling around with designing a character sheet that will only be useful for me and my friends, I still hit this problem, because we don’t all agree on what the house rules should be, and we’re constantly changing our minds.  Imagine how much more difficult it is to come up with something that will be useful to all gamers: there’s a reason that D&D has been around for over 40 years and no one has yet solved this problem.  Oh, sure: there are lots of attempts out there, some done with spreadsheets, some as database front-ends, and some as general programs.  But this is not a solved problem, by any means, and all of them have some area where they fall down.  Again, the prevalence of house rules in roleplaying is a crucial thing here, because it means that you can’t just say, “well, I’ll just make a program that works as long as you’re not using any house rules at all, and that’ll be better than nothing,” because now your userbase is about 4 or 5 people.  It’s hardly worth the effort.

So it’s not an easy problem, although I often feel like that’s a pretty feeble excuse for why I’ve been working on what is essentially the same program for 35 years and never managed to finish it.  But I’m feeling pretty good about my latest approach, so, if you’ll indulge me in a bit (more) technobabble, I’ll tell you basically how it works.

First, after a long hiatus from the spreadsheet angle, I’m back to it, but this time using Google Sheets.  Although I’ve already hit the complexity wall⁶ with ‘Sheets, it took much longer to get to than with Excel.⁷  Plus it has a number of things I never had with Excel:⁸ you can sort and filter in array formulae, and you have both unique and join.  Much more intelligent handling of array formulae is the biggest win for me with Google Sheets; in many other areas (particularly cell formatting) it still trails Excel, to my annoyance.  But it mainly means that I never have to program extensions, as I did with Excel.  Plus, when I do decide to use some extensions (mainly to make complex/repetitive tasks easier), I get to program in Javascript, which is almost a tolerable languaage, as opposed to VBA, which is decidedly not.  I still have the code/data problem, but I’ve come up with a moderately clever solution there: all my “input cells” (which I color-code for ease-of-use) don’t start out blank, but rather with formulae that pull data from a special tab called “LoadData,” which is itself blank.  Then there’s another tab called “SaveData,” which contains a bunch of formulae that pull all the data from the input cells: every input cell has a corresponding row on the “SaveData” tab.  When you want to upgrade your sheet, you can rename the existing sheet, grab a new (blank) copy of the upgraded sheet, go to “SaveData” on the old sheet, select-all, copy, go to “LoadData” in the new sheet, then paste values.⁹  (And again: I coded up a little Javascript extension for the sheet that will do all that for you, but you still could do it manually if you needed to for any reason.)  Now, this isn’t perfect: the biggest downside is that, if you happen to know what you’re doing and you actually stick a formula into an input cell, that’s going to get lost—that is, it’ll silently revert to the actual current value—when you upgrade your sheet.  But that’s moderately rare, and it works pretty awesomely for the 95% of other cases where you need to transfer your data.  I still miss the ability to do database ops (e.g. SQL),¹⁰ and I absolutely miss the ability to make classes and do inheritance, but so far I haven’t found any problem that I can’t solve with enough applications of match and offset, hidden columns, and tabs full of temporary results.  (To be fair, I’ve postponed solving several problems, and I have a lot of “insert arbitrary bonus here” input cells, but those actually help out in the presence of house rules, so I don’t mind ’em.)

So I feel like I’m closer now than I ever have been before.  Sure, this one will only work for D&D, and only for one edition of D&D,¹¹ but if I can make it work for pretty much any such character, that’ll still be the closest to fulfilling my dream that I’ve achieved thus far.  I’ve got a lot more testing to do before I can make that claim, and several more character types to flesh out (I haven’t done very much with spellcasters at all, and monks are alwyays a giant pain in the ass), but it looks promising, and I’m starting to get just a little bit excited about it.  Which is why I wanted to share it with you.  And also because it’s been consuming a fair amount of my free time lately, so I thought it might be good to get some details out there for posterity.  Maybe one day, if you’re a D&D player, you’ll be using a version of my character sheet on your laptop at the gaming table.

Or maybe I’ll still be working on it in the nursing home.  Either way, it should be fun.

__________

1 For the 6510, this would have been.  Although I didn’t really have any concept of that at the time; in fact, I really only know it now because Wikipedia just told me so.
2 That is, because Javascript is how you write extensions for Google Sheets, just as VBA was how you wrote them for Excel.
3 Which, as I mentioned, I actually tried to do once.  I didn’t fancy it.
4 Let’s pretend that where “elsewhere” is is not really important for a moment.  The truth, of course, is that it’s vitally important.  But these are not the droids you’re looking for.
5 Which is not unheard of.  A lot of code out there in the world doesn’t really have data entered by a user, and quite a chunk of it doesn’t even have “users” at all.  And a lot of programmers work exclusively on such code.  For those folks, this is an interesting philosophical debate as opposed to a self-obvious truth.
6 By which I mean the point at which a spreadsheet fails to recalculate certain cells for no apparent reason.  Generally if you just delete the formula and re-enter it, then everything works.  But it’s nearly always intermittent, and thus useless to complain about or report.  Every spreadsheet I’ve ever worked with has a complexity wall, and the character sheet app always manages to hit it eventually.
7 To be fair to Excel, that was a decade or two ago.  It might be better now.  But I bet it’s not.
8 Again, it’s possible that Excel may have one or more of these features by now.
9 Well, except that Google Sheets currently has a bit of a bug with trying to paste values from one sheet to another.  But there’s a simple workaround, which is again a perfect reason to have a little code extension to do the steps for you.
10 Google Sheets has a query function that sort of lets you do pseudo-SQL on your data tables, but you can only refer to columns by letter, not name, so I consider it fairly useless.
11 Specifically, 5e, which I’ve talked about before on this blog.

GM Philosophy: Character Is King

I want to expand on a concept I’ve touched on before: namely, the idea that the “object” of a D&D game (or any PnP RPG) is to tell a compelling story.  Without rehashing too much of the “why” that is, I’ll just say that the fact that I can meet anyone from any walk of life, in any situation, and, if that person also has played D&D before, we will instantly start swapping cool stories about games we were in ... that’s the magic of D&D right there, in a nutshell.  The stories you forge when you roleplay are epic, magical, intense, and, amazingly, better than anything you’ve ever read, or seen, or heard.

The reason for this is simple: when a group of friends sits down at the table to play, we’re all bringing worlds of experience to bear on the problem of how to tell the greatest story imaginable.  Every fantasy book we’ve ever read, movie we’ve ever seen, videogame we’ve ever played—even pieces of art and songs slip in there.  Comic books, TV shows, fairy tales, YouTube videos ... all of it goes in the melting pot, and we all get to stand on the shoulders of giants and come up with something that is all of that and more: it is both derivative and original, it combines things that were never meant to be combined, and most of all it is intensely personal.  There is an inevitable us-ness that oozes out of our experiences and our dreams and our imaginations and indelibly stains the shared story that we create.  And that makes it something that you can never get anywhere else.  You may love the Lord of the Rings saga—no matter whether that means Peter Jackson’s 9-hour epic or the original half-million words of Tolkien—but you’d love it more if your best friend was Frodo, your cousin was Legolas, your coworkers were Merry and Pippin, and you were Aragorn.  By all the gods—old and new—you’d tell that story to anyone and everyone who would listen.  That would be legendary, by Crom.  That would be a holy grail, a dragon ball, a heron-marked blade, a glaive, a triforce.  That would be shiny.

So the principal idea of D&D, as far as I’m concerned, is that we’re all going to get together, and we’re going to tell a story.  And there is one simple rule for storytelling that I believe is paramount: character is king.  Not everyone agrees with me on this, but there are certainly plenty of famous authors (and even filmmakers) who concur.  We’ve all read books, or seen movies, or watched TV shows, where we just didn’t care about the characters.  No matter how interesting the plot may be, no matter how outrageous the situation or how detailed the setting, you’re never going to enjoy a story where you don’t give a crap if the characters live or die.  And, contrariwise, if you do care about the characters, then you’ll enjoy the story even if you could care less about the plot, or even the entire genre.  As a simple example, I don’t care for lawyers.  The whole premise of the courtroom drama I find overdone to the point of cliché, and it mostly bores me.  I never liked Perry Mason, I never liked Matlock, and I don’t watch Law & Order.^*  I always thought A Few Good Men was overrated, and even the ultra-classic 12 Angry Men I could take or leave.  But I read John Grisham novels, and I watched every episode of The Good Wife.  Why?  Because the characters are interesting, and I care what happens to them.

So the number one thing we can do to make our D&D game the Most Interesting Story Ever Told is to start with interesting characters.  And the number thing we can do to make our characters interesting is to develop their backstory.  You need to think about where your character grew up, who their parents were, what are the things they do for fun.  You want to play a hulking barbarian, like Conan?  Great: why are they a hulking barbarian?  If you like Conan because of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, then you know that he was a hulking barbarian because of the years he spent pushing a giant wheel as a slave.  Which was after the whole having-his-entire-village-wiped-out-by-bad-guys thing and the whole having-his-parents-die-in-front-of-his-eyes-as-a-child thing.  This is a pretty great backstory,^** and your character needs one just as good.  Or perhaps your character is a wizard, like Harry Potter, who has a pretty awesome backstory himself.  Or are you an archer, like Merida, an assassin, like Arya, or a kick-ass swordsman, like Cloud?  ‘Cause they all have pretty amazing backstories too.  You know why Merida uses a bow, you know why Arya worships the god of death, and you know why Cloud carries that big honkin’ sword.  Shouldn’t you know why your character is who they are?

And not only does a properly fleshed-out backstory make your character more real, and therefore more interesting, but you may find that it also throws off story hooks like fireworks throw off sparks.  I already told the story of my middle child’s first character, and how we came up with a moderately complex backstory in a pretty short amount of time.  I also noted that, since the backstory included a missing, possibly captured, former teacher, there was every chance that, at some point in our campaign, we’re going to find that guy.  As Chekhov’s Gun reminds us, such plot elements need to be paid off later in the story, otherwise they’re pointless.  Here’s another story from my time as GM where a player brought me a backstory that ended up heavily influencing the action of the campaign.

In between 2e and 3e D&D, I ran a game where we mostly used D&D rules, but I threw out all restrictions.  You could combine any class features you wanted, play any combination of race and class ... anything.  My brother said he wanted to play an elven paladin, which was something the 2e rules forbade.  I said, sure, that sounds awesome.  He said, my character’s goal will be to serve the elven king.  Whoa, I replied, that may be a problem, because there is no elven king in this world.  See, I had already developed a whole new world where I wanted to play with some of the stereotypes of the standard Tolkien-derived races, and I had worked out racial backstories and cultures for everyone, and the elves, it turns out, had given up having kings about 5,000 years ago, for complex reasons involving war and magical artifacts and evil archmages and whatnot.  It was sort of crucial to the whole campaign, in fact.  So I wasn’t too keen on having to rework all that just to suit my brother’s character concept.  So I explained all that to him.  Fine, he said: my character’s mission then is to find the long-lost elven king.  Or his descendants, or whatever.  That will be my quest.  I said, what if there just isn’t anything to find?  My brother assured me that his character wasn’t the sort of person to give up a quest just because it was hopeless.  Which I found sort of endearing.  So I made my brother (and his companions) journey to one of the Great Cities, so they could do research at the Great Library of Baqai, and then go on a quest to get something to appease the thriddles,^*** who were the only ones capable of navigating the massive stacks of books in the Great Library, and they produced a complex report on the royal elven lineage, which led the party to a strange hermit who seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of lost knowledge, who told them to be in a certain place at a certain phase of the moon, where they ran into a young elven maiden and her bodyguard being chased by a horde of zombies, and then our overeager elven paladin decided that she was the last remaining carrier of the royal bloodline, and we ended up following her around for months ...

So you can see how one little piece of backstory from a single character helped shape the whole campaign, and gave us dozens of great stories to tell about our adventures.  I could tell you stories like this all day: it happens in nearly every campaign.

This underscores the importance of spending enough time to create a real, believable character, with a history, and desires, and goals.  It takes a little extra time, sure, but it’s worth it.  Your D&D character is a superhero, and every superhero has to have an origin story.  You don’t even have to write it down—that’s probably the best option, but you don’t want to think of it as a homework assignment either.  So, if writing is not your thing, just tell it to me.  Draw a picture.  Make a YouTube video.  Whatever.  If you need help coming up with ideas, just sit down and chat with me and we’ll come up with something together.  It will be a small investment of time and effort, granted.  (And it’s because of this extra time and effort that I’m asking of my players that I don’t kill characters.)  But your time and patience will be rewarded.  With an amazing story that you’ll want to tell all your friends about.  And it’ll be all the better because every character in it will be a real, interesting person ... and because one of those people is you.

__________

* Well, except for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but that’s mainly because they’re never actually in the courtroom in that one.  Also: Vincent D’Onofrio.  Everything is better with Vincent D’Onofrio.

** Even if it doesn’t appeal to fans of the original character as envisioned by creator Robert E. Howard.  (Who was once played by Vincent D’Onofrio.  See?  I told you everything was better with Vincent D’Onofrio.)

*** A thriddle is a race that I stole from the Skyrealms of Jorune RPG.

A sequence of happenstances which were less than fortunate

I was doing really well there for a while.  I even got ahead on the blog posts and was scheduling them in the future.  Just for a few weeks, but still.

This week, it has all fallen apart.  A number of issues over the past couple of weeks, mostly personal ones, have conspired to blow through my backlog of posts and put me back on my more typical, oh-shit-I-have-to-do-a-blog-post-today sort of a schedule.  I even had one started already for this week, but I’m seeing now that there’s really no way I’m going to finish it.  So I’ll work on it tomorrow, or the next day, and have it up for you next week instead.

Sorry for the delay.  But, as I’ve noted before, the Internet is a big place.  I’m sure you can find something else to amuse you.  (May I suggest Netflix’s new version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, perhaps?  It really is quite good.)

Paradoxically Sized World IV

"Darkness to the Light"

[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.]

Kicking off yet another volume of music both from and inspired by LittleBigPlanet, we have my middle child’s all-time favorite LBP song: “Race Against the Sunset,” by Lullatone.  It is truly an awesome tune, found right in the “Prologue” area of LBP3, and it always puts me in a Paradoxically Sized World sort of mood.  I’ve paired it here with a non-LBP track from Shugo Tokumaru, “Platform,” as sort of a mirror of the opening for Paradoxically Sized World III.¹  Together they make about 3½ minutes of an excellent volume opener.

Also in the back for more category is one of my favorite electronica artists Ugress, who finally shows up with an actual tune used by the game: “Ghost Von Frost,” which was used in the PS Vita version.  Similarly, we saw Pantha du Prince last time, but this time we get to hear his tune which was actually used in the game, “Photon.” Likewise Cinnamon Chasers, who give us “Luv Deluxe” (both tunes are from LBP3).  Contrariwise, last time we saw Tashaki Miyaki,² it was their LBP-used music, whereas now we’re straying from that.  Strangely, it’s yet another late-fifties remake, this time “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” originally by the Everly Brothers.  Tashaki Miyaki give it their inimitable stamp, of course, which makes it fit in nicely here.

It also kicks off a little 3-song run of 50s/60s-inspired music, including “Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider Go!!!” from Trentemøller and “Bombora” by the Atlantics.  Trentemøller is yet another band I would have never heard of if not for LittleBigPlanet, although by this point we seen them on several other mixes.³  But this track from LBP2 was my official introduction to them, and I’m so glad I found them.  The Atlantics, on the other hand, are a 60s surf-rock band from Australia.  “Bombora” was a major surf-rock hit for them in 1963, although this is their 1999 remake, which I find to be a bit fuller and more echoey, which you really want in a surf-rock classic, in my opinion.  This version was also the one used by LBP, for its PSP version.

Speaking of runs, right in the middle of this volume there’s a pretty kick-ass run of worldmusic: from the Indian feel of Beth Quist’s “Om Asatoma Sad Gamaya” (which also provides the volume title), to the Caribbean vibe of Thievery Corporation, out to the Far East for a touch of Japan from KOAN Sound, then circling back to the Middle Eastern strains of Falik, another band I discovered via Magnatune.⁴  Nice little world tour, if I do say so myself.

Other tunes that actually come from the franchise include Gary Numan’s “Trois Gymnopedies,” a mellow, almost spooky, piece of new-wave electronica from before there really was electronica, which is used for the “Bear with Us” level in LBP3.  (Fun fact: although Numan’s version is from his 1980 album Telekon, the original Gymnopédies are 3 works by Erik Satie first published in 1888.  See also Wikipedia.)  Plus we also have “A Go Go” by Trüby Trio, which is one of those songs quite rightly dubbed an “earworm.” It’s a catchy little piece of bossa-nova-inflected jazz from a German band who specialize in a style called “broken beat”.⁵  Another catchy little tune is from Combustible Edison, another of those bands we keep seeing turn up here despite the fact that they’ve never been officially used in an LBP game, more’s the pity.  “Alright, Already” is one of those tunes that just makes your head bop, whether you want it to or not, and keeps it under 3 minutes so as not to wear out its welcome.

As always, I’ve added a note for each track used in a LittleBigPlanet game: either 1, 2, 3, PSP, PSV, or Kart.  If a track doesn’t have a note, it isn’t from an LBP game (that I know of).

Paradoxically Sized World IV
[ Darkness to the Light ]

“Race Against the Sunset” by Lullatone, off Summer Songs [EP]

3

“Platform” by Shugo Tokumaru, off Port Entropy
“Trois Gymnopedies (first movement)” by Gary Numan, off Telekon

3

“A Fifth of Beethoven” by the Walter Murphy Band [Single]

2

“Ghost Von Frost” by Ugress, off Collectronics

PSV

“Om Asatoma Sad Gamaya” by Beth Quist, off Silver
“Mandala” by Thievery Corporation, off Radio Retaliation
“Introvert” by KOAN Sound, off The Adventures of Mr. Fox

3

“Xanthanon” by Falik, off Streaks and Strokes ⁶
“Photon” by Pantha du Prince, off Elements of Light

3

“Alright, Already” by Combustible Edison, off Schizophonic!
“Luv Deluxe” by Cinnamon Chasers, off A Million Miles from Home

3

“All I Have to Do Is Dream” by Tashaki Miyaki, off Under Cover [Covers]
“Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider Go!!!” by Trentemøller, off Into the Great Wide Yonder

2

“Bombora” by the Atlantics [Single]

PSP

“4 Ton Mantis” by Amon Tobin, off Supermodified
“A Go Go” by Trüby Trio [Single]

2

“Subterra” by Saru, off Downtempo Dojo
“Space Suit” by They Might Be Giants, off Apollo 18

Total:  19 tracks,  72:55

There are very few songs in the LBP franchise that I’ve heard before (which is one of the reasons I like to use it as a music discovery service as much as a videogame), and most of those I have heard, I haven’t heard the version that LBP uses.  One of the exceptions to that rule is “A Fifth of Beethoven,” by the Walter Murphy Band.  This was a #1 hit in 1976,⁷ and I’m just old enough to remember hearing it somewhat ubiquitously around that time.  Wikipedia describes it as a “disco instrumental” version of Beethoven’s famous symphony, but I never thought of it as disco.  It’s just pretty cool.  I was a bit surprised to hear it used in LBP (right in the first world of LBP2, “Da Vinci’s Hideout”), but now I have difficulty thinking of it in any other way.  This song is also noticeable for almost certainly being the first time I ever heard a vibraslap.⁸

And, while I’m not sure there’s anything truly unexpected here, I could point to our last 3 tracks, all from the closing tracks of the volume.  First we have “4 Ton Mantis” by Amon Tobin, a Brazilian sound designer who has never actually been featured in LBP, but probably should be.  This track of his is a little mechanical, a little insistent, and a little ambient all at once, and I think you’ll really dig it.  That leads us into “A Go Go,” and thence into “Subterra,” by Saru.  Saru, a.k.a. LA-based producer and DJ Steve Branson, is one of those bands that I no longer have any idea how I managed to stumble across, and he meets my critera for “really obscure artist,” but his album Downtempo Dojo is not to be missed.  And, to close us out, a snippet of a song from those masters of song snippets, They Might Be Giants.  I just felt like “Subterra” has such a strong sci-fi vibe, for some reason, that I couldn’t imagine anything other than TMBG’s “Space Suit” following it.⁹  Plus it makes an awsome way to close out the volume.

Next time, we’ll put on our black lipstick and silver jewelry and blend into the night.

⇐ Paradoxically Sized World III

Paradoxically Sized World V ⇒

__________

1 Where, you may recall, I used a Tokumaru tune (“Rum Hee”) that was from the game (also from LBP3’s “Prologue,” coincidentally) paired with a Lullatone tune (“Hot Sand”) that wasn’t.

2 Meaning, last time we saw them on this mix, which was last volume.  We also saw them on Darkling Embrace I.

3 Specifically, Darkling Embrace I and Smokelit Flashback V.

4 “Another” being a word which here means “in addition to Beth Quist.” See Rose-Coloured Brainpan for more info on Magnatune.

5 Which I have to confess I had never heard of before I started doing research for this blog post.

6 This album seems to have utterly disappeared from the Internet, for some bizarre reason.  The only link I could find to throw you was this one, which goes to a YouTube video of the whole album, which makes it somewhat difficult to extract just the song (although, if you want to try, it’s between roughly 52:08 and 58:03 in the “video”).  The only other place I know of that you can find this particular track is on SoundClick.

7 Just for a week.  But still.

8 Other notable songs to include the vibraslap are “No One in This World” by Kutiman, which we saw on Smokelit Flashback IV, and “Would?” by Alice in Chains, which will see on another mix in the fullness of time.

9 Although I wrestled with this decision, because “Space Suit” makes an excellent bridge, and I already had it slotted for another mix, which we shall also come to in the fullness of time.  But when something’s perfect, you roll with it.  So here it is.

GM Philosophy: Death or Consequences

Historically, D&D has been both too indulgent and too heavy-handed in its approach to being wounded in combat.  On the one hand, magical healing is cheap and easy, and fixes everything.  There is very little that can happen to you in a typical D&D combat that can’t be fixed by the first-level healing abilities of a cleric, druid, or paladin (from 2e onwards), or even a bard (starting in 3e).  Sure, cure light wounds can’t fix being poisoned, or blinded, but, then again, how often do those things come up in combat?  There isn’t much restriction in saying that magical healing can’t regrow a lost limb if there’s no way to actually lose the limb in combat in the first place ... and there isn’t, in most editions of the game.  You can be at zero hit points—which is the fantasy RPG equivalent of flatlining—and receive magical healing, and not only are you magically alive again, but you immediately leap up and start hacking monsters like nothing ever happened.  No recovery period, no lingering weakness, just bam! you’re once again a killing machine at top efficiency.

On the other hand, if by some mischance you do manage to die, then you’re just boned.  Sure, there’s raise dead and similar spells to allow characters to ignore even the worst possible outcome of being wounded, but those are very high-level spells, with the net effect that, by the time you can cast them, you probably don’t need them any more.  Your biggest chance of dying is when you’re low-level, when neither you nor anyone in your party is even close to being able to cast raise dead (or resurrection, or restoration, or regeneration, or even reincarnation, which is about as lame a death-defying “R” spell as there is).  Of course, you could hire some high-level cleric to cast it for you, but that requires a lot of gold ... which, again, at low levels you’re unlikely to possess.  And, even if your party has the cash, they’ve still got to stop what they’re doing, perhaps right in the middle of fighting their way through the dungeon to the ultimate boss fight, battle their way back out to the surface (carrying your lifeless corpse), and then trek back to town, lay out a huge wad of gold pieces, and finally start all over again.  And historically it has been ridiculously easy to die in D&D: Gygaxian lore is full of stories of instant death for characters and potentially apocryphal quotes like “I can’t tell you how you died, because your next character might enter this room too.”

So, overall, traditional D&D has had no consequences for getting hurt, until you’re dead, at which point the consequences are overwhelming.  And recent editions haven’t improved the situation.  Oh, sure: they’ve attempted to address problem #2 by making it harder to die.  Nowadays, instead of being dead as soon as you get to 0 hit points, you’re only dying at that point (to steal a phrase, you’re only mostly dead), and, depending on which edition we’re talking about, it can be anywhere from trivial to convoluted to slip over to the other side.  But this doesn’t really address problem #2: it only postpones it.  It makes death a bit less likely, but it’s still exactly as much of a pain in the ass when it finally does happen.  And their solution to problem #1 is to put their fingers in their ears and repeat “there is no problem!” over and over until we almost believe it.

What it all comes down to is consequences.  If you play a roleplaying game where there is no possibility of dying, there is nothing at stake.  The risks are not real, and you have no motivation to play it smart, to avoid rushing into danger, to occasionally decide to back down and live to fight another day.  Because you know you’ll live today.  I had a game once where I (as the GM) described hordes of goblins guarding an objective, and my players said, “okay, we’ll just go in there and kill them all.”  Because they knew they could, and they knew it might take more rounds than the typical combat, but so what?  Eventually they would prevail, because the goblins couldn’t possibly kill them.  They’re goblins, after all.  What’s the worst they could do?  “They’d have to crit me just to hit me,” one of my mathier players pointed out.  “So one in 20 will do a little damage.  There’s, what? a hundred of them?  So about 5 of ’em will do a little damage.  I’ve got dozens of hit points and the cleric could heal me if I needed it, which I won’t.  In fact, let me save you a bit of trouble and I’ll work out exactly how many of them I can kill every round, so that way you’ll know exactly how many rounds before they’re all dead.”  Back of the envelope calculations does not an epic battle make, and I wasn’t even looking for an epic battle.  I just wanted them to solve a problem without slaughtering all the natives for once.

So there must be consequences.  Sometimes you’ll read articles on the Internet about how D&D was actually better when you could die at the drop of a hat.  These are good articles, by knowledgeable, erudite players.  But I think they miss the point.  What they’re really saying is that the game is no good if there aren’t consequences.  And I don’t disagree with that at all.

But is death the only possible consequence? the only consequence of consequence?  You see, there’s a pretty big problem with death: creating a new character is a huge investment of time and effort.  And I personally, as a GM, have already talked about why I play D&D and my philosophy that an RPG is a shared story, and, as in any story, character is king.  So I not only want my players to put the normal amount of effort into creating their characters—no shortcuts or pregens or any of that nonsense—I actually want them to put in extra effort.  I want rich, detailed characters that have extensive backstories.  If I then make it easy for those characers to get blasted into goo by the whim of the dice, what kind of an asshole does that make me?

So there has to be something better.  There have to be consequences, but death is too much.  So the pledge I make my players is, I will not kill your character, unless you agree to it.  We are after all telling a story, and sometimes the characters in a story die, and that’s right, and proper.  If you think your character should die to advance the story, or you just want to try a new character and want to have your existing character go out in a blaze of glory, I’m all for that.  We’ll give them an absolutely glorious death.  But, barring that, I promise you that I won’t kill your character.

But I also promise you that, if you are reckless, or careless, or sometimes just because the dice gods are cruel, there will be consequences.  Every time you hit 0 hit points, there will be a lasting repercussion, and it will not go away just because the party cleric tossed a few healing spells your way.  Maybe it will go away on its own (eventually), or maybe you can undergo a quest to get it sorted, or maybe you’ll just be stuck with it forever ... disabilities make for fantastic roleplaying opportunities, after all.  What sort of consequences are we talking about?  Oh, the possibilities are inifinite.  You could lose a finger.  Or a hand.  Or an arm.  Or a leg, or an eye, or a spleen.  You could be blinded, deafened, lamed, or paralyzed from the waist down.  You could be scarred or burned horribly and have your charisma impacted.  You could suffer a concussion and have your intelligence lowered.  You could go into a coma and wake up days, weeks, or months later ... possibly with a crippling new phobia.  You could be driven partially or completely insane in very creative ways.  You could stub your toe, or you could have to be carried around on a travois by your companions and fed soft foods through a straw.  Don’t ever imagine that there are not fates worse than death.  (For more great ideas on terrible things a GM can do to players, check out this article from Dice of Doom.)

Which is not to say that I want all my players to be living in constant fear.  But a little bit of fear is healthy.  When I tell you “there’s a hundred goblins surrounding the encampment; how will you get in?”, you do not want to tell me that you’re going to hack your way through.  Trust me: this does not end well for you.  And, hey: if you get your hand lopped off, you can always jam on a stylish hook.  Also, an eyepatch makes a lovely fashion accessory.  Or, hell: jam a magical gem into that empty eye socket and scare the living daylights out of any low-level foes you happen to meet.  The possibilities are endless.  So, to the question at hand, I say forget death: I choose consequences.

Insert evil laugh here.

A Fresh Start

One year ago I told you to have a wonderful 2016.  However, you did not listen to me.  You had a crappy 2016: you let Prince die, and you let David Bowie die, and you let Leonard Cohen die, and you let George Michael die, and you let Carrie Fisher and her mother die, for crying out loud, and you tried to reroute an oil pipeline through sacred Native American lands, and you broke up a nearly-half-century-old agreement while simultaneously depriving the European Union of half its military, and you completely destroyed the third oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and you let the police kill somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand people, and, worst of all, you elected a sleazy pussy-grabber with ties to white supremacy and the Russian oligarchy to the post which is still, for just a bit longer, considered to be the most powerful in the world.  So, fuck you guys.

I will not tell you to have a wonderful 2017.  I’m not sure 2017 is capable of being wondeful at this point.  I’ll just advise you to have a better 2017 than you did a 2016, because, if it gets any worse, I may have to just sit on the sofa and consume beer and Cheetos until the end finally comes for me.  Either that or I’m gonna hafta start researching how to create the virus which will start the zombie apocalypse, ’cause the point at which The Walking Dead starts looking better than the real world ... that’s some fucked up shit.

So try to calm down a bit for this year, wouldja?  Let’s all just chill out a bit and see if 2017 can be a bit more relaxing, a bit less fatal, and feature signficantly less misogyny and racism.  I’m setting my expectations fairly low here.  Please don’t disappoint me.

Thanks.