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Welcome to My Slashfic

Hoh-leeeeee crap! We just got the log from last night’s RPG.

Wait. Let me back up. Ella, running our ongoing M&M “Tethered” campaign is taking a lengthy vacation. So Jude’s taking a sabbatical from gaming as well to ease his busy schedule, and Jen is running a three-session D&D game to keep the rest of us occupied.

I knew going into this that it wouldn’t make my top ten list of RPG sessions. Jen and I have very different tastes, and there’s no right or wrong when it comes to taste. The silver lining: I’ve been clamoring for variety, and this will at least be different. So if we’re going to do an amateur Jane Austen imitation using D&D rules, then by gum I’m going to do the best amateur Jane Austen imitation I can! Besides, whatever I don’t like will all be over in three weeks, anyway.

We had our first session last night. Joe ducked out, so it was just Dave and me trying to match Jen’s vision. Jen sent us a session log this afternoon, ostensibly as reminders for us for what we did this week, and to get Joe up to speed.

I can’t help but notice, however, that well over half of this write-up consists of material we never witnessed. It’s a private conversation between the apparent villain of the piece, a fallen noble working his way up the chain again and sleeping with one of his conquerors, another hunky noble who will hint broadly, at every opportunity, to everyone in the room, that his sexual preferences won’t be a problem as long as they’re kept under wraps. This strikes me as very silly. It’s also destructive to the premise of the adventure, which is supposed to be about navigating strict and arbitrary social obstacles: how are we to take social mores seriously if the major NPCs flout them continuously? It also reeks of bad slashfic. Slashfic almost inevitably looks ridiculous to anyone who isn’t into the particular kink the slashfic addresses. But again, that’s merely a difference of taste. Is bodice-ripping any more ridiculous than the bare-chested hack-n-slash warriors on which RPGs are founded?

Quite beyond being silly and reeking of bad slashfic, however, the write-up is concrete evidence of a cardinal sin of GMing: never consider your NPCs cooler, more interesting, or above all more important than your PCs. If you cannot help yourself, then never, ever, ever be obvious about it. It makes the players feel like spectators in your adventure, rather than protagonists in theirs, which rather defeats the whole purpose of role-playing for everyone else at the table. If a GM wants to write his own story about his own characters, he’s better off telling it as a novel; the captive audience will just get in the way with their pesky attitude that they’re supposed to be the heroes of the story.

Our GM is spending more attention on her own surrogate personality than on the adventure, and offering us a chance to share in her adoration, as though it were a gift of extra background material rather than the self-indulgence it is. Knowing that my contribution isn’t really that important to the unfolding scenario sorely tries my resolve to contribute at all.

2011 06 14 mdlake Games
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Buried Treasure

The story of George de Hevesy’s (Hevesy György) buried treasure sounds faintly familiar; I think I’ve heard it before. But clearly it isn’t repeated often enough to be common knowledge, and so the story bears repeating.

Earlier I’ve written of the heroic self-smuggling of European scientists out of Europe before and from beneath the advancing Nazis. Most were enemies of the Reich, if only by circumstance—Jews, communist sympathizers, homosexuals, or at least intellectuals—and therefore in personal jeopardy, which does not diminish the heroism of what follows. Knowing the German regime’s suspicions, and that many of them could be under surveillance, they circulated letters about the splitting of the atom. No talk of sustained chain reactions, or practical applications, or megabombs; no suggestion of fleeing to England or the States; just the sharing of innocuous-looking professional knowledge.

It was enough. The greatest physicists and chemists of Europe were able to connect the dots and realize they’d suddenly become valuable military assets, and began to smuggle their talent off the continent, along with the world’s most vital military intelligence, concealed in their brains. What with one thing and another—late arrival of the post, experiments that needed to be finished, the lack of practical skill to which genius is prone, a need to assist others in the exodus, surprise at the speed of German advance—these escapes were often somewhat slapdash.

Left behind in the hurry and confusion when German invaded Denmark were Max von Laue’s and James Franck’s Nobel prize medals. Hevesy, who would win the Nobel himself later that year, feared the Nazis would seize them, either as status symbols or for their value as metals, so he dissolved the medals in a vat of acid. Returning to his lab after the war, he found the vat safe on the shelf, precipitated the gold back out of solution, and gave it to the Nobel committee, which had the medals recast from the original gold.

The technique is so technical, the chances of success so slim, and the circumstances so romantic that the story reads like something out of the golden age of science fiction, wherein heroes using the power of Science! single-handedly defend the earth from alien depredations.

2011 06 10 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Learning Environment

Class was very unpleasant today, due to the heat—a whopping 99°, the morning news predicted. School closed early because some school buildings get dangerously hot in the afternoon sun, but I still had my morning classes, and they were exhausting, for both me and the kids.

Hard to pay attention to sums of infinite series, an admittedly dry subject until the mental framework involved becomes useful in calculus, even in the best of conditions. (Calculus is two years down the road, or more likely never for most of this Algebra 3-4 class.) In sweltering heat, for a seventeen-year-old with twitters to feed and faces to suck, damn near impossible. Even rougher on the teacher who has to compensate for the heat-induced inertia by injecting more enthusiasm of his own.

Tiring as it is, though, I’ll take it over tomorrow. We’re supposed to get thunderstorms late tonight, so tomorrow will be hot and humid. Students feeling beaten down today will be irritable and confrontational tomorrow. Expect several fights in halls and playgrounds. If you think teaching an inert audience is bad, it’s nothing compared to teaching a hostile one.

2011 06 09 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Forget It, Phelps

Had a laugh-out-loud moment last night, watching Eileene play L.A. Noire-with-an-“e.” Its protagonist, Detective Phelps, shares with Sgt. Friday a straight-as-an-arrow personality that’s stiffly awkward most of the time and occasionally rises to neurotic. Okay, I get the idea that he’s a straight cop in a dirty city, that he actually pursues evidence instead of beating his confessions out of suspects, that he disapproves of all the other cops drinking on the job, that he’s got a college education in an era where that’s still a mark of status. Fine. You can take it too far, though, and sometimes developer Rockstar does.

So last night, we witnessed a flashback to Phelps’s service, beginning with an argument under fire that his men are to call him “sir” and salute, despite a soldier’s reminder of standing doctrine not to do so—it identifies the officers, who the Japanese soldiers, like soldiers in every other army in the world, are bright enough to target preferentially. Despite Phelps’s boneheaded insistence on protocol, he survives and his squad wins the fight, miraculously capturing two of the enemy for interrogation in the process. As he will later be in L.A., Phelps is surrounded by crude, insensitive types who just want to murder the dirty Japs what is just killed their buddies, but Phelps disagrees.

He begins interrogating the prisoners in fluent Japanese. Not only has Phelps’s iron discipline enabled him to master an obscure foreign language (in an era when classical Greek was considered more important than French, and any European language more important than all non-European languages put together), but he has mastered the subtle social cues of that most alien of nations, knowing to slap a prisoner around for taking a hostile tone towards an officer. Even in violence, Phelps is kind: the cuffing is not an expression of rage but rather a face-saving measure for the prisoner, helping a shamed man realize that he’s surrendered to a superior, not a sub-human gaijin. Then Phelps launches into a lecture about how poor little Japan didn’t attack Pearl Harbor because they were in the grips of a violent, conquest-obsessed regime (they were), nor because they held Americans in contempt (they did), but because the mean ol’ US of A cut off their oil. “How would you feel, corporal, if some country tried to take away American resources?” Only we hadn’t. We had just stopped selling oil directly to Japan; we hadn’t blockaded their purchase of oil from other parts of the globe, though there was talk of doing so. Also missing from the history lesson was any mention of what Japan had been doing to raise such ire—bloodily subjugating Korea and Manchuria, with no evidence that it would end there.

The whole “cultural awareness” thing is pretty silly to start with. Even granting that Phelps is about two generations ahead of his time in respecting all nations as co-equal, and graced with the superhuman resolve to maintain it towards a nation that launched an unprovoked war against his country and busily shooting at him, personally, you’d think Phelps would have studied his current events with as much discipline a he pursued his Asian languages, and that he’d hold Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and other victims of Japanese aggression in enough regard to learn the entire sequence of events leading to Pearl Harbor.

The exchange is out of character, anachronistic, preachy, and just plain wrong. It absolutely ruins immersion, as if Jack Nicholson had paused amid the action of Chinatown to recite, loudly and stiffly, “Of course, the fact that many of these events take place in San Francisco Chinatown should not be taken as a slur against the fine residents thereof, who are just as virtuous and just as American as you or I,” and Walsh had replied, equally robotically, “Indeed. Our nation has been dramatically enriched by many immigrant cultures, and I, for one, hold the Chinese in warmest regard.”

2011 06 08 mdlake Games
Politics
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I don’t know whether anyone is actually playing Unknown Armies any more. I think the fan base was always comprised mostly of guys who bought the books and like to imagine playing someday, rather than actual players, but there was a time when the list featured rules questions and ideas for new material: plots, archetypes, magical themes, house rules.

For a year or more, virtually all the list’s electrons have been spent on reporting weird news. The rationale is that weird news could inspire plotlines for UA’s weird setting. On the presumption that weird news can only be the glimpses we in the general public get of a secret magical conflict, speculation on the purpose and outcome of the ritual presumed to lie behind each news oddity follows. It’s an exercise that requires little effort or commitment, and especially doesn’t require anyone actually to be playing UA. Without that actual at-the-table dynamic, the entertainment value of discussing weird news gets stale; after a while, none of it looks worthy of becoming a scenario.

Today’s offering is an exception, though. Nearly. There’s a short story to be had from a couple touring the US, visiting all 50 states, and getting hit and killed by a car shortly after crossing the border into Ohio, number fifty on their itinerary. I doubt that story ought to involve magical rituals, ascent to godhood, the sabotage of same by a rival mystic, or a blood sacrifice to the gods of the interstate, but it might. Interesting, if not game-worthy.

2011 06 07 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

The Failure of Monte Cristo

Dave wants to run a campaign titled “Bastards,” for the PCs will be bastards in more than one sense: cut off from (what they consider) their rightful respective inheritances, and willing to sink to extreme and contemptible methods to secure them again.

If we can really stick to our resolve, it should stretch our boundaries, which I feel need some stretching. Still, I worry; neither subtlety nor pathology come naturally to me as a player. So I’m going to turn to books and movies to help get me into the appropriate frame of mind, beginning with The Count of Monte Cristo. I’m about a third of the way through the tale of elaborate vengeance, and it’s not proving very satisfactory. I’d expected a blackhearted tale; instead, I get a lighthearted adventure.

Oh, the vengeance is there—or will be, I presume—but events conspire to make everything easy. The implausible coincidences don’t end with Dantés inheriting a vast buried treasure to accompany his escape from prison; they continue to pop up like coins for the bouncing Mario brothers. Everyone involved in his vengeance has met everyone else, across national boundaries and social strata, and in a way that none knows the significance of the tales they tell one another. And tell one another they must, for they share their darkest secrets with the mysterious Count no more than two minutes after introduction. Anyone with an honest face, it seems. The language doesn’t match the theme, either. There’s no brooding, no anguish; merely rapid, even flippant, commitments to undying love or enmity, often on flimsy grounds.

The celebrated novel could make a fine resource for a GM, suggesting how to keep the pace of a tale of vengeance lively. For a player on a crash course in playing nasty, it’s a failure.

2011 06 06 mdlake Games
Review
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Past is Prologue

So Sarah Palin coughed up another gob of the ignorance and inarticulacy for which she is infamous, roughly suggesting that Paul Revere ran ringing a bell at the British troops to warn them that they wouldn’t take our guns, so there. Insofar as her half-formed sentences have meaning at all, they were false and foolish. Coming from Palin, that isn’t news.

Held to task even on Fox “news” for her gaffe, Palin decided to go for broke. Rather than admitting she’d gotten tongue-tied, she insists that she was right all along. A barefaced denial of documented fact. Again, coming from Palin, that isn’t news.

Revelations that Palin’s supporters, or party operatives if you’re feeling paranoid—there’s no way to tell which—are engaged in a concerted attempt to rewrite the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to match, retroactively, Palin’s blithering may qualify as news. I suppose it’s the natural progression from right-wing revisionist history and organized efforts to flood targeted sites with right-wing messaging, but positively fabricating the historical record is still a step up from wildly inaccurate speculation upon and misinterpretation of history, and the baldly Orwellian nature of the attempt still comes as a surprise.

Literally Orwellian. Orwell was aghast at the Stalinist technique of rewriting historical documents and even doctoring photographs to match the political narrative of the moment; he merely extrapolated from isolated incidents to continual, industrial-scale revision of the historical record to form the premise of 1984. “Oceania is now at war with Eastasia! Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!” Palin’s supporters differ from Stalin’s only in that the impetus to distort the historical record grows from the ground up, rather than being directed from the top down. They differ from Orwell’s Ingsoc party not at all, from the formless hatred to the doublethink upon which such revision depends to the self-motivating nature of that delusion.

Happily, responsible parties spotted the effort and have frozen the page until order can be restored. Less happily, Wikipedia’s open door policy will make it impossible in the long run to keep fantasy posing as fact from the page; claims that Revere did warn the British the colonists would resist will eventually appear with, at most, a polite “such assertions remain controversial” or “documentation for the claim is slight.” Part of the price of free speech is that some of it will be wrong; the information age makes it possible to be wrong on previously unimaginable scale.

But by god, if you didn’t already know not to rely on Wikipedia for your history assignments before, you know it now!

Postscript: This Longfellow revision beat me to the punch. Worth a chuckle.

2011 06 06 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Sorry, Home-Schoolers

Mike Birbiglia tells a very funny story about his encounter with a bear. The tale meanders a bit, drifting at one point to a claim that, if Birbiglia were a fish, he’d want to leap from the water too, and grow arms and become human, “which is what happened, over time.” To which he adds, “…sorry, home-schoolers.” It gets a big laugh.

That euphemistic insult for the willfully ignorant is oh-so-tempting; only a conscious act of wisdom and self-control keeps me from trying to spread it.

After all, home-schooling doesn’t necessarily mean ignorance, or religious intolerance, or any of a lot of ugly things. Parents may choose to home-school for a variety of reasons: to enjoy as part of the larger parent-child relationship, for fear (rightly or wrongly) of poor teachers in their local school, to avoid an enormous commute in some of those sparsely populated arid states, to give their kids attention and a customized education that teachers in a factory education system cannot afford. And, while many parents underestimate the quality of education public schools may provide, or the difficulty of providing a better one, or both, a parent with or without an education degree can still provide a perfectly satisfactory education.

Nevertheless, we all know that one of the biggest motivations for home schooling is to preserve doctrinal purity. Creationists are the most celebrated case. Knowing in their hearts even if unwilling to say it aloud that they’ve lost the debate and lost it big-time, their only defense is to keep their kids insulated from the evidence, open debate thereof, and ideally even from awareness of the issue at all. But fundamentalist Christian creationists are hardly alone in their urge to minimize their children’s contact with scary ideas coming from outside the tribe. The garb of orthodox Jews doesn’t just “preserve the old tradition;” it also serves to make the kids look alien to the larger community, one link in the armor against cultural contact. Eileene narrowly avoided being raised in the INC, a Filipino church whose internal policing verges on cultish.

Home-schooling doesn’t have to isolate a child from his peers, though it does act as a barrier that a wise parent will work to diminish. When that isolation is the primary appeal of home-schooling, however, it’s child abuse as well as an act of willful ignorance, a plugging of the ears and shouting “LalalalaIcan’tHEARyouuuu… And neither can my child!” that is the last refuge against ideas—good ideas that will triumph in honest examination, else why fear them? Bad enough to embrace ignorance yourself; unconscionable to inflict it on your children.

It’s this deliberate stupidity that makes the idea of using “home-schooler” as an insult so appealing. But I’m bigger than that; I don’t need to insult home-schooling with the label of fundamentalism just because so many home-schooling fundamentalists insult public education.

2011 06 03 mdlake Atheism & Religion
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Lern to Spel

Some punk struck with his graffiti last night. What he wrote on the school walls isn’t important, just a thoughtless series of words; it was the gesture of graffiti that translates as “fuck you.” The spelling, however, was particularly poor, even for thoughtless graffiti, which made me wonder which bothered the faculty more: the gesture or the display of ignorance. I know what Principal Lustig would say, but maybe the English department would feel differently.

Nope. Three out of three English teachers felt that it was the disrespect that mattered—toward them, toward the school, toward education as an institution. Bad spelling can be corrected. A bad attitude? If we knew how to correct that, it’d be worth a Nobel Prize, at least.

2011 06 02 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

I Like to Watch

Eileene’s been playing L.A. Noire, and I’ve been watching.

Watching is the ideal way to enjoy it. The production values are high; the celebrated facial simulation, in particular, may not live up to the hype, but it is very good. A promise of things to come. The strategic interface, seamlessly fitting into the setting as your detective’s notebook, works smoothly. There’s lots of eye candy to appreciate when you aren’t forced to concentrate on gunfights and navigating traffic—that is to say, when you’re playing.

Because there’s a lot of gunfights and driving. Despite being a detective game, examining clues and questioning suspects comprises only a small fraction of your activity. Gunfights are about as common as detectivizing, and between any two other acts, you’ll have to handle your own driving. Eileene says it handles badly, and I believe her. Chasing suspects on foot seems pretty clumsy, too.

More to the point, it doesn’t seem to add anything to the game, which seems unable to decide whether to offer a mystery (or series of mysteries), or to treat you as glorified beat cop, which I consider a design error. The action sequences don’t move the story much. Most of them don’t move the story at all, as they are emergency responses to APBs: officer down, armed robber, suicide threat. They’re quick but numerous, pointless, and handled by simple rote. I don’t know whether the many gunfights and the endless, ubiquitous driving were a decision to pad out gameplay, or a sad attempt to mimic an open environment, or a muffed job to appeal to two very different audiences, but between the hassle and insignificance of 90%+ of the game, watching someone else is the way to go.

Lots of eye candy, none of the frustration, you can walk away from the screen and get a sandwich during all the pointless driving, and you can easily chime in with suggestions during the occasional investigation, since those aren’t in real time. Just find yourself a patsy to do all the legwork.

2011 06 01 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink