Don't Lose Your Mind

I picked up a copy of "Don't Lose Your Mind" at DexCon. This is a supplement for the very cool indie game "Don't Rest Your Head". I've finally had a chance to finish reading it, and there is some very worthwhile material there.

I was actually running a DRYH event at DexCon based on the initial book, and the supplement leaves me feeling as though I'd missed some key points from the original. On the bright side, it means that the supplement is a very worthwhile purchase. On the other hand, I really wish that at least some of the ideas from it were in the core book. I would highly recommend that anyone who bought the first book buys the second.

The most important element is that the original book explains how a player character can potentially go from being Awakened to becoming a Nightmare once certain things happen, and that's really as much as it says. There are examples of Nightmares in the core book, but what DLYM does is illustrate that transition and what it means in practice, and that makes all of the difference. Character is everything to me, and a lot of DRYH is so abstract as to be difficult to get a grip on. DLYM brings it all home, giving examples of how a character can descend into madness. One or two examples of this in the core book would've made a huge difference in my approach.

I'll have to take a fresh look at DRYH to see if I can improve the scenario I've already written for it with ideas from DLYM. I think I'm going to have to run it at home a few times before I write another convention scenario for it, though, as I still don't quite feel I have the grip I need to give it the impact it should have.

My first main problem in running the game is that there are an awful lot of abstract things made material. It's very cool reading, but difficult to bring across cohesively. It's hard to give the players a sense of what they can and/or should do while they're in the Mad City. When anything can happen, who cares what happens? It seems better to keep the characters in the real world for the most part (weirded up because they're Awakened and see things others don't) and occasionally sidestep into the Mad City, but the game as written seems as though player characters are supposed to spend more time the other way around.

My second main problem in running the game has been bringing enough Pain. When I was initially looking over the Nightmares they seemed plenty powerful to me, but in actual play, they seemed underpowered compared to player characters bringing their full resources to bear. I could just up the Pain values, but I assume that the power levels as written were done that way for a reason, so there must be something I'm not getting here. As I said, I'll have to read it again, then try it again sometime at home and see if I can do better.

Chutzpah

There's a Jewish hip hop group called Chutzpah. That is so entirely perfect. What else would you call a Jewish hip hop group?

Listening/Focus

It's been a very rough week, especially at work. The short version is that there was a lot more work than people to do it (which happens a lot around a holiday weekend), and when that happens, some of the less ethical workers take measures to push work off to other people. They don't care who else has to do it as long as it isn't them. There's no reason to go into detail; it's just something that happens, and it's human nature when you're overwhelmed, I suppose. Management gives the people who do it heck when it happens, but by then the damage has already been done. A negative comment on someone else's review next year doesn't do the dumpees any good.

And so I was having anger management issues early this week. My wife pointed out that I'd skipped meditating two mornings in a row because we'd gotten a late start, which I hadn't realized until she said it. We had also gotten less sleep than usual for a couple of nights, and I'm sure that had some effect as well.

By midweek I'd gotten myself back together a bit, back on the meditation track (still not getting enough sleep, though), more focused on what I had to do, and not worrying so much about what everybody else was doing. Things got better. This upcoming week will likely be much worse. Labor Day weekend means more travel (and more accidents) and a maximum number of people out on vacation, but I feel better prepared to face it.

So what does this have to do with listening? For starters, I had to listen to my wife to get me settled back down in the first place. I had to learn to listen to my anger building up inside so I could head it off before reaching the explosion point. Yoga and meditation have both taught me to do a better job in general of paying attention to what's going on inside before it becomes a problem on the outside. I just have to be more consistent about it than I've been, especially this past week.

So let's try it again this upcoming week and see if I can do better.

Hey, You Kids Get Out of My Yard!

I hadn't had much previous awareness of Youtube, apart from the occasional viral video, but I've realized that I can find just about any commercially released song on there that I can think of. This is fantastic if I want to revisit a song I haven't heard in a long time and don't want to bother cluttering up my hard drive with a copy of it, or just want to check out somebody I've heard of but haven't actually heard yet, since I don't listen to the radio very often. I spent the better part of an evening recently just looking for the most obscure bands or songs I could think of and there were few, if any, that I couldn't find. If you have a taste for music with a heavy dose of English humor (I'm looking at you, Monty Python fans), got to Youtube and put in Neil Innes or Bonzo Dog Band, and check out whatever looks potentially amusing to you.

I was even able to find convenient videos showing how to play some songs, meaning that I didn't have to puzzle it out by ear for myself if I wanted to learn how to play them, provided I wasn't concerned about getting every nuance correct.

And lyrics! I hadn't needed to figure out the lyrics to a song since before I owned a computer, and now of course I can find the lyrics to anything in a matter of minutes. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was listening to the same part of a song repeatedly to figure out a mumbled line or two of a song I was supposed to sing at band practice later that week. In fact, it's probably been a dozen or so years.

Not to mention that it's cheaper and easier to find even the most obscure music via download than it's ever been.

I'm sure none of this is news to anyone reading this, and tells you more about how long it's been since I've done anything musical than anything else. Once again, I marvel at how we ever functioned without the internet and find myself feeling very, very old.

8/20 is H. P. Lovecraft's Birthday

I'll be celebrating by reading "The Atrocity Archives" by Charles Stross, which makes numerous Lovecraft references, and maybe I'll unpack the special edition set of Call of Cthulhu dice I bought from Q-Workshop.

Kill Bill

I watched both parts of "Kill Bill", within a few days of each other, and enjoyed the second part a good deal more than the first. The first part seemed to be little more than a series of connected fight scenes (admittedly entertainingly executed), while the second allowed the characters a little more time to show personalities. A movie called "Kill Bill" could have been anticlimactic, since the title certainly suggests a specific end, but I truly wasn't sure exactly how this was going to play out until it got there.

Quentin Tarantino is a bit of a mystery to me. He's managed to turn what I would consider weaknesses (a taste for especially cheesy 70's films and music, a particularly crude vocabulary, and a tendency to write all of his characters with exactly the same voice) and turn them into a distinctive style of his own. I suppose what this tells us is that it's better to be yourself, even if it's not an especially impressive self, than it is to be like everybody else.

I enjoy his wisecracking dialogue (the actors always seem to be enjoying it, too), and the man knows how to bring a certain tension to a scene. He also knows how to spring a surprise, even if he relies on surprise as a technique a little too much. He never seems to censor himself and decide there's something he won't do, so you always have the sense that anything can happen.

I was going to say that he could shore up some of those weaknesses and make even better movies, but after thinking about it, he might actually lose some of what makes his movies work if he did.

Roleplaying Projects Update

Tomorrow will be the first session of my new home campaign for In Nomine, called "Dramaville". The name comes from a rap song, and is a reference to gang activity in the Reading/Lancaster/Lehigh Valley area. The campaign is going to be about angels trying to deal with that gang activity. I can't claim any real knowledge of the subject matter apart from having done some research, but it's inherently dramatic material, and I'm happy with what I have so far.

The players have at least started creating characters, and we'll start the session by finishing off and fine tuning those characters, then we'll begin actual play, introducing those characters and their situations. If we're lucky, we'll be able to get some of the characters introduced to each other by the end of the session.

I haven't had much success in translating home campaigns to convention material, apart from "Rumspringa" for In Nomine, but I think I might get a convention scenario out of this one before all is said and done, though I'll have to modify the material a lot to make it more focused.

My top secret GURPS crossover project isn't going to work out, and has been shelved. I'm keeping my notes for it in case I find a solution to my problems later, but I'm not optimistic. It's a pity because the title and event description probably would have been a big draw. The scenario itself, however, just doesn't give the players the opportunity to do the things they would want to do with these characters, and any solution I've tried seems to destroy something essential. Maybe something else will come to mind if I step away from it for a while.

And so I'm moving on to my next GURPS Cabal scenario. The characters are already made, except for one new character, and I already have an outline of the story idea written months ago, so this might go quickly. The previous Cabal scenario didn't draw especially well, but I attribute that more to my event description (not one of my best) than anything else.

I'd like to have an addtional GURPS scenario for next year, but now that the crossover project has been shelved, I need another idea. I have a rough idea for a Doctor Who scenario, but GURPS Doctor Who may not be a good choice with a new licensed Doctor Who system coming out soon. If I can't come up with something good to run with GURPS and a strong idea emerges from the Dramaville campaign, I may be doing more In Nomine next year than I'd planned.

Satisfying Roleplaying Revisited

It can be valuable to have a friend call you out when they think you're wrong about something, especially if they believe you're deluding yourself in some respect and happen to be correct. And of course, this friend should be reasonably tactful about doing something like this. It's important to consider when reacting that the friend is truly looking out for your best interests, even if he makes you uncomfortable.

As it happens, I don't think my friend (Nate) is correct in this case, but what he had to say was valuable in more than one respect anyway. He said that he felt my preference for running GM-driven games at conventions vs. running player-driven indie games comes down to ego. He felt that, at the core, the reason I like to run that kind of game is that I like to try to show off how clever I can be.

I had to seriously consider the possibility that he was right. After all, I have to admit that I enjoy when players tell me they like the way I've written a character or timed a key plot twist. Who doesn't like being on the receiving end of a compliment?

Then he asked the question that clarified it all for me. He asked why I think my personal creativity would be superior to that of a table full of players in creating a dramatic situation that would be satisfying for those players. It was a good question. My answer at the time was that I sometimes spend weeks or months considering how to create an interesting dramatic situation for a game, while that group of players is coming up with ideas on the fly. They have synergy; I have preparation. So which is better?

The answer is, neither one. Which is better depends on what kind of a game experience you like and how creative the people involved are. If the GM in a "top down" situation isn't creative and does a poor job of preparation, you're in for a bad ride as a player, while a well prepared GM can be very entertaining. If you're in a player driven situation with players who bring nothing to the table, that's likely to be a bad experience, too. I've also participated in player-driven games with remarkable people who constructively bounced off of each other, creating very enjoyable situations.

To use a musical analogy, it's the difference between a group of musicians playing a song they all know and a group of musicians jamming together. Musicians playing a structured song are constrained by the limitations of that song (though they can improvise to a point), but if the song is well written, the result is likely to be more pleasing to an independent listener than pure improvisation. Musicians jamming may be thoroughly enjoying themselves, but even they will admit that the results are musically uneven, however talented the players may be.

In the case of a roleplaying game, the creative people and the audience are the same people, so there are no uninvolved parties. Jamming is arguably better for that reason. On the other hand, this doesn't take into account that all creativity is not equal. Some people are brimming with ideas, while others bring little to the table.

Indie games try to solve that problem with game mechanics that assist and encourage the less creative players to contribute more and prevent the more creative players from excessively dominating the session. The idea is similar to some jazz, where the musicians use a particular song as a basis for improvisation with different players coming to the forefront at times. In theory, you get the best of both worlds with a combination of structure and improvisation. In practice, if you have a weak player in that situation, it still shows.

It's true that people have more capacity for creativity than they realize, but different people come to the game table for different reasons. Some of them come to be entertained and simply don't want to work that hard for their entertainment. Those players prefer to be presented with an interesting situation they can react to, and want the GM to "bring the awesome", as some of the indie folks like to put it.

At the end of the day, it's two different experiences and a matter of preference. If I'm the GM in a "top down" game, I have the most creative input and as long as I put the work in, the experience is satisfying for me personally, even if the players aren't great (and of course it's better if the players are good). I don't think it's about ego for me as much as it is about seeing the kind of story play out that I find interesting, and I'm willing to put the work in to get there. If the players in that situation are satisfied with their level of creative input and with what I bring to the table, everybody is happy. If I participate in an indie game where players have equal input, I have to be more fussy about the quality of the players for me personally to achieve the same level of enjoyment. On the other hand, if the players in that indie game are good, it's a whole lot less work for all concerned to have that positive experience, which is a Very Good Thing. There's plenty of room in the gaming world for all of it. I think the key is to recognize what kind of game is likely to please you, then find other people who enjoy the same type of structure.

Scratching An Old Itch

I've finally gotten the urge to play music again strongly enough to get some instruments out of storage. It's been too long, and there's an awful lot of rust to be knocked off before I'd be up to playing with any other musicians. The good news is that I don't seem to have forgotten much. I pulled up a video of an old favorite on Youtube and played through the whole thing without so much as one flubbed note until the very end. Not bad for a song I haven't played in over a dozen years. However, that particular song was more demanding mentally (lots of chord changes) than technically. When I try some of the physically trickier songs, I run into trouble pretty quickly. Practice will help, but only time will tell how much.

My ear seems to be better in spite of being so far out of practice, which I attribute to increased attentiveness (partially because of my current spike in interest and partially because I'm probably more patient than I used to be). Today I played through three songs I'd never played before, and while the results weren't impressive, I actually picked them up faster than I remember doing in the past.

I definitely don't want to be in a band again, but I do want to play with other people. I don't want to deal with the business end, I don't want to deal with the interpersonal politics of an ongoing band (about song choices, who gets to sing what, etc.), and I don't want to deal with the egos. I just want the music, which sounds easy, but usually isn't.

Once upon a time, my ego required an audience, but I can honestly say that doesn't matter any more. It'd be fun to play in front of people once in a great while, but I don't need it, and I'm certainly not worried about making money doing it. I twice joined bands simply for business reasons, in both cases leaving situations that made me musically happy, because I was sure that the musically happy bands were doomed to languish in garages for various reasons. I'd love to have either one of those situations back now. All I can do is remind myself not to repeat that mistake, which shouldn't be a problem.

My plan at this point is to shake the rust off and see who I know that might be musically compatible, not worried about getting in front of an audience, and won't mind playing perhaps once a month. I suspect this won't be easy, but I know at least one old cohort (Bob, for those who know him) is interested, and that would be enough to start.

Lightening Up on Remakes

It's odd, but it took what may be the worst idea for a movie remake ever to convince me that remaking a movie that was entertaining in the first place isn't necessarily blasphemy. It may be a bad idea, but it's not blasphemy.

The powers that be at MTV have decided to remake "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". Talk about a movie that doesn't need a remake! If you try to improve it, you'll almost certainly fail to achieve the campy quality that made it a success in the first place. If you merely try to duplicate it, what's the point? Sometimes the gods just smile upon a particular combination of talent and circumstances and an amazing thing happens. You can't recreate it, so why try? Why not just do something else? The reasons are usually financial rather than creative, and that's just a fact of life, because movies are expensive to make.

At the end of the day, the original film is still there. It doesn't go away because someone does a remake, good or bad. Stage plays are effectively "remade" all of the time in revivals with different casts and directors trying to do their own take on a play that's been performed dozens of different ways, and somehow the world keeps turning when a bad version happens. New versions of old songs are recorded. And occasionally, there are good remakes, or at least remakes that suit some tastes better than others. John Carpenter's version of "The Thing" comes to mind.

And so we might just have to deal with Luke Perry as Doctor Frankenfurter, Britney Spears as Magenta, and Lindsay Lohan as Janet, and life will go on. I might even watch the remake if it's on TV, if only out of curiosity.

Robert Hazard, R.I.P.

He was best known for writing the song "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", recorded by Cyndi Lauper, but when I think of Robert Hazard, I think of the songs "Escalator of Life" and "I Just Want to Hang Around with You", both of which I played in a cover band many moons ago. He may not have been well known to the general public, but he's got a special place in my personal music history, and I'm sure in the hearts of a lot of others. Rest well, Robert, you made some good music.

M and Metropolis

I've been on an old movie kick lately. No full blown reviews here, just a couple of comments.

Everybody's seen at least some of the images from Metropolis, if not the movie itself, without even necessarily knowing where the images came from, and that tells you something about the movie right there. When some of the images are so striking that people are still looking at them roughly ninety years later, you know they carry power, for one reason or another.

The acting is what you expect for the time period, for the most part. As a story, I don't fully understand some of the actions the characters take, and I'm sure that at least part of the reason for that is that those actions aren't intended to make sense as things real human beings would do, but were intended as metaphors. That's fine; it's still a fun movie to watch, and well worth a rental. The themes hold up, even if it's not entirely clear to me what Fritz Lang is trying to say with it. It's a classic for a reason. I'd give it a seven out of ten, and it's far more interesting than most of the movies being made today.

I rented "M" out of curiosity. I'd read that Peter Lorre puts in an outstanding performance as a pedophile, and thought that that, along with the challenging subject material (especially given when it was made!), would at least be worth a look. I have to admit I was expecting something more along the order of a character study, based on what I'd read, but I was completely wrong on that count. Most of the movie involves the police trying to track down the pedophile, and ultimately the local criminals start tracking him down as well because the police being so active is bad for their business. Peter Lorre's most effective moments are during the trial scene toward the end, in which he pleads that he can't be held responsible for his actions. He's a sort of predecessor to Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Norman Bates in Psycho, in that you know he's a bad guy, but you feel genuinely bad for him. The movie is ultimately about mob justice, which was also a significant element in Metropolis, so obviously this was something heavily on Fritz Lang's mind. There's nothing here to squick anyone bothered by the subject matter, as you pretty much get Peter Lorre chatting up little girls, then leading them away while a balloon symbolically floats away (or something similar).

There are also some well done scenes showing Peter Lorre's character being chased through a warehouse by a mob of criminals once he's been identified. Good stuff.

I couldn't really recommend "M", unless you particularly want to see Peter Lorre in one of his better performances or you're a student of the movies of the period, but it wasn't bad. Five out of ten.

Conclusion: Looking for a Satisfying Roleplaying Experience

I was speaking with a friend who'd read the last post about roleplaying games and commented in person. Some of our discussion helped me to better understand how to express what I'm talking about here. His suggestion to me was that I continue to look through indie games and learn to trust other players more, and he feels I can find something workable for me that way. There's merit in his suggestions in that it can only be a good idea to keep looking for something new if I'm not satisfied with what I have, and it's a good idea (and good spiritually) to get my ego out of the way and learn to flow with other players or the mechanics of the game taking creative directions other than those I would've chosen for myself.

Still, my cohesiveness argument comes back into it. Games where creative control is shared don't tend to produce stories that hang together very well, and good story is a significant goal. In theory, the game mechanics of an indie game are supposed to produce that cohesion, but in practice I haven't found the results satisfying. There are always events that work well enough from a purely logical perspective but don't feel right to me.

Also, let me point out that the cohesiveness I'm looking for doesn't have to come from me personally. I'm just as happy to play in another GM's game if they can create the sort of experience I'm looking for. It's just that for conventions, I can only offer my own game and seek to play in others I enjoy. I can't offer someone else's game, which is why I'm looking for suggestions for what I can offer that'll make me and a reasonable number of players happy. I've always tended to GM because the best way to create the game I like is to do it myself.

My friend and I had quite a discussion on author's stance vs. actor's stance while playing characters in roleplaying games. For those not familiar with the terms, actor's stance is staying entirely in character without using any information the character wouldn't have and trusting that the GM will bring the characters together in ways that make the game entertaining. Taken to an extreme, the actor is responsible only for being true to the character and it's not his fault if his actions don't produce a satisfying game for anyone else. This is usually the most enjoyable roleplaying to me, but it's also a frequent excuse for all manner of obnoxious behavior on the part of some players. In contrast, author's stance is when the player looks at his character from a more distant perspective and chooses the character's actions based on what would make a good story, even if it's bad for the character and doesn't make 100% sense from that individual character's perspective.

We found that my point of view was that the most satisfying roleplaying occurred when the players usually immersed themselves in the characters (actor's stance) while simultaneously being aware of how this was working for everyone else and occasionally shifting to author's stance for the good of the whole, using author's stance to get over the rough spots, so to speak. The GM's main role (from my POV) was to do the same thing for the characters not assigned to the other players. My friend's opinion was different, in that he felt the default position for players should be author's stance because it produced the best story for everyone, and because he felt that he became too personally wrapped up in actor's stance, losing perspective and occasionally getting upset with the other players.

Both points of view are entirely valid, and even work reasonably well at the same table, but the discussion helped me to clarify in my own mind what I'm personally looking for. I'm looking for that personal investment in the character to provide a more visceral experience; he's looking for a more objectively interesting story. In my experience, a lot of indie games have that "third person" feel to me due to the mechanics the game designers have chosen, and the people who enjoy them obviously have no problem with that, but those mechanics push my head out of the mind set I enjoy, which is probably why they don't work as well for my tastes.

So my goals points me in the direction of LARPs (Live Action Roleplaying), which provide a very immersive experience and would scratch the performance itch, but LARPs have problems of their own from my perspective. The first problem is that participants in a LARP don't get the overall picture until/unless they do a wrap up at the end, while I prefer to see the characters' various stories intertwine as they develop. The other problem is that players in a LARP are limited to playing characters that look like themselves or end up looking ridiculous trying to play someone who looks nothing like them, which breaks that reality too much for my tastes. For some reason, for me it's okay for people to play roles very different from themselves in a tabletop game because nobody is supposed to look like their character. It's rather like the way human beings find robots disturbing when they appear too human because they don't quite actually get there. It all comes down to what sort of story conventions the player is willing to accept. I also like the way a GM can shape the story of a tabletop game on the fly, adjusting to the interests of the players as he goes, while a LARP is simply unleashed and becomes whatever it's going to become.

The conclusion I'm reaching is that as a GM, I can keep offering games with more of an author's point of view and expecting players to take the actors' roles as long as I understand that I may not draw as many players as I'd like, and if those numbers drop off enough I'm simply going to have to accept that it's time to do something else. In the meantime, I can keep experimenting in the indie community, try to keep an open mind, and see if I can find something in that realm that's enjoyable, perhaps in a completely different way. Trying LARPs may also be an option as long as I choose carefully, playing games of a strongly realistic nature.