Uncrossing the D&D Setting Streams

Reverance Pavane, regarding my earlier D&DNext wish list:

Forgot to ask about what you are looking for in an official setting...

I don’t so much have a single clear preference as an awareness of the difficulty the D&DNext team faces in harmonizing the streams on this one. You want DMs to create their own worlds from the set of assumptions the rules build into any D&D game—there are wizards and gods and orcs and demons and this particular spell list and so on. At the same time, a canon of lore has accumulated around D&D, so that its audience expects certain characters, places and situations as part of their experience. Obvious examples: Sigil, the drow and their Underdark cities, and the roster of demon lords that slightly shifts with each new take on the setting. To many fans, these are as much a part of the D&D feel as magic swords or the fireball spell.

3E’s original vision had a vaguely defined Greyhawk (which each DM would make up as he went along) as the default world, with the classic settings depicted in walled-off supplements. 4E split the difference a bit, leaving the material world undefined but concretely populating the otherworldly spaces.

A unity edition suggests a breadth of approach, giving fans of the classic settings the tools to play around in them, and kitbashers the leeway to disentangle the intellectual property elements from the rules. Perhaps the team will find a way to treat past continuities in parallel, so you can adventure across the Forgotten Realms in original, reboot, or rereboot modes. A take on setting that is, if you will, officially unofficial.

So, where setting is concerned, my hoped-for keywords would be familiarity for current fans, accessibility for new ones, and flexibility for all.

The Birds: Remember

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Community, Comedy & DramaSystem

Benjamin Hayward asks:

After watching the first season of Community sequentially, I was struck by how much it's characters resemble Dramatic Heroes much more than Iconic ones in their decisions despite the show being advertised as a sitcom. Reading the DVD box reveals all. The show is supposedly about how attending college changes the characters through the lessons they learn. In this way, the characters all slowly change throughout the season, with some doing so more than others in each episode. Have you watched enough of Community to comment on how Drama System might fit it? Or perhaps how Drama System might fit serial comedy in general?

I haven’t subjected comedy to the same analysis that I have drama and the procedural, so consider these thoughts provisional. Blame Aristotle for losing the treatise on comedy that originally accompanied The Poetics. If only he’d backed up to a USB drive!

Comedies tend, like procedurals, to threaten the characters’ status quo and then return to it. The leads aren’t solving external problems as the iconic heroes of procedural stories do. Iconic heroes encounter disorder and tame it. Comedy protagonists tend to instigate disorder (often by pursuing an internal flaw, just like tragic heroes), which continues to spiral out of control in response to their efforts to control it. Finally the disorder reaches a culmination. The hero, undone, confronts his flaw and all is forgiven and order restored.

The equivalent of the procedural would be the slapstick or physical obstacle: the accelerating conveyor belt, the clock hand from which the hero dangles, the damnable road runner who won’t be caught. Moments of character comedy play out just as dramas do—there’s a petitioner who wants something, a granter who does or doesn’t give it to them. Because of these similarities you could play a sitcom format with DramaSystem—though I’m not sure who really wants to. It’s easier to be funny by riffing on a putatively serious game than to keep the jokes flying on purpose.

Community creator Dan Harmon sets out to subvert sitcom conventions and as such bends his characters much further out of their original molds than the audience’s comfort level might permit. This becomes all the more apparent after Season One. Still, you could argue that whatever changes the characters go through, or surprising qualities they reveal about themselves, the study group itself—the real community the show’s title refers to—is restored to harmony at the end of each episode.

D&DNext Wish List

The announcement for the upcoming new version of Dungeons & Dragons positions it as an Ecumenical Council for tabletop roleplaying's flagship title. Reuniting the disparate partisans of the dread Edition Wars under a single new banner is a tough brief. The Mearls-Cook-Cordell-Schwalb team comprises a formidable brain trust--one well-wired into the sometimes paradoxical demands of the gamer tribe. So I'm very curious to see what they draw from each past version as they assemble this Uber-edition. Given my past freelancing for the line, the possibility exists that I might get to see what they're up to—and thus be unable to talk about it. So, before that happens, here's my list, untainted by actual information, of what I'd hope to see swept into the new iteration.

Of course the vastness of the challenge is that everybody will have a different list.

4E

Concise, manageable, easy-to-design creature stat blocks

On-line tools add ease of play

Alignment simplified and detached from mechanics

3E

Open license as focus of community excitement

2nd Edition

Emphasis on setting (though this is a double-edged sword, as splitting the line into multiple settings started the great D&D diaspora)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

baseline tropes of the D&D feel (whatever that is, leaving out the dysfunctional ones)

prose style brimming with idiosyncratic personality

serves as introduction to the fantasy canon

Blue Box Introductory Set

fast combat

feeling of being a kid again

 

Comments that ignore the above conceit to simply stake out a prior position in the Edition Wars are permissible, but will be silently judged.

Headlines as Story Beats

Hamlet's Hit Points identifies three basic story beats relating to the presentation of information. The pipe beat hides info for later, and as such is strictly a creature of fiction. The other two beats, the question and the reveal, are central to any narrative communication that seeks to attract and hold audience interest. Questions cause emotional friction or longing; reveals relieve these feelings. The first is a down beat, the second an up beat.

New stories can be broken down with beat analysis, too. The shoehorning of information into a storyline with emotional ups and downs becomes most apparent on television news. However, it’s present in print reporting as well.

However arranged, a newspaper or magazine headline poses a question. As much as it may seem to lay out the basics of a story, it’s really working to excite your imagination and formulate questions about its further details. The body of the story then proposes to answer that question, along with the core journalistic five Ws: what? Who? Where? When? Why? (And the red-headed stepchild, How?)

If you’re using social media to spread awareness, you can garner more clicks by hooking into the beat structure of headline and story. When you write a blurb on Twitter, Facebook, G+ or whatever to a post you want people to read, compose it so that it poses a question, in the reader’s mind if not directly. Reference to one of the 5Ws never hurts.

The hidden dynamic of the headline, and how to harness it.

Why ghouls are the next vampires.

Who are the players of the future?

When to eject dysfunctional gamers.

Of the 5Ws, the most clickable is the H. People want to know how to do things.

Other classic headline tricks attract clicks. Citing a number poses an implicit question. If your headline reads “Ten Mistakes GMs Make”, I’m immediately wondering which items you’ve chosen.

The Birds: Sorry

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Cthulhu and Me

Benjamin Hayward asks for my cthredentials:

You've been posting often about H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu on Twitter, Facebook, and here. Would you mind doing a blog entry talking about your first exposure to, favourite part of, interest in, and history with H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos?

I am among the first wave of readers who caught the Lovecraft bug from gaming. Call of Cthulhu came out when I was in high school; I bought it right away and was soon off to the Orillia public library to track down their copy of the Arkham House anthology The Dunwich Horror and Others, with its Lee Brown Coye cover. When Sandy Petersen’s game helped spur a resurgence of interest in Lovecraft, I grabbed the paperbacks as they showed up in the small Ontario city of my birth.

The story that I find most brilliant, innovative and influential as a piece of writing is “Call of Cthulhu”, with its documentary realism and disorienting, stories-within-stories structure.

The one that scared me the most was “Whisperer in Darkness”, perhaps because I mentally set it in an area I knew well from my childhood—not New England, but the stark landscape of Ontario’s Muskoka district. I also retain vivid sense memory of my first reading of the subtle and brilliant “The Color Out of Space.”

Lovecraft interests me on a couple of levels. The kid in me loves the outlandish details of its creatures. The geek responds to the quasi-continuity he builds as he adds to his corpus of stories, so that knowledge of one informs one’s responses to others. The group collaborative aspect with his peers is also appealing—and the reason the mythos sits in ambiguously in the public domain for anyone to play with. I appreciate him as an exponent of intellectual horror: it is as much about our fundamental aloneness as the fear of being torn apart by a star vampire or hound of Tindalos. In his mature work he is also a top-notch stylist, marrying prose to content in an uninhibited way we could use more of today.

For all of these reasons, I am glad to get to dip my toes in the icy Lovecraftian pool, both with works for Trail of Cthulhu, such as The Armitage Files, and as editor of the upcoming Shotguns v. Cthulhu fiction anthology for Stone Skin Press. There are also some other short fiction projects in the offing, which I’ll announce when the stars are right.

Minotaur Planet

According to a conspiracy theory both odd and oddly un-sinister, a youthful Barack Obama, as part of a secret CIA program, used to teleport to Mars. Why, the official denials only serve to confirm it!

To rip this from the headlines into an Ashen Stars scenario...

Teleportation technology doesn't appear in the game setting. It's a notorious plot-hoser. And in a roleplaying game you never have to leave out an establishing shot of a shuttle for pacing or budgetary reasons.

With this in mind...

A wealthy woman hires the lasers to locate her missing daughter, Rika True. Like many missing persons contracts, the arrangement calls for them to bring to justice anyone responsible for any harm that may have come to her. Rika, they learn, was last seen applying for employment with the utopian Eden Corporation. They find the uncharted company world that serves as its headquarters: a lush paradise that provides Eden settlers with a life of ease and luxury. They discover that Rika won the coveted right to participate in an Eden teleport experiment. The experiment turns out to be a scam to feed willing volunteers to a bi-dimensional predatory entity. The twist: it's the entity that makes the planet inhabitable. If they destroy it or drive it away, the atmosphere immediately becomes toxic. Should the lasers reveal this to the populace, the residents decide that they'd rather continue the modest sacrifices than abandon their paradise. Do the lasers bring the system crashing down, as their contract demands, risking the lives of thousands?

Bring Back the Old-Timey Political Nickname

I've started in on The Game of Thrones of political biography, Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The first volume, The Path to Power, begins by establishing the Texas political scene prior to LBJ's birth and during his childhood as the son of a Populist state representative.

As a savorer of political lore, I have to say that the modern era has lost one great element from the early part of the last century—the old-timey nickname. Honest Buck. Old Oxcart. Cactus Jack. Heck, I would settle for Pinky.

The trick is that the nicknames have to be favorable, bestowed by admirers. In the modern media environment unironic affection for political leaders is harder to find. Reagan had “the Gipper”, but he got it on loan from Hollywood. Margaret Thatcher's “the Iron Lady” cut both ways.

I'm too much the satirist to come up with straight-faced, old-timey-ish nicknames for current figures. Hillary “Pant Suit” Clinton? Michelle “Crazy Eye” Bachmann? Rick “Santorum” Santorum?

The best I can do is Barack “Long Game” Obama. Fans of the Steve's Dad candidate might go for Ron “Gold Standard” Paul.

What moniker would you bestow on the politician you admire?

The Birds: Coalition

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Avoiding Foot-Mouth Proximity Incidents (Creator Interaction Edition)

Now that you've had time to check out the podcast episode mentioned in yesterday's post, it's time for me to lay a little Rashomon on Joe's account of an awkward Gen Con moment . To recap, Joe remembers me looking at him like he was a “total douchebag” because he hadn't yet wrapped his head around Hamlet's Hit Points. Co-host Nicky avers that this is because Joe was indeed being a total douchebag.

I wouldn't say it quite like that.

Joe led off with a faux pas, to be sure, and I, wag that I am, let him twist in the wind over it. To paraphrasing from memory, he started by saying that he didn't like HHP as well as Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering. I laughed at this, in an oh really kind of way, and then proceeded to tease him about this for the remainder of our chat. And am teasing him a bit more now, because that's how I roll. Another creator in similar circumstances might conceal his dudgeon, or get genuinely shirty with you.

Which brings me to a general service announcement. Here are a few handy tips on how to maintain mutually comfortable foot-mouth separation when talking to creators you meet at conventions, signings, and similar events.

The apparent intimacy of the Internet, and the opportunity it provides to express your judgments on art and entertainment products, may lead you astray when it comes time to engage in person people whose work you admire. You may think that creators want to hear critiques of their work expressed with the same frankness you'd use when talking with friends or posting to a forum.

They do not.

Even the necessary process of getting notes from collaborators and trusted readers can be emotionally fraught. Unsolicited notes during a casual social encounter? Etiquette breach! Etiquette breach!

That doesn't mean you ought to fawn, or claim that you like stuff that you don't. Remember though that the unwritten rules of casual interaction remain in force.

When in doubt, ask yourself if you'd expect a good reaction to a comment were the subject swapped to something more mundane.

“I don't like that shirt as well as the one you wore last week.”

Or, given that creative work is a labor of love riven with self-doubt and setback, test your remark by recasting it in a more deeply personal vein:

“I don't like that new baby of yours as well as your first kid.”

If you have an issue with the work, you might succeed in smoothly raising it, if you are indeed a master of diplomacy. Phrasing it in the form of a question might help. “I didn't believe it when Josie went back into the house,” comes off as a note, and is socially assaultive. “Why did Josie go back into the house?” expresses the same thought but doesn't play as a critique.

Roleplayers are luckier than fans of passively consumed work; they can describe practical problems they had in play, or anticipate having in play. “How do I make combat crunchier?” obeys the etiquette of casual interaction. “I still don't like your combat system,” violates it.

Some become unnecessarily anxious when meeting people whose work they like. No one in this field is a Clooney-level celebrity who needs social insulation from fans. I sure want people to feel comfortable approaching me for a chat. I strive to make myself accessible, and so do the vast majority of my colleagues.

On occasion this anxiety leads to a related faux pas, in which an embarrassed speaker tries to defuse the situation by backhanding the compliment, inadvertently converting it into a jab. Never feel you have to apologize, or undercut yourself, when saying something nice.

If a creator makes you feel bad for being excited about his work, they're the douchebag.

Not that Joe, in our inciting example, was being a douchebag, total or otherwise. He just had an unfortunate foot-mouth proximity incident (FMPI), which happens to all of us now and then.

And now we are all well-equipped to avoid similar FMPIs of our own.

2 GMs, 1 Mic On Hamlet's Hit Points

In episode 20 of their 2 GMs, I Mic podcast, the irrepressible Joe Wolz and Nicky Helmkamp tackle the issue of pacing in roleplaying games. In the process, they give Hamlet's Hit Points a thorough and gratifying examination. Those of you already familiar with the book may be most interested in the examples they give of applying its lessons to actual play.

Joe tells a funny story on himself in which, when talking to me at Gen Con, his comments on the book led me to look at him like he was a “total douchebag.” While it is true that he led with a wee faux pas, I would, and will, characterize the moment somewhat differently. But before I turn the anecdote into a remake of Rashomon set at the Pelgrane booth, I'll give you time to listen to the Wolz-Helmkamp version.

Shotguns v. Cthulhu Cover Preview

Here's a peek at the cover for Shotguns v. Cthulhu, the upcoming anthology of action-oriented Lovecraftian tales from Stone Skin Press. Jason Morningstar brilliantly captured the bold, graphic look we're pursuing for the line with his double-barreled, multi-tentacled retake of the skull and crossbones motif. Sans text, the design would look great on a T-shirt. Alas, that's a category of merchandise publishers have difficulty shifting, so you'll just have to keep an eye out for the book when it arrives later in 2012.

The Birds: Virulent

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A New Year's Tale

Scene: a new preserves and charcuterie shop in Kensington Market, Toronto. In keeping with the place's friendly vibe, the counter guy tries to engage a customer in conversation. The customer, in his mid 50s, dressed in a natty overcoat, sits on a bench eating the sandwich he's just been served.

COUNTER GUY: Do you have any plans for New Year's?

CUSTOMER: [has a mouthful of sandwich, unable to talk.]

COUNTER GUY: Any special plans?

CUSTOMER: [indicates that he's eating and can't reply]

COUNTER GUY: Anything special you're doing for New Year's?

CUSTOMER: [rising] My wife wants to divorce me, because of my girlfriend.

Sleigh Bell Sign-Off

The presents are wrapped, the Christmas pudding cooked, and it’s time once again for my holiday sign-off. As visions of sugar plums dance in my head, I’d like to thank everyone for hanging out here, or dropping in from your redoubts at Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. I’ve been grateful for your attention as I launched Ashen Stars and The Worldwound Gambit. Hamlet's Hit Points, released in 2010, continues to find new readers, which pleases me to no end, proving that a labor of love can make good in our long tail world.

The big news here on the blog was my pre-Gen Con flight from Livejournal to Blogger. The latter’s better analytics and the immediate success of Google+, have helped me to keep the joint alive as eyeballs shift from blogs to social networks. Highlights of the year in blogging include the wrap-up of the Korad world-building experiment, a Kovalic-led encounter with a classic Wisconsin smelt fry and its requisite brandy old-fashioneds, a two-pronged assault on creative paralysis, and a Cthulhoid victory in the annual Gen Con buzzword competition, and the traditional TIFF Capsule Reviews. Together we hated on haters, reconsidered secrecy, and feared the rising of the dread mascots.

I’ll be back in the new year to keep you updated on Hillfolk and The Gaean Reach, to share the scoop on new fiction projects, and to kick off the impending “Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff” podcast. With a US election cycle fully swinging, I may dare to disturb the dusty padlock on the Politics Hut. How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way will resume, as will the usual talk about movies, narrative, writing and the gun-toting despond of deadpan avians.

Until then, enjoy or survive, as the case may be, your holiday time with friends and family. Imbibe judiciously and beware of road hazards, whether they consist of black ice, drunk guys, or Heat Misers.

Merry Christmas, Internet!

See P. XX

Down the non-Euclidean chimney comes Santa Cthulhu with a big bag of year-end See P. XX. Find the sneak peek at the Shotguns v. Cthulhu cover amid sundry other gifts from Pelgrane Press:

• My column on information flow in GUMSHOE.

• The horoscope of the mysteriously dead Augustus Darcy, occultist author famed for The Book of Smoke.

• The conspyramid contest for Night’s Black Agents.

• Winners and answers for the Cthulhu Apocalypse contest.

• New releases and a peek at Pelgrane’s 2012 slate.

All gather round the eldritch fireplace!

Ironic Hero, Absurdist Villain

If an iconic hero remains true to himself and thereby changes the world around him, the ironic hero hews to his inner compass and is disappointed by the way the world changes despite him. We don’t see the ironic hero much in fiction, because that pattern is too much like life.

As is apt for a playwright, the life of Vaclav Havel divides readily into three acts—from avant garde dramatist to dissident to head of state. In that third act, he becomes an ironic hero. The act begins with heady early days, scored to deep Zappa cuts, as he strives to infuse his office with an artist’s humanism. From these scenes of bohemian promise, the story shifts tones. He presides as a constitutionally weak President over a society quickly bored by his ideals. Despite his efforts, his country splits in two. He urges the dismantlement of the lucrative Czech arms industry, and is rebuffed. Havel remains a hero to the outside world, and certainly to me. To the home audience, not so much. Heroes get tiresome when they stick around too long. We prefer them when they to ride off into sunset in timely fashion.

The ironic hero is sadder than the tragic hero, and leaves the stage without catharsis. The tragic hero falls from greatness, brought low by his telling flaws. The ironic hero fades, due to ours.

In a bid to provide easy contrast for blog posts, Kim Jong Il died on the same day as Havel. By immiserating an entire nation and killing millions by famine in order to maintain his cult of personality, he leaves a legacy as one of the era’s most monstrous real-life villains. The scale of his crimes makes him almost too monstrous for fiction. Another of his qualities definitely disqualifies him as a fictional bad guy—despite his enormous body count, he was as ridiculous as he was menacing. This is a consistent trope of the modern mega-mass-murdering dictator. Comic characters become funny through a gap between self-perception and the way others see them. Mussolini, Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein all embodied not just the banality but the absurdity of evil. It’s not always the case—Pol Pot managed to be straight-up sinister, and the publicity-shy goons running Burma are no barrel of yuks. Kim, however, might have been a character in one of Havel’s allegorical plays.

A Contrary Life

A motif emerges in friends’ reminiscences of the alternately brilliant and maddening Christopher Hitchens. At some point they all have to note that they didn’t agree with Hitchens on everything. In fact his barbed-wire views were so various, so untethered from standard ideological allegiances, that it is mathematically impossible to agree with all of them.

Many of the tributes mull the question of whether Hitchens was, in the end, a man of the left or right. If you go by the degree of discomfort eulogists of both factions display toward him, he winds up on the left. His liberal friends may have a tough time accepting his unrepentant touting of the Iraq conflict, but that pales compared to conservative distaste for his atheism and general loathing for hierarchy. Lots of young Trotskyites wound up as neoconservatives. Hitchens didn't so much discard one for the other as fuse the impulses together, with ferocity of judgment the bonding agent.

Admiring individual contrarians, as opposed to contrarianism itself, can be a fraught business. When summoning a pithy Mencken quote one has to keep in mind his pro-German sentiments in the lead-up to WWII. In late career, the contrarian may reveal himself not as an all-around puncturer of fuzzy thinking, but a much less interesting creature, the hedonistic Tory.

Still, one can look to figures like Hitchens and Mencken for the aspiration to question assumed truths, and to pursue logical propositions to their pitiless conclusions. To defend itself, even a culture of empathy needs the ability to construct an argument. Relying on cant or empty pieties leaves you only able to sputter when challenged. What does not kill your argument makes it stronger.

No matter how intense a detractor one might be of one Hitchens stance or another, the techniques he uses are transferable to the support of any position based on facts and reason.

If you look at him as a practitioner of the vanishing art of debate, his weak arguments become as informative as his strong ones. There you see the dodges you might skewer when deployed against you. In neocon mode, Hitchens cheats wildly, engaging his opponents’ worst arguments or resorting to untestable counterfactual assertions. This is where you see his twin passions, his hatred of tyranny and religion, combining to overwhelm the skepticism that anchors his best polemical writing.

I certainly envy the legendary Hitchens recall—virtually everything he read went straight to the memory bank and stayed there. As someone who makes his living as a writer, I can only gasp at his mammoth output, mysteriously squeezed into days given over to the voracious pursuit of Johnny Walker-fueled conversation. One account clocks him at a hard-to-credit 10,000 words per day—all the more staggering when you consider time spent on reading and other research.

With his prodigious intake of Scotch and cigarette smoke, Christopher Hitchens embodied the romantic image of the hard-drinking, hard-typing man of letters. I’m happy to identify with that so long as I don’t have to do it. His early death from esophageal cancer illustrates the real-life hazards of that image. As any contrarian knows, being a romantic figure is a dangerous business.

The Birds: Christmas Cake

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