Cross My Palm With Silver

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money."

The idea of monetizing RPG products is somewhat divisive. Huge Ruined Scott has always been adamant, as far as I can tell, that his creations will always be available for free. Kent also has strong views that RPG-related stuff should be created and shared for free, and people who try to sell them are grubby, greedy and vain.

I have some sympathy with that sort of stance. I used to have a button for PayPal donations which I never really felt comfortable with and eventually removed, because it didn't sit right with me to imply that I expected anybody ought to feel that I thought I deserved money for this constant stream of bullshit I spew forth onto the internet. The clumsiness of that sentence is strong evidence for the argument that I don't deserve it.

Moreover, I think there is something honourable and good about creating things for others to use, for nothing in return. It is something to be encouraged.

And nor do I need the money. I have a good job. When I finish and release Yoon-Suin, it's not as if it will make a material difference to my life even if I were to charge money for it. I'll spend it on booze and women and just waste the rest.

On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves: I like money. And being paid for doing something is a nice feeling. It shows that your work is valued. I have done enough freelancing to be aware of that - working hard to produce something and sending it off for financial reward gives you warm fuzzies simply by dint of showing that your work is worth something. It wouldn't be human not to enjoy that feeling.

I'm also of the view that people value things they pay for above what they get for free. I've downloaded plenty of free products (lawfully) that I have never so much as looked at, because since they are free I subconsciously view them as throwaway. If I've paid for something, though, you can be sure I'll give it due care and attention.

"I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad."

Confessions of an Ouija-Board Role-Player

In yesterday's entry Alex J left an interesting comment about Ron Edwards and ouija-board roleplaying (about 2/3 of the way through the essay: I recommend CTRL-Fing "ouija"). As he put it, poking holes in Ron Edwards' arguments, and particularly his writing style, is to engage in "cruel dead horse beating", so I'll skirt over the irritating and non-intuitive jargon, the arrogance, the pretentiousness, the mandarin insistence on using a particular terminology to describe every last piddling thing, the complete inability to communicate anything resembling a coherent argument, and the faux-familiarity. I'm interested in the notion of the Ouija-Board Role Player, because I'm pretty sure, based on Ron Edwards' description, that I am one of those:

How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power. 

Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else.

That's exactly it, really, and I find that I like the description, as it captures the essence of what happens at the table, as I see it: one the one hand, although nobody says as much, what happens is purposive, and, at any given moment, somebody is controlling what happens and driving the action - sometimes the GM, but more usually a player, or all the players. They're "doing stuff", to put it bluntly. On the other hand, you get a "story" emerging from this process all the same, in a totally unpremeditated fashion, as a biproduct of that purposive behaviour, more or less by accident. And that isn't under the control of any one person at the table. It develops out of the ether of the interactions between all the participants and how they act within the game.

Of course, Ron Edwards is intending all of this as, basically, a description of bad gaming (he actually describes my view as that of "the most deluded role-player in the world"). Chiefly, this criticism seems to revolve around the failure to address "Premise", which is a concept he takes from Lajos Egri and which, even if you accept it as a useful tool in the context of dramatic writing, is not particularly suited to activities outside of that context. He also comes to the conclusion that people who experience ouija-board gaming are, basically, social retards who convince themselves they are enjoying themselves when they actually aren't, which I have to say I do not find incredibly persuasive. Then again, I am the most deluded role player in the world, after all.

Role Playing as Emergent Process

What does it mean to play a role in a role playing game? asks Brendan. This, I think, was written in response to all of this. And in turn, that reminds me of something kent wrote ages ago in the days when he used to write lengthy and interesting blog entries.

What is often missed in these discussions, it seems to me, is that almost everything that happens with your character at the table is emergent - it develops through play. This includes equipment, level, hit points, and all the other mundane system-related variables, of course. But it also applies to the 'personality' of the character too, in my experience. Generally, they begin life as ciphers - not quite blank slates, as you may have some vague ideas about the type of character they are - but almost.

Personality comes with interaction with the game world, the other PCs, and with NPCs. Characters get fleshed out by their life experience, in other words. As usual, the 2nd edition DMG has it right (albeit stated in the context of giving advice on what level new PCs should be introduced to a campaign):

If at all possible, start characters at 1st level. The lowest character levels are like the early years of childhood. What happens to a character during these first adventures will do much to determine how that character will be role-played. Did Rath the Dwarf save the day by fool-hardily charging into battle when he was a mere 1st level? If he did, the odds are good the player will try it again and will begin to play Rath as a bold and reckless fellow. 

On the other hand, if Rath was clobbered the first few times he rushed in, the player would begin to play Rath as a cautious, prudent fellow. Even the smallest events can have a great effect on low-level characters, so these events sharply etch the behavior of the character. Deny the player these beginning levels and you are stripping him of the opportunity to develop his character's personality.

It is through experience that PCs become fleshed out into real 'people', in other words, and starting off a new PC is like putting on a new pair of shoes. It takes a while to wear them in. This also means that players don't have full control over how their PC develops: the process is a pseudo-mystical mixture of design and the quasi-random emergent processes of interaction and events, with the primary emphasis on the emergent processes. This fact should be obvious to anybody who plays role playing games, I would suggest.

The Boulevard de Temple

This is the first ever photograph of a human being, taken in either 1838 or 1839 in Paris, on the Boulevard de Temple:

It was a 10-minute exposure, so although the road looks almost entirely empty it was actually a bustling scene - it's just the traffic was moving too quickly to be captured. However, in the lower left-centre of the picture are two small figures: a man getting his shoe shined. He and the shoe shiner remained in place long enough to be captured.

There is something faintly disturbing about those two figures caught in time. Alone of all the many people who were travelling along the Boulevard de Temple in those 10 minutes - hundreds, perhaps thousands - only they have travelled down to us through the 175 years or so since the picture was taken. And by pure accident. They remind me of insects trapped in amber and preserved by happenstance for all of time.

If I was currently running an Unknown Armies or Call of Cthulu game, this photograph would feature in it. Who were these men, and is their apparently coincidental capture on film actually of cosmic significance?

On Playing Roles

It's confession time: I've fallen off the wagon and have started playing Football Manager again. My free time is going to the hell where youth and laughter go - an endless series of boring looking menus, crappily animated match graphics and annoying features which is utterly loathsome and yet at the same time irresistibly compelling.

But it has me thinking about role playing in the wider sense. This is something I have talked about before in the context of wargames: the tendency for people who are engaged in any type of game to...well...role play. We all do it - doing a voice for the little top hat as you move it around the Monopoly board; uttering dark threats to our competitors and cackling like a maniacal dictator as we conquer Ukraine in Risk; imagining that our chess pieces are little warriors fighting it out on the chess board like that game Chewbacca and R2-D2 play on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. Our imaginations demand it.

I always do the same thing when I play the computer games I play - which are almost always strategy games, admittedly. When I'm on Football Manager, I have to admit that, childish as it might seem, I am acting as an actual real life Jose Mourinho figure in my own mind - interacting with players and scouts; having rows with journalists; watching DVDs of the Marseille v Red Star Belgrade match from 1991 at 3am to gain tactical insights while my estranged wife texts her lover in another wing of my enormous Cheshire mansion; passing brown paper envelopes stuffed with £50 notes to referees' assistants under the table in fancy London restaurants; flying off to Milan for secret meetings with Silvio Berlusconi to see if he wants to make me an offer I can't refuse; attending a bunga-bunga party. Just playing the game is not only unsatisfactory, it is literally impossible. Your brain won't allow it. (Or, mine won't.)

The acts of playing a game and playing a role are somehow connected in our brains, it seems. Oddly, the same goes for sex. I wonder if there is something about losing yourself in a fun activity that allows your personality to slide - something about lost inhibitions and freeing one's mind and vaguely hippyish-sounding nonsense like that. I once read about a psychologist who noted that when people engage in a creative activity which they enjoy they lose sense of time and bodily needs and become hooked into that activity and totally focused: he called it a "creative fugue" or words to that effect, and I wish I could remember his name.

What I Did Tonight

Tonight I jotted down notes on the following "things to go in the Yoon-Suin book":

• Lunar observatory
• Velvet worm breeder
• Magical tattooist
• Glacier spirit
• Wishing pool
• Silk weaver
• Blessed hijra
• Desert troll wiseman
• Black powder artisan
• Ape temple
• Blessed carp pool
• Butterfly breeder
• Chrysanthemum orchard
• Bronze dragon statue
• Glacial waterfall
• Elephant cult

I sometimes think I lead quite an odd life.

Inspirational Pictures [IX]

What are these? 

Taishou Cthulhu

Call of Cthulu's default time setting is the 1920s, and for good reason (it's not just that the 20s happened to be when Lovecraft was writing, although of course that's a large part of it). It's because the 1920s was the era of modernism, when rationalism was usurping tradition and old sureties, and this was what Lovecraft's horror chiefly played on. As David Barr Kirtley put it in a recent GGTTG episode, Lovecraft's stories are not about things like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other beings of legend - the existence of which is patently false and hence not very scary - but about powerful beings from space whose existence is believed in by your neighbours, and your neighbours might very well decide to kill you in those beings' name. The fear is not based on complete irrationality, but on something which could actually be true. At the same time though, of course, there is fantasy and mysticism in there too: there is a constant tension between the old ways of thinking and the new.

Lovecraft, in other words, despite his love of the past, was in his own way a quintessentially modernist writer, just as much as his contemporaries like Hemingway, Dos Passoss, Stein, Williams, Stevens, and so on. So the 1920s are the perfect fit for a RPG based on his work.

This makes me think that it would be interesting to run a Call of Cthulu game set in the Taishou period in Japan (1912-1926). During this era, Japan underwent a transition to a democracy, continued its near-wholesale adoption of Western technologies, cultural artefacts, and political philosophies, and developed apace. It was a modernist society par excellence.

At the same time, the Lovecraftian requirements of alienness and indifference would be perfectly complemented by having the PCs as Westerners in this strange land, where everybody is suspicious and odd anyway so how do you know who worships Cthulhu and who doesn't? Moreover, like the Nazis, the Japanese extreme right groups embraced weird mysticism and hocus-pocus to the hilt - one of their main factions was called the Black Ocean Society, for heaven's sake.

(I hardly think I'm the first person to notice this, of course, and I'm sure Chaosium already have a Japan supplement out there. It doesn't stop me pondering it as an idea.)

Coincidentally, and as a sort of adjunct to this post, there is a whole coterie of Japanese horror authors engaged in Cthulhu mythos fiction: there are four anthologies of their work published in English in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series. I've yet to read them, as they're difficult to track down, but the reviews I've seen are stellar.

Early Lovecraft

On my long train journeys to and from work I've started ploughing my way through the complete H P Lovecraft on my Kindle. I read his major, established stories way back when I was a teenager, and several times since, but there are plenty of obscure pieces I have never really come across before, so I am gradually fighting my way through in chronological order.

It's fair to say it's a bit of a struggle. It's also fair to say that while Lovecraft matured into a great horror writer, in his early years his works were only a few steps away from being utter tripe: imaginative, yes; good stories, no; frightening, not in the slightest; unintentionally humorous, often. They have intriguing ideas and set-ups, but the execution is often amusingly poor. (A particular favourite in this respect is "The Statement of Randolph Carter", which manages to build up a considerable head of eerie steam before flattening you with a final sentence that has you struggling to contain snorts of laughter.) And it is absolutely staggering to imagine that nobody could see his plot twists coming from a mile away - viz. "Old Bugs" and "Memory".

I'm also not fond of the sub-Dunsany dreamscape type of stories from his earlier years: curios like "The White Ship", "The Doom that Came to Sarnath", etc. (Although I'm not a huge fan of his later works in this so-called Dream Cycle, like "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", either.) They show a writer who was brimming with ideas but who still hadn't learned yet how to formulate them into a genuine story.

That said, there is something compelling about Lovecraft's vision even in his juvenilia. All the elements are there: the ancient mysteries, the sense of a vast body of knowledge existing somewhere that humans cannot comprehend, and above all the indifference of the universe to whether we live or die. That in itself makes it worth carrying on. It also made me fork out £21.99 on the Sixth Edition of Call of Cthulu yesterday in my FLGS, when another game I want to run is the last thing on earth I needed. 

Relevant to Your Interests

My friend Patrick, the "other DM" in my group, has announced the intention to publish a supplement for D&D, which he summarises as "Albino whales hunting phosphorescent shrimp in hidden oceans"; if that doesn't whet your appetite then quite frankly you ought to take a long, hard look at yourself and ask what you are doing with your life.

Also, Benoist, who is a difficult person to get along with and then some, has created a series of posts in which he builds his own megadungeon and describes the process. It is not just incredibly useful and detailed, but also - and this is very welcome after all of the idiotic controversy over rats and copper coins in recent weeks - genuinely inspirational: read it and rediscover your love for a good dungeon.