Pathfinder, 2nd Edition: Some Early Thoughts

I am excited about yesterday's announcement of Pathfinder, 2nd Edition. While I agree with Wizards of the Coast’s strategy of getting off the edition treadmill, Pathfinder is a different beast. Its roots are old -- almost 20 years old, now -- and deep in soil Paizo did not till. I hope that the 2nd Edition modernizes Pathfinder a bit and helps Paizo own a more concise and structured product that more closely mirrors their design philosophy.

Of course, I also hope they achieve this without fundamentally changing what makes Pathfinder Pathfinder. The purpose of the game at launch was to continue a 30-year legacy that the legacy’s stewards had seemingly decided to abandon. It would be a shame to undo that work now that it is a 40-year legacy, and now that Paizo are acknowledged stewards of that legacy. This could be a challenging tightrope to walk, but I have quite a bit of faith in Paizo’s creative talent.

There’s not a lot of detail in the announcement Paizo has released, but it’s still worth reviewing and assembling some early thoughts.

In the weeks and months leading up to that release, we are going give you an in-depth look at this game, previewing all 12 of the classes and examining many of the most fundamental changes to the game.

Alchemist is an interesting choice for a new core class, just like goblin is an interesting choice for a new core race. I’m not wild about technology-based classes in fantasy roleplaying -- conceptually I’m a big fan, but I’ve never seen an implementation I’ve enjoyed.

Goblins… I just hate Pathfinder goblins. They feel like a complete waste of a humanoid species, played entirely for comic relief, and they have no readily obvious links to hobgoblins or bugbears. The goblinoid races are one of my favorite pieces of Dungeons & Dragons metalore, and I’ve never liked Paizo’s implementation (or lack thereof).  Hopefully their introduction as a core player character race (excuse me, 'ancestry') will improve matters at least somewhat.

Each one of these choices is very important, modifying your starting ability scores, giving you starting proficiencies and class skills, and opening up entire feat chains tailored to your character.

I’m not wild about this strong suggestion of gating. I hope that there is enough flexibility baked into the process such that players can build the character they want and not the character Paizo has laid out. It’s important to remember that while more options gives players greater customizability, they actually restrict personalization, and I think the latter is what players really want. No one gets excited about playing the same character as someone else, no matter how detailed that build is.

Finally, after deciding on all of your choices, the only thing left to do is figure out all of your bonuses, which are now determined by one unified system of proficiency, based on your character's level.

I’m seeing a lot of folks read this as a similarity to D&D5, but it sounds to me more like a nod to D&D4’s system of flat bonuses by level. I really hope Paizo does not go that route. In all honesty I am not in love with either system, but the key differentiator is on which side of proficiency your flat bonus matters.

In D&D5, you apply your proficiency bonus to a few select skills, and as you level your proficiency bonus increases. In D&D4, you apply a proficiency bonus to a few select skills, and as you level, your bonus to all skills increases. It’s a subtle difference, and again, neither system is really personalized, but it is possible to at least feel some ownership over the former.

I think Pathfinder’s skill system is one of the game’s greatest strengths, and I would hate to see it simplified too greatly. D&D5 is good for a lot of things, but skill-focused character design is not one of them.

Encounter mode is what happens when you are in a fight, measuring time in seconds, each one of which can mean life or death. Exploration mode is measured in minutes and hours, representing travel and investigation, finding traps, decoding ancient runes, or even mingling at the queen's coronation ball. Of all the modes of play, exploration is the most flexible, allowing for easy storytelling and a quick moving narrative. Finally, the downtime mode happens when your characters are back in town, or relative safety, allowing them to retrain abilities, practice a trade, lead an organization, craft items, or recuperate from wounds. Downtime is measured in days, generally allowing time to flow by in an instant.

This is a fine nit to pick, but I’m a little disappointed by this characterization of the three pillars as defined in D&D5 (Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay). Some of these word choices: “easy storytelling;” “a quick-moving narrative;” “allowing time to flow by in an instant;” these are not necessarily what I am looking for when it comes to a system’s support for roleplaying.

I am a big believer that roleplaying games should not have rules for roleplaying, but they should require rules around which roleplaying can be built. Things like alignment, a robust selection of arms and armor, non-combat feats, crafting skills, and other elements create a framework that lets players envision their characters as more than a miniature figurine on a vinyl grid. Part and parcel to these rules is that they can’t be given short shrift. Storytelling should be satisfying, not easy. The narrative should take the time it needs to come full circle. Town life should never flow by in an instant.

Again, this is a lot to infer from a single paragraph. I’m interested to see the direction in which Paizo takes their own interpretation of the pillars, and I have positive expectations.

Most of the game happens in exploration or encounter mode, with the two types of play flowing easily from one to the other. In fact, exploration mode can have a big impact on how combat begins, determining what you roll for your initiative.

If you’ll excuse a moment taken to indulge a pet peeve, initiative is not a rule that needs to become more complex. It impacts a single round of combat. While I have great nostalgia for the days of weapon speed and individual monster initiative, there is a strong argument to be made that even the traditional methods of rolling initiative do not provide a good return on time invested.

After initiative is sorted out and it's your turn to act, you get to take three actions on your turn, in any combination. Gone are different types of actions, which can slow down play and add confusion at the table. Instead, most things, like moving, attacking, or drawing a weapon, take just one action, meaning that you can attack more than once in a single turn! Each attack after the first takes a penalty, but you still have a chance to score a hit. In Pathfinder Second Edition, most spells take two actions to cast, but there are some that take only one. Magic missile, for example, can be cast using from one to three actions, giving you an additional missile for each action you spend on casting it!

I think this might be the most telling paragraph in this entire summary, and I wish I had more to say about it. With so little detail, however, it is impossible to really gauge. This is a huge change, and I think it looks great on paper. However, it feels like this should be more than sufficient to make 2nd Edition fundamentally incompatible with older material. I am very curious to see how Paizo handles this in the playtest. A handwave will not suffice.

Today’s blog update doesn’t really provide much in the way of greater clarity, beyond giving what appear to be two descriptions of possible rounds: “move once, draw your sword, and attack,” and, “move away, draw a potion, and drink it.” These examples do not inspire confidence. They sound pedantic and slow. Getting three actions per round instead of two goes some way toward mitigating that, but if we are tracking every little thing our characters do as an action, now, I’m not convinced that is an improvement over the old system. That feels like a throwback to 20th-century D&D.

Two 7th-level creatures might have different statistics, allowing them to play differently at the table, despite both being appropriate challenges for characters of that level.

I know what Paizo is trying to say here, but it still makes me want to respond with that, “You don’t say?” Nicholas Cage meme.

This also makes it easier for us to present monsters, giving us more space to include special abilities and actions that really make a monster unique. Take the fearsome tyrannosaurus, for example; if this terrifying dinosaur gets you in its jaws, it can take an action to fling you up to 20 feet through the air, dealing tremendous damage to you in the process!  

Hazards are now a more important part of the game, from rangers creating snares to traps that you have to actively fight against if you want to survive. Poisons, curses, and diseases are a far more serious problem to deal with, having varied effects that can cause serious penalties, or even death.

Monsters with unique mechanics and hazards as encounters in their own right were hands-down my favorite things about D&D4, and I absolutely encourage their implementation in any roleplaying game. I wish D&D5 had preserved more of them.

All in all, I see why this announcement is being met with mixed feelings. I think ten years is a respectable length of time between editions, and you could argue that Pathfinder has really been waiting for a substantial update for closer to 20 years. I agree that the game could use a fresh coat of paint. But this summary does not fill me with confidence.

I don’t see the mechanical similarities between this summary and D&D5 that others are decrying, but I do believe the simple approach to fantasy roleplaying is more than adequately covered by D&D5 at the moment. While I’m the last person to advocate gatekeeping through rules complexity, there is something to be said for the fact that greater complexity is Pathfinder’s niche. What I would love to see is more of an effort from Paizo to demystify that complexity and showcase its value, rather than stripping it back.

Nevertheless, it is still early days, and far too soon to be drawing conclusions from such a brief summary.  I look forward to seeing what we learn from Paizo about Pathfinder, 2nd Edition, in the coming days, weeks, and months, and I'll definitely be participating in August's playtest to the best of my ability.  Exciting times!

Dungeons & Delicious Fudge

The concept of "fudging" die rolls as a dungeon master is a difficult thing to discuss without misrepresenting my position.  The dice absolutely have to be sacrosanct.  The random number generation aspect of the hobby, in conjunction with a robust set of rules, provides verisimilitude, and verisimilitude is what makes a roleplaying game a roleplaying game, and not a collaborative improvisational storytelling coffee klatch.  I hate the term "fudging;" in an attempt to make the act sound like it is not as serious as cheating, I think it trivializes a devastating responsibility.

The dungeon master cannot cheat.  I do not mean they should not cheat; I mean that for a dungeon master to cheat is an impossibility.  You might just as easily say that the Chance deck in Monopoly cheats, or the board text in the Game of Life.  The dungeon master is not a game player, they are the living execution of the rules.  To suggest otherwise calls into question the very core of the hobby: what makes it fundamentally superior to video gaming.

A dungeon master can make mistakes.  A dungeon master can be terrible.  In more contemporary parlance, the dungeon master is the CPU that runs the game's code, and they can be susceptible to glitches and overheating like any other processor.  But they have a substantial advantage over a computer -- they can think.

Ignoring the results of a die roll is not something that should ever be taken lightly.  It is not a betrayal of trust, it is the essence of trust.  It should only be invoked when the alternative is miserable, and a good dungeon master is trusted by their players to make that judgment, not to always be honest.  Honesty is a terrible trait for a storyteller to have.  No one wants honest stories.

In an honest story, the hero dies when he rolls a natural 1 on his Perception check and has his throat slit in the night by a kobold.  In an honest story, the climactic encounter against the villain is over in a round when he fails his Intelligence save and the Mystic mind-controls him off the balcony and onto the rocks ten stories below.

If you'll excuse the rhetoric, it blows my everloving mind that anyone could ever trust their dice, or authors whom they've never even met, to run their games for their players better than they could.  The system is not worthy of trust.  It is not sapient; it is not conscious of the events at the table; it is a poorly playtested and edited set of rules in a book written long before the campaign even began, which relies on shoddily manufactured plastic polygons to generate simple numbers for the abstraction of the incredibly complex interface of aptitude, skill, and chance.

You need a system to adjudicate all the crap that doesn't matter, for a sense of realism, and that realism is important.  But if you let realism decide even the most critical elements of your story, everyone is in for a dull ride.  If you're a good dungeon master, when the chips are down the system doesn't matter.  If you're a bad dungeon master, no system will save you.

For the love of Gygax, if it was as simple as books and dice, players wouldn't need dungeon masters.  I'm not saying 'don't roll' -- I am definitely not saying 'don't roll' -- but if you roll and the result doesn't make good sense, don't 'domo arigato Mr. Roboto' it, step up and KICK ASS.

The Caller Role in Dungeons & Dragons

Do any of you fellow children of the mid-20th century (whether actual or spiritual) remember the role of Caller? Do any of you still use it in play?

For those of you who don't remember or are unfamiliar, the Caller was a player job in the same vein as Mapper. Instead of being the player with good spatial sense, a pencil, and a pad of graph paper, they were the player with good organizational skills, a projecting voice, and a knack for reaching compromise.

It was the Caller's job to listen to the party when the Dungeon Master had presented them with a choice, get a sense of the group's opinions and reasoning, suggest a unified course of action, and then report that action to the Dungeon Master once something resembling consensus had been reached. 

The Caller was also originally responsible for tracking player-character actions in combat, at a time when players were expected to commit to an action before initiative was rolled, and lose that action if it became irrelevant or impossible during the course of the round! (That rule really sped up combat, but at a pretty severe cost in fun.) 

For some reason the concept of the Caller seems to have fallen out of contemporary D&D. I hear a lot of Dungeon Masters talking about co-DMs, or assistant DMs, or even just players monitoring the party's initiative track, but generally these roles seem to be about assisting with combat or narrative flow, when I think the Caller's greatest advantage was the impact they had on session-to-session party choices. The Caller also had no Dungeon Master knowledge of the campaign, which was a major consideration.

Investigate the mines or the sewers? Torture the prisoner? Trust the NPC? Right or left at a T intersection? Every Dungeon Master knows that these questions can stop a group cold for valuable minutes. They can try to guide the party through the decision, but it can be a tightrope. On the one side, the party is reading every word for hints about what lies ahead. On the other, there is inherent bias toward directing the PCs at the more interesting choice. 

Combined, these two risks virtually guarantee that some decisions will be impacted by metaknowledge of the campaign. Having a player mediate these decisions is valuable not only to a Dungeon Master's peace of mind but to a party's organic enjoyment of the campaign.

I bring this up because I was recently lamenting to one of my players that our current group could use a Caller, and I was surprised to learn that he was unfamiliar with the concept. He is not much younger than me but entered the hobby later in life and through Palladium rather than TSR products.

Upon explaining the idea behind the Caller, he reacted with a revulsion that genuinely surprised me. At first I had a wrong sense of why he was upset, and tried to explain that 'Calling' isn't an in-character task. While it is certainly possible that the Caller's character is also the party leader, this isn't a requirement, so naming a Caller is not equivalent to making one PC dictator for life.

But my friend corrected me, saying that he understood the concept but that he couldn't imagine trusting a fellow player with that kind of control. This floored me, as I'd never considered that someone might perceive the Caller as being "in control." I had stated that the Caller was occasionally responsible for forcing the party minority into a choice when there was no agreement on a path forward, but doesn't that happen anyway, only much more slowly, without a Caller?

What worried my friend was that a Caller with a bias could exclude individual players from participating in the campaign. I see the risk, but feel like such behavior would be transparent, and would lead to censure of the offending Caller, if not removal from the group! It would be a simple enough matter to rotate Caller responsibilities, to avoid even sensible players developing an undesirable ego about their role in the group. 

Of course, the flip side of that compromise is that just like most parties have a born Mapper, most parties also have a born Caller, and by not utilizing them a Dungeon Master is not taking best advantage of his resources.

All in all, I think my opinion on the value of a Caller still stands, despite this new perspective on the risks of assigning one. They provide a valuable service not only to the Dungeon Master but also to their fellow players, by keeping play moving through decision points rather than bogging down in minutia and disagreement. Not every group needs a Caller, of course, but I imagine there are quite a few struggling along without one.

But perhaps I spend too little time playing to see why the Caller might rub the other players the wrong way. I'd be interested in hearing feedback from other Dungeon Masters and players about whether they are currently utilizing a Caller in their games and how beneficial or detrimental they feel the role is to play.

Price Pointing

A short time ago, BBC Radio 1’s website Newsbeat featured an article by Dan Whitworth, calling attention to a British price hike for the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The new Call of Duty will apparently retail in the UK for £55, rather than the usual £45. Apparently UK gamers are up in arms about it, although judging by the reactions from Dan’s interviewees, it’s not going to affect their purchasing decisions. Maybe that’s because they’re already willing to pay the equivalent of US$75 for a game Americans only pay $60 for. What’s another $16?

We Americans saw a similar phenomenon in the US around the inception of this latest generation of console gaming hardware in 2005 and 2006 when the price point for a new video game jumped from $49.99 to $59.99. I don’t remember a particular fuss being made about it at the time, although debate still rages in the community as to whether games were worth $50 in the first place. It’s this ‘price point’ mentality – this idea that no matter what the content of a video game (or, for that matter, a roleplaying sourcebook), it is worth a certain amount of money simply because it belongs to a certain class of commodity.

It is difficult to argue this point about video games because of the multiple genres involved, all of which have very different standards of quality. For instance, I may find it ridiculous that Halo 3, a ten-hour game, retails for the same price as Lost Odyssey, a 50-hour game, but that is largely because I am a roleplaying gamer, unlikely to get much enjoyment from Halo 3’s robust multiplayer system. But on the other hand, it is a often a challenge to find two games in the same genre that are wildly disparate in content, largely because the games with lesser content often suffer from other failings that cause them to be panned by the community.

Fortunately this generation of games has at least one example I am very familiar with. Take Shadowrun, another contemporary of Halo 3 that shares both the ‘shooter’ genre and Halo’s publisher, Microsoft. Shadowrun has no single-player content, which suggests a lower price point, but its matchmaking is also vastly inferior to Halo 3’s, and its bot AI is considered to be so bad that Halo 3’s complete lack of bot AI is preferable. These latter elements mandated a lower price point, and one was eventually reached – through market pressures. The game was retailing new at $29.99 only a few months following its release.

But the point is that both games started out at the same place, in terms of cost to the consumer: $59.99. Why was a game so clearly inferior to its contemporaries priced so highly?

Admittedly, in recent years we have seen game publishers set lower prices for ‘second-string’ video game titles, between $25 and $40, but this typically has nothing to do with quality or quantity of content and everything to do with brand. The big releases are all still right up there at $60, not including ‘special editions’ that can run anywhere from $70 to $120 or more. Now, I’m not saying that video games on average are not worth $60. That’s an argument for a different post, and probably a different blog. What I’m asking is, “Why is EVERY game worth $60?” It seems to me that gamers need to use some of that consumer market pressure that drove the price of Shadowrun down so quickly to convince game publishers that we are smart enough to notice that not all video games are equal. Maybe this means some of them will become more expensive than $60. But it sure as heck should mean that many of them become significantly less expensive.

This same phenomenon is visible in the roleplaying game industry. Wizards of the Coast raised the cost of the core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd Edition, from $20 to $30, and we all grumbled but didn’t argue. Their press releases were right, after all – the price point on the books had not risen for twenty years. It was time. I do not begrudge companies responding to the forces of inflation. Now, books a fraction of the size of those core rulebooks retail for $35, and major sourcebooks can retail for as much as $50. But the real issue is that again, these numbers are irrespective of content! Page count for a $35 sourcebook can range anywhere from 100 to 300 pages. So I’m forced to ask, “Why?”

Why is a 100-page book worth the same amount of my money as a 300-page book? Why hasn’t the community used its collective consumer power to do something about this? Why are we so content to throw our money away on these hobbies?

It’s certainly not that we aren’t aware. People notice these things; I know they do. I’ve heard them complain. But no one ever seriously eschews making a purchase as a result. Video gamers might wait until a game hits the shelves used to pick up the occasional title, but if it is something we really want, we’ll buy it new – or as soon as it shows up used, in which case we’re essentially paying full price anyway, and for a lower-quality product.

Perhaps we ignore these ludicrous price-point strategies because we recognize that spending money on these things is a waste to begin with, and we acknowledge this at such a basic level that we are not enraged by the blatant discrepancies. Personally, I think it’s time we all got a bit more active and conscientious about the value of our dollars. We owe it to ourselves, but more importantly we owe it to the hobby.

D&D4: One Year On

It’s been a little more than a year since Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition, launched, and after six months of playing it regularly and six more of watching it evolve I think I have finally defined what it is I don’t like about it.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy D&D4. I’ve come to terms with it in a way that allows me to enjoy it a great deal as a sort of beer-and-pretzels, fantasy-combat board game, in the same vein as the old DUNGEON! game or the more recent Descent and Runebound. I’m not being flippant – I really do enjoy these games and I consider D&D4 to be one of the best. In a lot of ways, I’ve been waiting for a game like D&D4 my entire life. But I don’t consider D&D4 to be a roleplaying game.

I have to define ‘roleplaying game,’ because I’ve come to realize that the term means something different for everyone, and that my definition is somewhat more strict than most. First and foremost, I consider a roleplaying game to be a system of rules in which I feel comfortable telling an interactive story for the benefit of a group of players. It has been said that a good roleplayer doesn’t need rules to roleplay, and I agree with this sentiment – I spent much of my youth ‘roleplaying’ adventures with my friends in the woods behind my parents’ house – but roleplaying without rules is just improvisational acting, not a game. Likewise, a game like Dungeons & Dragons without rules for roleplaying is just a fantasy combat simulation.

When D&D was originally released back in 1974, that’s all it was – a fantasy mod for a squad-level medieval wargame. Even the concept of setting beyond a hole in the ground with a city nearby wouldn’t be published for another year. I bring up original D&D to illustrate that I’m not trying to make a value judgement or a comparison to the ‘good old days,’ here – just because a particular game is not roleplaying, or a spate of roleplaying is not a game, doesn’t imply that they are somehow diminished. They’re just in a different genre, by my definition.

I have a deep and abiding respect for Gary Gygax (may he rest in peace), and I shared many of his opinions, but this is one topic on which we differed. He was of the opinion that roleplaying was something that happened outside the rules. To me, that’s not a roleplaying game; that’s acting while wargaming. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact, it is exactly how I tend to play the fantasy board games I love so much. But to me, a roleplaying game is a game that unifies roleplaying and combat under a single rule system, or at least with related rules systems. There need to be out-of-combat rules strict enough to provide challenge when performing tasks outside the dungeon, and in-combat rules relaxed enough to provide opportunity for character personality to emerge in battle. This is where D&D4 falls short for me, on both counts: its vestigial skill system and its exhaustive power list.

I’ve been mocked, in the past, for wanting to expend character resources on a skill like ‘pottery,’ because doing so limits the dungeon-crawling efficiency of my character. But for me, creating a character is not about creating a single-purpose tool. My favorite campaigns are the ones where characters purchase homes, open businesses, and marry townsfolk (or other adventurers), and in so doing become relevant not only to the success of the campaign but to the success of the setting. In short, my favorite campaigns are the ones that encapsulate an entire life rather than individual dungeon escapades. I have trouble explaining this to other D&D players, I think because they consider activities like these to be external to the game, or at best a secondary game. But for me, spending hard-earned gold on a permanent home or business is just as viable an investment as purchasing a new weapon or suit of armor. I believe, therefore, that the same rules should govern both.

Most D&D4 gamers I speak to seem to agree that the skill system is crippled, but many of them don’t seem to mind it as its impact on traditional 4th Edition play is minimal. For me, the lack of a flexible, diverse skill system is damning – it robs me of even the most basic system of adjudication for non-combat actions. This is apparently not a common concern, but it is mine. If I want my character to make some money on the side shoeing horses, there should be a difficulty associated with the required tasks just as there is a difficulty associated with dungeon crawling. It’s all part of the same game.

My complaint with D&D4’s power list is more esoteric, and harder to explain. Players railing against D&D4 often claim that there is less choice involved in creating a D&D4 character than there was in previous editions of the game, and this is pretty patently untrue, as fans of the system are quick to point out. Wizards and clerics have lost a lot of options, but everyone else has definitely gained in the variety department. I think what my fellow discontents are trying to say, rather, is that in D&D4 all choices are laid out for the player, even hard coded, and there is no creativity involved in their selection.

In previous editions of D&D, players had fewer choices to make in the rules, but there was a lot of empty space in character generation as a result. Room to extrapolate on things. A character became a person not because he was extensively customized with established rules, but because he was so similar to every other member of his class and race that you had to look between the rules to personalize him. In D&D4, between powers and feats, characters are watertight. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great game design. I just don’t think spamming ‘Twin Strike’ encourages creativity, and I consider creativity to be a very important part of roleplaying. Can you rename Twin Strike? Can you reflavor it? Sure, but at the end of the day, every power has its own established, unique rules for execution and result. There’s only so much modification you can do without changing the mechanics. The mechanics of a power are definitive.

I think the best way to illustrate this particular point is to suggest an alternative. Even if a player likes the power list as written, I doubt they would argue that it would not be even better to have the capacity to design custom powers for their characters. And that is the “choice” that my fellow discontents are missing in D&D4. When all attacks were a d20 roll against THAC0 followed by rolling weapon damage – or to put it another way, when there was only one rule for attacking – there was a lot more room for personal embellishment. Every attack was different because every attack could be – the d20 roll governed only its success or failure. The power list removes that wiggle room by rigidly defining a character’s options during combat, and discourages embellishment by providing an effortless and universally recognized alternative.

And that about sums it up. By my definition, D&D4 is not a roleplaying game. It seems to me that D&D4 cripples roleplaying coming and going, as its combat rules are too detailed and its out-of-combat rules not detailed enough. Now, plenty of people are roleplaying using the D&D4 rules and enjoying it, and I don’t mean this piece to suggest that they are somehow doing it wrong. As long as they are enjoying themselves, that’s the ultimate goal, and I am glad to see them achieving it. The above are just the reasons why the new system doesn’t work for me personally. I had hoped for a long time that an increased number of supplements would ‘rescue’ D&D4 for me, but these issues are fairly substantive, and present in the core of the system. It seems unlikely they will ever be “fixed” in this iteration of the game, so I continue to look elsewhere for a roleplaying game with a system that will support the kind of long-running immersive campaign I prefer to dungeon master. I will, however, continue to enjoy playing D&D4 modules for enjoyment’s sake.

Jones the Cat on Gaming

I’ve been meaning to write this piece for a while – since shortly after we acquired our new kitten, Jones the Cat – but actually having a kitten around the house made me that famous extra bit busy that knocked this journal off the bottom of my high-priority list for a few months. My apologies; I’m going to try to get back into posting regularly again now that she’s been spayed and the stress is slowly wearing off. I’ve got a few things stored up that need to be given voice.

Jones the Cat is not named after T. S. Eliot’s Bustopher Jones, nor is she named after Ellen Ripley’s cat from the Alien franchise. I admit to being pleased by the unintended relationship with the latter.

Jones is named Jones the Cat to distinguish her from Reverend Jones, Jones the JP, and Jones the Prize Cabbage (which describes both his hobby and his personality). If you’ve not seen The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, it comes highly recommended. While it is at its core a romantic comedy, I suppose, it is also a really great look at how a village is a living entity and not just a collection of shops and an inn. So in that regard it might even have some roleplaying application, for fellow dungeon masters.

I’m writing about Jones because she’s unexpectedly taught me a great deal about gaming in the five months we’ve had her, and I think her lessons are worth spreading around. She has shown me that cats are consummate and capable gamers, and that I had forgotten a great deal about what that means.

Lesson 1: Frugality

Expensive toys are boring toys. Crumple some paper into a ball, and you have some real entertainment.

This is really the big one. Miniatures and map tiles and three-dimensional molded plastic dungeon walls are certainly very attractive, but they’re also expensive. Certain year-old popular roleplaying games are trying to convince you that you need these things to play, these days, and this could not be further from the truth. I think the jury is still out on whether combat visualization is necessary at all, even in new games, but assuming that you ascribe to the school of thought that it is, coins make perfectly good markers for characters and monsters. A piece of white paper with an inch grid drawn on it is sufficient for laying out most combats. I know there are dungeon masters out there who agree with me on this one: how many times have you painstakingly drawn a detailed, complex field of battle on a wet-erase mat only to have the entire battle use only the tiny open space in the lower-left corner of the map?

Remember that anyone can draw bushes and rocks, or use household objects to represent them. Remember that using a quarter to represent that orc isn’t any more disruptive to immersion than using the giant dire badger you got in the randomized booster of miniatures. Remember that, worse come to worst, you can even design your own rules.

I haven’t even touched on the absence of need to purchase pre-published modules and adventures, because I’ve always been a homebrewer, but it is just as true as the above that you can come up with your own stories. Money is strictly unnecessary to being a gamer.

Lesson 2: A Change in Scenery

If I drop the mouse here, it is a field mouse. If I carry the mouse over here, it is a rock mouse. If I bat the mouse into here, it is a cave mouse.

This rule applies more to wargaming than to roleplaying, but the same basic thought applies to both. A unit of soldiers changes entirely based on where and how it is fielded. Keep your mind open and your terrain modular, and the smallest number of miniatures can participate in an infinite number of sorties and conflicts. It’s not necessary to own multiple different large armies and several different detailed tabletops for the purposes of playing a wargame. Change the circumstances, and the same pieces can be rearranged into limitless combinations, each one sufficiently different from the last to be entertaining.

Lesson 3: Do What You Love

Play, play, play. Eat, eat, eat. Poop, poop, poop. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Play, play, play…

This is the lesson I have found most difficult to learn. Life is short. If you’re going to play, play. If you’re going to write, write. If you’re going to design, design. Better yet, do all three, when you feel like doing them. Being happy is just about the most important thing in the world.
It’s unfortunate that we do not have the same kind of leisure time that cats do – we have to look after ourselves. We have to work so that we can eat, and be clothed, and keep a roof over our heads. But that is all the more reason why we should use the time that is our own to do what we love, and have fun. Because if we work, and then come home and work more, what are we really accomplishing except our own misery and the misery of those around us?

Do what you love. Easier said than done, but worth striving for.

Lesson 4: Get Plenty of Sleep

I’m not tired, I’m just resting my eyezzzzzzzzz…

This is one we should all pay special attention to. No matter how good an idea staying up all night to game seems to be, it never quite works out. Playing without sleep sucks. Gaming, like most things, requires a certain amount of focus that is quickly lost after you’ve been awake for 16 hours. Caffeine only delays the inevitable and ultimately makes it worse. If you’re going to pull an all-nighter with your gaming pals, make sure you catnap in the afternoon or evening. It may feel like a waste of your time, but it’s going to be a bigger waste of everyone’s time if you’re falling asleep at the table. Dungeon master or player, or even if you’re just playing Halo, no one appreciates a gamer who can’t pay attention and stay focused.

Sleeping now means you can play later. It’s an exchange. Don’t short either activity.

Lesson 5: Hallucinate

This apartment is filled with bloodthirsty paper balls, bent on my death. I must destroy them.

This is the rule that fuels the others, and it should not require much explanation. You would not be a hobby gamer if you did not have an imagination, so use it! If something stops being fun, change it! Make up new rules, or a new situation, or new characters, or a new twist – a new anything! It doesn’t matter how stupid or insane it seems to you – you are predisposed to find your own ideas dumb, and you should not let that stop you. If it sounds like fun, it probably will be.

Remember being a kid, and running around the woods with a stick, pretending it was a sword? I’m not necessarily recommending that you join a live-action roleplaying game, here – the good ones are few and far between – but ask yourself why you think people who LARP are freaks, and reconsider those opinions. Try to tap into that childhood mindset and make it active again. Be willing to experiment, and more importantly to get hurt. When you fall down you can always get back up again. Get crazy. No one ever created anything of value by thinking like everyone else.

--

UPDATE:

So much for the stress wearing off. Jones' keen gamer instincts have helped her to circumvent all five protective measures we've taken to prevent her from pulling out her stitches. I've already had to rush her back to the vet once. We're hopeful that her duct-tape-enhanced Elizabethan collar will hold until she gets the stitches out on Friday, but it is difficult to be optimistic in light of her terrifyingly advanced problem-solving ability. If anyone's reading this, your thoughts and prayers would be appreciated.

Faith Check: Natural 1

I find myself troubled. This journal is not, as a rule, for detailing my personal life, but this particular issue is somewhat thematic, so I hope you’ll indulge me.

Last month, I turned 30. The change was not immediate – realistically, I’ve been feeling it coming on for a number of months – but I do wonder if it is not at least subconsciously linked to beginning my fourth decade of life: I seem to all appearances to have grown out of tabletop roleplaying, just like my father always said I would.

I explained these feelings to a friend the other day, and said that I was feeling odd and depressed because I had always been defined by tabletop roleplaying. He disagreed, replying that I had always been defined by telling a story, and that for many years roleplaying was the best way for me to exercise that interest. I think he might be right, because that is exactly how I feel: I’ve reached a point in my storytelling career where telling a story through a group of participants has become inefficient and ultimately unsatisfying. It’s not writing. It’s barely even practice.

My dream job is writing for roleplaying games, whether they be tabletop games or computer games or console games. But that’s not the same thing as sitting at a table with four friends and wrestling them through over-long combats and awkward interpersonal acting, and I’ve begun to realize that I can’t get there from here. Even the best computer or console roleplaying game is still a linear experience at its core, no matter how many subplots it contains. Even a play-by-post game is more an interactive novel than a true tabletop experience, by necessity. Even tabletop roleplaying sourcebooks tell a story that ultimately has nothing to do with the people sitting around the table. It is the gamemaster’s job to interpret these dense documents into something personal and enjoyable for the group, and that is what I’m tired of doing. I’m tired of writing my story and then having to chop it up and shift it around and – in short – give someone else say in how my story goes.

I acknowledge that this sounds spectacularly selfish, but I do not feel unjustified. Gamemastery is possibly the only art form that requires such input from one’s audience. And that is good; it is all part of the fun of tabletop roleplaying. The trouble is that it is no longer interesting to me. What I want is an engaged audience that appreciates and recommends without actually being involved in the process. I want to keep reading roleplaying game materials, and designing game systems, and writing stories, and having them bring people joy, but I no longer want to workshop them. I want to be my own author. I want to be a complete entity unto myself, and I want my audience to be a complete entity unto itself.

And who knows, next week I might realize this was all a fevered hallucination and that gamemastering tabletop roleplaying sessions is really where I belong. But I doubt it. I feel like change is on the wind, and it is time to grab my hang glider.

It is a long drop.