Author: Wren

Saturday Afternoon Musing

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I just took a five-day weekend and I already need another. One of the things I’ve been reflecting on recently is that it has been quite a summer. Two weddings because the relationship I was in, the end of the relationship I was in, throwing myself into my writing and my work in order to take attention away from the end of the relationship I was in, working more than ever so I could pay off my car loan, paying off my car loan, tons of flooding in my area, winning the Hamilton lottery, going to see Hamilton, trying to enjoy my long weekend and the game I took it for and being unable to because the internet has been going in and out without warning or pattern… A lot has been going on.

Sure, some of it has been good stuff, like the lottery and Hamilton, but that’s a still lot of emotional energy that gets spent. I can tell I’ve reached a new low because I’m always filled with the kind of existential exhaustion I associated with my depression but none of my other usual symptoms that go along with it. I also find myself spending an hour or more sitting on the couch, doing nothing or letting the TV just run because I know the internet is out again and, sure, I could write in a Microsoft document and just past it into WordPress when I’m finished or I could even just grab my phone and write my posts on it if I don’t want to bother with a bunch of temporary files but that’s a lot of effort and it’s taking all the energy I’ve got to just stay calm about how unreliable the internet has been and how that’s been negatively impacting my relaxation activities. Which isn’t at all a description of how I spent my early afternoon while waiting for the internet to come back so I could finish today’s post and get it online.

It definitely doesn’t help that work has been super stressful as well. We’ve got a big deadline coming up and I’ve had to assert my priorities to some senior coworkers a lot more than I’d like to. I’ve also had to deal with the prospect of getting put on a future project that continues a current project which has been a total nightmare of everything going wrong and one person domineering the design decisions. It’ll be a great product eventually, of course, but a lot of the time it feels like it’ll be good despite some people’s best efforts to turn it into an unholy abomination of things that sound good but are totally useless. I am extremely uncomfortable with conflict, but I keep finding myself gearing up for them at work because I don’t mind telling people they’re wrong or that they’re wasting my time. I’m one of the only people stubborn enough to sit through an hour of a meeting and stick to my (correct) line of reasoning rather than just agreeing so the meeting will end. I don’t blame my coworkers for not being willing to fight to the death like I am because they’ve been dealing with this guy for much longer. Most of them are much friendlier than I am with people who waste their time and none of them are as stubborn as I am. I’m a perfect storm of the right personality traits to confront people like this person and the sincere desire to never be in conflict ever. I’ll fight the battle because I recognize it needs to be fought and, if it turns out well for me, will save me stress and effort in the long run, but I’d also rather just keep my nose down and get through each day as it comes.

Some days, it feels like a lot of my life is like that. Lots of stress and effort now so things will hopefully be easier later. As I see this particular thought crop up in my life, I find myself wondering at what point I stop thinking “it feels like” and start thinking “my life is”? I think the main problem the later is that it’s easy to go from reflecting on how much effort I put into everything in my life these days to a whole slew of negative thoughts. Stuff like “is it worth working this hard” or “I have to work this hard because nothing good ever happens” or “I wish something nice and easy would happen because nice stuff never happens to me,” all of which are false. If anything, this past summer has taught me that this isn’t really a “good” versus “bad” scenario, this is a “work” versus no work” scenario. I did no work to get the Hamilton Tickets. Spent twenty dollars and clicked stuff on an app every day for so long I forgot I was doing it. That’s not any kind of definition of work in my book. That was a good thing that happened to me. It was an amazing thing that happened to me and I’ll be holding on to that happy giddiness for months.

I don’t sleep enough. I take care of myself last of all. I have depression that leaves me feeling listless and unable to do anything but focus on moving myself forward through the day. I get so caught up in my anxieties I can’t breathe. I have a hobby that fills my soul with meaning and helps me set direction for myself. I have good friends around me who care about me and the stuff I care about simply because I care about it. I have terrible luck, but it often turns good in surprising ways and at unexpected times. I can support myself and am only financially limited by my willingness to work extra hours. I make enough that I don’t actually need to work more than my required minimum number of hours to make ends meet. My life is pretty well-balanced, honestly. It’s not bad. It’s not great, either, but it’s on the positive side of neutral. I just have to work hard pretty frequently. Not because my life or lifestyle is in danger if I don’t, but because that’s the cost of making progress on my dreams. I wish it was easier, but then I probably wouldn’t value the time I get to work on my dreams as much as I do. I wouldn’t value a quiet weekend in the woods as much as I do.

Today, I don’t wish my life was different. Today, I just wish I had a few extra hours each day. There’s so much to do… It’d be easier if I suddenly got four extra hours every day so I could sleep more. I bet I’d get a lot more done if I was well-rested all the time. Maybe that’s what I should do with my next vacation. Just go to bed every day at ten at night instead of staying up super late because I know I don’t need to get up for anything in the morning. It’s worth trying, some day.

 

For Now

Wren Leave a comment

I’m not all I want to be.

I do my best to listen and to look
As I follow each hook and crook
And read every single book
While I do my best to cook
Up some kind of understanding.

I don’t think that’s too demanding
A task for me to stick the landing,
But here I am, stuck standing
With nothing more commanding
Than a sense of appreciation.

It fills me with frustration
That I can’t form the foundation
Of a simple proclamation
Because I’m stuck with the realization
That I can only speak for me.

I can’t just let that idea be
So I try my best to truly see
But I think we can all agree
There is no guarantee
I will ever get the words out.

Constant fear and niggling doubt
Cause both a flood and a drought
Of words as I try to write about
A path without knowing the route
It takes from beginning to end.

No matter what I intend,
There is no way for me to bend
My experience so I can pretend
That I have anything to append
To what someone else has said.

At night, while I lie awake in bed,
I dream of a time when my head
Is no longer filled with things unsaid
But, right now, I see instead
That I’m not yet all I want to be.

So, for now, I can only speak for me.

Destiny 2’s Future Looks Brighter Than Ever

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When I finally managed to log onto the Destiny 2 servers on Tuesday, a few minutes after noon, it felt like I was playing a whole new game. Except worse because I knew I wasn’t playing a new game and had a whole pile of expectations about how things worked that wound up being wrong. There were some growing pains at first, and I’m certain there will continue to be more, but I’m optimistic the changes the “Live Team” made to Destiny 2 are going to result in a better gaming experience over the course of the next couple years. Even after only two days of play, both shortened by internet problems unrelated to the game, I can confidently say the game is miles better than it was before.

My only major gripe is how frustrating it is to try to track weekly progress now. Instead of having one place I can go to check out my progress on everything, I now have to go to the map location of each activity and hover over it to see my progress. This means that, in order to check my overall status, I have to do a few dozen clicks whereas I used to be able to check it by tapping or holding a few keys on my keyboard. Additionally, there wasn’t really a clear explanation of how the changes would roll out for the weeklies, so I was left searching for them until I hit both level 50 and the “soft cap” of my character’s power level (500). I’m sure the information is out there somewhere, but so much happened in the space of a week that it was almost impossible to process how the immediate changes affected my gameplay, let alone what the future changes would mean. You can even see it in the community as a lot of the once-reliable information resources are struggling to keep up with everything that’s rolled out and the vague promises that more will be coming as time passes. Even the patch notes are too dense to read through without missing stuff and I’m someone who literally studied how to parse texts in order to get at the meaning inside of them.

When it comes to actually experiencing the changes rather than trying to learn about them, things are much better. After the update, the gameplay feels so smooth that it’s like playing a different game. Shooting feels way better than it ever did before, as does bullet impact and ability strength. Reload speeds feel somewhat sluggish now, but I’m pretty sure it’s because everything else is so fast-paced now that the unchanged reload speeds feel extra slow. I feel like my character moves faster, that combat resolves faster, and that all of my abilities are available faster. In the first mission alone, I used my ultimate ability, my “Super” three times before the first cutscene interrupt the mission. It was amazing. I finally felt like the powerhouse the game’s lore and history says you should be. A one-man (or, in my case, robot) army capable of beating even the toughest foes into the dirt with enough cleverness and ammunition.

Probably the biggest change to the pacing of the game was the introduction of what feels like sharper contrasts around your character’s power level (or Light level). Before, I could easily muddle through encounters above my Light level so long as they weren’t that far above it. If the gap was bigger, about thirty or higher, I’d get stomped into the ground and the same wasn’t really true of when you’re that much stronger than your enemies. Now, even a ten-level difference is noticeable and that’s for both sides. Being stronger than my enemies lets me just soak up damage like nobodies’ business and laugh as my health drops into the red because nothing but a bunch of mini-bosses or a single-big boss could kill me before I killed them. Enough mooks could kill me, and they have the times I got overconfident, but it’s pretty easy to just mow them down on your way to the real fight.

The new story isn’t very long, but it sets up a few interesting questions and leaves enough of an open end that their promises of more to come might actually be in reference to lore and story content rather than just gradually shifting environmental stuff. It’s also pretty engaging, given that they revealed during the announcement of the expansion that they were killing off one of the favorite characters in the game. It’s hard not to get caught up in what’s going on, especially because the bad guys talk now and say things that make you actually think for a moment about what you’re doing and what a “Guardian” (the generic term for what your character is) is supposed to do in general, when confronted with a situation like this one. All that being said, it doesn’t really leave you with much question about what you’re doing by the time you get to the end of the missions and anyone who has spent any time thinking about mortality or taken a decent philosophy class in their life will be able to adequately answer the questions. It’s fun and engaging, but nothing particularly special.

What has wound up being the most fun part for me has been the sense of exploration and discovery I get as I re-learn how to play this game at the same time that everyone else does. I can google almost anything new I want and never actually get answers to my questions unless there’s a discussion on a message board with people also trying to figure it out. The efficiency of new weapons, the locations of enemies that give you good rewards, how to trigger the more powerful versions of the public events, where to go to find all of the vendors, and so much more. Everyone is still figuring things out and it feels great to be able to contribute to that.

That being said, here are some things I figured out, specifically for anyone playing Destiny 2:

  • Join a clan and have people on your fireteam. It makes life so much easier and certain bounties require it.
  • Do all the bounties you can. Glimmer is easy to get right now, so spend it freely (and they’re super cheap) and reap the rewards in consumables and tokens.
  • Try new weapons and probably stay away from any PvP experience right now because either I really suck, everyone else is amazing, or people have just figured out how to win by being super shitty and do nothing but play PvP so they can be shitty to people. Seriously, it sucks.
  • Keep an eye on your random perk rolls but only for Legendary and up gear. If you like the perks, just hold on to it since you can always strengthen that gun or armor later.
  • The Tangled Shore is super fun, so spend tons of time there.
  • Bows are silly but only really work well in the Tangled Shore. They feel a little underwhelming elsewhere.

I’ve got a lot more specific information, but that’s not super useful unless we’re chatting while you’re playing so I’m not going to post it here. If you play and are reading this, let me know if you’ve got any questions or found anything particularly fun you’d like to share! I’d love to hear about it.

 

I Finally Saw Hamilton

Wren Leave a comment

On Tuesday of last week, the twenty-eight of August, I got a notification on my phone I had always dreamed of getting but never expected to actually get. I had won the Hamilton lottery and could purchase one or two tickets to see the show in Chicago on the following day. Needless to say, after spending two minutes freaking out, I bought two tickets and then started going down my list of people to invite. Unfortunately, my first pick was busy since it was his first day back at work (as opposed to cleaning up while on the clock) following the flooding and he couldn’t get the day off to drive to Chicago for a matinée showing. Thankfully, one of my roommates was my second choice and he was able to get the day off. So I went. Even with eight hours of driving due to traffic and construction, it was worth it.

Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s big-hit musical, was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I cried throughout it, not just at the emotional moments, of which there were many, but whenever the writing, acting, vocal work, staging, and lighting came together to create these wonderful little moments of perfection. As a whole, the musical showcases some of the most clever writing I’ve ever seen and sets aside the tried-and-true method of weaving songs together for one that relies more heavily on certain phrases that are the best foreshadowing I’ve ever witnessed. Between the moments where the songs themselves pull you out of the show, to impart some useful historical information or to help move things along, I was caught up in a world of song and voice. I can’t remember what the people who sat in front of me looked like, despite the fact that I spent three hours staring over their shoulders. I lost sight of everything while the show was in full swing. I was more caught up in this show than in anything else I’ve ever seen, read, or done. The full three hours of the show passed in a blink, interrupted only by an intermission that felt longer than either half of the musical.

While I can’t speak about the show in a general sense, since my only experience with it was the specific show being performed in Chicago, I honestly can’t imagine how it could ever be done poorly. The set was fairly standard, a level stage with an upper deck the actors could reach using a couple of on-stage staircases or some off-stage ones, and mostly functioned as a place for more of the chorus to dance and sing from, though it was used to add emphasis for some characters during important moments. The set was used entirely for staging, for dictating where people moved and how actors showed up on stage. All of the scene-setting, all of the environmental stuff that told you where the bit the actor were currently performing, was done entirely through lighting and the clever use of props. Using stuff like tables, desks, stools, and various similar things, they were able to create everything from a tent in the Revolutionary War to bedrooms or open fields. The best part of the staging was their use of a two-part turntable so one group of actors or props would spin one way and another group would spin the other way. They used this to amazing effect in one of the songs during the second half of the show, “Hurricane.” It blew me away and created the images that have stuck with me the most.

Honestly, the entire show was memorable. Each moment felt perfect, each little bit of acting and each scene being set felt like it was perfectly natural and complete, like it was unfolding on stage the way it certainly must have unfolded in the eighteenth century (with perhaps some liberty taken for language). I’ve been listening to the soundtrack since I got back into my car after the show and I feel like I can sit back, listen to the amazing music, and rewatch the entire show in my head. Each of the actors stood out from the crowd in their own ways and there was no wasted movement as they made their way around the stage. It was super clear they had the practiced precision that comes with repeating something dozens of times, but the emotion and energy they put into the show felt like this was their first night in front of an audience.

I don’t want to go too deeply into the content of the show because I avoided everything from the music to plot summaries for almost three years before I finally got to see Hamilton and I’m so glad I did. The sheer wonder and powerful emotion in some of the songs would have created scenes in my head and I would never have gotten the chance to see the show for the first time without any expectations or preconceptions. It was worth the years of denial for that moment when the lights dimmed and the first actor walked out on stage. I know it’s probably too late to recommend that you do the same thing, but hold on to that abstinence if you’ve managed to stay away so far. The music is magical and there are scripts out there you can read, but the show itself is better by far and worth waiting for.

What I will say is that it’s a relatively modern take on Hamilton, specifically it reflects modern scholarly opinions of Alexander Hamilton and some of the other Founding Fathers. The music is pretty Hip-Hop centric, which is another way it’s modern, but it seems like a pretty accurate portrayal of history, with the only liberties taken being in the way the characters spoke to each other rather than how situations resolved. I did some research to confirm this and it’s as accurate as a couple hours of reading can show. I’m sure a dedicated historian could shed more light on the subject, but I don’t have the time for getting another bachelor’s degree before writing this review.

I suggest downloading the Hamilton app so you can participate in the lottery or, if you’ve got a bit more money to spend, buying tickets the normal way. No matter where you see it, no matter who you see it with, it’ll be one of the most memorable days of your life. I suggest you go invest in enriching your soul.

Coldheart and Iron: 27

Wren Leave a comment

READ FROM THE BEGINNING

The nomads’ old home was in the third, fourth, and fifth floors of a ten-story apartment complex. As we walked up to it, there was an old wooden sign by door that once proclaimed this building was the Park Estates but had been spray-painted over sometime in the last couple years. Now, it read “Headquarters of the Chicago Gents” in fluorescent orange and had a few splatters of blood on it.

“So you actually had to fight your way in, I see.”

“Yeah. Most of the patrols just ran, but the guards out here stayed and fought. I’m having Lucas look around for any more patrols, though”

“Sounds like you underplayed what you did to capture their base, Camille.”

“Not really. I had Lucas cover our backs and left one person to shoot at their defensive position at the front door while I led everyone else to the roof. They didn’t have anyone up there or ever watching all sides of the building since every other door and window on the first two floors is sealed. So we cracked the door and cleared them out. They were panicking when we started shooting and we just took them down. I’ve got a sniper on the roof scaring off anyone who pokes their head out, though.”

“I can’t wait to get some rest!” I stretched my arms and sighed. “It’ll be nice to sleep for a few days.”

“That’ll have to be later, unfortunately. There’s some cleaning to do, though I had everyone I could spare get started on it. We made a mess.” Camille wrinkled her nose and popped open the door. “Honey, I’m home!”

One of the Wayfinders, came down the stairs carrying a body wrapped in plastic and smirked. “Great, now help us haul around everyone you killed. There are a lot of them.”

“We’ll need one of the small supply sleds to move the corpses, so just dump it here for now and help carry supplies upstairs.” Camille gestured out the door at the Nomads who’d stopped to gaze around their old home. “I think they might need a few minutes to get used to how everything has changed.”

“Right away, Lieutenant.” the Wayfinder dumped the corpse inside an apartment and I got a glimpse of the other corpses inside, waiting to be hauled away.

“Any of them still alive?”

“No. I tried to leave a few injured but alive and they just kept trying to grab their guns so no it’s on Lucas’ group to capture someone alive.” Camille shrugged. “From the duty rosters we’ve found, I’m pretty sure that are at least a dozen other patrols out there.”

“Eleven or fewer, now.” Natalie walked up with her pack and an armload of papers. “We took out one of them on our way to the rendezvous. Once Lucas gets back, I should have their maps and routes copied into my maps so we can make sure we won’t run into any of them.”

“I’m more worried about them coming back here at some point.” I gestured for Camille and Natalie to step aside so people wouldn’t have to walk around us. “You’ve got a sniper on the roof, but what about someone on the ground to grab them if they sneak up?”

“That’s my job. Now that you’re back and once you’re unloaded, I’ll be going back outside to do a circuit of the neighborhood.” Camille moved toward the door. “Speaking of which, let’s get you unloaded.”

It took us a few trips to get everything up the stairs, but we managed it by mid-afternoon. It would have been faster, but there was, as Camille said, a lot to clean up and the Nomad parents didn’t want to expose the children to all of the blood and gore. It took most of the rest of the day to get the corpses moved since there were more of them than I wanted to count. Camille had led the Wayfinders in an absolute slaughter. As the sun began to set, the Nomads began walking through their old home, setting everything to rights and gathering everything the bandits had left behind onto a table in the central rooms while I led the Wayfinders in getting a meal started.

Once we’d finished cooking, using most of the perishable supplies after checking that they were still good, Lucas and the scouts showed up. By the time we’d served the food and the Nomads started going over everything they’d found with Natalie, Camille returned.

“Any luck?” Lucas looked over at her as he scooped stew into his mouth.

“Yeah. I found a small patrol. They’re cooling their heels in one of the lower areas. We’ll get to them in the morning. Now, I just want food and a bed.”

“Ask and you shall receive!” I placed a bowl of stew and an ancient biscuit in front of Camille. “Soak the biscuit before you bite it. I recommend using the stew, but Lucas seems to be enjoying his biscuit water well enough.” Lucas raised his glass and swirled it around, sending the soggy lumps dancing again.

“How’s the state of our supplies?” Camille stuck her biscuit into her stew and then used her spoon to push it to the bottom of the bowl.

“With what we’ve picked up here, we can wait a week before leaving and then take out time getting to the enclave without worrying about running out. We could even wait here for the Blizzard to pass, first, if that’s what we want to do. That’d require hurrying once the Blizzard ended, but we’d still have a day or two of buffer without moving too quickly.”

Camille nodded, a pensive look on her face as she picked at her stew. “One of the bandits offered up a bit of information as I dumped them in their new temporary home. He said there’s a rumor going around, passed between bandit groups when they trade, that the Chicago enclave has some big thing happening before the blizzard.”

“Yeah?” I sat down with my own bowl of stew, sans biscuit. “Did they finally figure out where the heat was leaking out of the subway system?”

“No. Maybe. They rumor wasn’t about that. Apparently, they’ve got some kind of wall or barrier tech they’re going to put to use before the blizzard. According to the rumor, it’s supposed to fix everything including the cold so finally people can use computers outside of bunkers, grow food outside of greenhouses, and protect them against any of the monsters that show up.”

“Does it grant wishes, too? Maybe provide us all with immortality?” Lucas sniggered and took a swig from his biscuit water. “Maybe it can provide everyone with biscuits that are entirely water-soluble.”

“Laugh all you want, but this guy believed in what he said. Maybe it isn’t everything he wants it to be, but the rumors are worth checking out.”

“It’s kind of a moot point since we’re going there anyway.” I shrugged and stirred my stew a bit. “Does it really matter?”

“If the rumors are true, we should probably get there sooner, rather than later. I’d suggest skipping out on the rest we had planned and heading straight there.”

“We’d have a mutiny on our hands.” Lucas set his glass down and pushed his bowl aside. “I’d mutiny.”

I gestured at Lucas to calm down. “What would we gain by heading there before the Blizzard? If they’re testing out some new technology, better to wait until it’s been put through its paces before we put ourselves at risk near it.”

“That makes sense, Marshall, and I’d normally be one hundred percent with you on this, but there’s something you’re both overlooking.” Camille leaned on her elbows and propped her head on her folded hands. “If this group of bandits is sharing rumors with us that they’re getting from other groups of bandits, and they actually believe everything they’re saying, what do you think is going to happen to the enclave when they start up their barrier?”

“It’ll keep bandits out, so who cares?” Lucas shrugged.

“The bandits will attack and try to claim the enclave, and this barrier, for themselves.”

Camille nodded. “And if we want to keep the Chicago enclave alive, perhaps even settle down there for an extended rest, then we should go offer what help we can before it’s too late.”

“Shit.” Lucas sighed and pulled his food back towards him. “I’m going to eat, talk to Natalie about maps so she doesn’t murder me, get eight hours of sleep, and then head out. I’ll listen for more rumors and start clearing a path to the enclave. I’ll send a scout back for you all, so be ready to move by noon.”

I smiled at Lucas as he shoveled food into his mouth. “How do you know what I’m going to decide?”

“It’s easy.” Lucas shrugged. “You always opt for whatever is going to help people or protect the people trying to keep society together. Plus, they need our help. Not even the Chicago enclave could take on the full force of the local bandits.”

“Well, now you have the force of an order behind your plans. Get it done, Lucas. We’ll catch up to you tomorrow.”

“So much for resting up.” Camille spooned stew into her mouth. “I’ll revisit the prisoners in the morning, make sure they’ve shared everything they’ve got for us. In the meantime, I’m going to finish eating and then crash.”

“Get some rest. I’ll take care of guard tonight. We’ll need you in top form for clearing the way forward tomorrow.” Camille nodded and I turned back to my stew, planning how to tell everyone we weren’t going to stay here as we originally planned. It was going to be a hard sell, especially for the nomads, but the prospect of a return of at least parts of the life we knew before the collapse would be enough to tempt anybody. Even now, I had to push down the excitement bubbling up inside of me. I needed to stay focused, or else we’d never actually get the chance to find out.

Tabletop Highlight: Creating Fun and Interesting Characters

Wren Leave a comment

Having played and run tabletop games for over 8 years, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to create a fun, interesting, and engaging character in almost any tabletop RPG. While the strict definition of those first two descriptors means there’s a lot of subjectivity involved in the process, there are a few things you can keep in mind while you figure out what you think would be fun and interesting that would help keep the game an enjoyable experience for you and those playing with you. For the most part, they fall into two categories I’d summarize as “the ability to be engaged in or by the story and other characters” and “a series of imperfections that expose them to risk.” These are two fundamental parts of creating a character that are generally built into tabletop games with a basis in hard numbers but they can often be overlooked in other games. Additionally, the later can be avoided in hard number games like Dungeons and Dragons if the player optimizes their character in such a way that obviates all risk.

For the most part, exposing your character to risk is part and parcel with playing a tabletop game. There are some characters who avoid most risks as a result of their playing making them cowardly or extremely self-centered, but those often include the risk of negative social consequences or a loss of advancement opportunities (advancing via level or ability progression, specifically). Risk is a pretty broadly defined word and the only real way to avoid it entirely is to find a way to make your character so powerful that nothing bad can happen to him or to play with a group of people who are going to enable your (the player’s) machinations and rule-lawyering (a term that means you rely on your knowledge of the rules, their exploits, and the various gaps between them in order to manipulate an interaction in the game, either as the player or as the character, so that it resolves to your advantage). Typically, the only players who do this are the ones who actually enjoy having a character who never fails, so most of the failure here is the fact that it often frustrates other players, by either wasting their time as you argue through some obscure rule with the GM (who is always the final arbiter of rules but often lets things slide just to get the game going again) or by making their characters essentially useless.

Risk is essential because it the main vehicle for growth and change in the story your character is telling. Even if they aren’t a central part of whatever plot is currently unfolding, being unable to make them strive or risk something means they’re going to remain unaffected by whatever happens. They might learn new information or they might gain interesting new abilities, but there’s no way for them to actually change their course unless they fail something. Failure is the best teacher there is and sometimes the price of the lessons we learn are steeper than we’d like. If there was no risk of failure or loss, then what is the point in playing out the scenario? We all roll dice because we’re not certain of the outcomes and removing the chance of failure removes the need to roll dice. At that point, you might as well be reading a book or listening to someone tell a story. Sometimes, you lose it all and your character dies. Sometimes they lose something important to them. That’s just part of the game and the sooner you accept that you might need to let go of a character you loved, the sooner you’ll be able to really enjoy the character you’ve created and their experiences in the world of the game.

Thanks to the structure of games like Dungeons and Dragons, your character is automatically a participant in the story that’s about to unfold. If your character wouldn’t actually leave their humble origins and go on an adventure, you don’t actually make them. There’s always some part of them that has a goal to accomplish or some reason to want to explore the world beyond their village. In other games, it isn’t always that simple. Some games, like any that use the Fate system, require a little more intervention on the player or GM’s part. A lot of the Fate system games are based a little more in real-world sensibilities. For instance, the Fate game I’m currently playing in is based in a fictionalized version of the city we all live in because we’re familiar with it and the game requires a certain amount of city knowledge in order to navigate the game and tell a story together (the Fate system is much more role-play intensive and gives more story-telling power directly to the players). As a result of this more real-world feel for our game, are people need to be functional adults in this game. We all have lives and jobs and responsibilities that existed before the game began and most of which still exist after the game has begun. If you weren’t careful, it would be possible to create a character who has little connection to the plot and the other characters, which makes it even more difficult to keep them involved in the story. The GM can only do so much. The rest is on the player to write their character in such a way that it is easy to involve them in the story or else they’ll spend more time sitting out than anyone else.

The easiest way to get your character involved in the story is build in some flaw that allows the GM or other characters to pull them along. Maybe they have really bad luck and a history of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as my character in the Fate game does. Maybe they’re an insatiable thrill-seeker with little regard for their personal safety or the lives of others, like my first fifth-edition character was. Maybe they feel it is their duty to protect the overlooked members of society and are banished from their home for speaking out against their lord when the lord raised taxes too high for the peasants to afford. Maybe they’re easily swayed or they have debts they need to pay. Maybe they’re morbidly fascinated by crime scenes and bought a police scanner so they can go gawk every day. Maybe they are so meticulous that they can’t rest until they’ve reviewed every little detail that seems out of place. All of these things have one thing in common: there’s something that allows them to be easily put in danger, manipulated, or otherwise involved in whatever is going on at the time. If you’re having trouble thinking of something that would be applicable to your current game, just ask the GM for suggestions that would make it easier for them to set a plot hook or get the players involved in some story they’ve cooked up.

How you specifically apply these ideas is really up to your own interpretation. Like I said earlier, your definition of “fun” and “interesting” is probably different from my own and you should make sure your character fits into them. Including the two things I mentioned here, risk and engage-ability, should easily fit into your definitions, though. And don’t be afraid to give them more flaws or take more risks than necessary. Most of the fun in tabletop RPGs comes from success against all odds or when everything hilariously blows up in your character’s face.

Descent Into Darkness

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“Listen well, children, for I shall tell you of the world we lost and how this place came to be. Of what once was and may someday be again.

“The world was peaceful, once. A place of prosperity, light, and community, where anyone could reach out and connect with whomever they wished. Though conflict remained, it was small and often little more than jest. A brief disagreement blown out of proportion as a symbol of the bond between two brothers. Brothers born from a shared love rather than the same mother. Truly a time when the commonality between men mattered more than the weak bonds of blood and circumstance.

“Some decried this time of peace and love as nothing more than the death throes of a society brought down by its own complacency, and they may have been right, seeing how we now live in darkness and solitude, all that we once held dear lost to us as the great libraries of Alexandria were lost to the Ancients. So to, has much of our culture and what made us great been lost to us with nothing more than the elements to blame. And we, proud and once mighty, assumed ourselves safe from such trite things as a storm or the wind and rain.

“But no. We were proud and we were wrong. And now we pay the price of our hubris as we live out the rest of our days in darkness.”

“Charlie.”

“As the darkness descends ever deeper, we must-”

“Charlie, do you and the kids want cupcakes?”

“Mom! I’m trying to talk about the collapse of human civilization!”

“What? It’s just a power outage. Are you that upset you can’t play your games online?”

“This isn’t about that!

“Leave your cousins alone and go read a book.”

 

Saturday Morning Musing

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Ever since the flooding in the Madison area happened, I’ve started to regard thunderstorms and rain storms as actual storms rather than a simple minor shift in weather conditions. I used to enjoy sitting on my porch during storms, drinking a beer or just watching the rain fall. Now I can’t really shake the feeling that I’m looking at one of the first steps required to create a natural disaster. I used to take comfort in rain but now I spend most of the storm wondering if this is going to be enough rain to flood again or if the slow but steady rain over several days is going to make the lakes and rivers around here rise even more. I’m not in any danger, thankfully, but tons of people who live near me are in danger, as are a bunch of people I know.

Storms were once incredibly dangerous weather phenomena because they could knock over buildings, wash away months or years of hard work, and easily ruin the lives of people who were in their path. As humans developed into what we are now, we learned to set up our lives in such a way that it would mitigate the dangers of a storm. Things like better building techniques, irrigation, mechanical pumps, and stuff like gutters or cisterns or aqueducts are all things we’ve developed or learned to use as part of our adaption to storms. Most of them were meant to make it more likely that we’d survive the storms or to prevent the storms from wrecking our things, but some of them were things we built to make the storms work for us. Humanity, ever-adapting, learned to be able to thrive in an environment where chunks of ice, huge globs of water, and the occasional bolt of electricity are fairly frequent over the course of a year.

We got used to the storms and nature’s wrath expressed through earthquakes, giant storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and lava spewing out of giant rocks on the horizon. We learned to adapt and to build our homes in a way that would leave them somewhat more likely to survive the same disaster again. We refused to move away from places we’d adopted as our homes and determined we would master our environment. No amount of flooding, storming, hurricaning, or erupting would stop us from living where we wanted. For a while, that even worked. We built giant walls to keep the water where we wanted it, with complicated doors and windows so we could control where the water went once it was gathered up. We learned how to make big, strong buildings that would not only stay upright in an earthquake, but protect the people inside them. We learned how to predict eruptions and what to do when they started in order to save as much of our community as possible. We figure out how to predict the worst of the storms and then communicated to people that they needed to hide in specially designed shelters. We just adapted to the problems we found in our areas, invented insurance to pay for the homes that kept getting wrecked, and carried on with our lives.

And then we screwed it all up. Thanks to global warming and the fact that the entire world dragged its feet on responding (and many parts of the world still refuse to respond and at least one significant part of the world refuses to accept as fact), we get the leveled-up version of every storm. Hurricanes flood and destroy the costs. Tornadoes rip apart the interior of the US. Earthquakes show up in areas where there never were any before. Giant waves wreck coastal countries. Rainy seasons and typhoons stick around much longer in come areas and disastrous droughts show up in other places. Wildfires burn all summer and destroy ever larger patches of land. All the while, the people leading my country stick their heads further up their asses, people with money decide how best to screw over everyone else, and reactionary politics starts working its way into political systems that seem designed to let them have their way. The world is on its way to hell in a hand basket and it feels like all I can do is watch. And write.

I don’t really think I’ve got the power to change much right now. I’ve got a platform and a voice, but not a lot of people listen. I’m not even the person people should be listening to for these problems. Those people are screaming at the top of their voices and all the systems that should be taking notice are ignore them. It sometimes feels like there isn’t much of a point to trying. I wonder if there’s any point in trying all the time. Not about sticking to writing, I’ve thankfully passed that point in my life, but about trying to make people see what’s wrong in the world. So many people want nothing but confirmation of their own biases or to be told that someone else is taking care of the problem. What’s the point of reaching out if everyone who will listen already agrees with you and everyone else refuses to accept anything that differs from their opinion? In the age of the internet, it’s super easy to find whatever you want to confirm your incorrect beliefs. I mean, we’ve got people who think vaccines are bad because one shitty-ass doctor lied to the world (and lost his license) and we’ve got people who believe the Earth is flat because some people wanted to figure out if they could make people believe something stupid. How the hell do you try to talk to people about scary, difficult topics in a world where people will believe governments are controlled by some fictional “deep state” and that a bunch of money-grubbing assholes are actually prophets of some insider who will shortly expose the “deep state” for the dark cabal of secrecy and manipulation it supposedly is?

The world suddenly got too weird for me to understand it. I want to be a voice of reason, but it’s pretty clear that people care less and less about reason lately and more about emotional appeal. But only emotional appeal that benefits them because screw all the people who die due to, or have their lives ruined by, worsening natural disasters, racism, police brutality, fascism, extreme poverty, or disappearing natural resources.

Normally, I’d like to go sit on my porch and take comfort in the rain that’s gently falling on the area, but I can still see the pile of ruined furniture and carpet sitting next to my neighbor’s driveway if I do, so I can’t really enjoy the rain that’s probably helping to grow mold behind what’s left of the drywall in their once-finished basement. Instead, I’m going to sit here and write something until I feel better about being unable to make the change I want to see.

 

Today is My Birthday

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After a certain point in high school, I haven’t been super fond of my birthday. To be honest, I never really dissected that. I don’t know if I ever spent any energy on why I’m decidedly neutral on the subject of my birthday before today. I’m all about other people’s birthdays and throw myself into celebrating them as much as I can with my limited means and social energy. But not mine. I like to mark them, sure, but mostly by gathering my friends around me to do something like we’d do any weekend. Hang out, go hiking, play D&D, maybe watch a movie or play a game together. Hell, last year I got a cake to celebrate moving day two weeks after my birthday and otherwise pretty much forgot on my own birthday.

If I’d had to say why I wasn’t very interested in my birthday before a couple of years ago, I’d have said that I’d rather celebrate personal achievements. Sure, birthdays are a celebration of life, but I’d rather just do that as a part of living it rather than taking a day to specifically celebrate a particular life. I didn’t really want attention back then and I much preferred to do things on my own terms than try to accommodate people’s desire to mark my birthday. I wouldn’t stop them, of course, I was never that much of a Grinch, but I wasn’t about to encourage it.

Now, I see that birthdays are a chance to let people celebrate you. Structure is super nice and while we should let people we care about know that we appreciate them all year long, it’s still nice to use their birthday as a bit of an excuse to make a production of it. To kick it up a notch or do something special just for them. Which is why I’m more interested in other people’s birthdays than my own. I like letting people know I appreciate them. Any resistance I currently feel to celebrating my birthday is because August has never really been that great of a month for me and I don’t really keep track of my life in terms of years. Sure, I know my age, but that stopped being a measurement of my growth a long time ago and now I keep track of time since big events.

My life has had a lot of big events and there are definitely a few that are sort of definitive moments that I know had a big impact on my life. Looking back on them, I can see how my life would have been incredibly different if I’d made a different choice and how the choices I made contributed to me being the person I am today. There’s a wide variety of events and while reflection on my life is the purpose of this birthday post, I’m not going to go deeply into all of them. Some of them were moments I don’t want to share because they mean more to me for being private or because I don’t feel ready to share them.

The first one, and one that actually was two forks disguised as one, was my parents telling my three siblings and I that they were going to have another children who would wind up being twelve years younger than me. I fell out of my chair laughing and wound up being almost a third parent to my younger sister since my dad worked a lot and my mother was homeschooling us at the time so she needed all the help she could get. I eventually realized that this was the moment that I decided to deal with the crazy randomness of life and (mis)fortune by laughing instead of crying. There’s more behind that, but this isn’t the post to go into it. I also realized that I enjoy taking care of and teaching people. It really helped me to learn to cope positively and how to be patient and compassionate.

The second is not something I’m willing to write about in any detail online, but I learned how I respond in a crisis and that there’s a certain part of me, beneath the compassion and desire to just love people that will stay firm and act when I feel like I don’t have any other choice.

The third was the college I chose. I grew more than I thought possible, in ways I never expected, and learned things I never knew I didn’t know. I met a lot of amazing people, a handful of terrible people, and discovered that we’re all the heroes of our own narratives but sometimes that means we’re the villains of someone else’s. I made mistakes and I hurt people. I made mistakes and hurt myself. Like I said, I learned a lot. Without the place I chose, I’d have been an incredibly different person, to the point of it being useless to try to guess what or who I might have been. I’ve got no frame of reference for who that other Chris could have been, so how could I ever guess? The other side of my college choice is that it also resulted in a giant pile of student debt due which has left me feeling like I’ve been forced to put my life on hold until I pay it off. Even though I don’t regret my choice and think that the choice I made was the right one, I still struggle with the prospect of all my student loans and how much of my money I’ll have sunk into them by the time they’re paid off.

After that, there’s my move to Madison and my first job after the move. It didn’t go well, but I really figured out what was important to me and what my limits were. Tied to that is another thing I don’t want to share online, from two years ago (almost to the day), that irrevocably altered my life. There are some questions you never want the answers to and, throughout my life, I’ve gotten two of them I’d prefer to have never come across. But it reinforced my resolve and sense of self. The two experiences, my first job and the thing from two summers ago, weren’t positive influences on my life, but I learned a lot from having made it through them. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God” (Robert F. Kennedy on hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.).

It’s been a long twenty-seven years. I’ve hopefully got many more years ahead of me, but I wouldn’t mind if they were a little less eventful. I’d prefer if my next major life event was something good, like being able to write full time, getting married, or buying a house. Those would all be nice, even if there’s less to learn from the happy moments than the difficult ones.

Despite the Bumpy Road, I Haven’t Forsaken Destiny 2

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Destiny 2, despite the hopeful and positive review I gave it in December, has had some major struggles during its first year. There have been numerous controversies and even damage control didn’t manage to do anything but limit the fallout of the problems. From the numerous bugs breaking the Player versus Player elements of the game that cropped up every time something big came out to the discovery that the game was specifically programmed to rarely drop ammo for the gun you’re using, the first year of the release was a series of ambitious ideas that ultimately fell flat. There were out of control power-balance issues that made it difficult to succeed in PvP unless you did very specific things people shared on the internet so literally everyone could do them. There were frustrating bugs preventing a lot of the more interesting unique armors and weapons from performing as they were supposed to. There were even a few instances were doing events the way you wanted to became impossible because getting kills with your character’s special power (their “Super”) didn’t count toward the goal of getting X kills with your character’s Super. I ran into that one and had to change how my character worked in order to complete the objective. Sure, it was an easy change to make, but it’s so incredibly frustrating to only realize that the game wasn’t counting my kills after getting what should have been half the kills I needed.

I’ve fallen through platforms, used a piece of armor that literally didn’t work the way the description said it would work, had to deal with ineffective grenades because enemies could just run away after they exploded and ignore the secondary damage effects, had a gun whose special effect wouldn’t trigger half the time despite its trigger literally being “is being continuously fired,” and gotten stuck in loading screens for more hours than I’d like to count. The game has crashed at random only to give me reasons that had nothing to do with why the game actually crashed and I’ve had horrible moments where clicking out of the game has caused it to fail to finish loading the activity I’m about to do.

Despite all that incredibly frustrating crap, I’ve continued to play the game. Either my roommate or myself has figured out a way around the bug we encountered and we kept playing. I got better at the game so I could more easily tell when server lag for the PvP matches was to blame for me missing my target and I even helped set up a raid that took forever because some of the mechanics for a particular portion of said raid are incredibly obtuse and stupid. I’ve stuck through it for an entire year, keeping at least one character near the maximum power level so I could stay relevant and it is finally about to pay off.

As is now tradition for a Destiny game, the first year of its release is an absolute train wreck. Once that year is over, the live team takes over and will take care of all development for the game until the next one comes out. In Destiny 1, the live team fixed all the problems, managed to quickly fix most of the problems they introduced, and actually gave the player community what they wanted. By the time Destiny 2 was imminent, Destiny 1 was actually a really fun and successful game. As is evidenced by the announcements we’ve gotten ahead of September 4th’s expansion and the patch notes from the groundwork update we all downloaded today, it is entirely clear that the live team actually took the lessons they learned to heart the first time. It is equally clear the core team did not. To be entirely fair, the core team tried to entirely bypass the issue by doing something new but it ultimately failed. To make matters worse, it often felt like no one had actually tested out the software before they sent it out to the players and the proposed solutions generally felt like someone was pretending to listen to your problems while planning to just do what they want in the end.

Now, the live team is swooping in to give the players what they want, fix the balance of the game, and literally give the protagonist of the voice, The Guardian, their voice back. Seriously, the core team didn’t let the protagonist speak at all, instead using the little magic/holy-powered robot orb that made you into the unkillable killing machine you are as the voice for the protagonist. It was rather frustrating to have the orb, your “ghost,” constantly talking at your character or cracking jokes with other people. In addition to a bunch of quality-of-life updates and fixes, they’re adding a new game mode, a huge new expansion, something they’re calling the biggest raid ever, and a whole host of new weapons, armor, and unique items in order to revitalize the game so that everyone isn’t running around with one of four guns in each of their three gun slots. Hell, now you don’t even need to worry about the gun slots as much because now it’s almost possible to have a gun of any type in any gun slot, with the exception of some of the most powerful ones, like swords and rocket launchers.

While it remains to be seen just how much this power shift breaks the game, I think it’s a far better way of fixing the game than the core team’s strategy of trying to pull back on the power. Just give everyone godly powers and then no one will complain because they’re just as stupidly powerful as everyone else is. To paraphrase the villain from The Incredibles (the first one, not the second one): “If everyone’s super OP, then no one will be.” It’s a good strategy for a game where you’re essentially supposed to play an immortal, god-killing terminator of all that would stand against you. Seriously, your character killed a god-equivalent creature in the first game and I’m pretty sure we killed one of its almost-god children in this one. There’s nothing wrong with being a little OP if everyone else is, too.

It’s really been a mixed bag, this first year of Destiny 2. All signs point toward things improving, but I think I’m going to remain cautiously skeptical for now. I don’t really want to get my hopes up after they were crushed when I moved from playing Destiny 1 on my friend’s PlayStation to playing Destiny 2 on the computer. As much as I’ve enjoyed the game, there’s always been this sense of missed potential hanging over it because of how good the first game was by the time they stopped updating it. Hopefully this new expansion will help it finally reach that potential.