Author: Wren

Threading my Way Through a Knotty Problem

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As I start spending time in my evenings meditating and trying to figure out what’s going on in my head, I sometimes feel like I’m failing because so much different stuff keeps tumbling out. I start in on one thing, but then my attention shifts and I’m suddenly following some other string in the tangled mess that is my head these days. It makes me feel like I’m not making any progress.

Which isn’t true. I’m making progress. Just like untangling anything, sometimes you can only work to untangle a single thread for a little bit before you realize there’s something else is preventing you from making progress. Then you shift your attention to the next thread and get back to work until you run into the same problem again. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you can make the whole thing easier by finding a single thread you can untangle and pull out of the knot entirely.

That did not happen to me last night. I spent a lot of time shifting between threads and I made significant progress on one of them, but I think I’ve got a lot more work to do before I’m ready to start pulling things out entirely. I’ve been writing down the thoughts that come out of this so I don’t lose track of what’s going on and so I can return to things that feel like they’re not finished or like there’s more I want to consider before moving on. I started folding laundry as part of my meditation and that worked really well because it gave my hands something to do while my mind was engaged but I started falling asleep as soon as I tried meditating without laundry to fold. I need more sleep because, right now, my main limitation to how much time I can spend meditating is that I keep falling asleep while trying to meditate.

Regardless, the big thought that came out of last night has to do with the way I commit to things I like and the driving force behind that commitment. I realized (not for the first time, but it really clicked in the context of my writing and relationship) that one of the reasons I tend to 100% or 0% everything is because I’ve lost a lot of good things in my life and I want to make sure I squeeze every second/ounce of enjoyment and positive emotional input out of them that I can before I lose them.

I haven’t lost a lot of people, thankfully, at least not in the sense that most people mean when they say that. I have, however, not had very good luck at developing history with people. Outside of my family, I have a couple high school friends I still occasionally talk to and a handful of college friends I’m still close to. Most of my childhood friends moved away when I was young. A lot of my friends from high school and I all grew apart. Same thing for college. A few people from my life did things that made it easier to walk away than to try to stay friends with them and I got pretty good at letting people go.

The same is true of things. I’m not terribly attached to things because I’ve moved a lot and I was made to throw out some of my favorite stuff when I was younger because my family went through a “Harry Potter is bad” phase as a result of what I believe was the influence of some of the more reactionary/conservative members of a home schooling group my family belonged to. This taught me that “things”  are transient, to be enjoyed while you have them, and to not mourn them once they are gone. Which means I’ve gotten good at letting go of things I can’t find or have lost. I move on easily, when it comes to things I used to love or enjoy.

Taken together, it paints a pretty interesting picture. I obsess over the new things in my life and let the old things slowly fade. I invest a ton of time and emotional energy into people who are important to me, trying to build strong relationships as fast as possible with the people I like, sometimes at the cost of maintaining older relationships. I do this with all the stuff I have and do (because this applies not just to possession and “stuff” but activities as well) because I am very aware of the transient nature of life. “Someday, all my things will be gone and I only have so much time in any given day, so I must do things now or else I run the risk of never enjoying them or doing them.” That thought process was why I spent literally all of my free time during March and April of 2017 playing Breath of the Wild. That though process was also why I give myself such a hard time when I fall short of my daily writing goals.

With people, there’s a similar thought. “I must establish a strong relationship quickly because I care about this person and want them in my life. If I can establish a strong bond quickly, we have a better chance of making it through whatever goes wrong.” Because something almost always goes wrong. I’m sure some of the things that went wrong were my fault since I invested so heavily so quickly, but a lot of them just felt like people being people: mercurial and not always predictable. Only a few did something that was actually nasty or awful. Then, if/when things fall apart, I move on and don’t look back, investing all my energy in new relationships. It isn’t exactly healthy, even if it isn’t as stark in real life as I’m painting it here. I am still in contact with a lot of people from my past, but I don’t generally communicate with them.

While its less of a problem with stuff, since I can practice enough self-control to not let this mindset negatively impact my life, I struggle with it in my relationships. Particularly with my girlfriend. I often feel like not seeing her for a week is a huge loss. Or if we don’t do something on the weekend. Or if there’s a short trip we could be going on together but only one of us goes. It doesn’t really make sense and it often bugs me that I feel so frustrated or anxious about those things,  so even keeping it to myself and preventing myself from acting on these feelings doesn’t prevent it from having a negative impact on my life. The anxiety sits in my stomach, lurking in the dark, and rears up whenever there’s a missed opportunity to do something with her, but it spends the time between events muttering about making sure our relationship is strong enough for whatever comes up.

Which is probably the core of the anxiety: the fear that something outside of my control is going to happen to my relationship and I’ll lose something I highly value. I know that to live is to be unable to predict the future or control what goes on around me, but there’s a huge difference between knowing something intellectually and overriding the instinctual fear of loss drilled into your by a lot of your past important relationships.

Going hand-in-hand with that is the fear that no one will ever pick me over other options rooted in the fact that even *I* do not pick me over other options. Got a friend (not a close friend I spend a lot of time or emotional energy on) who needs help? Let me just throw away my need for relaxation and desire to have a calm morning before the plans I made for that afternoon so I can help them. Got a project that I feel I should be working on? Let me just ignore how tired I am and how much I need to just be quiet and breathe so I can keep working on it until I collapse from exhaustion. Someone needs something that I have? Guess I don’t really need or want it. Someone I know needs financial assistance? Good thing I’ve got this money set aside that I was planning to use to pay off my car loan early. I really suck at ever prioritizing myself, even when it should be clear the amount of good I’ll be doing for someone else is heavily outweighed by the bad I’ll be causing myself.

Thankfully, I’m working on choosing myself right now. That’s what all this meditation and contemplation is supposed to be. Also, now that I know the root of the fear and anxiety that is making me go a little crazy in terms of emotional investment and attention, I can work on addressing it. These threads might still be a part of the tangled mess, but I’ve figured out one of the big knotty bits and I can finally start working on unraveling it.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming to Bring You…

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Angst. Not really. Sort of? Whatever.

I’m taking a break from my usual writing program/schedule/practices to focus on writing that’s going to help me with some things I’m trying to work through right now. I’ve been staying off Twitter more and more, lately, and it has gotten me thinking. I’m not exactly staying away from Twitter these days so much as kind of realizing that my brain’s a bit full and having a hard time saying anything without a whole bunch of unrelated stuff coming out. I feel like I need a break, but taking a break hasn’t changed anything. I’d really like to confidently push on like I have been because determination, discipline, and hard work are my strongest virtues, but part of me is starting to believe it might be time to take a break from moving forward. I haven’t spent much time on me, and I think I need to.

You know those diagrams people are always bringing up? “Fast, Cheap, and Good. You get two.” is the one that comes up in most of my professional experiences. “Sleep, social life, or grades, pick two” was the mantra of my fellow college students. I’ve heard of several more, too. These days, I feel like I’m making a similar choice. “Hold a job that pays your bills and student loans, work on writing projects, and maintain mental and physical health. Pick two.” Job and Writing have been my choices for the past 6.5 months and I think it’s starting to show.

Which is weird because while I still feel less emotionally stable than I believe is my norm and like my health (physical and mental) is always teetering on the edge of going somewhere bad, I feel like I’m handling it better than I ever have. All this writing helps me. It provides me a sense of location and a tether so that, no matter how bad the storm gets, I never drift far from where I’ve decided to stay. This doesn’t make the storms smaller, but it makes it easier to get back to things once they’ve passed.

I guess what I’m thinking here is that maybe I dropped anchor in the wrong place? Maybe I need to drift for a little bit? Which is hard, because I’ve grown to rely on the sense of security that constant connection to something gives me. I definitely need to spend time looking inward, whatever that means for my ocean/storm/tether/anchor metaphor. The big thing is, I don’t really know what I need and clinging to what I’ve been doing when it clearly isn’t what I need isn’t going to do anything but prolong this.

Which, you know, looking back on what I’ve been producing lately, seems pretty damn obvious now. Which is also one of the benefits of all my writing. I can see some stuff float to the surface if look back at the right time. Which is to say I’m not going to stop writing. First of all, I’ve got another 6.5 months of daily blog posts to put up. That’s not going to stop because, no matter what else happens during 2018, I will end it able to look back and say “look at this awesome thing I did. I am the shit when it comes to daily posts.” Secondly, blogging my thoughts every morning is a great place to find patterns, test out ideas, and just figure out what’s going on in my head. For instance, this whole post and the decision to change the course of my blog for a bit started as a what was supposed to be a 3-tweet message about why I haven’t been on much.

I need to spend more time untangling the mess that is my thoughts and emotions. I need to spend more time figuring out what it is I want from day-to-day. I need to spend more time investing in myself because, right now, I’m about as in-need for some serious time and effort as the US’s infrastructure. Haha… Topical humor.

I deflect all real attempts at connection with most of my peers using humor and pretending to not be serious. I spend way too much time monitoring myself for idiotic and self-destructive attempts to sabotage my relationships. If people ask me what I want or how I feel when I get emotional or express dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, I honestly cannot tell them anything. I have no answer to those questions. As someone who used to pride himself on his ability to take a look inside and figure out exactly why I felt the way I did or what things were going on that were making me feel a certain way, I’ve done a really shitty job of maintaining that.

I need it back because it was what let me constructively deal with my mental health issues, grow as much as I did, and work on growing healthy relationships with my friends. It wasn’t the only thing and I’m not entirely up shit-creek without it, but it would really help me work on my mental health issues if I could actually figure out how I feel about things that come up with my therapist and what exactly I want out of… well… Everything.

Tabletop Highlight: The Narrative Imperative

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I like to tell stories with my D&D games. Doing so can be tricky at the best of times because you’re merely the person setting the stage when you run a game, unless you’re willing to deny your players a significant amount of autonomy. If you let them have their freedom, the players are the ones who plot the story and direct it. You are all the actors, the camera man, the producer, the SFX artist, the prop master, and the scenic designer. And more! The hats you might be required to wear when dealing with a particularly willful group of playing is beyond my ability to describe, remember, or predict. There are simply too many things a good GM does when running a game to keep track of it all.

The thing is, though, you can have a lot more control over the story than most people think if you’re good at setting plot hooks. Plot hooks are for snagging players, not landing a story in their lap. You are hooking their attention and directing their actions toward a particular end that you’ve likely spent a fair amount of time devising. Most people stop that as soon as the quest has been given and the players have declared their choice. If they bought in, why spend more time on it? If they didn’t buy in, maybe you can recycle it later or find another way to pitch it once they’ve done something else. But hooks can be used quite frequently to help lead your players where you want them to go or to keep them focused on what you want them to be doing.

In my story-centric campaigns, frequent use of hooks can make the players feel like they’re at the center of the universe. Too much of that feeling can be bad because they don’t feel like there’s any risk, but enough can make them feel like the heroes their characters are. Carefully managing the frequency and type of the hooks allows me to keep my manipulation under the radar when I want it to be. It also lets me do things a bit more obviously if I know there’s something my players want that is in line with my goals. I can make them buy in a little more heavily for a portion of the overall story and they get to influence the events of the story in a way that makes their characters feel important.

My favorite way to do this is to give them an entertaining cast of characters that is invested in a particular outcome. If they care about these characters, then they’ll listen when they talk and be more willing to pick a path that helps them out. For instance, if you wind up protecting the bad-ass woman punching a hole in a stone wall because the god who saved your life told you to go do something that led you here and then it turns out that you discover the ancient, hidden tomb of a forgotten mummy lord while guarding her during a trip across a desert wasteland, the players might be pretty inclined to involve her in the tomb exploration (at least verbally, since she’s a busy woman) which means it becomes super easy to lead them in the direction of the other tombs the badass woman’s associates find since it turns out that their discovery actually explains why the blight the badass woman is investigating is happening in the first place. Now they’re all invested in doing what was essentially the NPCs job and they feel like they cracked the case wide open because they made one lucky skill check. Throw in a few hints as they go along at how this ties into the larger story and now all they want to do is figure out what is going on and fix what their main villain broke.

This isn’t to say, of course, that I don’t give my players the opportunity to go off and do whatever they like. If they want to ignore what is going on in front of them and do something else, they’re perfectly capable of doing so. I might not always drop some neat adventure into their lap (and definitely won’t if I sense that they’re being petulant or trying to derail the game on purpose), but I let them do as they wish. I just always make sure they know that time is passing and what they’re leaving behind might not be here when they get back. The passage of time and windows of opportunity aren’t exactly manipulation, but they do help keep players focused on their core quests.

The other main way I continuously hook my players is by giving them hints of what is to come and how powerful they could be if they follow down their current path (the one I want them to). Hints at alliances, potential gear, the experiences, and the in-world fame or glory for accomplishing mighty feats. The path laid out is not the only for growth and ever greater power, it’s just the easy way. Haring off in your own direction and doing whatever the heck you want can lead to growth and power, but it can also lead to dead-ends and unfortunate circumstances. I’ll never direct my players down a plot line they can’t handle, but the world is full of many dangerous things and they might run afoul something horrible if they stray too far from the places they know. If the party does something dumb, I will totally let them die. If they almost die or barely make it out of something awful because they did something incredibly dumb, they generally learn that there’s danger out there and wandering around willy-nilly means they might encounter it.

Thankfully, all of my players are very invested in the current story and they all want to find out what happens next, so it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep them invested or focused. For the most part. The “focused” bit can be tricky at times.

The End of a Long Road

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The road was long and the directions did not always make sense. Despite it, he prevailed. It took years, many false starts, innumerable dead-ends, and more moments of hopelessness than he cared to remember. Finally, after everything he went through, he had reached his destination.

He walked through the empty city, admiring the towering structures that he had thought he’d only see in his dreams and trying to imagine what it would look life a year from now, when it was filled with people.

It took everything he had to keep himself from being overwhelmed by excitement. He wandered from one landmark to the next, checking them out as he passed and doing his best to stay calm as the city matched everything he’d always imagined.

Of course, it wasn’t entirely perfect. The entire city was in ruins, but that didn’t excuse the misaligned walls he found and the scattered bugs throughout. Nothing major of course, since the fact the city was a ruin hid most of them from even the most dedicated observer. He made some notes, but knew they’d need to wait.

Finally, it was time to leave. He’d be back eventually. He’d never be away for long, that was for sure. For now, though, it was time to leave and let everyone else in. He glanced at the timer overhead and decided to stick around a bit. Seconds after the timer expired, the first person showed up. A scant few seconds later, two more people blinked into existence around the first one.

“Have fun!” He smiled at their bewildered expressions and then logged out. After taking off his headset and gloves, he tapped a few commands on his computer and sat back to watch the active user counter quickly climb toward one million.

Saturday Morning Musing

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I saw Avengers: Infinity War recently, with my girlfriend and my two roommates, and I’ve gotta say that my least favorite part of the movie was talking about it before and afterwards. Trying to actually engage in a debate about the timeline, what was likely to happen, what the movie’s actual events would mean in the long run, and how this all fit into the greater Marvel universe (which was the dumbest part of the discussion because the cinematic universe is 100% not the same uni/multiverse as the comics) was completely useless.

That isn’t to say that anyone was being stubborn, intransigent, or deliberately abstruse. No one was trying to be difficult and it was mostly just spirited debate for the most part. There were some difficulties, as there often are, because we all have very different ways of expressing our opinions that can sometimes make even the same opinion seem opposed to each other  The main issue is that I can point out the problems of a movie or book without it impacting my ability to like or enjoy it.

I studied literary criticism in college, which means I have a hard time turning of the “critique” part of my brain, but it also means I was quite literally trained to be able to look at the flaws of a story and still be able to evaluate it without letting one or two faults cloud my judgment. I’d like to say that’s the only difference, but I know people who were in my classes who never quite figured out how to do that.

When I said there were problems with the timeline that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has previously released as a result of the movies they released after the timeline, one of my roommates immediately leapt to defend the MCU despite the fact that, as we eventually figured out, he agreed with me. To him, my statement implied that the timeline issues of the MCU made the whole series of movies problematic. In my mind, it meant exactly the words I said. It took us a couple of minutes to figure out that he’d added implications that I hadn’t intended and to settle into an uneasy moment of agreement following a couple minutes of disagreement, but this is a situation I’ve been in so many times I feel like I should start to expect it any time I have something critical to say about any popular book or movie.

I could provide a long list of the things that got messed up or where unnecessarily changed in the Lord of the Rings movies and let’s not even get me started on the pile of steaming issues that was the second and third movies in the Hobbit trilogy. There’s also a few issues I spotted in the Harry Potter books over the course of the last few years, as I’ve re-read them a couple of times. Hell, I can even find problematic things in even my favorite books. Any time I start to talk about them with most people, though, they immediately get defensive or start bashing whatever we’re talking about.

It starts to feel, sometimes, like people can only love or hate something and that, when they do this or react strangely to me pointing out issues in something I love, people are telling me I can only love or hate something. I dislike being told what to do or put inside a box at the best of times, but this whole thing grinds my gears because emotions and preferences are so much more complex than that. I can love something that I believe pointlessly frustrates me. I can dislike something that has elements I enjoy. Like the everything else in the world, appreciation for stories is made of shades of grey rather than just black and white.

The only thing that frustrates me more than this is people telling me I can’t like something because they think its dumb or people acting like their opinion means something definite. I have a person in my life who does this a lot and I have a hard time expressing my frustration about it because I get so annoyed when it happens that my response is almost always too extreme for the infraction. I know I should say something, but it’s really hard to be polite and have an earnest discussion about what someone likely doesn’t see as problematic when you’re fighting down the urge to be angry about it.

What You Like

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I want to like the things you like.

When I see the glow in your eyes
And the way you get so excited
I want to burn with the same passion.

I want to feel the blazing light
That shines from your face
Whenever I let you run away with the conversation.

So I try to like the things you like
And warm myself in your glow.

The magic you see in children’s books
Reopens my eyes to the way
The world looked when I was small.

The walk was an easy one to make
But not one I’d thought to start
Until you bridged the gap between
The books I love and the worlds I left behind.

The unattended care of movement
Made in sync with loud music
As you cluster with your friends,
Never seeing beyond the circle
Of smiling eyes and laughing lips
Which only care that you are there.

It was never something I cared for
But I find myself there with you,
Forgetting my elbows, for once,
And the rest of the world, too.

Pastimes set aside as I try to stay
On top of chasing all my dreams
Are things you like just as well
But which were wasting my time
Until I could do them with you.

Any chance to spend some time
On any activity with you
Seems like a dream I can chase
A bit more literally than the others.

Things about myself that I can never see
No matter how long I look in the mirror
And the way my words come out,
Often halting and slower than I can bear,
Without ever doing justice to how I feel,
Earn that special smile you show me
When you want me to know you like me.

I was never something I cared for,
At least not in terms of “like” and “dislike”,
But I find myself wanting to start
Because you like me and I want to like what you do.

Video Games in the Workplace

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Because I work at a super cool place, one of my team’s side projects was to design and build an arcade cabinet shaped like one of the products my company is famous for. Once it was ready, we started using it to work out some of the kinks in the system we had set up to act as the software for our cabinet. It was a desktop computer and a large TV, so it was nothing complicated, but the version of windows was leftover from a computer two company operating system upgrades ago and the computer itself was something basically built out of salvaged parts the company was throwing away. Needless to say, it did not work very well. We had it mostly working for a while, aside from an occasional crash, but someone tried to fix that and it wound up getting bricked.

For a short period of time, though, the entire team competed at Galaga. Mortal Kombat was popular, but almost everyone played Galaga at some point or another. Or at least we tried to get everyone to play it. Whether or not they actually did it has yet to be determined because, after a few weeks, a couple of front-runners emerged.

Galaga isn’t a terribly complicated game. The levels always happen the same way, the mechanics work the same from game to game, and it is possible to win by simply memorizing the game’s patterns. If you know where everything is going to be and how long it will take your bullets to get there, you can easily get your score super high. If you know the trick to get two ships and are confident in your ability to kill everything before it can kill you, it gets even easier to get up there. Unfortunately, new levels kind of kill your ability to remember your way into victory, so your high score tends to increase slowly unless you’ve got amazing instincts. Sure, all the levels are different, but the patterns are similar enough that you shouldn’t be caught entirely unaware.

Myself and two coworkers competed for the top spots. One, Competitive, of them took it very seriously, and the other, Infrequent, only occasionally played. Competitive liked to get me to take turns with him, since our scores were close and we’d trade top spot every week. Infrequent would have been the clear leader if he’d played consistently since he almost doubled our scores the first time he played and then set the leaderboard solidly in the six-digit range. It took me a week to figure out how to get my score that high, but I eventually got there. A week later, Competitive did as well. Infrequent stopped playing at that point, so it was mostly just me and Competitive taking turns.

I have nothing against a healthy rivalry, but it was getting frustrating. Competitive wanted to play every day and he’d just walk up behind me, grab me by the shoulders, and say “How about some Galaga?” or brag about the fact that he held the high score. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to play anymore, despite the game’s comforting repetition and engaging simplicity. Galaga is a lot of fun and I can see why people loved arcade games, now more than ever, but it wasn’t worth the amount of disruption Competitive brought to my daily life, especially when he started wanting to play twice a day.

The entire dynamic felt weird to me. Both Infrequent and Competitive had played Galaga when it first came out. Competitive seemed to just enjoy having someone to play against while Infrequent seemed like he was disappointed in his stellar performance. The first time I played it was in a combo arcade at a pizza place, while my family waited for a seat. I was six or seven, I think. The next time I played it was at work last year. I pick up games quickly, especially ones that rely on repetitive mechanics, and I’m stubborn enough to put in the time it takes to get decent at something. If I’d kept at it, I’m certain I’d have gotten quite good at it.

These days, no one plays. The computer that once held the games was bricked and now the arcade cabinet sits cold and empty. Competitive stays in his office and I need no longer worried about being accosted by a man looking to feed his competitive spirit. I kind of miss it, though. The game wasn’t amazing and the controls kind of sucked, but it was simple, it was fun, and it was a puzzle just waiting for me to figure it out. I hope we get the cabinet fixed again soon. I’d like to get my high scores back.

The Man in the Golden Hat

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While my favorite Terry Pratchett stories are those following the Night Watch and Sir Samuel Vimes in particular (because of the themes they explore and the cast of characters in each of them), my favorite Pratchett character is Moist Von Lipwig. This unfortunately named man is introduced in his first story, Going Postal, as he sits on death row. The narrator reveals that he was a swindler and crook who defrauded banks, cheated people, and convinced himself that he wasn’t doing anything wrong because everyone chose to be swindled (for common street swindles like the shell game) or because they tried to cheat him (by buying a ring supposedly worth a lot of money for a tiny amount and then selling it to a jeweler only to find out it wasn’t even worth what they paid for it).

Eventually, of course, he was caught and sentenced to die for all of the money he stole and hid. Of course, nothing is that simple in Ankh-Morpork, the city most of Pratchett’s stories revolve around. Lord Vetenari, the current tyrant, decides to spare Moist on the condition that he take a job as the postmaster of the city’s failing post office. As is his modus operandi, Lord Vetenari leaves out just enough information to make Moist Von Lipwig’s life interesting.

Moist wisely takes the job and the arc of each of his three books is set. Vetenari gives him a difficult, nigh-impossible task and he rises to the task, not only figuring out how to restore public faith in his assigned institution, but often taking care of several other problems for Vetenari. The plot of Going Postal isn’t just about restoring the postal service, but about fighting against the corruption plaguing the rapid-communication towers. These semaphore towers were bought out by a group of greedy men who wanted to milk them for all the money they’re worth, regardless of what it costs in people and reputation to do so.

Moist, of course, rises to the occasion, taking on the administrative challenge of the post office and the inter-personal challenge of facing down the head of the company that owns the semaphore towers. He puts his silver-tongue to good use, selling the entire city on the idea of a functioning post office and his new invention, stamps. The people of Ankh-Morpork are easily entertained, as Pratchett likes to point out, and Moist is a master showman. He gets a golden suit (with matching hat) in order to stand out, he constantly makes bigger and bigger claims, and he constantly steps up every challenge he’s given. When he manages to somehow squeak through as a result of sheer luck or some audacious plan, the people reward him with their belief in the dreams he weaves.

That is why he is my favorite. He talks big and never feels more alive than when he is taking some insane risk. He wants to be challenged and to risk everything on the power of his tongue and the ideas he can sell people. He talks his way out of almost every corner he’s in and then somehow manages to deliver on everything he promised. He feels like a fraud and knows that he’s selling an impossible dream to people all too willing to believe him because he makes them want his dream. All while wearing a flashy golden suit.

In his subsequent books, Making Money and Raising Steam, he finds himself in a few more tight corners and needs to put in a bit more effort to get himself out, but he always manages it somehow. Despite the fact that he was a con artist for most of his life, he has become one of the most beloved people in all of Ankh-Morpork. He gets his kicks taking insane risks for the good of the public and constantly helps pull society forward by, as he likes to say, “selling them the sizzle” because a sausage always smells better than it tastes.

He’s one of the few heroes in Discworld whose power lies in his words. Some of Pratchett’s protagonists have magic. Some have luck. Some have a keen detective instinct or impeachable ethics. Some are strong. But only two rule through the power of their words and only Moist Von Lipwig has more than one book. William De Worde, the editor and first reporter for the Ankh-Morpork Times, does similar things in a different way, but his power lies more in his access to printing things in a paper than the words themselves, so I prefer Moist Von Lipwig.

I don’t really identify with him or anything like that, I just like the idea of a hero who abhors violence and wins using the strength of his words. The ability to spin a tale so well that you can talk yourself into or out of anything is a power I’d love to have. More than any other power, honestly.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 16

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

I woke up in a dark room. I had a few confused moments of wondering who had let the lamps burn out before the throbbing of my head started up. As the steady beat of pain pounded against my temple, everything came back. I fought down a surge of panic and settled for quickly standing up. In my haste, I didn’t realize that my hands were still tied behind my back so I pitched forward onto my face.

I lay there for a few minutes, doing my best to let my pain fade a bit while I ignored the bubbling sound my nose made. I didn’t think it was broken, but the sharp pain of landing on it had cleared my head. After the pain of my nose and head faded enough to ignore, I took stock of my surroundings. The room was completely dark, but not entirely soundproof. Every so often, I could hear the shuffle of feet passing by two of the walls. The fact that I could hear it and the rough, cool feeling of stone against my knees told me they’d taken my watch and my insulated gear.

My feet were free, so I rolled onto my back, tucked my legs to my chest, and slipped my hands around to my front. The zipties had been replaced by nylon rope, but it was tied too tight for me to shift my hands at all, so it was still awkward to push myself to my feet. I cautiously stood all the way up and, after encountering no ceiling, I lifted my hands above my head. I couldn’t reach whatever ceiling there was, even standing on my toes, so I shifted my attention to the walls. Careful shuffling footsteps brought me to the wall. I put my hands on the wall and used my feet to measure my room.

I was in a rather large room, some twenty by thirty feet, but there didn’t seem to be anything else in here with me. At least nothing against the walls. As I made my way back to the corner, I stopped every few steps to listen for the shuffling sounds from earlier. Once I’d located them, I stood in the corner and listened to them walk around me. After a few hundred heartbeats, I sat down. There was no way out. I couldn’t see any glimmers of light and I hadn’t felt any seems in the wall as I went, so I was either in a pit or they’d somehow managed to conceal the door from me.

“Hello?” my voice croaked into the empty room, but nothing happened. No one answered and the steps outside didn’t change.

Just as I was settling down to try to sleep off the throbbing pain that covered my head, I heard a few rapid, light steps beside the wall. A moment later, part of the wall near me silently swung open. I was behind the door, so I was saved the worst of it, but I still couldn’t see anything for a few seconds. Just as my eyes started to adjust, the door started to close.

“Hey!” I started coughing as my voice caught. I needed a drink badly, but my attempt had attracted the attention of whoever had opened the door. A tall figure stepped into the room, pulled out a battery lantern, turned it on, and shut the door. I blinked in the harsh fluorescent light, trying to see who it was.

“Here.” I recognized Camille’s voice as the figure held out a water bottle. I took it gratefully, but couldn’t get it open with my hands tied like they were. Camille twisted the cap off, and I downed the water quickly.

“You’re the best.” I dropped the flimsy plastic bottle and leaned back. “Anything you can do about these?” I held up my hands.

“Sure.” Camille reached into her pocket and pulled out a switchblade. “I’m surprised you weren’t able to conceal anything when they stripped you. This is the shoddiest operation I’ve ever seen.” Camille popped the blade out and started cutting through the nylon strands, careful not to hurt my hands. “They didn’t even strip us naked. Half the bandits seemed like they were afraid to touch a woman, so I was able to hide all of my knives easily.”

“Excuse me for my failures.” I watched as Camille slipped the knife between my wrists and cut the last strands without so much as marking me. “I fell unconscious before we were unloaded and I just woke up about half an hour ago.”

“Shit, Marshal, you’re going soft.” She smiled as she pulled me to my feet. “And that mouth on you! No wonder they punched you in the head.”

I shot her a smile that became a grimace when it cause a flare of pain. “Tell me they didn’t ruin my good looks, at least.”

Camille made a show of looking me over in the lantern light before shaking her head. “Nope. Can’t ruin what you didn’t have.” She winked and resisted the urge to smile again.

“Anyway, Mar. You’ve been out for about six hours, then, since that’s how long we’ve been here.” She held up a hand. “I can answer any questions you’ve got, but not right now. Trevor will be here in a couple of minutes and he’s our ticket out of here.”

“Trevor?” I stood to the side as Camille switched places with me.

“Yeah. He’s the leader of the little squad the bandits made from the laborers, so he’s got a few keys, including the one to this room. I heard he was planning to stop by after dinner, so I stole a key and made my way over here as fast as I could.” Camille grabbed a few of the longer strands of nylon and started arranging them on my newly freed wrists.

“Then I’m going to pretend I’m still tied up so he can come inside to beat on me, at which point you’ll jump him and take his keys?”

“More or less.”

“Neat.”

Camille rolled her eyes and picked up the lantern. “Just do what I tell you and we’ll all get out of here alive.”

“Always.” I took a deep breath and went back to my spot on the floor. The entire room was just as empty as I thought and the only signs of the door was that it was a slightly different color. There was no handle, no visible hinges, not even the tiniest gap. Whoever had made the door had been a master. After another moment’s thought, I turned to Camille. “There’s no way to open this door from the inside.”

“Yeah. All the cells or storage rooms are like that.” Camille hunkered down and switched off the lamp.

“What do we do if he doesn’t show up?”

“Wait for someone else to. I should have a few hours before they notice I’m missing.”

I was silent for a few moments, listening for the sounds of people walking around the room. “Thanks, Camille.”

“You’re welcome, Mar.”

I closed my eyes, trying to focus on listening. I lost track of my heartbeats, but eventually a louder set of footsteps appeared and stopped near where the door should be. A moment later, the door opened and I was almost blinded through my eyelids. I opened my eyes the tiniest amount, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on.

“Hello, Captain Marshall.” Trevor’s voice made it all too easier to see the sneer on his face. “I guess we get to have our time together today, after all.”

I blinked a bit, trying to pretend I couldn’t see. “Fuck off, asshole.” I took a look out the door and saw two more laborers standing just outside, watching Trevor as he stood a few feet away from me. I glanced over at Camille and cleared my throat twice before turning my attention back to Trevor. “I’m not into guys so either beat me up or leave me alone. Whatever you do, just cut it out with this obnoxious flirting.”

When Trevor growled and stepped forward, Camille silently rose to her feet and pointed from me to Trevor. “I got it.” Camille nodded. “You’re intimidating. Just do whatever you came here to do and get out. I’ve got better things to do that talk to you.”

“Like think about your girlfriend?” I stopped shuffling around and looked him in the eye. He smiled like he’d just won the lottery. “Don’t you worry about her, Captain Shithead. I’ll make sure she sees what horrible shape you’re in after I’m-”

I leapt to my feet from my position on the floor, closed the gap with Trevor, and punched him in the stomach with everything I had. As he doubled over and I grabbed the back of his head to bash his face into my knee, I saw Camille slip around the door. I heard a satisfying krack as I broke his nose and he fell bonelessly to the floor. Trevor groaned and squirmed, trying to clutch his face without actually touching it. I watched him for a moment before kicking him in the nuts for good measure.

By the time I turned my attention back to Camille and the two laborers outside, Camille was already wiping her knives on their jackets. “Grab that one.” She pointed to the one a couple of steps outside the door and then hauled the other dead laborer inside. I leaned out the door and admired the concrete structure around us for a moment before grabbing the other laborer and dragging him inside. Thankfully, neither had bled much, so the floor were still mostly clean. I grabbed the shirt off my laborer and wiped up the floor as best as I could, and then ducked back inside the room.

“Now what?” I dumped my dead laborer next to the other one.

“I take his keys, stab him in the kidney, and we leave.” I watched as Camille did just that and then grabbed the lantern from where she left it. Trevor twitched a little bit, but he’d stopped by the time Camille closed the door behind us. I absently touched my nose, checking to see if it was broken, as I followed Camille down the hallway.

Camille was in her element. She moved almost silently and took out four bandits as we walked down the hallways, killing them so quickly they didn’t have time to do more than register our presence before they died. I did my best to keep up with her between scuffles and stayed out of her way during them. My head was still pounding and I thought longingly about ibuprofen. There had been some in the medical supplies we’d recovered before the blizzard settled in, but Camille and I had higher priorities.

I followed her back to where her cell had been located, and she started going from door to door, checking for more Wayfinders. All of the rooms right around hers were empty, but one at the end of the hall contained Lucas. The bruise on his face had grown darker, but he seemed in better shape than I was. His zip-ties had been replaced with a set of loose manacles on his wrists and ankles. Enough to discourage him from attempting an escape, but not so much that it would restrict him from working.

He grinned up at us as Camille tested keys on his manacles. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. Except you, Marsh. From the sight of you, it looks like you’ve got sore eyes.” He chuckled as Camille found the right key and yanked him to his feet.

I rolled my eyes at Lucas as he started rubbing his wrists. “You’re one to talk. Your face is worse than anything I’ve gotten today, and you’re stuck with it constantly.” I smirked, careful not to move the side of my face that was still throbbing. I glanced around Lucas’ cell while Camille loosely wrapped the manacles around her left arm. It was a small room, about ten feet long and six feet wide with a small pallet that Lucas had been sitting on, a bucket, and a couple rings bolted to the concrete walls.

“How’d you get out, Camille?” Lucas stretched and started cracking his knuckles. “I didn’t manage to conceal anything on me and the bastards didn’t come close enough for me to take them out.”

“I stole my guard’s keys while he was busy watching me strip to be searched.” Camille shrugged. “I just wrapped the keys and my knives in my shirt, stood around in my underwear for a couple of minutes, and got dressed again. Like I told Mar, these young guys seem pretty timid when it comes to anything but pointing guns at people.”

“At least we have that going for us.” I shook my head slowly. “We need to cover more ground. Can we afford to split up?”

“Negative, Captain.” Lucas shook his head. “They have us spread out. We’re going to need to check every door and, if we start killing people now, we’re going to get found out before we’re ready. Better to stick together, hide, and find everyone first.”

I sighed and Camille chuckled. “It’s a bit too late for that, Lukey-boy.” Camille poked Lucas in the ribs and cracked her knuckles. “So far I’ve killed seven people today and four of them are just sitting in hallways.”

“Alright. Speed and murder it is.” Lucas held out a hand. “Give me half the keys and I’ll go check the eastern wing. You guys can handle the western one.”

“Just how big is this place?” I looked from Lucas to Camille. “Did someone give you guys a map? How do you know it so well?”

“Millie struck gold during processing. She asked to see plans for the base, to offer some advice on fortifying it.” Lucas wrapped the keys Camille gave him in the blanket from his pallet and tucked them into his pants. “As a result, we’re going to have to face some meaty checkpoints, but we all got a good look at the blueprints of what this place is supposed to be. It’ll put some of our fortified depots to shame if there’s enough of them alive to finish it when we’re done here. See you guys at the main entrance in thirty.”

Lucas started down the hallway, soundlessly making his way down the hallway. I watched him go for a moment before turning my attention back to Camille who was trying to get the manacles to sit comfortably on her arm. “Did you happen to know where they stuck our things?” She shook her head. “How about where to get some guns?”

Finally satisfied, she started down the hallway after Lucas. “Come on, Mar. Who do you take me for? Of course I know where the guns are!”

Tabletop Highlight: To Run or To Play, And Why

Wren Leave a comment

I love both playing tabletop RPGs and running them. When I run, I get to tell a story in a different format, hand-in-hand with a group of people who are just as excited about the story as I am. When I play, I get to participate in a story with a bunch of other people who care about what we’re doing and escape from my life for a while. Running a good game leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction and calm exhaustion that make me want to rest up so I can prepare to do it again the following week.  Playing a good game is exhilarating, whether I succeed or fail, because I got to do things I normally wouldn’t and think about things in new ways until I eventually return to myself, ready to coast through the rest of the day on the relaxed feeling I get from not being me for a while.

When you run a game, there are a million little things you’re doing to make it work out. Keeping track of the larger plot arcs as time passes, maintaining a world for the players, playing the part of any number of NPCs the players encounter, designing challenges for your players so they don’t get complacent or bored, telling a story so everyone can participate, and so much more. For every hour of game I run, I do a minimum of one and a half that many hours. Generally, it winds up somewhere in the two-to-four range. For instance, this week’s sessions was mostly travel, a chance to resupply, and a couple random encounters that wound up giving me an idea for an interrupt to the main goal the players are pursuing that also lets me bring in the requirements for a player’s prestige class. In order to get all that ready, I spent all of Sunday afternoon preparing a single item of legacy, adjusting the encounters to fit a party with tons of martial damage but almost no magical support, and digitizing some notes for the players to reference about their character. Throw in the time over the week leading up to that when I fleshed out the interrupt quest(s) and a couple of hours Friday night writing out my notes so I could see how they fit into the campaign plan. All of that adds up to about ten hours of work for four hours of play.

However, I now feel an immense sense of satisfaction that the players are moving along on their quest, that they feel like I’ve reminded them of the dangers of complacency and that they know there’s not just a goal, but actually feel tension because outside forces are quite capably working against them. It felt good to see my plans play out as I intended, to see my player get excited when I let him know we’d be able to get his prestige class stuff worked in soon, and how they all had to play their characters out in a situation that challenged their characters’ normal modes of addressing problems. I wanted to shake them out of their grooves without shaking up the story and I managed to pull it off, so now I’m excited to see what happens as a result of this.

As a player, I can ignore everything but the needs of the body as I place myself in the situation of my character. All of my knowledge except what my character knows and what might be applicable to the situation fades away. Sometimes the buzzing of my phone or my inability to remember the exact terms of an ability require me to break my focus, but those are quickly set aside so I can return to the game. Decisions are make, abilities are used, skill checks are made, and the story unfolds as I walk through halls and dungeons that exist in the murky, semi-transparent realm of my imagination. As a story-teller myself, my mind fills in all the little details as my character moves through their environment and I do my best to play by the rules of the game without breaking the illusory world I’ve created in my head.

Some GMs are better than others at letting this play out and some characters are better for it than others. If my character’s focus is on their own well-being, it is easy. If I need to focus on other characters because I need to protect them, it is more difficult. I don’t like filling in the gaps on other people’s characters and few people describe their character in great enough detail to create an image. A bunch of the people who don’t describe their will, instead, wind up drawing them, and that is better in some respects, but so solid an image can make it stand out from the murkier world I’m creating. Any character who takes the fore or who moves on their own is my preference. Sometimes, though, a character is so different it is hard to really get into their mind, so all of my effort gets focused on playing them correctly (or what I think of as correctly) that I don’t get quite as invested into the game as I would like.

Personally, I’d prefer to have both playing and running happen in the same week so I can get both the escape and the satisfaction, but I only have one group I play in with any regularity, and that game is a bit harder to get invested in for a few reasons that mostly revolve around totally valid stylistic choices by the DM and the fact that I don’t know any of the other players or the DM very well. I know one of them a bit better, and she’s the person who invited me, but everyone else is still basically a stranger. Running happens most weeks, but not every week because of the time and energy commitment involved. If I’m feeling worn out because of work or my mental health, I’m not really in a place where I can run a game and I’ve learned better than to try anyway.

In an ideal world, I’d have one night of fully-immersed play and one night of extremely satisfying running. In this world, I can generally manage one night of play and one or two nights of running, so that’s still pretty great, if more exhausting that I anticipated before agreeing to everything. Still, the benefits are worth the costs.