Saturday Morning Musing

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Last week, I completely rearranged my room. Originally, I was just going to clean it from top to bottom (multiple times since a ton of dust had built up thanks to my pet bird whose full-time job is dust generation), moving things around so I could clean underneath them, but I got hooked on the idea of changing how my room was laid out so I would up permanently shifting almost everything. Rearranged my books, threw out a bunch of junk, set up a new shelving system so I’ve got space for additional books, and even figure out a way to flag all the books I haven’t read yet so I don’t forget about them.

What originally started as a project about taking care of myself and the spaces I inhabited turned into a sort of meditative rejuvenation projection. All the physical labor involved in moving every single thing in my room and the mental labor of figuring out how to improve on an incredibly packed room using what I had previously thought was the optimal layout left me with no energy to berate myself or get caught up in thought spirals. As a result, I was able to really clear my head for the first time in a few weeks and actually think about how I’m feeling after what had been an emotionally exhausting May and June. It felt good, once I got past the incredibly gross feeling of being coated in dust and sweat for nine hours.

Beyond just the fresh feeling of having a “new” space to inhabit, I feel like I finally got all of my emotional processing from my break up to finally click into place. There’s still some healing, growing, and changing that still needs to happen, but it’s all stuff that just needs time now. I don’t regret it, anymore. I also don’t really want to make any more “pronouncements” about my emotional state right now because I recognize that my feelings are going to shift from day-to-day as stuff happens and I continue to go through the post-breakup process. I’m sure I’ll have another day before too long where I’m upset about everything all over again because something will remind me of a part of my relationship that I loved and my OCD will seize on it so I can’t get it out of my head. If I try to deny that, I’ll only wind up in a negative thought spiral about my relationship and another one about how I shouldn’t be upset anymore. That wouldn’t be good for me.

After I’d finished the new layout for my room, finished processing all my emotions, and actually did most of the work of laying out my room, I settled into a couple of hours of putting things back to rights so I could occupy my room again. While I did, I thought about the difference between being emotional or mentally healthy and being able to cope with one’s emotions and thoughts. I am not terribly mentally healthy, thanks to how often I struggle with depression, anxiety, and OCD, but I’m actually pretty good at coping with my own emotions and thoughts. I process things quickly, can figure out what’s going on inside my head, and have healthy outlets for emotions that are not productive or useful in living a life that makes me feel good.

Sometimes, it can feel tempting to say I’m emotionally or mentally well-adjusted even if I’m not emotionally or mentally healthy. The problem is both phrases mean mostly the same things, so it can be difficult to find the right way to talk about this. When I meet people who would probably get a clean bill of health from a psychologist or psychiatrist but have almost no ability to cope with, process, or handle their own emotions, I wonder which of us is better off. I usually think it’s me, because at least I’m not a gigantic shitshow of a human being intent on making my issues into problems the rest of the world has to deal with.

These days, it feels like these kinds of people are coming out of the woodwork and showing up all over the news. Fans harassing actors, artists, writers, and other content creators online. Political extremists who know nothing but assume everyone who disagrees with them is some kind of monster. Horrible people who decide that shooting a bunch of people is an appropriate response to rejection or anger. It can be difficult to remember these people, for the most part, always existed and they only seem to be more prevalent than emotionally well-adjusted people because the current twenty-four/seven news cycle is almost entirely a platform for stirring up fear.

There is still a lot of important reporting that happens, but it tends to get lost in the constant stream of idiotic crap that spews out of “news” sources. I don’t remember who said it and I can’t find it since I don’t remember the exact quote, but someone said that governments and public figures used to mislead people by controlling what information they can access. Nowadays, governments and public figures mislead people by flooding them with information until they can’t tell what’s true and what is false. That’s a lot of what is going on, these days. The internet is flooded with crap until people can’t tell what is true and what is false. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I deal with this sort of frustration by writing about it, by talking about it with people, by trying to learn more about the problem and ways to counteract it. One of my favorite ways is summaries of recent news articles followed by citations from trusted news sources pertaining to said stories. A few people (including a friend of mine whose page you can find here) have taken it upon themselves to do just that and finding someone to help weed out the truth from the crap is great, especially when they cite their sources so you know whether or not you can trust the story.

This all went rather far afield from where I started and where I originally planned to go, but I wound up taking a break to read some stuff in the middle of writing this and got a little distracted. I hope you have a great day and find a positive way to deal with your frustrations!

Captured in Words

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Once, I wanted to try to find
The words to say how I felt.

All I found were little phrases
That didn’t serve my needs
And quiet thoughts that lived
Past the edge of speaking.

I would have liked to continue,
Trying as hard as I could,
Just to see,
If I could have ever figured it out.

I never could find a way
To talk about the wonder
I felt when I looked at you.

I wouldn’t have minded
Spending the rest of my life looking.

Now, all I have left are memories
Of what I once wanted
And echoes of a feeling
I once felt resonate.

Maybe, if I can capture this in words,
I can stop feeling it
And finally let it go.

The Return to Overwatch

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I’ve been taking a break from Overwatch for a while. I got to a point where my favorite teammate, my roommate, wasn’t playing very much, so I was mostly playing solo or with other friends. Unfortunately, most of the time, I got placed with people below my skill level or who weren’t trying to play well, and so I got trounced repeatedly. I’d often wind up with the most kills, the most damage-dealt, the most time on the objectives, and the most kills around the objective, four out of five of the measures of individual player achievement in Overwatch, all despite playing a tank character who is supposed to focus on keeping people alive. One or two out of the possible four (the fifth is healing and all the tanks I’m best with don’t do healing) is not a problem, but consistently getting all four is frustrating, especially when we wind up losing because I’m the only person contesting the objectives or trying to coordinate the team.

I’m no savant. I’m not even an amazing player. I’ve got a good grasp of team strategy, character dynamics, and how to figure out people. I have a few skills I’ve polished very well and I’ve got an excellent sense of timing and battle flow. As a shot-caller, I’m pretty good at figuring out where my team needs to be and what we need to be doing. As a tank, I’m good at being where I need to be. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before but with a different take-away, Overwatch is a team game. I can’t win the match on my own. I can do everything right and still lose. I can call every shot with perfection and lead every charge perfectly, but my strategies are doomed to fail if all the people who were behind me when I started peeled away to do who knows what on their, leaving me to get shredded by an enemy team that stuck together.

It can be incredibly frustrating to lose because my teammates either aren’t trying to win (“it’s just Quickplay, quit trying so hard” is a common refrain when I try to communicate with my team) or everyone is trying to play Call of Duty. I don’t might losing if the other team is just better than we are. It can be incredibly frustrating, just like any loss, but at least I know I lost because they were just better or smarter or faster than my team. Losing because my team is a pile of idiots who pick the worst possible characters or refuse to play healers or tanks doesn’t feel good at all.

A common response to this sort of behavior in matches is to just stop caring. Most of my friends don’t really care or can just shut it off when they started to get bummed by dumb Overwatch matches. They’ll lean into whatever dumb thing the rest of the team is doing and laugh as it inevitably collapses. I can enjoy that. Some of the most fun matches I’ve played have been when we did something dumb that would up working in the silliest way possible, or failing in a huge but hilarious way. The thing is, those matches aren’t super fulfilling to me. The matches I enjoy the most, that I get the most from, are the ones where we execute brilliantly timed plays, where the entire team operates in sync, where we manage to just barely scrape a win because we were slightly better or managed to combine our abilities perfectly. Those feel amazing and they’re the reason I play Overwatch.

I want those games because I feel like I’m learning something new or improving myself. I like forward progress and that’s difficult (if not impossible) to get when you can’t actually play at your current skill level. I don’t like re-treading the same ground again and again because I’m being held back.

I’m sure I’ve screwed up matches for other people. I’m not some poor victim of the twists of randomly assigned teammates, I’m also one of the perpetrators. I can get a little tilted (playing aggressively and unwisely because I’m angry) when I get frustrated. I’m good at keeping my cool and playing consistently, but I occasionally mess up horribly because I’ve misread the situation or made a terrible guess at what the enemy team was going to do. I get that most people aren’t doing it maliciously and I’d probably benefit from trying to help other people play well than lamenting that they play terribly, but there was little incentive for people to actually care during most matches or to try to be a team player beyond winning or losing the match (which people don’t always care about).

That might be different now. Recently, Overwatch added an “endorsements” feature. You can endorse allies for sportsmanship, shot calling, or being a good teammate. You can endorse enemies for sportsmanship. If you get endorsed frequently, you get rewards and a little ranking thing next to your name. It also shows what you get endorsed for by coloring each endorsement differently and showing the percentage via color around the endorsement level in your name. Now, players are rewarded for actually working as a team beyond a win or loss. You can also spot when people just get endorsed because people see no drawback to endorsing as many people as possible after a match. If they are heavily endorsed for sportsmanship and very rarely endorsed for anything else, there’s a really good chance their opponents are just auto-endorsing them at the end of matches. If their teammates like them, there should be a higher percentage of “teammate” or “shot calling” endorsements.

I’m cautiously optimistic (like always), so I’m willing to get back into the game. I’ll give constructive leadership and shot calling a try again. I’ll do my best to make my teams the best we can be, try to reward good teamwork with endorsements, and hope positive reinforcement is going to be enough to change my experience with the game. If I can get back to a year ago, when I just loved playing the game whenever I had the time, I’ll be ecstatic. If I can stop feeling frustrated every time I play, I’ll count this as a rousing success. The internet is aglow with praise for the endorsements feature, so maybe it really will mean a shift in the game’s culture.

The Dark Lord? He was more a “Shady Lord” Than A Dark One

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The Wizard Derk was a simple man who wished for nothing but to putter around his gardens and magically breed interesting creatures. Unfortunately, in The Dark Lord of Derkholm By Diana Wynne Jones, Derk is selected and that year’s Dark Lord for the tours that pass through and has to scramble to perform a job that he is not only ill-suited to perform, but which was purposefully given to him in the hopes that he would be the last Dark Lord. Not only does Derk need to worry about all the “Pilgrim Parties” (vacationers from a different world who have paid to be the heroes in an adventure story) passing through on their vacations, but he has to worry about the leaders of his world who have set him up for every kind of failure they can imagine and a few they never expected.

The Dark Lord of Derkholm is a wonderful fantasy book that does a great job of satirizing fantasy. The story illustrates how silly (and how devastating) some of the typical fantasy tropes can be for the people experiencing them. World leaders complain of destroyed countrysides, ruined crops, obliterated towns, slain citizens, and pillaged homes, all while some man from the same world as the Pilgrim Parties, referred to only as “Mr. Chesney,” reaps profits that put the collected salaries of the people actually doing the work to shame. As a result of the damages, each person hosting a part of the events spends more than they earn and are in the end stages of slow economic decay. If that wasn’t enough, most of the damage comes from large groups of condemned criminals who are brought into their world to act the part of the Dark Lord’s Army, some of whom wind up escaping their prison camps in order to pillage the countryside for real, killing and burning as they go.

Each of the characters who takes part in the story, aside from the one who came up with the idea of ending the Pilgrim Parties instead of just getting more money from Mr Chesney, is a wonderful and complex person who still plays into stereotypes in ways that serve to better accentuate their characters rather than limit it. The one exception, Querida, the head of the Wizards, is an enormously powerful and clever old woman who feels one-dimensional because all she does is come up with a plan. That’s it. Her plan is to ask the oracles how to end the Pilgrim Parties and then throw as many wrenches into the works as possible. She comes up with ideas and then has other people actually figure out how to make it happen, but winds up getting all the credit for things working out. Not only that, but she expresses no concern when Wizard Derk is devastated by the results of the Pilgrim Parties, callously tries to separate him from his wife, Mara (magically, since Derk and Mara love each other and their children too much to separate), and tries to kidnap or trick most of Derk and Mara’s children. She’s awful and seems to be just as callous as Mr. Chesney.

Give the clever ways the other characters are written, how human and real they feel, with personalities distinct from each other and personal goals they pursue in entirely Human ways even as they’re tasked with seeing to the Pilgrim Parties, I can only conclude Diana Wynne Jones wrote Querida that way on purpose. There are a lot of powerful characters in this book, from Elven lords who can just wander into any part of the world they like to ancient dragons who can warp reality with the merest hint of their power, but most of them fall into one of two categories: those who respect people and those who do not. Even in Derk’s world, the ultimate victim of Mr. Chesney’s machinations, people with power but no respect for individuals without it are just as bad as Mr. Chesney and, though it is never confirmed, you get a sense that those sort of people are the ones who agreed to Mr. Chesney’s proposals in the first place. “I’ll get what I want because I have power and screw everyone else.” All of the villains that emerge are like this and so are some of the supposed good guys. The people who respect others, some of whom aren’t even people, wind up being the true heroes of the book because they work to mitigate the damage being done by this last season of Pilgrim Parties as everything goes haywire, eventually bringing the story to its happy conclusion where all the villains get punished, the ‘good guys’ are mostly ignored, and the good guys get to return to the happy lives they knew before they were interrupted by the awful ‘good guys’ and the Pilgrim Parties.

To be entirely fair, the plot itself wasn’t anything remarkable. You know from the start that things are going to more or less work out the way they seem to even though there’s not much in terms of foreshadowing, subtle or otherwise. In the end (SPOILERS), things literally only work out because the gods intervene, which apparently only happens because the world rose up to save themselves so the gods finally decided to pitch in. Literal deus ex machina. It hurt a little bit to see everything capped and explained in a few pages by gods who let all these people suffer for so long simply because the leaders hadn’t decided to put a stop to the Pilgrim Parties. Which is another example of powerful people who don’t respect less powerful people. The book is full of them, and they show up in the least likely places. Almost like it’s a theme, or something.

In the end, the only people who are truly happy are those who respect other people and treat everyone with a certain amount of kindness and care, regardless of how much power they have. The theme only becomes visible once you get to the end and can reflect back on the book, but it was a really fun read so I recommend taking the time to get there. If you want a good book that plays with your emotions and reactions to make its point, reads very easily (I cannot stress how wonderful a read this book was), and will show the humanity inherent in everything from Dragons to Griffons to Demons, definitely give Diana Wynne Jones’ The Dark Lord of Derkholm a read.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 18

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

When we opened the door, the rain of bullets flying out met nothing but empty air. One grenade rolled out, but Camille kicked it back as she and two other Wayfinders chucked a handful of grenades through the door. Half a second later, the bang of the grenades exploding was accompanied by the shriek of metal and the screams of whoever had been trying to keep us out. Camille dropped to the floor, peeked around the door, and then waved us in.

At the end of the hallway, right in front of the next door, was a machine gun mounted on top of what used to be a metal barricade. All that was left of the checkpoint was some gore, twisted metal, and the acrid smell of explosives. I stacked up on the door, two Nomads behind me and Tiffany, one of the Wayfinders trainees, across from me. I nodded to her and, after nodding back, she pulled the door open.

I fired at the first bit of movement I saw and heard someone curse as they dodged away behind one of the I-beam pillars. As I took in the rest of what looked like a large gathering hall, I noticed there were barricades set up around the bases of each of the pillars. A closer looked showed they were our barricades, but I had to duck behind the door again before I could get a count of how many there were.

“They’ve got our barricades set up!” I yelled over the din of gunfire from the gathering hall to Camille who was still looking around the corner at the far end of the hallway. “We’re going to need more grenades.”

“But your barricades!” One of the Nomads, a man who looked maybe a few years older than I was, poked his head out into the open doorway for a moment before a bullet whizzed past his face. He flattened against the wall again, his eyes glassy with a mixture of fear and adrenaline. “Won’t you need them?”

“Not if we’re dead. Pull!” I grabbed one of the grenades tossed forward by Camille and, after pulling the pin and waiting a second, tossed it high into room. It landed behind the barricade my first target had hidden behind and I watched as three bandits scrambled out from cover to get away from the grenade. They weren’t fast enough.

One of the grenades that had landed near the center, short of the others, burst into smoke and, after a few seconds, I waved my group forward. We rushed forward and off to the side, directly toward the now-smoking ruins of the barricades I’d hit with my grenade. With the Nomads covering us, Tiffany and I did our best to reassemble the barricades in a dozen seconds, took cover behind them, and cleared out the next set of barricades from our position. After trading places with the Nomads, Tiffany and I rushed forward again, to the next barricade, moved them around, and then settled in for a longer slug fest.

All across the smoke-filled room, we listened to the crack of rifles as our squads moved through the smoke to engage the bandits. Every so often, a bandit would pop up from behind a barricade to shoot and Tiffany or I would take them out. Just as the smoke started to clear, a grenade sailed out of the smoke and landed next to us. I kicked at it, scooting it across the floor, but Tiffany tackled me away from the barricade, swept around to the front, and then started pulling me around it as the grenade went off.

A few bits of shrapnel hit me in the left leg as I was being dragged around, but the barricades protected us from the worst of it. I started to roll around to the front, but Tiffany slumped over on top of me. I immediately pulled her around the other side of the twisted barricade and fired a few blind shots over it to cover me while I checked her out.

The battle raged around me as I provided first aid to a bullet wound in her side. Thankfully, it had mostly just taken a chunk out of her side as it went rather than going through her or hitting bone, but she was definitely out of the fight. I covered it with gauze, wrapped the whole thing in some duct tape, and then told her to get back to the rest of the injured people when we cleared the room. After she nodded, I wrapped some tape around the oozing shrapnel wounds in my leg, and rejoined the battle.

A few minutes that felt like hours later, we’d cleared the hall, blocked all the doors but the our retreat, and started taking the wounded back to join the rest. No one died, thankfully, but we had two more Wayfinders out of commission, including Tiffany who was angry she wouldn’t be able to help rescue Natalie, and only one Nomad. After collecting the surviving bandits, we took their remaining ammo and grenades before tying them all to tables, spread eagle so they couldn’t move.

While I was heading that up, trying to ignore the pain in my leg as I walked, Camille rigged up traps on every door but the first one we planned to search. There had been no sign of Natalie, Jonathan, or the bandit leader, so we were going to have to search through what the map we found called the dormitory, the training rooms, and the ‘homes,’ which were basically large apartments that went underground rather than further up. Apparently, the bandits had planned to make this a permanent city.

After Camille was finished, we stacked up on the door again and repeated our earlier procedure, this time with the help of the mobile barricades we hadn’t wrecked. Open door, let bullets fly, grenades, approach, cover, return fire, and then throw a couple of grenades or shoot until all bandits are killed.

The first door, to the training rooms, went quickly. There were almost no bandits in there and, after we blew up the checkpoint and machine gun nest, the rest surrendered. The apartments weren’t even dug up yet, so the hallway ended in a gigantic empty concrete room–larger than even the gathering hall–with a dirt floor covered in digging equipment. By Camille’s count, we’d only killed a little over half of the bandits we’d seen and only a handful of the Laborers. As a result, we changed strategies a little bit when it came to assaulting the dormitory.

This time, when we opened the door, we just threw in a few grenades and then slammed the door shut again. After they went off, we opened it back up and fired blindly down the hallway. When no response came, we peeked around the door and found the checkpoint deserted. The machine gun, a chunk of twisted metal at this point, resting on the ruined remains of the metal barricade.

“Camille.”

“Yeah, Cap?”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, Cap.”

“What now?” I stepped into the hallway, following Camille as she silently stalked forward.

Camille shook her head and signaled me to stop following her. I fell back to the door, gesturing for every else to do the same. She held her rifle tightly to her chest and crept forward until she was pressed against the wall next to the door. She carefully put an ear to the door and didn’t move for a couple of minutes. Eventually, when she finally heard whatever she was listening for, her face hardened and she made her way back to us, silently but swiftly.

“They’ve got something prepared on the other side of that door.” Camille was whispering as she pulled everyone back from the hallway and closed the door.

“We need to figure out how to spring their traps safely. Can we blow through the door?” I held up my last grenade.

“Probably not.” Camille held up a single grenade. “We’ve only got five left and it took almost two dozen to get that first door open. I’ve got a different idea.”

I put my grenade back on my belt and stood back. “You’re in command. You don’t need my permission.”

She nodded but I the hard look on her face still hadn’t faded. “Grab some of the injured but still mobile prisoners.”

“Ah.” I took a deep breath and looked her in the eye. “You sure?”

“I said it, didn’t I?” Camille gestured to two of the Wayfinders. “Each of you pick out a prisoner and bring them back here.”

Five minutes later, hands tied to their empty guns, Camille sent them forward to stack up on the door and, after a moment, open it. Judging from the way the prisoners eagerly went along with the plan, Camille seemed torn about changing it. Before she had a chance to change it, the prisoners rushed forward and yanked open the door. As they did so, we all dove for cover and prepared for the worst.

A moment later, the door into the hallway was blocked by concrete and everyone outside it was covered in aggregate dust. “Shit.” I coughed.

Camille stood up and shook most of the dust off her head. “Everyone up and get your guns on that door way! I want Marshall, Alice, and Lauren to set up barricades to cover our backs if they show up through some secret door. Everyone else, pair up with someone and take turns getting your faces clear. Move!”

A busy minute later, we were all set up around the filled doorway, waiting for something to happen. A few more minutes ticked by until, finally, we heard the voice of the bandit leader somewhere above us.

“A pity that trap didn’t catch more of you. Three should be enough, though. There are so few of you left.”

We all looked up. At the top of the main hall, some thirty feet above the ground at the opposite end that we’d originally entered from, a light had turned on and a small balcony was being lowered. I could see figures standing in the shadows of the alcove that must lead to somewhere in the dormitories.

“You’ve done an excellent job, but it ends here. You’ve got some of my soldiers, and I’ve got some of your commanders. We can trade and you can be on your way with whatever you’ve got in your hands, or we can kill your commanders and then shoot you from up here. There’s not enough cover for you to hide behind, at this angle.”

Al stepped forward, pulling Natalie by her elbow. From the bloody look of her face, they’d apparently been interrogating her. Jonathan didn’t look any better. They both had their hands restrained behind their backs and both got prodded to the edge of the balcony by Laborers wielding automatic rifles. “If you do anything but lower your guns, we push your people to their deaths.”

“Cam.” I whispered, not even daring to move my mouth. I heard her clear her through and the almost silent click of safeties being released. “How do we know we can trust you? What’s to stop more of your people from gunning us down as soon as we lower our weapons?”

“My word.” Al spread his hands smiled his same, vile little smile. “That’s all the assurance you’ll get fro-”

Five rifles cracked in unison and Al, two bandits, and the two Laborers with their guns trained on Natalie and Jonathan, all fell. Natalie spun, ducked, and pulled her hands around to the front. She grabbed one of the automatic guns and kicked the other to Jonathan. They both opened fired into the alcove and the rest of the Wayfinders weren’t far behind. A few seconds later, it was all over.

I ran forward and started stacking tables with the help of the other Nomads while Camille got the rest of the Wayfinders into a better position to monitor the alcove. Within a few minutes, we had a stack that was high enough for Jonathan and Natalie to drop down onto. Instead of them both hopping down, Natalie lowered Jonathan to me. “Grab him!”

I grabbed Jonathan and helped him to the floor, Natalie following behind. When he got there, I realized he’d been hit in the chest during the firefight, only staying on his feet due to adrenaline. “Shit!”

Natalie swept up, grabbed my first-aid kit, and started cutting off Jonathan’s shirt. “Hold him. I need to see if it came out the back.”

I called over two of the Nomads and we gently rolled Jonathan onto his side as Natalie continued to cut his shirt away. A moment later, I heard her swear. “No exit?”

She shook her head. “It’s still in there, somewhere. Where’s Tristan?”

I gritted my teeth. “He died in an ambush at a checkpoint when we first broke out.”

“Can you do it?”

I looked down at my suddenly nerveless hands. “I can try. I don’t know nearly enough for this, though.”

Jonathan coughed suddenly. “I can…” Jonathan coughed again and I saw blood fly out of his mouth. “W-walk you through it.”

“Sure thing, Jon. Just take it easy.” Right as I turned to yell, two Wayfinders appeared with a stretcher. “Get him on that and get him into one of the storerooms. They’re cleaner than this place, right now. Grab all the first-aid kits you can find and see if they still have Jonathan’s pack in the storage room.”

I leapt to my feet, pulled Natalie to hers, and gave her a kiss. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Ow” Natalie winced.

“Sorry.”

“You’re okay. I’m glad you’re safe, too. I love you.” Natalie pushed me toward the door, where the Wayfinders bearing Jonathan had already disappeared.

“I love you, too.” I ran after Jonathan. “While I’m performing my first surgery, send someone else to tell the other injured people to do something longer-term about their injuries.”

“Aye, Captain.” Camille saluted. “We’ll take care of rooting out the rest of the bandits and Laborers. You save our surgeon.”

I fought down the urge to scream as I ran and settled for a single word as I entered the makeshift surgery suite. “Shit.”

 

Tabletop Highlight: Figuring Out How Much is too Much

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The fun of inventing new societies, creating entire civilizations, and developing cultures is what draws me to storytelling, at least when it comes to what I get the most from. As a result, I really enjoy playing Dungeon Master and one of my favorite parts of running my own Dungeons and Dragons campaigns is the prep work. The thing is, preparation work, especially world building, is one of those things that will take exactly as much time as you’re willing to give it. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as I’ve practiced storytelling, both as a writer and a dungeon master, is that there’s a fine line between over-preparing and creating a world that doesn’t feel real.

One thing that dungeon masters often need to do is create towns and cities for their players to encounter. If it is a sizable city, chances are good that there are multiple blacksmiths the players could hire to create them some new gear. Some of them might be better than the others, some might have a preference for particular kinds of work, and some might just hate adventurers. They all have names, pasts, business practices unique to their specialties and levels of experience, and they all have opinions about each other and each other’s work. You, as the dungeon master, can figure all of this out or you can spend the time working on the political situation that it is likely the players will encounter instead of the intricacies of business and the people behind said business that will mostly be ignored by the players who only want to know who the best smith is (which is usually easy to figure out). To be entirely fair, some players might be more interested in the business scene than the political one, so maybe that’s the system that’s more important to your next session. Or maybe they won’t be interested in either the business or political situations and will just want to kill some monsters and protect some peasants, so maybe you should spend more time focusing on the environment around the town.

The key to figuring out what you need to prepare the most is in figuring out what your players will want. I’ve never met a player who changed what they were interested in from one session to another aside from one player who was literally just doing it to point out the holes in the world and ruin everyone’s good time. All players, even the aforementioned asshole, tend to be very consistent. Your first few sessions with a new group might need a little more work because you’re not sure what they’re going to care about yet, but once you’ve gotten a feel for them you learn where you need to focus.

The way I view dungeon mastering is that I’m basically creating the world only about as far as the next few steps ahead of the players. There’s always a horizon, major geographical features, and a sense of society behind it all, but the majority of the world is an empty canvas I only fill in as the players move or discover. If you wind up preparing in the wrong direction or keep trying to push your players in the direction you want them to go in, they’re going to wind up walking into all of the blank spots and feel like the world isn’t as solid enough to really believe in. Some players are more willing than others to ignore the empty spots they find, but most of the reason most people play Dungeons and Dragons is for the immersion you can achieve when you set aside the concerns of the primary world and fully embrace the secondary world. These are the people I run for and this is the kind of player I am.

No matter what you do, there will always be hiccups. You can’t have every name ready and planning everything out in excruciating detail so you’ve got the name of every blacksmith and item shop proprietor prepared is a quick recipe for madness and frustration when 99% of it winds up going unused. I’ve even seen dungeon masters get angry with their players for not exploring and caring about the world as much as they did. I’ve even felt it myself, when I took the time during the week leading up to the session to prepare an exciting encounter and a new bit of the world for them to experience and then my players spend two hours dithering about who goes on what errands and what supplies they need down to the last copper.

It can hurt to put in a lot of work and not get to see it come out in your game session, even when you know it’ll come up in the next one or the one after that. It doesn’t hurt much, though, so long as you focus on making sure there’s plenty of world for the players to experience as they dither about and shop for really weird things you’d never have imagined they wanted. Really, it just give you a week off of preparation. If all you can see is all the work you’ve done going unnoticed or un-experienced, you’re going to eventually lose your temper.

Part of the problem is how the line between too much and not enough shifts from group to group and even from session to session. My players care a lot more about the names of the people around them if they know they’re going to be in the same place for a while. They also tend to care less about the actual layout of the town the longer they’re there or the bigger the city is. For over two years, they’ve gone through literally the same town every time they enter a civilized area without ever realizing that they’re all laid out the same. All I’ve had to do is scale it up based on how many people live there. I created my second city just recently because I needed something different for a future adventure they’re probably going to go on. They don’t care what the places look like because they’re more interested in the people and the plot than the exact geography, which works for me since I can create interesting characters with ease and I’ve got a list of random names sorted by race and status so I don’t need to spend any time trying to figure them out when I make up a new NPC for them to befriend/eventually fight.

If you’re trying to figure out where the line is for your group, I recommending starting with more detail and slowly scaling it back. That way, you can avoid subjecting your players to a campaign full of blank spots before you figure it out. Step it down slowly and you should be able to notice when your players start to feel like the world isn’t as real as they’d like. At that point, kick it back up a little bit more than you think you need to and work to achieve a level of effort you can still enjoy. You’re supposed to have fun, too.

 

Equal Rights for Familiars

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“Being a witch’s familiar is a thankless job. You have to carry stuff around, hunt for magical reagents, fight off adventurers, and clean her bathrooms. I don’t know if you know what a steady diet of potion fumes and small children does to your insides, but I have first-hand experience with what comes out and I can tell you it is not pleasant for anyone.

“It’d make it all worth it if she’d just release the curse that binds you into your demi-mortal form, return the locket that holds the soul of your beloved, or, in Theodore’s case, stop dosing you with love potions every six hours.”

“You take that back! My Gina is a lovely woman!”

“Shut up, Theo. We all know what’s really going on, even if you’re incapable of believing it for another hour or two. This is exactly what I’m talking about! We need to unionize. We need to campaign for equal rights within the magical community! We must walk up to the table and demand they give us a seat.

“I know you’re all worried about what your witch might do to you if you protest or participate in our strike. For some of us, that will be the price we pay in order to gain freedom, rights, and respect for the rest of us. We outnumber them and they can’t just kill us all! The magical community would collapse overnight without us to support it.”

“I get what you’re saying, but have you considered that they can just replace us with a simple spell?”

“Sure, but they can’t kills us with a single spell!”

“Actually, they can.”

“What?”

“Yeah. My witch developed it last week. We’re pretty screwed.”

“Uh, I’ll put that on the agenda for next week.”

“If we’re still alive, next week.”

Saturday Morning Musing

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There’s a lot to be said for doing new things. Almost every bit of life advice will include something along the lines of “expand your horizons” or “step outside of your comfort zone.” It is possible to grow if you stay focused on what you’re already good at or interested in, but you can’t really grow in new ways if you never push yourself in a new direction. If you want to meet new people, learn new things, and participate in new experiences, doing new things is your best bet.

There’s also a lot to be said for doing the same things. Only by constant practice can you even approach mastering something. You can’t really master the violin by playing the saxophone. Sure, playing other stringed instruments and listening to music will definitely help your understanding as a whole, but you’ve got to stay at least somewhat close to your chosen instrument if you want to master it. You need discipline and repetition if you want to find the peak of your abilities. If you want the highest level of recognition, mastery over your chosen field, and to transcend your limits, you need to stick to more or less the same thing.

That being said, doing nothing but new things isn’t going to let you really gain experience or enjoy something because you wouldn’t stick with it long enough to really experience it. Doing nothing but the same exact thing is stifling and will only hold you back because small variations and exploring new parts of the same concept or practice is what will eventually achieve a higher level of skill. A mixture of repetition in your new experiences allows you to really experience them on a deeper level and trying new things in your repetition lets you feel out the edges of your ability so you can focus on surpassing them. The key to both is to mix in a little bit of the other.

At least, that’s been my experience. Doing something new is great, but only by doing it a couple of times can I really get a feel for it. It’s like when you buy a new album and enjoy a few of the tracks at first, but grow to enjoy different ones (or more of them) as you listen to the album a few more times. As you listen to the individual songs multiple times, your understanding of the song grows and you notice things that you missed initially. If you only stick to doing the same thing, though, you blind yourself to what might be out there. If you only listen to the same album or the same artist, you’re going to miss out on the rest of the genre you’ve been enjoying.

The first time you do something, you’re so caught up in the newness of the experience that you don’t really have the opportunity to appreciate it. The second time, it is still very new, but you start to notice things beneath the surface. Every time after, you find something new you missed before or get another chance to appreciate something you might have only noticed in passing the first time. If you keep doing it, though, you start to lose appreciation for something you enjoyed. Whatever hidden things intrigued you so much initially become boring and plain. You stop looking for something new in the experience because you think you’ve found it all.

Right now, as I try to get my life back in order after its relatively recent upheaval, I find myself seesawing wildly from one side of the equation to the other. I want to lose myself in something new, to experience something so wholly new that I don’t have any ability to analyze it or to do anything but open myself to the experience, but I also want to lose myself in the comfortable repetition of familiar things that don’t require my participation. I want either nothing but new things or nothing but old things. I want to be able to ignore all thoughts of all the things in my life that have been repetitions of new things and new aspects of old things because they’re tied up with a lot of complex emotions that I can only feel right now. I can’t do anything to them but experience them and wait for them to pass. For someone who wants to be able to control every aspect of their life, it can be a little hard to swallow the fact that there isn’t always something proactive I can do about what I’m feeling.

So I anxiously pick it at in the back of my mind and I wait. Impatiently. Unfortunately, reclaiming my life for myself is easier said than done and it requires a good deal more repetition of new experiences that I anticipated. It is interesting to see just how much of my life changed over the past year. To see how much of it feels like it no longer belongs to me alone. How often I feel as if something important is missing as I do things that I never imagined would belong to anyone but me.

Most of my relationships before this one where in college and the one that wasn’t in college was immediately after college. I didn’t have a life the same way I do now, with little routines, habits, and a set of things I kind of just assume will be a part of my daily life. Back then, everything was fluid, apt to change, and exciting. Now, I struggle to find meaning in the routines and to find purpose in pushing myself out of my comfort zone. People entering and exiting my life felt so natural back then and I never did anything long enough to feel like it belonged to me or to anyone else. Now, I feel like there’s a giant hole in my life and no one has even left it, not really. We’re just different now and that little, enormous shift was enough to throw the orbit of my life out of balance.

I guess I don’t really know what I want my life to be. I don’t want it to be a series of days where I repeat everything in new ways until I achieve mastery of whatever I’m working on. I don’t think I want it to be casual repetition of a string of new things, either. I want to say it should be a mixture of both things, but that feels like a cop-out as I write this. I feel like there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for how I feel, hovering just on the edge of my ability to voice it, but I can’t quite get it to take the one last step I need to be able to put it to words.

I feel like being able to finally understand that thought, to be able to put it precisely to words, would answer a lot of the questions I’ve been asking myself for the past couple years. I don’t think it will solve my problems or fix anything, but I feel like it’s the key to figuring out how to solve some of my problems and fix some of the things that feel broken. Maybe, after enough new experiences and enough honing my craft, I’ll find the right thought and the right expression. Maybe.

The Weight of Air

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Invisible clouds on the hidden horizon
Press against silent hills and tall trees,
All blended together by the unseen sun
And a moon too furtive to show.

The dusky sky delays dawn
As a shimmer of heavy grey haze,
Stale moisture that rose to rain,
Rules on high and patiently presses
On a world whose bated breath
Mocks the still waiting wind.

Falling drops playfully promise
Relief from the weary weight
That clings to sticky skin
But, like a kiss that never comes,
Remains only a half-hearted hope.

Returning to the Borderlands

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Borderlands is one of my favorite game series, second to only the Legend of Zelda series. There’s guns, gnarly explosions, the ability to instantly reduce someone to a red mist and chunks if you do enough damage, stupidly high numbers, an incredible cast of hilarious characters, guns with ridiculous effects, weird missions, plenty of jokes, and some incredibly stirring moments. These games, and the second one in particular, have been responsible for some of the strongest emotions I’ve ever felt as a result of a video game, and they did it all by creating an over-the-top and crazy world with an equally over-the-top and crazy cast that are still entirely real and believable. And they say you can’t really tell an interesting story in a first-person shooter.

Since the second one, Borderlands 2, is my favorite, I’m going to focus on that one. When you start a game these days, you can pick one of six playable characters, each with their own unique back stories, class abilities, and role. Since the game has cooperative play for up to four players, each character tends to fall into one of the roles you find in a typical RPG. Axton, the commando, is the party tank. Maya, the siren, is the party cleric. Zero, the number (assassin), is the rogue. Salvador, the Gunzerker, is the blasty mage. Krieg, the psycho, is the barbarian. Gage, the mechromancer, is the off-tank. Each of the characters has three skill trees that allows you to focus them toward one part of their role over another. Axton, my personal favorite, can focus on hit points, regeneration, and not dying; putting out tons of damage, staying mobile, and tactical damage; or creating a turret that is going to be a huge threat to all of your enemies, thereby diverting their attention away from you.

No matter which character you pick, the story stays pretty much the same, aside from a slight variety in the way the NPCs interact with you and what background information you’re given for your character. Handsome Jack, the owner of mega-corporation Hyperion, wants to dig up a vault and unleash the creature within it upon the planet, removing the bandits and people who live on it in order to turn it into what he considers a more peaceful, happy planet. He’s willing to kill anyone he has to in order to do what he thinks is best, constantly blames the player for forcing his hand, and seems to delight in the violence he gets to personally inflict on the people who defy his tyranny. Your character survives a train wreck and is then recruited by the anti-Hyperion resistance in order to strike back against Handsome Jack in an attempt to gain control of the creature inside the hidden vault first, so you can unleash it upon Hyperion instead.

Needless to say, a lot of crazy stuff happens that severely complicates everything. All the while, as you try to sort out the plot and turn in as many side-quests as you can, you’re collecting guns with crazy effects like shooting in bursts of thirteen that, when shot into a wall, create a low-quality rendition of the oldest cave paintings in the world. Or guns that never run out of ammo, guns that generate their own ammo, guns that explode when you attempt to reload them so that you never have to bother with replacing ammo clips, grenades named after classic D&D spells, and automatic sniper rifles that get more accurate the longer you hold the trigger down. Half the fun of the game is seeing what crazy guns you get and what their crazy effects do and, since the guns are all entirely randomized aside from a few important ones, it is incredibly unlucky that you’ll encounter the same gun twice.

As you move through the missions, gaining levels and collecting loot, you get to unlock new powers and abilities, turning your character into a one-person murder machine whose only weakness is one-shot kill attacks like some of the incredibly powerful enemies have and the fact that you sometimes just run out of bullets. The reason Axton is my favorite is because he not only just gets straight boosts to his damage, he also gets incredible health regeneration. He is my ideal character for a solo game because I don’t need to worry about dying as much and can take my time to line up the head-shots that’ll make each fight a breeze. It is incredibly rewarding to watch the huge numbers pop up as I shoot a bandit or bizarre creature in its weak point. There are ways to get higher numbers with other characters, but that’s contingent on luck and the right combination of guns and abilities.

While some missions can be difficult because of the requirements or that the way the game is designed to accommodate both solo play and cooperative play with your friends, the game is also forgiving. Hit boxes for most enemies and weak points are rather larger than they look and there are ways to bypass any amount of aiming deficiency. Shotguns, for one. Grenades, combat abilities, melee attacks, and stubborn refusal to do anything but work on improving your aim until you can nail a head-shot from across the map also work really well. Your best bet, and the most fun way to experience the game in my opinion, is to play with at least one other friend. The cooperative experience only adds to the game, since it makes it a lot easier to just plow through whatever enemies are blocking your way forward, to a degree. There are usually more enemies as a result of extra players by your side, but a friend can help you get back on your feet if you’ve gone down far more easily than if you need to rely on killing an enemy.

If you don’t mind a little gore on occasion and enjoy first-person shooters, I cannot recommend Borderlands 2 (and the rest of the family) strongly enough. It is incredibly fun and, though the pacing can slow to a crawl at times of heavy side-questing, is never boring. Check it out for the PC (my recommendation) or the re-release put out on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. You can’t go wrong, no matter how you choose to enjoy it.