Asking for Information

Okay, this one is a little out of left field, but I need a good rant.

What is it with some people and the need to work towards an answer by asking a series of vaguely related questions, before finally asking the actual question they had in the first place?

It really bugs me.

An example: earlier today I had a very pleasant woman on the phone at work, and she asked me three questions. For one of the answers (which I will call [X]) I had to speak to another department. So, I dutifully call the other department, get all of the information I've been asked for, and go back to the woman.

I start reeling off the answers, and she interrupts me. "Oh, what I actually need to know is [Y]." Now, [Y] is vaguely related to [X], but wasn't part of the answer I'd obtained. So I call back to the other department, and obtain [Y], go back to her, finish relaying the information, and she says "ah, well, I was looking for the detail of all payments in and out, so we can figure out [Z]." Guess what I had to do to find all that out. Yep, put her on hold and go back to the other department again.

This is where I start to get ratty. Not with her - I'm a professional, after all - but with her behaviour. If she had asked me to find [Z] up-front, I could have got everything she needed in one go. The conversation would have been about half as long as she made it, because she didn't actually tell me what she wanted to know. For some perverse reason she thought she needed to tease it out of me, one snippet at a time.

So, my advice to anybody who contacts a company looking for information: start out with the end-point you want to get to. Chances are, they can figure out exactly what details you really need.

Fatherhood and Games Mastering

Something very strange happened to me last week. I had to stop and think about it for a minute, before I realised what was actually going on.

I was writing a bit of prose for a friend of mine for my weekly Pathfinder RPG game - his character has had a semi-prophetic vision (of the "prevent this" variety), and I'd set up the scene of the vision, and wanted to describe something to make it seem more dramatic.

Not wanting to go into too much detail about the scene I was describing, suffice to say that it was about demons terrorising a town that they had taken control of. Now, to me, demons in RPGs are evil, end of discussion (though I am also a merry user of the redeemed demon as one of my favourite NPCs in my long-running campaign). So, any evil thing you can think of is fair game for demons. Since I happen to have a fairly vivid imagination, I can think of quite a lot (though some truly depraved things still shock me).

So, I had an idea for a particular part of the scene - not to go into too much detail, but it involved a young child being harshly treated by a demon, and the child's mother able to only watch. I got about half a sentence into writing it, and stopped. That half-sentence got deleted. I got on with the rest of the story - I didn't even think to try and come up with a different description to use to "strengthen the image".

Why?

Because, as a father with a two-year-old, the image in my mind sickened me. Sickened me on a level I can't properly describe. Over the years I've described lots of things for RP, some of the worst crimes one human can inflict on another, and I've never had a problem writing things down for stories, but I had to avoid this one.

I doubt I can really explain it, but I've found one of my taboo subjects, and it's there not because I as a person consider it particularly depraved or awful - I can write that sort of description until the cows come home - but because I cannot separate the emotions I have regarding my own son and the things I write.

I can intellectually discuss rape, or torture, or the vilest means of dismemberment - I know the mechanics of them, but I have no deep visceral understanding of them, even though, for example, I have a close friend who was raped. But evil being done to a child? That's when Daddy steps in and slams on the brakes.

I'm not the same person I was before my son was born. I didn't really realise that until last week. Up until now, I'd always thought I could deal with anything in a mature, intellectual, detached way.

Boy, was I wrong.

I was again reminded of this when I was flicking through the archives on Gnome Stew and came across a post about taboo subjects, which is what prompted me to write here.

I don't think I have all that many taboos in my own games, but I certainly don't revel in pushing the boundaries of politeness, and I'm certainly a lot more careful than I once was about even mentioning certain subjects. The important thing is what stopped me writing that thing about the demon: if it doesn't add to the story itself, it's gratuitous, and if it's gratuitous, it probably doesn't need to be on the page.

My two-year-old son taught me something about writing and Games Mastering that I didn't understand until now. How awesome is that?

Times are Changing

I guess this is the part where I apologise (again) for not posting much. Okay, so it's only been a couple of weeks since my last post, but I thought it might be a good idea to mention something.

I'm going to be a daddy.

My wife and I are expecting our firstborn in January 2011, and in case you didn't guess, that means some huge changes to my life, particularly how much time I get to game.

I'm really not sure what life is going to be like after our son (apparently) is born, but everyone tells me that things will never be the same again. I'm looking forward to finding out. And terrified at the same time.

So, there we have it: That's what's changing in my life right now. I'm trying to squeeze as much "me" time in as I can before he's born, but I can safely predict that come December I'll be in full-on panic mode.

That, plus trying to quit smoking puts my life at an all-time stress-high.

I'll still be trying to put deep thoughts down whenever I can, though.

Now, to make this a bit more like my blog tends to be, my major project took a bit of a leap forward over the last few days (not as much of a leap as I wanted, but that's what balancing is all about): I have finally created a core template for City of Heroes Hellions in Mutants and Masterminds. That will make the following groups almost trivial to create: Skulls, Family and Freakshow. I also put a bit of work into a writeup of Statesman, but it's tricky not to make him overpowered as an NPC.

So, Clockwork and Hellions are done, with several other groups to follow swiftly on. Eventually I'll be able to put some thought into how to handle Council (they're a bit of a nightmare at first glance), and that will be the true core of my project completed. Once I have a gameplan for Council (I don't expect to actually work on them until I have said plan in place), I'll work on other low-level groups, and make my way up through the level chart (it gets easier the more I do).

Once I have either full statblocks or templates ready for the enemy groups, I'll be poised to make requests of the owners of Paragonwiki, as well as NCSoft/Paragon Studios themselves (who have previously given me a verbal "blessing" for the (non-profit, fan-based) project, but this was a few years ago), get writeups on the city zones, devise a "Contact Directory", and wrap the whole thing up in a pdf to make publically available to anyone interested.

Roleplaying fail.

Prompted by a Livejournal post by my friend Fusebox_Ellen about some RP in City of Heroes, I have decided to add some more thoughts.

As it should be obvious, I know the player and character to which she is referring, and it is a particularly reprehensible bottom-milliner who shall remain nameless.

For anyone who hasn't read that, this particular player claims to be autistic (in fact, isn't shy about declaring it), and is playing a several-thousand-year-old half-demon who also claims to be autistic.

Now, I'm no doctor. My speciality is astrophysics with a lively interest in cosmology and particle physics. My understanding of the autism spectrum is that the external signals are a lack of desire or interest in social interactions, coupled with narrowly focused repetitive actions. Within the realm of their condition, people with autism are frequently brilliant at the subject of their focus, but lack many of the skills deemed necessary to interact with the wider community.

Now then, we come to this player and his character. I'm going to call him "T". T's social skills are severely lacking. By which I mean that he has no concern for others.

In an online RP community such as City of Heroes, where you have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, the cardinal sin is God-moding - dictating the actions and/or effects of actions on characters that are not your own. Different people react to it in different ways, and the same person might react differently depending on the characters involved - for example, I have very few qualms about many of my characters' friends spontaneously giving them hugs, but if a stranger did it, I would react strongly and negatively OOC. The preferred method of approaching this sort of situation would be something along the lines of "Richard moves over to give Annette a hug" - I've not stated that he does give her a hug, just that he's intending to, which affords the recipient the opportunity to avoid it should they choose to.

Fortunately for me, I have never been on the receiving end of T's actions, so I've not had to deal with them. God-moding avoidance can easily escalate into e-peen measuring contests, and at the end of the day, I am not going to let someone else dictate to me what my character can or cannot do, or has happen to them. With the sole exception of a GM'd plotline, which is highly unlikely in the setting.

Further to the God-moding issue, there's also the thing that actually winds me up more than anything else, which is that T's character (I'll call him "Y", should I need to) is meant to be a superhero. Read that again, just to make sure you have it straight in your head. A SUPERHERO.

Superheroes, except certain particularly dark anti-hero types, generally do not threaten (not "pretend to threaten") to kill people in bars for not letting them queue-jump, and nor do they chase a villain onto the road and then stand there and laugh when said villain gets hit by a truck. HEROISM DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, to borrow a phrase.

Now, to give him the benefit of the doubt, this hero makes no claim on being an ultimate paragon of virtue, but Y is not a villain pretending to be good so that he can live amongst heroes - he claims to be an honest-to-God, bona fide, hero. A hero who interacts more with villains than other heroes, who laughs at people who get run over by trucks on the street, and who loses his temper so easily that unless he can get to the front of the queue for the bar, he threatens to kill the people in his way.

That is not the way heroes behave, in my book.

The character explains away this social ineptitude by proclaiming loudly and often that he is autistic.

The player then defends his character's social ineptitude by proclaiming loudly and often that he is autistic.

Autism is being used as an excuse, it seems to me. An excuse when actually none is needed - the player is roleplaying after all, so it would be a simple enough matter to actually make the character a socially inept, rude, obnoxious sort. But the player doesn't seem to want that. He wants the character to be liked. And yet does things that make it almost impossible to actually like the character.

Perhaps an inability to learn is one of those things I don't know about autism. Could well be.

The character is despised by a sizeable fraction of the RP community in CoH, and the player is the subject of many a rant in certain circles. I don't know if that's unfair, and if the player autistic, then it probably is unfair. But I am still left with the nagging feeling that someone who truly was autistic would play a non-autistic character, and just quietly let people know that they struggle in social situations, so the character's behaviour might be a little off-centre... and that's only if the player is even capable of RPing at all, due to the underlying social nature of the activity.

Tubthumping

Okay, I'll admit, that's a pretty obscure title for a post, but I really couldn't help it. Allow me to explain.

I've been watching a lot of Bones recently, and that song was mentioned in one of the episodes I saw a few days ago.

But, more importantly, for anyone unfamiliar with Chumbawumba's anthemic piece, it features the phenomenal line "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down".

Alright, why is this relevant to anything at all?

Well, I mentioned a few days ago that my Wednesday night RP group may be getting an extra player this week... and it looks like it is.

Alright, so what's so special about that?

Time for me to tell you all a little tale. Some of you may have heard this already, but please bear with me.

For the last 22 years, I've been friends with a great guy named Adam. He's pretty much the nicest person I've ever met... no, scratch that, he IS the nicest person I've ever met. He qualifies quite easily up there as one of the best friends I've ever had. He and another of my friends, Jim, were the Best Men at my wedding. The two of them come as a package deal.

On June 17 2007, very early in the morning, Adam was attacked on the driveway of his parent's home, where he lived. Not to put too fine a point on it, the attack was cowardly and vicious, and a clear attempt to murder Adam. I won't go into the details of why.

Adam suffered massive physical trauma, including severe cranial damage - a HUGE chunk of his skull was shattered. To get an idea, take your left hand and place it on the left side of the top of your head, with the heel of your hand on your hair line. The area covered by your hand (including your fingers), is what was destroyed.

It is only thanks to the quick action of the paramedics and the sterling work of the Neuro-trauma ward at the John Radcliffe in Oxford that saved his life. He was comatose for weeks, and has still not fully recovered.

Physically, at least.

Recently (at the end of February), Adam finally got his skull-plate installed. He just spent 18 months with only a partial skull, and now he has a titanium plate.

"Why, oh why is this relevant, Chem?", I hear you cry. Simple. The returning player is Adam. For the first time since the attack, he's coming back to roleplaying, and he's coming over tonight, too.

He got knocked down, but he got up again.