I Am Mute With Grief; Let My "Like" Suffice
I remember when my friend Kat went into the hospital to have a tumor removed, and her husband Eric kept us posted via Twitter. I remember at the time, not being on Twitter, that it seemed a little cold and distant, to let us know whether Kat was alive or dead via a 140-character broadcast.
Then I went into surgery for a triple-bypass, and I saw the other end of that; the deluge of requests, the constant phone calls, everyone’s worry piling up in a tide of messages that were just incredibly stressful for Gini. All this love had a cost, and that cost was communication, and when Gini started posting updates on Facebook, I understood: this was a mercy. She was near-unmanned by her concern for me. Let her post once, so she doesn’t have to relieve this stress over fifty texts and phone calls, and give her more time to hold my hand, for it may be the last.
I survived. My youngest cousin did not. He had a terrible accident on Monday – on a pedal bike, of all things – and he died. I’ve been kept in the know by my Aunt and my Dad, and haven’t said anything because it’s not my story to tell.
Finally, this morning, his sister posted a terse message to Facebook. And I commented, as did at least fifty others, expressing loss and support and concern. I was okay then.
Until I saw that she’d “liked” my comment.
I know what that “like” means. It means, grief has stolen my words, and my time, and my energy. Please. Let this one click suffice to show that I saw what you had to say, and acknowledged it, and that’s all I can do right now.
Sometimes, social media is petty, and mean, and full of insults and childish vitriol. But today, it’s a low-energy way of staying in touch at a time when I’m sure they do not want to talk to anyone.
That’s a small blessing on a very dark day.
The Official Ferrett "Ask Me Anything" Thread
I do this when I have a lot of Tedious Stuff to do at work, but don’t have the time to write a real essay. So. Here’s how it works:
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly.
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful. You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious. Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability. Go.
Random Thoughts On Going Viral: Some Follow-Up Thoughts On "Dear Daughter"
So my essay “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have (Fucking) Awesome Sex” was reposted at The Good Men Project, and now it’s all over the net. Over 31,000 people have “liked” it on Facebook, and I’ve gotten requests for interviews. (Sadly, all on a weekend I’m presenting at the Geeky Kink Event, so I’m booked.) And with this comes a lot of weird emotions:
1) I’ve had a lot of people claiming I’m either a good father or a bad father, which makes me uncomfortable. That turns the essay into a moratorium on whether my daughters are appropriately well-raised for society, and I don’t particularly feel like dragging them out into this spotlight. I don’t often discuss Erin or Amy on this blog because I arrived in their lives with a (much smaller) audience, and early on I decided that they should choose their own level of involvement. They, quite wisely, chose not to play. And so inadvertently having this essay blow up as a spotlight is a little awkward, since it does kind of invite the question, “So are his daughters happy?”
They are. But how much of that is due to me is questionable. I think if we’re honest as parents, we acknowledge we are but one oar in turbulent waters; my kids arrived pre-baked with their own genetic inclinations towards specific mischiefs, and all their relatives weighed in (often against me, sometimes rightfully so), and then when they got to be adolescents then the approval of other children started to matter a lot. You can be a very good parent, I think, and have a child who is quote-unquote “bad” (which I define as “unhappy” or “in a life’s situation that makes them unhappy”), and you can be a terrible parent and luck out.
Being a parent is a lot like being the President: there’s a lot more luck involved in good results than anyone wants to admit.
2) I had one guy telling the world, “HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE DAUGHTERS! CHECK HIS BIOS!” which struck me as supremely weird. One of my proudest moments was when I was on a panel with John Scalzi, discussing blogging, and he looked at me and said, “…I didn’t know you had daughters.”
I was proud because I have a reputation for being an oversharer, but my kids? Have their own lives. I’ve kept them shielded from that aspect of my D-list celebrity fame, and that feels good. So to have a guy using that strength as proof I’m making all of this up? A little strange.
(I tend to treat idiots on the Internet as though they’re stray dogs, confused and baffled by the world. I’m not mad, just trying to figure out how any sane person would come to this conclusion.)
3) I’m not a great father. I have some strengths, and open communication about sex and drugs is one of them, but I’m also introverted, short-tempered, and hate phone calls like they were acid poured on my genitals. I’m glad what I said resonated, very glad, but there’s a lot of dads who are way better than I’ve ever been. One solid opinion does not greatness make.
4) Some of the comments involved people saying, “Oh, man, so you wouldn’t mind if I had sex with your daughter? Mind giving me her number?” Which completely misses the point. Would I give you her number? No, because – as mentioned – I don’t own her. If she wants to give you her number, then she can. Because I don’t think it’s bad that they have sex with people.
I do think it’s bad if they have sex with idiots, which is why I try to encourage them otherwise. But I’m also not sold on my own infallibility. Maybe you’re not as much of an asshole as I think you are. I’ll suggest, but ultimately she has to come to her own conclusions.
But, you know, I’m pretty sure she’ll spot you as an idiot off the bat. And if I have taught them one lesson, it is in fact not to fuck the terminally stupid.
5) I’m glad I’ve had enough pieces hit it big to handle the criticism, praise, and misreadings that come with any article that blows up. (Though the blowback on this one is nastier than almost anything I’ve weathered before now.) The thing people never get about these sorts of essays is that, despite all I’ve written before, the article is only tangentially about you. People share things this widely because they wish they’d said it themselves, and as an author, I just feel grateful that I’ve articulated this churning wellspring enough that it resonated.
Basically, if you shared it, thanks. I’m glad it helped. I hope it convinces someone. That’s all the good I can do.
Numenera: The Review
Gamers will do what you reward them for doing. They can come to hate you for that.
That’s one of the tenets of designer Mark Rosewater. He says that gamers will do whatever you encourage them to do via a game’s rules, even if what you’re asking them to do is not fun. Do your rules reward players who keep track of money down to the last copper piece, providing extra XP for people who treat the game like it was Accountants and Assets instead of Dungeons and Dragons? Well, they’ll do it, even if there’s no one stopping them from discarding that rule… and they’ll come to believe your game is a tedious slog. So, Rosewater says, you have to be very careful about what sorts of play your rules incentivize.
D&D, unfortunately, encourages the wrong things.
D&D has been trying to accentuate the roleplaying aspect for years, but in the end, the main function for getting XP is killing monsters and stealing treasure… so that’s all most players do. The ill-advised D&D Fourth Edition changed the game into the all-combat system, basically assuming the roleplaying would arise organically and turning the game into a miniatures fighting game – which immediately looked inferior to the computer-handled combat of World of Warcraft, and D&D’s been struggling to regain its footing.
Numenera, Monte Cook’s latest RPG, attempts to reward different behaviors.
Numenera feels like an experienced DM stripping D&D down to its core and trying to refocus it on storytelling. The mechanics are clean, relatively simple, and emphasize story complications. You no longer get XP for killing monsters, you get them for story complications.
Which is to say that the GM says, “Okay, you’re climbing that ledge into the Baron’s lair, and it’s going too easily. I’ll throw in a GM Intrusion; you grab a loose rock, which tumbles out of your hands, hits your head, and you begin to fall.” The player can choose to refuse the GM intrusion, in which case he has to pay 1 XP for a smooth climb, or he gains 2 XP as a reward for story complication – and has to give one of those XP away to a player immediately.
XP, in turn, are a more dynamic resource than most games. You can save XP to level up, but you can also burn a point of XP to reroll a die, have another player reroll their die, make a task easier, and so forth. Monte estimates about half a player’s XP will be spent making the game easier, which in turn gives the players a little more control than the usual frustrating “I’ve rolled four critical misses in a row!” dependence on dice.
This clever little twist would be notable in roleplaying alone, as it’s got the right incentives; you don’t get XP for killing monsters, but rather for allowing more interesting things to happen in the game. You can have a very boring game, if you want, but then you’ll get no experience. And so the DM can, as the guidebook notes, subtly railroad you; if you want the players to be captured, rather than fudging die rolls, you instead keep intruding until the odds are stacked against them, which gives them more of a reward and makes it feel a little more natural.
The rest of the game feels surprisingly refreshing, designed to deal with common problems in roleplaying. Characters love spending hours tweaking their characters, but that means that DMs often spend tedious hours creating NPCs in the same system. Solution? NPCs are built using an entirely different and quicker system, so you can generate a monster in twenty seconds. GMs often have problems setting the difficulties of various tasks thanks to lots of tables and modifiers. Solution? Monte creates an absolute table of difficulties from 0 (anyone can do it without effort) to 10 (the maximum doable by humans, the stuff of legends), and sets it up so that it’s trivial for a GM to figure out how hard this door is to unlock.
The end result is clean, stripped, efficient. It feels like the game is working for you; in D&D, there were so many rules it felt like you often had to battle the system in order to remember how to do something, but Numenera is working in your direction. There’s even a large section where Monte talks to you, the GM, directly about the intent behind these rules, with lots of admirably concrete and crunchy examples about how you’d use them in real life.
The setting, alas, is a touch less successful. Numenera takes place in a far-future Earth, with people living in the detritus of long-dead civilizations, emphasizing mysterious futuretech. That is very evocative, and works wonderfully. Less so are the kingdoms and geography of the world, which aren’t nearly as memorable as the setting; you have all sorts of semi-generic places like The Seafaring Trader City and The Kingdom Riven By Civil War, which feel just a tad underimaginized for such a rich and crazy world. Admittedly, I’m spoiled by Monte’s rich imagination at work in Planescape, where each plane was a reflection of one of the classic alignments, but it’s disappointing to have such a bizarre and rifty world with a layer of old medieval history plopped on top.
(The sample adventures, however, are richly imagined – and there are four of them, which I think do a better job at bringing out the setting than the tour through the lands. This is a significant saving grace, and there’s even an added adventure for Kickstarter backers.)
Also slightly disappointing: cyphers, which are one-shot, mysterious, salvaged items characters carry to have very potent powers they can only use once. This is a conscious design choice, and a very good one, to give players a constant flow of exciting, above-their-paygrade powers to dazzle with. Yeah, it gets weary when a character teleports out of every danger, but the cyphers are sketchily working things forced to do duties they were never designed to, so having an excuse to have a character teleport once into the Duke’s bedroom – when, say, he began to fall from a ledge – leads to the stuff of legends. Which is exciting! It’s great to have a constant stream of new powers to toy with!
Alas, given how often you’re supposed to give cyphers out – supposedly characters should burn through 1d6 of the devices per session, and have them replenished – there’s just not enough variety for my tastes. There are a hundred sample cyphers, which seems like a lot, but I know from long experience on the Wand of Wonder table will grow stale quickly. So I was hoping for a thousand of them to start with. One suspects other numenera tables will be brought out stat, but for such a critical aspect of the game – which was almost named after the cyphers – I would have liked more fleshing.
Still, this looks to be one of the best new games in a long time, and it accomplished what a good game should do: it has me ravenous to play it. The next step is clearing my schedule to see when I can do it, and assembling enough players to bring it on, and personally? I can’t wait to start bringing people through the Ninth World. If you’re interested, and you should be, I’d definitely pick up a copy now. Because though I have yet to run a session, it looks like it rewards all the right things for both GMs and players, and that will allow wonderful games to emerge organically.