A Disappointing Roleplaying Experience

As anyone who cares about my roleplaying posts knows, Delta Green is my favorite RPG.  It’s The X-Files meets actual FBI procedurals, and their sourcebooks are so detailed and so realistic that I feel smarter for having read them.  The guys who create Delta Green are deeply knowledgeable about their subject material, whether that’s the Philadelphia Experiment or the history of the New York underground, and they fuse that with Lovecraftian creativity in a way that creates new and spectacular horror.
Yet I’d never run a Delta Green game.  So when our current campaign fizzled, I agreed to run a one-shot, and I was all the excited.  I ran Dead Letter, my favorite Delta Green module.  I did all the research to make it work according to the timeline.  I got the information readied, the right sheets photocopied.  And…
…everyone was frustrated and bored.
Now, part of that was that I’d mistakenly stressed the “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in real life” without stressing the dangerous nature of the job.  In real life, you’d never break into a magazine’s office – that’s high risk.  And so the players were very conservative, talking to no one, flashing no badges so as not to draw attention to themselves, and in retrospect I should have amped up the danger of “We need to have this thing tracked down and bottled up ASAP,” perhaps by also adding the time pressure that they’re all doing this on their vacation time and thus only have a week or so to rectify it, so as to impel them on to more adventurous approaches.
And part of that was, in true Delta Green style, they weren’t actual agents agents – we had a Customs agent, a CDC doctor, and a Financial Services crimes investigator so there wasn’t a sense that they had true authority.  I could have also fixed that by implying that yes, maybe you weren’t FBI proper, but when someone from the government shows up with a badge, people listen regardless.  If someone from Customs showed up on your doorstep to say there were some irregularities in some shipments of yours, your blood would run cold.
And a third part of that was the way that the players kept talking over each other, which was something I need to minimize.  Some very vital questions were asked when I was answering other players, which I didn’t hear, and as such at least one vital clue hit the floor.  (A vital clue that would have been answered automatically had gunshots not been fired accidentally, but that’s part of the process.)  As a GM, I should have been proactive in solving that and told players to shut up, I’m talking to Gini, ask when I’m done – and then all the clues would have been given out.
But a large part of it was that though the adventure was awesome to read, it wasn’t that fun to play.  And that’s due to two parts:
1)  The research part of the adventure was ludicrously detailed – you could find out the stock prices on Amalgamated Bio-Corp, and the history of the Blackfoot tribe’s legal conflicts with the EPA, but there wasn’t much for players to do.  Which is to say that the first part of the adventure was largely front-loaded with “Do a Library Use roll, have me read this wall of text at you,” which gave them a lot of background to consider but no clear path to take.
So what you got was a lot of exposition, but not delivered in an interesting way.  Fascinating to read when you’re just looking at pages, but dry and tedious when I, the GM, am spending more time relating information to you than you as the PC have spent in-game time acquiring said knowledge.
2)  The detailed nature of the adventure actually was a hindrance, as it gave the illusion of more paths to the adventure than there were.  When reading it, it seemed obvious that the thing to do was to break into the magazine office, get the list of subscribers, and cross-check it against people living in the Blackfoot area.  But as I GMed it, I became excruciatingly aware that course of action presumed that the players would be willing to take the (admittedly dire) risk of breaking into a magazine office – a left-wing magazine that specialized in embarrassing government exposes – to just hunt around for Stuff To Find.
It did not occur to them that the office would have a list of subscribers, held neatly on an assistant’s Macintosh.  It did not occur to them to phone up the post office in the Blackfoot reservation to get clues in advance.  It did occur to them to talk to the Blackfoot local constabulary to ask about the mailer of this package, but given that the information I’d read to them had told them that the Blackfoot Council was hostile to outsiders, they immediately discarded that idea in favor of asking random bar-goers.
As such, a lot of the expected pathways to the information were lost, without easily-found redundant sources.  The bar patrons knew some bits of things, but not nearly enough, and so the players foundered without proper clues, as I struggled to find alternative ways to give them out without breaking the reality of Delta Green.
Part of that is that the players don’t think like FBI agents, which is of course nothing I could fault them for.  But a vital part is that Delta Green is really, really great to read – so great and filled with facts that it obscured the central issue that this module only had a few clues for stumbling upon the “correct” pathway, and those pathways often involved explaining to the players what their legal (literally legal, as in “Here’s how you get a warrant”) options were.
I think Delta Green would be great, with the right play group, but you’d have to have players who thought in terms of police procedurals – players so experienced in what to look for that they’d actually fill in these gaps that the actual module itself held.  But what I had here was a situation where reading the module was a far superior experience to playing the module, as it was much better running through it in my head than it was to watch three people flailing, unsure where to go, while I tried to guide them to the next segment without handing it to them on a cracker.
I still love Delta Green.  It’s still the best.  But I think if I had to run a DG campaign, I’d have to do it the way my old GM Jeff did, running it as tight-room games where basically we were all pushed into a paintcan – one notable session involved us trapped in a limousine in an alternate dimension where we had to start doing things like “I tear up the seats” to find the clues, because there was literally no where else to go.  And the Library Use skills would have to be played out by interrogating someone with their own agenda, as opposed to reading 1,000 words at them as they made better rolls.
In short, I’d need to approach it as a way of interfacing with the players so that the infodumps were massaged in, and more than one or two pathways could stumble upon the correct answer, and that the pathways themselves weren’t self-contradicted by the pressures in the text.  I’d like to try running Delta Green again soon, but it’s a more complicated RPG experience to do it justice.
I’ll get it.  But that day was not yesterday.

I'm Not Mentioning You On Twitter

So I just posted this Tweet:

“It tells me that you’re comfortable asking readers to pay you so that you can get better.” http://t.co/XNrhpOxdAr
— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) January 28, 2014

That’s a quote from an essay by Chuck Wendig, who is all over Twitter.  I don’t follow Chuck.  I don’t need to.  He’s retweeted by my author friends at least six times a day, so I forget that I don’t have him friended, as there’s no human way to avoid him.  It’s a good thing he writes fine essays.
Yet I didn’t tag him in this Tweet, because I don’t like tagging people unless I want them to weigh in.  For me, the @ is like a 1st-level summoning spell, where you have a 10% chance of causing the Author Himself to appear, adjusted by the author’s CR.  And in this case, I’m just saying, “Here, read this essay on self-publishing that I like but could be controversial,” and as such I don’t want Chuck to show up.  If there’s any blowback from this Tweet, well, he’s getting enough of that on his blog.  I doubt any worthy debate will occur on Twitter.
Yet I’m also doing a mild disservice to Mr. Wendig by not @-a-boying him, as people who like the essay are now less likely to follow him on Twitter.  If they don’t realize this is a Chuck Wendig essay, maybe they’d be more likely to click through if I mentioned him.  As a marketing tool for the mighty Chuck Wendig marching machine, I have failed.
I dunno.  I don’t like yelling at people – “HEY YOU ON TWITTER!” – unless I have something interesting to say.  And so I sometimes give the impression that I don’t read, when in fact I read voraciously, all the comments and entries and friends-lists – I just eschew notification unless I’m adding something other than, “I liked that.”  But there are some people on Twitter who I know precisely because they do tag me all the time, and I feel more warmly inclined to them.
So should I?  Probably.  Do I?  No.  Even on the Internets, I’m strangely shy.
Dunno.  No big wrap-up here.  I just don’t rope in authors much on Twitter, because I worry I’ll bug them.  Which is my entire life, really, trying not to bug anyone.  I fail at it, but that’s because I’m a loudmouth.  So it goes.

Downer Abbey And The Two Types Of Television Shows

My wife inducted me into Downton Abbey like it was a cult.  She watched it one fine weekend when a friend had come to visit, and then kept bugging me.  “You have to see it before the new episodes start in January!” she cried.  “If you don’t, well….I’ll watch them without you!”
That was the worst threat she could muster.  And in our relationship, it’s a significant one.  So I snarfed down the Abbey over a drunken weekend, and adored them.
Now we’re indifferent.
Oh, we’re watching the series as it’s aired on PBS, but the storylines seem insipid and when did Lord Grantham get to be this bloody stupid?  And while S4 has A Particular Storyline that sets my teeth a-jangling, aside from that, I don’t think it’s that bad…
…it’s just that the flaws are so magnified when you have to wait a week between episodes.
It’s not that Lord Grantham wasn’t an idiot before – Ponzi scheme, anyone? – but when we were watching them all in one slurried flow of upper-crust shenanigans, his idiocy lasted like three hours tops before he did something noble and we loved him again.  Now, his latest dumbness leaves a bad taste in our mouth all week as we contemplate his complete inacumen with anything financially-related (and worse, his utter inability to fathom this), and what the hell are you doing with that maid, Tom and every bad plotline leaves us heavy with regret for a week as we wonder, “How long will this botched storyline go on?”
Which isn’t to say that the previous three seasons didn’t have that, but that was resolved before the end of the day, so we could be content.
Now, we’re forced to watch in drips and dollops, and the flaws are so excruciatingly magnified when that’s all we have to pick over.
Admittedly, in this case we have a choice – we could Torrent the last season and watch it in a gout – but this makes me think that Downton Abbey is a show that is utterly meant to be watched in one huge lump.  Its strengths are magnified in marathons, its weaknesses minimized.
As opposed to, say Arrested Development.
People felt let down by the Netflix-only season of Arrested Development, but it’s not that bad.  Then again, I was never a huge fan of Arrested Development.  It’s a funny show, but I never got the obsession people got over it.
But Arrested Development is a perfect week-wait show.  It rewards re-watchings, with subtle jokes that you have to scrutinize to get.  Its plotlines are so off the wall that theorizing what’s going to happen next is almost as pleasurable as watching the show.  The more you discuss, the more you appreciate it – and I think the fact that Netflix allowed us to gobble it all down in a weekend was actually a bad strategy, as I feel Season Four of Arrested Development would have been more appreciated if people had been forced to appreciate it one slow drip at a time.
Thus my theory: there are Marathon Shows, and Wait Shows.  Some shows shine when watched in a breathless rush, a day spent in front of the television.  Others do better when you anticipate from week to week.  And I think that’s why some shows really shine on DVD – Breaking Bad was a show that had some pacing issues in the middle seasons as a Wait Show, but goddamn if it didn’t feel brilliant when you watched them all together.  And then you have this weird phenomenon where people flock to the show because of the Marathon, then bitch and bitch about the current season because it’s slow, this plotline’s dumb, when will this end.
It’s not that the show broke bad.  It’s that your experience of watching it changed.  And that change made a bigger difference than we could realize.
(That said, I think S4 of Downton Abbey thus far is an actual drop, as we have more dumb storylines working in parallel than I recalled before, but the principle remains the same.)

Planescape: Torment – The Review

Here’s everything I accomplished this last weekend:

• Played Planescape: Torment all the way through.

That’s it.  Two fourteen-hour days, replaying a fifteen year-old game.  Obsessively doing nothing but staring at a screen, managing artificial combat, and clicking dialogue options.
It was wonderful.
I need videogames as a cleansing reset button for my soul.  Gini does not count videogames as part of the entertainment budget, as “You get bitchy when you can’t play games.”  A diehard workaholic, even my down time needs to have me feel like I’m accomplishing something.  And so I’ll settle down for a day or three, do nothing but beat a videogame in every way it can be beat, and then return to real life.
Videogames are a form of meditation for me.  I feel totally refreshed today.
And Planescape: Torment is widely viewed as the best computer RPG ever, a game so complex it contains literally five novels’ worth of writing – half a million words buried in dialogue options.  But what makes it great?
The depth.
I think of my old buddy Jeremy, who got irritated by all these cut-scenes in Halo because he wanted to get back to the fighting, and go, “No, this is not for you.”  Planescape is gouts of story, spilling out on the screen with so many detailed characters that the characters are the story, and you’ll frequently spend an half-hour or more just picking your way among the dialogue trees to make sure you’ve caught everything they have to say.
What they have to say is brilliant.
The glory of Planescape: Torment is that it all holds together as a story.  I can think of no other videogames that are better than most novels when it comes to stories – even Bioshock Infinite, with all of its grandeur and theme, is a fairly simple tale told with a lot of bombast.  Most videogame stories are comic book vignettes strung together by action sequences, or maybe an episode of 24 strung together with action sequences.  But Torment is as complex and winding as a Gene Wolfe novel (though not as obscure), with themes and choices looming large.
They thought through everything.  Everything.  You wake up in a mortuary, not sure who you are.  Later on, if you get the optional ability to speak to the dead, and if you choose to break back into the Mortuary to talk to the corpses around you, and if you talk to the right corpse, you will find the corpse who knows the reason why you weren’t cremated at the Mortuary with the rest of the stiffs (and it is, indeed, a good and character-based rationale).  I have never seen such a sprawling videogame that is knotted so tightly – because you, as the Nameless One, are the reason for everything in the game and yet not the master of it.  There are depths everywhere, that feeling that you’re missing something because you overlooked the right corner.  Things feel like they’re spilling outside the screen, with hints and allegations of larger mysteries that you are not involved with and may never get to know.
Plus, the imagination behind everything is stellar.  The Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts, run by a reformed succubus called Falls-From-Grace, is just one of a hundred fascinating concepts.  Hell, the way the game plays with immortality – what can you do with your body if you can’t die?  How could you leave clues for yourself if you forget things? – is more imaginative than whole beloved series of other games.  This is the only videogame where STR is your dump stat, because greater Wisdom and Intelligence means that you can fathom more of the wonders around you.
Now, that’s not to say that Planescape: Torment is perfect as a game, because it has a very annoying habit of placing fetch-quests so you have to run all over the damn city, repeatedly, with piss-poor pathfinding once you get beyond three people.  It’s easy to overlook, say, critical doors, as we’re dealing with a 1999 interface in a 2014 world.   And the last act suffers from lack of variety, feeling rushed together for deadline, and Lord if I have to kill one more fucking Curst guard I am going to fling this computer through a portal.
But in the end, Torment delivers what I want: talk.  It’s a game that understands that if I have put all of my statistic points into social interaction, then I shouldn’t have to be punished with a senseless final battle.  If you’re smart enough and convincing enough, you can talk your way out of the end game, in a way that makes utter sense.  I may have to play this game as a dumb fighter, just to see how frustrating it would be.
It’s a good game to get lost in for the weekend.  And it asks a very real question: What can change the nature of a man?
A game with a philosophy to it.  It’s wonderful.

Justin Bieber and the Somali Pirates

Yesterday, I wrote about Somali pirates, and how bad I felt for them because they didn’t have much power, and then the US government showed up.  I wasn’t exactly sad to see them shot, because they were vicious and unrepentant, but sad in the sense that shit, given better options they mighta been better people.
And there’s Justin Bieber in the news, driving drunk and spitting on fans, and I have the exact same reaction.
Okay, Justin’s ridiculously wealthy and well-loved while the Somali pirates are… not.  And Justin’s probably not killed anyone yet, but then again technically neither did the Somali pirates (on that last famous mission, anyway).  Yet I do feel there’s a line to be drawn between them on the Great Graph of Human Experience, because you put people into situations like that and it’s highly unlikely they’re going to turn out different.
Justin’s a teen pop star, and… well, let Mara Wilson, a.k.a. “Matilda,” explain to you how that shapes your whole childhood.  Basically, Justin’s an egomanical dickhead, but a rational egomaniacal dickhead.  Every life’s experience he’s had indicates that millions of teenaged girls will adore him no matter what he does, he’s experienced zero significant fiduciary difficulty from any of his antics, and he’s gotten away with everything.  Worse, he’s surrounded by people who encourage this behavior, as they’re warming their hands by the rich glow of his stardom, and so he literally has no one to tell him “no.”
I remember being at a company meeting where we all took the Meyers-Briggs test and discussed teamwork.  And the slickly-nice lady consultant leading all this said, “Remember, nobody ever died from too much positive feedback!”
“John Belushi did,” I said, and then there was a veeeeery awkward silence.
But seriously.  One of the big problems with life is that you have to prioritize two things: your personal experience, and the experience of others.  For many years, my personal experience at writing consisted entirely of variants of “Nobody wants to publish your story.”  Now, other people told me, “If you keep writing, you’ll eventually get good,” so I believed what others had experienced over my own personal story.
…and that was totally wrong advice.
Yeah, I have become a decent writer, but it took a Clarion to blast the old habits out of me and show me that simply “writing” wasn’t enough.  I had to be merciless about my own prose in a way that I literally didn’t know how to do.  If I’d listened to that advice and not stumbled across a Clarion, I’d still be writing, and I’d still suck.
Sometimes, prioritizing that Other Experience is positive, like when you got beat up by minority kids in school but get told that they’re not all like that.  Sometimes, prioritizing that Other Experience is profoundly negative, like when you get told that gay people are an abomination unto the Lord and fling your own kid into the street.  The problem is that an artist like Justin Bieber is bombarded with Other Experiences – nobody’s ever short of career advice for a musician – and up until now, he’s made millions by shrugging off the advice of other people to do what he wanted to do.
So to a guy like Justin Bieber, fobbing off Other Experiences is his path to success.  It’s like Kanye.  The guy’s instincts have served him well thus far.  He’s probably laughed at more people who told him a track like “Black Skinhead” couldn’t chart.  He’s been told that his ego would kill his career a thousand times over.  So why would he ever listen to anyone who told him no, dude, this will wreck your career?
Likewise, Justin Bieber’s entire life has consisted of him doing what he wanted, and things working out.  That is probably not going to last him forever.  But good luck convincing him of that.
And like the Somali Pirates, I can’t feel bad for the inevitable crash.  He can’t get away with this shit forever.  Eventually, he’s gonna have a bad album and the teenaged girls are going to see him as a vaguely embarrassing remnant of their childhoods and move on, and he’ll get pulled over for drunk driving and Twitter won’t light up with #savejustin hashtags.  And the cops will be right to throw his ass in jail, and Justin will have made his own bed, and if he’s lucky he’ll pull himself out of it and stop being an asshole.
But every thing in his life is shaping him to be an asshole.  A ridiculous handful of people have the wisdom to know when to prioritize that Other Experience and go, “Okay, even if I can get away with spitting over a balcony, it’s wrong,” but most folks take their cue from what people accept.  If their job accepts T-shirts at work, they’ll wear T-shirts.  If their job lets them get away with texting at work, they’ll text at work.  And if their job lets them spit on customers and everyone – including the customers themselves – thinks it’s a hoot, well, you’re gonna spit.
And in that sense, Justin’s a big ol’ Somali pirate.  He’s getting what’s coming to him.  And I’m not going to be sad, but I am going to be a little wistful when I think of how this could have been avoided and I don’t really see a way it could have been avoided.
One’s rich, one’s poor, both are victims of circumstance.  So it goes.