Posts Tagged ‘paul tevis’

A big thanks to Paul Tevis for getting this great article on my radar:

John Scalzi – Three Cheers for Chewbacca, SciFi’s Ultimate Sidekick

I heartily agree with the whole thing – Chewie is one of my favorite characters, and exploring the nature of sidekick-ism through him is something I have done just for the hell of it on occasion. I even created an rpg character based on Chewbacca (Kashyyyk, from the PTA Star Wars game we play annually at GenCon) who is right in the thick of struggling with these issues. And reading this article brought a lot of the issues back to the front of my noggin.

Here’s a pertinent quote from Scalzi’s article …

Never once in the movies do you get the sense that Chewbacca is looking enviously at Han Solo’s captain’s chair and thinking to himself, man, how long do I have to hang around with this wahoo until I get to sit there? Why? Because Chewie is comfortable with himself as a person and a sidekick. He’s so comfortable, in fact, that he actually lets other people talk for him. I strongly believe Chewbacca could speak human if he so chose — but he prefers to let the other characters shine. That’s the sort of selfless assist to others that makes him perfect in the sidekick role.

- via John Scalzi – Three Cheers for Chewbacca, SciFi’s Ultimate Sidekick.

Now, imagine my SW-PTA character, Kashyyyk, is essentially that character – a competent, protective fuzzball who is by nature plenty content to spend his life as the sidekick, best friend, and pseudo-father-figure to the roguish hero Han Calrissian. Kash (who by the way can and does speak human) is committed to watching his pal’s back and keeping him safe in the midst of also helping him become the galaxy-saving rebel hero Kash believes Han can be.

But then pour all over that an interesting little twist – imagine that Kashyyyk is also the fated messiah of the wookiee race, destined to lead his people to a new era of freedom from the oppression of the Imperial Skywalker Dynasty and – at least in my mind – freeing them from their persistent role of playing second fiddle to humans.

Imagine that however the fiction plays out, Kashyyyk is going to find it nigh-impossible to remain true to BOTH aspects. You can pretend to walk the line between sidekick and alpha-dog all you want, but eventually it catches up to you. Eventually you’ve got to choose.

Now, I have NO IDEA how it will all play out. But I’m betting it’s going to be one helluva lot of fun, angst, and blood, sweat and tears.

Paul Tevis has created a story-game, and it is finally published and in several peoples’ hands, and I want to give him a big WOOT for getting it done.

A Penny For My Thoughts »paultevis.com.

This game’s official launch is an odd kind of moment for me. I’m planning to buy it as soon as I can get the scratch to do so, and I want to play it. Actually, it’s more that I NEED to play it. You see, I’ve long thought of this game as a dragon that I need to slay. Although I am pretty sure I don’t feel quite that way anymore, Paul’s game has nevertheless had an unmistakable effect on my roleplay over the past two years.

I shall elaborate…

Read the rest of this entry »

Go to the Orphic Institute for Advanced Studies and secure a copy of the upcoming instructional manual for their revolutionary new memory-recovery process.

Today I was hoping to create something either written or visual to share in honor of Brigid’s Day, but in an odd twist, I got completely buried today in client work due to a botched Joomla upgrade.

So tonight, as I try to settle in for the evening, I have been reading through some of my favorite blogs and I ran across a really potent entry from Paul Tevis that hits creativity right between the eyes.

I’m going to be thinking about what this means for me all night tonight, I suspect. And hopefully tomorrow, I’ll grab a moment and make myself available to it, and CREATE something.

Becoming Available To The Moment » paultevis.com.

You Know, you would think someone would have thought of this idea and widely shared it by now. Goodonya, Paul! All PTA I play from now on will include this simple but brilliant hack.

Gameslinger Enterprises › This Fall, On The WB.

See the full text of these two waypoints on the Canon Puncture site:

Waypoint #7: Cool Sidekick Syndrome, where I do a very weird rant about my friends treating wookiees like crap.

Also: Waypoint #6: Cheater Stance, where I found myself away from my computer for so long on Saturday that I had to sort of cheat just to get in a waypoint for the day – and linked to a post from Ogre Whiteside ( ) without actually adding my own commentary to it.

It’s been nearly two years now since I first encountered the theories of Ron Edwards on The Forge. I’ve been wrangling with it all that time, slowly and gradually coming to appreciate the great game designs and discussions and intellectual challenges that have been born out of those theories, and slowly finding that they have the potential to help me grow in the style play that I really long for, but still essentially resenting Ron just a bit for some of the things that I THOUGHT he was trying to say about the dysfunction of most traditional games.

Well, today, May 24th, 2007, will now have to be considered some sort of Misfit Monkey holiday.

Today, for the first time, during an interview on the Theory from the Closet podcast (episode 8), I listened to Ron Edwards and actually understood him and –gulp– pretty much agreed with him.

Holy crap, I think I’m starting to get it. I understand why he was pissed – particularly at White Wolf – and said that stuff about brain damage. And I finally understand (also partially thanks to Paul Tevis) what the meaningful distinction is between “Story Before”, “Story After”, and “Story Now.”

If you care to dig deeper into what I’m getting at, you’ll get a much better result by listening to the Theory from the Closet interview (or listening to Paul Tevis’ latest HGWT: A Few Games More episode) than you’ll ever get from reading anything I am currently capable of writing. So I encourage that big time, if this subject interests you at all.

But the gist of it is, Ron was pissed at early White Wolf games like 1st ed. Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf specifically because they promised a new thing. They promised that their games would result in stories – stories that could be watched by an audience and the audience would be entertained – stories that could be considered LITERATURE. Stories that were epic and interactive and rich. They made this unprecedented promise, attracting a whole bunch of people who wanted to roleplay just exactly that sort of way, and then, in terms of system and mechanics, failed to deliver on the promise, because they failed to actually build a system that rewarded “story now” play. They brought about a nice new twist to “story before” play, where the GM makes up a significant portion of the “story” before the players even become involved, but did nothing to foster or reward the true interactive, collaborative type of in-game shared story development that “story now” calls for.

So in a nutshell, White Wolf promised “Story Now” and failed to deliver. And the most unfortunate part of that is, the result was that instead of thinking that it was the Storyteller System’s fault, many folks thought it was their own fault. Every time someone would play Vampire and it would fail to make them a grand collaborator in epic literature, people would say, “I must be doing it wrong, I need to keep trying. I need to buy more splat books and keep going with this.”

Anyhow, I don’t want to belabor this, if you want more depth I really ask you to go to the sources I’ve mentioned. My main point is, today, this time, Ron Edwards made sense to me. He articulated clearly and he did not offend my entire gaming experience. And after two years of being pretty resentful of him, today I grokked him.

And that feels kinda weird. I need to go lie down. Except I can’t, because I actually want to go play Little People pirates with Liam.