Posts Tagged ‘society’

Lucasfilm, Ltd.

Leia: “Yes, I’m sure that watching the old guy who was your mentor – for like two whole days – get sliced in half by a lightsaber is pretty traumatic. Did I mention that yesterday I watched my homeworld and everyone on it, including the family that raised me, get blown to bits? But hey, you’re the hero, so let me comfort you in your moment of grief.”

BSG at the UN: Wow, That Actually Worked!

David Moore shared this with me, I’m passing it on. Some of the BSG cast went to the U.N. and talked about how good sci-fi can address real-world issues pretty effectively. And Edward James Olmos took the opportunity to school the U.N. assembly on the notion that using the word “race” as a term of separation is totally asinine, because there is is only one race, the HUMAN race. And then he shouted “So say we all”.

And most of the assembly shouted it back at him. Yep.

Another shareworthy laff-fest about our beloved PoTUS, discovered courtesy of a tweet from Mighty Mur Lafferty:

Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To ‘Savage Sword Of Conan’ #24 | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

Hee Hee. I needed some ticklish giggliness after my my morning dump about family drama, so this was really refreshing.

I’m as big an Obamaniac as you’re likely to find, but still, this is really funny because, well … come on people, lighten up.

Andy Borowitz: Poll: Obama Even More Awesome Than Originally Thought.

The CP crew is getting together to record a few segments for upcoming shows tonight, and I proposed a discussion about our experiences with playing non-human (or non-dominant) races in RPGs. We’re going to do the segment, it turns out – but I still wanted to explore it a bit here in my blog as perhaps a teaser/precursor to the segment when it comes out in a future episode.

Basically, for a couple of days I’ve been mulling over the idea that – for me anyway – the idea of playing a different race often seems to be more a matter of gaining a particular set of abilities and powers and a schtick, rather than actually trying to portray a race within the cultural context of a setting (although as you’ll see below, I dunno if that’s as true as I was thinking it is).

For example, I’ve been pondering playing an ogrun or trollkin when we do our Iron Kingdoms/Savage Worlds mini-campaign in January. But when I asked myself why I’m really considering that, I found it is because I want to try to play a big tough grunt/brick with an ugly mug and a heart of gold, not so much because I have any real interest in exploring what it feels like to be an ogrun in the Iron Kingdoms. So it occured to me that if I want the tough but loveable grunt/brick Ben Grimm archetype, I don’t really need to be an ogrun to do that. I could be all those things with a human character.

When I proposed this discussion to the crew, I noted that Rich (the who is after all, ORKLORD) loves to play orcish characters. So, I asked him for his take. He responded with some things that actually unlocked a few things in my noggin:

Boy do I love to play orcs. One of the reasons I like them is that they externally represent their flaws – green skin, tusks, bestial appearance. Another is that their culture is barbaric, something I like because they just don’t truck with all the propriety and foppishness of our culture. They deal directly and definitively with things. Another alluring aspect of the orc is that they came from something so beautiful (in Tolkien legend, they were once elves) but
now they are twisted and downtrodden. To me, that leads to truly compelling stories.

Perhaps another thing is that orcs are hated by many gamers, so maybe I’m finding something cool in the uncool.

I’ve played orcs who revelled in their evil like gleeful, dirty children. I’ve played orcs who hid from their past and tried to ape humanity with middling success. Grbek, my Burning Wheel orc, was perhaps my greatest achievement. He was savage and brutal but he wanted to raise up his race to somethign greater than they had ever been. He was a tragic hero in my eyes, despite his brutality.

Rich’s description of Grbeck helped me realize that maybe I’m maybe jumping the gun a bit when I conclude that I don’t play other races with much depth. In the Star Wars PTA game Currently available in audion on Canon Puncture Actual Play) I play a wookiee, Kashyyk, with motivations similar to what Rich shared about Grbek. As I’ve already shared elsewhere, with Kash I am partially exploring ways to break the mold of “cool loyal sidekick syndrome”, by drawing my conflict along the lines of pitting my intense loyalty to Han against the massive responsibilities that destiny has placed upon me with the whole messiah thing. There is certainly some depth there. And I’ve made efforts to explore that by establishing scenes with wookiees in-game.

I haven’t really ever played many other non-humans, though the few I have played are memorable. I played Theo Mendaharin, an Eshu, in Changeling. I really enjoyed digging into West African culture and myth with him, and really striving to figure out how to inhabit that. But I had two years to play that out, too. When I started, he was nothing more than a swashbucking smooth-talking trickster (like so many of my characters) who happened to have dark skin. I also played a Lakota brave named Napewiakpa [Shining Arm] – not a non-human in this case, but still a character from a non-dominant culture – in Deadlands, and that was a similar journey. He was a little bit of Kashyyk, now that I think of it. Living in the white man’s world and trying to prove something, loyal to his white friends but also responsible as a spokesperson for – and reluctant leader of – his people.

Come to think of it, whenever I DO play a character from a “race” that is not dominant in the given setting, it always seems I base the character around having something to prove to whichever race IS dominant. I’m sure there’s some fun unpacking that could be done there.

So, yeah, this waypoint is an intentionally incomplete musing about race in RPGs. Come to think of it, since I’m putting this out before we record the segment, maybe some of you would like to use the forums to share your own thoughts on the matter, and maybe we can even work some of those into the segment.

Obviously, I haven’t written in awhile. No blog posts, no VAM, and no posts on other folks’ forums – with one exception noted below.

I am in a big creative slump. Perrin stole my mojo and banked it all into his NaNoWriMo effort. And this Autumn has seen my mood drop like a spacecraft improperly aligned for re-entry.

Yeah, I know. Waaa-waaa.

And I’ve taken what energy I DID have and funneled it all into one thing – a fruitless, pointless, and ill-considered attempt to dialogue with Seth Ben-Ezra – a person I admire and respect from the RPG-design community – on his blog. It has turned into a major distraction and a major flashpoint for some soul-searching and navel-gazing on my part. And if you know me, you know that I don’t need much of an impetus to get into navel-gazing mode. But this one was massive even by my drama-boy standards. It wasn’t even about roleplaying games. It was about faith, religion, and how they intersect politically in our country in the wake of the recent election season. It was about my half-assed attempt to take Christianity back from the Fundies and prove to the world that not all Christians think like the stereotypical Christian is portrayed. I don’t bring this up much in my hobby interactions, but it is a big deal to me. And when I read Seth’s OP entitled “Thoughts for a Young Citizen”, I just HAD to get in on it. And for some reason I just HAD to keep getting in on it, long after all of the other commentors walked away.

I should have listened to Daniel when he told me to walk away.

Anyhow, it went badly. And it has dominated my thoughts and my mood for over a week. And it is amplified by other factors, and so, I’ve essentially crawled under a rock for a couple of weeks except when I chose to emerge and take pot shots at Seth.

I’m done with that now, and I’m walking past it. This was a particularly sad sojourn at a particularly unproductive waypoint. I take full responsibility because I could have stepped away at any time, could have handled it so very much better, and could have not let it get to me as much as it has. But I didn’t. I thought I had something to prove.

I suppose the way this relates to roleplaying games is this – for all our obvious ideological differences, I still really respect Seth as a game designer and rpg theorist. I like his passion for the hobby, I like his games. I like Seth. And if we get to see one another at a con, I’ll be happy to drink with him and break bread with him and call him a friend. Because there’s still a kinship there. Our hobby is a bridge over all the mess, and we can meet upon that bridge and be friends.

And I think that’s cool. I’m totally thankful for it.

Okay, I’ll try to get back to doing some actual waypoints again. Probably not every day, but as I’m able. I need to bust through this creative block, and so wish me luck and feel free to egg me on. I’ll appreciate it.

Inspired by this blog post from Ogre Whiteside

Ogre officially becomes the first person to get a second visit on my waypoint journey. I was sitting around thinking about whether to write today, as I’m grumbling about juggling too much stuff these days, and also, I’m getting way too depressed about the tone of the political situation with the whole “Real America/Anti-America” dungheap of gall, and it has already affected my blog writing. (i.e. what the hell was that wookiee rant all about, anyway?)

Anyhow, I wasn’t going to write a waypoint today, but I was reading Ogre’s blog and he has this great new post about the five biggest problems with trying to run ongoing campaigns (as opposed to one-shots and short-shots). It is all very pertinent and dead-on, in my experience. Heck, even the Canoneers are experiencing some of the same issues right now because we’re having scheduling and juggling problems.

So the thing is, I really appreciated Ogre’s post, but in my current mood, I totally took one little sentence that he wrote out of context and wrote a comment to his OP in response. And suddenly, I realized, “hey, this is a valid waypoint.” It doesn’t necessarily reflect all that well on me, but it IS how I feel, and so I’m sharing it here more as a journal entry to capture my mood at one particular point in time than anything else.

So, I urge you to read ALL of Ogre’s post, because it has a wealth of cogent points in it that go way beyond the thing I’m about to focus on. Here’s the part of Ogre’s post I responded to, followed by a copy of the comment I posted on his blog:

3. Differing play styles: Deela’s only into combat, everything else her character does is to get her closer to the next fight. Ramon wants a story about unrequited love and tragedy. Chandler wants to make orc dick jokes and to eat pizza. Randy isn’t into combat, he just wants to flirt with Collin’s character while they cuddle on the couch.

Pop quiz, which player is doing it wrong? None of them. Not a single one, and if you answered differently, you’re a dick. People want different things out of games, and not everyone wants the same thing out of the same game.

let me say that again because it’s important.

People want different things out of games, and not everyone wants the same thing out of the same game.

- Ogre Whiteside, Five Fatal Flaws, October 22, 2008

Awesome post, dude. But I’m going to have to go ahead and admit I’m a dick, because I totally think that Chandler is doing it WRONG and he’s an asshat if his so-called “play style” is to make orc dick jokes all night.

Overall I totally agree with your main point, even if sometimes I’m still tempted to grouse about some peoples’ play styles. But I admit I’m wrong and dickish when I do that.

But in my opinion, Chandler isn’t actually PLAYING, so his behavior doesn’t fall under the “all playstyles are valid” umbrella. As far as I’m concerned, Chandler should find the door right along with Farquar.

… UNLESS his character is the one making orc dick jokes. That’d be annoying to me, but I can’t say it’d be wrong. But I interpreted your OP to be suggesting that Chandler was using the table solely as his personal ‘Last Comic Standing’ audition, and that he gets his fun from making asinine commentary on the game instead of from playing the game.