Not Exactly a Blog

Ed and I have a system worked out for the winter holidays. We spend Thanksgiving with my family every year, because that's our big annual get-together. We spend Christmas with Ed's family every year, because my family's Jewish and his isn't. New Year's is just the two of us, and as much as I love both our families (even our noisy nephews), I am really looking forward to a quiet day off at home. We'll unplug the phone, rent a couple of movies, I'll make a nice dinner (note to self: stop at grocery store after work) for tonight, and tomorrow we'll sleep in. Who knows, I might even bake something. Hope your New Year is happy, peaceful, and fun!

To give you an idea of what kind of day it's been...I keep trying to use my security badge to get out of my work area, rather than into it.

I'm a bit behind on GAME WISHes so here's two for the price of one.

WISH the first: What three fantasy books/series would you recommend to other gamers? Why? What particularly makes them suitable for gamers to read? Would they be particularly good for novices or better for experienced gamers?

Dorothea's taste is far more literary than mine, as she's ever so much better read--not to mention the fact that she's a genuine lit-critter, and I am not. My suggestions may not be art, but they're good entertainment.

1) Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series has interesting characters, and enjoyable setting, and has the feel of a game--and is an enjoyable read for anyone, gamer or non. There are lots of plot threads that weave together well, and the characters have interesting personal lives in addition to adventures.

2) Diana Paxson's Wodan's Children is another series that's good for anyone. She has a knack for turning mythology into a personal story, which is what a lot of fantasy RPGs do. I like most her novelized mythology, so if you're not up for an entire trilogy, try The White Raven.

3) Robert Aspirin's MYTH series, because this gives you an idea of what it's like to actually play with five of your smartest and craziest friends. Or five of my smartest and craziest friends, anyway.

It was difficult for me to narrow this down to just three, so here are some additional comments for gamer reading--anything by Charles de Lint and Emma Bull, and Neil Gaiman's American Gods for modern urban fantasy; Mists of Avalon, because you ought to have read it by now anyway; Ray Feist's Magician and Riftwar series; Eric Flint's The Philosophical Strangler, for the same reasons as the MYTH books; and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass).

WISH the second: The RPG market is dominated by fantasy (with horror coming in second). Why have most attempts at creating a science fiction RPG failed (commercially or artistically), and what would a hypothetical SFRPG need to catch on the way fantasy has?

My short answer to this is game mechanics. High tech and space combat are nightmares, game-mechanically speaking. I think that any successful system is going to have to find a way to make the system and the both simple and elegant. Cool ideas are not the problem. Shadowrun is a great concept, but the game is practically unplayable. I love the Cyberpunk milieu, but again, the mechanics are dreadful. GURPS handles mechanics as well as anyone else, and better than some, so that's what I tend to use for high-tech games.

I think that setting can be a secondary problem. World-building takes a hell of a lot of time and research to do well, even if you have the very best software to assist you. Also, practically speaking, most of space travel involves a lot of doing nothing for a very long time until you get somewhere. You have a lot of time spent doing nothing. I think that the way science fiction games are going to sidle in is by way of alternate history. Personally, I would love to play a game set in S. M. Stirling's Lost Nantucket, or Harry Turtledove's alternate WWI series...or, really, any alternate history he's created. I'd also like to play in Eric Flint's (A. K. A. Harry Turtledove) 1632 universe. Douglas Adams' universe would make a fabulous game setting, but unfortunately, I think that he's the only one who could write the source books for it. (Perhaps if we locked Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Eric Idle in a room together, they could come up with something almost as good.)

Today's accomplishments:

One kitchen & breakfast room cleaned (and did it ever need it!)
One bathroom cleaned (likewise)
One loaf of bread baked
One chicken roasted
One husband fed
One Ellipsoid boggled

It was a good day.

I got yer white #$*@%!$ Christmas right here. Finally made it to The Two Towers this afternoon with Doug & Heather. When we went into the theater at a quarter to four, there were a few flakes in the air. When we came out, there was an inch and a half on the ground. Visibility is awful, and various weather reports tell me to expect a total of 5 to 8 inches for the "snowfall event." Doug and Heather live 45 minutes away in good weather, on the south side of town. Doug said they'd call when they got home or to the hospital, whichever they arrived at first.

Alisa and I, feeling intrepid, went out earlier today, shopping no less. We had a braved Borders, and as if that wasn't enough, I stopped at Trader Joe's on the way home. What with the weather and the holiday, there probably isn't a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread left in the neighborhood Kroger anyway. Fortunately, I have a plan. I have beer and chocolate to trade to my neighbors who bought bread and milk.

Happy whatever-you-celebrate-in-December, and to all a good night.

Ed's sister-in-law, Lori, refers to her kids as "poor man's birth control." Really, it's the two boys, who are six and two-and-a-half, who make me want to schedule a complete hysterectomy yesterday. My eight-year-old niece is gettting to the point where she's a) asking interesting questions and b) civilized enough to stay in the same room as adults. The boys however...they run around, make disgusting noises, and take their clothes off at any opportunity. I used to think it was because whenever I saw them, they were either angling for attention from visitors or hyped up on the many sugary foods served at family holiday gatherings, or, more to the point, both. Apparently not. It is impossible to have a conversation with the kids in the same room, and damned near impossible if they're in the same county. I suspect this has to do with why I find holidays so stressful. I can't handle the kind of chaos my nephews generate. And don't get me started about what happens when you throw two more male cousins under six into the mix, which often happens because Lori babysits her sister's kids. I wonder if it's too late to get her a tranquilizer rifle for Christmas.

I'm a sucker for a good radio play, and NPR's Morning Edition has been running a 5-part series this week, called I'd Rather Eat Pants. I highly recommend that you check it out.

One of the things I like about living in the American Midwest is that you get to see all the seasons. In the last three weeks alone, we've seen autumn, winter, and spring.

Someone--I have no idea who--rang my doorbell at 3:30 in the morning. Ed didn't hear a thing, but it woke me out of a sound sleep that I'd only managed to get into after midnight. I waited a few minutes, got up, turned on the outside lights, checked the locks on all the doors, and went back to bed...but not back to sleep, unfortunately. I'll be useless by 4:30 today. *grumble*

GAME WISH is back (hope you're feeling better, G.) and asks us How do you introduce a new PC to an existing group? Is it best if the GM takes special measures of some kind to integrate the new and existing characters, or should the GM just allow them to meet and let the players put it all together? Does it matter whether the game is oriented towards character cooperation or character competition?

My most recent experience with this is being the new character. In Rob's Thursday night D & D campaign, my original character got killed on the first night we played. The original party consisted of a group of friends who'd grown up together, and the other characters--particularly Sean's--were, understandably, very upset. This set the tone for my new character's relationship with the party. Bronwyn (the druid) was abandonned in the druids' grove as a child and raised there, rather than in the town that the other characters came from. She was shoehorned into the party, and as a result, she's been even more of an outsider than the kobold in a party of humans and elves. Sean's character in particular had no use for her whatsoever, until she managed to make his life easier by setting several orcs on fire (they started it).

I've got my voice back. Would you believe it was between the couch cushions all this time?

You would think that changing a light bulb wouldn't be a big deal. I wish. I'm so short that I almost need a stepladder to change the bulbs in a table lamp. For my outdoor and garage fixtures, I bought the funky-shaped long-life bulbs just so that I won't have to change the damned things for five years. Today's adventure was the last of the outdoor bulbs, which was the one in the light post at the end of my driveway. The fixture is about 6 1/2 feet tall, which is well over a foot taller than I am. It's also right next to a truly enormous evergreen tree, so my angles of approach are limited, and I have to put the stepladder on the grass rather than pavement. Did I mention that the ground's a bit damp right now?

The next part of this operation involves removing the top of the fixture in order to get at the socket. (The top is supposed to be held on by six screw caps, but three of them are missing.) This is a really poor design, because minute that you remove the top of the fixture, the six curved panes of glass that make up the body of the fixture immediately make a mad dash for freedom--in six different directions. If I were a poetic type, I'd say it was like a flower opening. From a practical point of view, it's a lot more like looking that the center of an octopus that's heading straight for you. Certainly there's some comic potential, but getting out of the situation is going to take a lot of manuvering and at least as many arms as the octopus.

The driveway fixture isn't the worst, though. The ones I dread are my kitchen light fixtures. This is entirely due to an incident in the apartment that I lived in with Ed before we bought the house. The light fixture in the kitchen the kind in which you have three bulbs covered by a very shallowly curved piece of glass, held in place by a single screw. One afternoon, I changed the lightbulbs in the apartment kitchen, and went about my normal kitcheny business. To this day, I swear that I firmly reattached the screw on that fixture. Gravity disagrees, though, because the glass came crashing down behind me as I stood at the sink--barefoot--at the far end of the kitchen from the only door out. The broom was also at the far end of the kitchen. I ended up climbing onto the counter and through the pass-through into the living room, by way of the kitchen sink. Ever since then I've had a distinct fear and loathing of that particular kind of fixture. There are two of them in the kitchen in the house. I'd make Ed change them, except that he wouldn't notice unless all six bulbs in the kitchen were out simultaneously.

Ed claims that the reason he doesn't notice the burnt-out light bulbs in the kitchen--or anywhere else, for that matter--has a very sound basis in evolutionary psychology. It all comes down to the fact that he's a hunter and I'm a gatherer. I notice details and remember where things are, whereas if something isn't food or dangerous, he doesn't see it.

It's fun to live at my house.

I talked to Ari last night, and he asked me not to write about him anymore, so I won't. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about him--and most of it is positive. ;)

By now, you'd think I would have learned to resist online sex quizzes. How about you?

*cough, cough, hack* You know, coming to work today didn't even seem like a good idea at the time, but I did it anyway. Probably because of that meeting in which we're supposed to figure out my fate for the next six weeks or so, until the next phase of the project starts. Whether or not I'm here for long after the meeting depends on the state of my digestive system. There are some things I simply prefer to do at home, and experiencing gastro-intestinal unpleasantness is one of them.

On the up side, Cathy seems to have solved her leaky pie problem. Adding a little tapioca to the filling makes it gel nicely.

My voice is now completely gone--fortunately, the fingers are fine. If it weren't for email, I'd be going nuts, not being able to communicate.

Update: Digestion now likewise on strike.

I just found out that Mom now has the same thing I do (she thinks). It's a good thing she doesn't have plans for Christmas...

The good news is that I feel better than I sound. The bad news is that I sound as though someone has taken a power sander to my vocal cords.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Still congested today, but at least I am well-medicated. It's as if I'm in my very own little cotton-lined world. Of course, some of that may be due to the fact that my ears are partly blocked from the congestion. By virtue of innumerable cups of tea, I have managed occasional full use of my nasal passages, at least.

Last night's D & D game at Rob's was probably the best day that Bronwyn has had in a while. She's now a 5th-level druid, and as the only member of the party who isn't multi-class, it's given her a bit of an edge. Better still, judicious use of a couple of spells, combined with some truly wretched saving throws on the part of the opposition, prompted Malvey to re-evaluate Bronwyn's usefulness. As Sean said, "If she keeps this up, and continues not speaking to him, he [Malvey] might actually start to like her [Bronwyn] a little." It doesn't hurt that Bronwyn also made Malvey laugh. We were talking our way past a rather inept orc ambush. Both of our mages are also fighters, so they wear armor and carry pointy things--i.e., they don't look like mages. Therefore, the orc leader didn't believe that they were. He said "Show us your mage." Bronwyn, in all her naive seriousness, said "We'll show you ours if you show us yours."

And as long as I'm talking about games anyway, this week's GAME WISH asks

Do you think that retroactive continuity is a good or bad thing in games? Is it a valuable GM/player tool or a cheat? Are there appropriate places for using it? Inappropriate places? How have you successfully used it or seen it used in a game? How about unsuccessfully?

I think that the best retroactive continuity is the kind you never notice. Therefore, it follows that the worst is the kind that is not only obvious, but obviously cheesy. It's a tool, and like any tool, it's the user who determines the outcome.

I've had to do some retconning--as have the players--in the Grand Ellipse, mostly for reasons of synchronization. I suspect that if you ask the players, they probably couldn't tell you how much, or most of the places, in which I've done it. At least, I hope not. (See above) I've done it in a couple of other games I've run also. Other GMs I know do the same thing, especially to cover a player's absence. My personal favorite is Doug's explanation, which is that the character whose player isn't there is taking care of the monsters that none of the other characters can see. Metagaming? Yes. Useful--you bet!

Digression alert

In fact, the only game I can think of offhand in which player absence hasn't caused continuity problems is the Teenagers From Outer Space game that I'm currently running. If a player doesn't show up, then his/her character is absent from school that day. If the other characters try to call him/her, they get voice mail. Sean's absence two games in a row was put down to his character's illness--the Altairian flu. On earth, it only affects ducks and pigeons. However, it has a particularly nasty effect on fire-breathing aliens--which Sean's character (Arlen) is. The Altairian flu has been a running joke ever since...not to mention the immolated pigeons in Arlen's front yard.

End Digression

I think that retconning can also be a great player tool. On more than one occasion, I've deliberately left a character's background incomplete--an outline, rather than a full document, if you will--in order to weave the character into the game a little better.

Overall, I find retconning, when skillfully employed, to be a great tool. Of course, that's probably because I tend to suffer from esprit d'escalier, particularly when running a game. In other cases, I'll set up a situation just to see what happens, and retcon the reasoning behind it.

I'm going to complain today, so you may wish to skip this.

I woke up on Monday with a sore throat, from post-nasal drip. Since then, my sinuses, eustachean tubes, and nasal passages have been filled to overflowing with what I will politely describe as goo. Now comes the disgusting part. Yesterday, after some hot soup at lunch, I dislodged a chunk of goo that was sufficiently large and deep that it felt like part of my brain had come loose.

I probably wouldn't be so cranky if I hadn't forgotten to take some cold pills this morning--and if I hadn't forgotten to take some with me as well. There's no going home early, either, as I have a 3:00 meeting today.

Enough.

If Jane Austen had written a housekeeping manual, do you think she'd have titled it Lawn and Laundry?

I got a lot of reading done over the Thanksgiving weekend--Diane Duane's Stealing the Elf King's Roses (good, but her Young Wizards books are better), Charles de Lint's Angel of Darkness (very dark and very good), Jody Lynne Nye & Robert Aspirin's License Invoked (entertaining), Harry Turtledove's Ruled Britannia (not his best, in my opinion, but very enjoyable nonetheless), Douglas Adam's The Salmon of Doubt (a collection of his posthumous work, including an incomplete Dirk Gently story), and Worlds that Weren't, which has four alternate-history novellas in it. Last night, I started Liz Williams's The Ghost Sister, but it's failing to capture my interest rather spectacularly. I used to feel bad about not finishing a book that I'd started, but I'm over it now.

Here it is, the long-awaited (by someone, I’m sure) Thanksgiving weekend adventure.

By way of providing a little backstory, I got a phone call from Ari last month, and to make a long story short, my sister is going to be my brother. My only problem with this is figuring out which pronoun to use with my past-tense verbs, and I’m working on that. So far, I’ve been using “he at the time” or “she at the time” to get around awkward phrases like “when my brother was a little girl.” In fact, I found Ari’s new nose ring to be a lot more distracting than the fact that Ari looks a lot like a teenage boy at the moment. It’s one of those facial piercings that draws one’s attention like a magnet, and I found myself wanting to converse with the nose ring itself rather than the person wearing it. In my opinion, it’s not particularly flattering, but it’s not my nose, either.

But I digress

As I was saying, I got this phone call from Ari, and once he’d actually managed to get the information across, I was rather surprised, but not in a bad way. If memory serves, my response was something to the effect of “Wow. That wasn’t what I expected. How’s it going?”

After a bit more chat, I asked Ari if he’d told our parents yet. He told me that he was working on a letter, and that he wanted to tell me first to see how I reacted. I let him know that a) I didn’t think he had anything to worry about, and b) he really ought to let our parents know right away, because if he didn’t, somebody was going to figure out that something was up the minute he stepped off the plane in Rochester. As a whole, the family may be rather crazy, but we’re not stupid. He did agree to tell me when the letter went in the mail.

The letter arrived on a Saturday. I knew, because our father called and asked for Ari's new phone number. He sounded remarkably calm, and obviously, I don't know what was said when Ari finally did talk to our parents, but our mom tells me that it went well. (In fact, I think that our father is far more disturbed by the nose ring.) Mom told me that she insisted that Ari tell our grandmother himself, but said she’d handle the rest of the (large, extended) family.

This was the situation as we all headed into Rochester, NY, last weekend.

From what I saw, Ari handled the situation well. I saw him wince visibly every time someone referred to him as “she,” but I didn’t see any ugly scenes, and I seriously doubt that there were any that I didn’t see. I have a feeling that there are plenty of people who don’t understand everything about the situation, but what I saw was that Ari was happier and more relaxed than anyone has seen him (or her, at the time) in years—-possibly ever. Ari’s always had a very good feel for doing what’s right for him (or her, at the time) and personally, I don’t see why that good sense would abandon him now. In fact, it would seem to be working better than ever.

It’s really not a Thanksgiving story per se, but do you really want to hear about leftover turkey and endless football?