I don't know if there are many folks still on Livejournal, but like many others I have migrated away. If you are actually someone who cares about what I have to say -- wow, thanks! But my sporadic update schedule is now spending time over at a place I have eccentrically named after obscure Appalachian boojums. The address would be ethan skemp without a space at wordpress dawt cawm. I would post a link but I am viciously suspicious of link-hunting bots. If they hunt links you know they hunt them here.

It is, among the circles I travel in, probably a minority opinion to say "elves aren't sexy." Even including the usual amount of caveats -- "fantasy novel/gaming elves specifically, everyone already knows Keebler/Santa's elves aren't sexy", "this is a personal opinion rather than an objective rule," "not just Mialee, everyone already knows she looks like a skinny horse eating a lemon)" -- it's a minority opinion. Even accounting for Gamers Who Are Sick Of Elves, and technically neither of us number among them, it's a minority opinion.

God knows video games consistently tout elves as the sexiest thing ever. They light up the Deeprun Tram sexchat in World of Warcraft, and don't even get me started on Bioware. Good ol' "in this game male characters can choose from among three different romantic interests: a female elf, a female elf who is a bit more exotic, and a female elf who is a bit more exotic and a bit more bitchy" Bioware. And then there are the constant banner adds out there in browser-game land, one pin-up after another with some pointed ears slapped on. And, y'know, it sells.

The thing is, I do understand why. Elves are often held to be a certain shorthand for perfection, at least if you go the Tolkien route. And when you don't, and you go back to their more fey origins to make them more flawed, capricious and even wicked entities, there's still usually an implied level of "sexy." Even when you have more exotic and sexualized races in the setting (like hot devil-girls), elves retain this element of "you should want to be/hit this." And it's all about the perpetual youth.

That's the "elf" fantasy, really. Never grow old, never sag, never develop wrinkles or a bit of a gut. It's appealing. We know this from our vampire test cases as well. And from an even more selfish viewpoint, the idea of being the human with the elf girlfriend or boyfriend is also appealing, because your lover's going to be young and taut and blemish-free for all of your days. (And of course, vampires can get in on this action by appealing to you with the same fantasy plus also they can give you immortality as well. Best STD ever!)

But it doesn't quite work for me (and for Aileen) the way it once might've. Because the thing about that fey mentality, and why it makes elves edgier and more intriguing, something more than "humans with pointy ears" yet still very believable, is that it also reflects eternal youth. It's the other side of the coin. The Gentleman With Thistledown Hair is the way he is because he's incapable of growing past a young child's solipsism and learning to actually anticipate another person's feelings. Puck has the joyous incapacity to care about long-term consequences because he has the attention span of a child. And really, after a certain point in one's life, that stops being attractive. It's interesting to watch, but nobody really wants to be in a long-term relationship with someone who's going to be emotionally a child forever.

It's something I can't unsee, really. Now that I look at elves as the incarnation of eternal youth in order to properly understand their appeal, I can't divorce myself from the downside. When they're portrayed as wiser and more mature than humans, it makes some sense from a psychological standpoint -- but now it causes thematic dissonance. It stops being about eternal youth and starts being about Better Than You In Every Way, and that's not sexy either.

Of course, perhaps this says something about where long-term relationships stand on my value chart as opposed to, say, casual hookups with wild immature young people. Honestly, that's probably where I can bring in the sexy when I need to for narrative purposes: this is the temptation of the ill-considered liaison, the impulsive but immature partner. The elf romantic interest is the crazy ex that isn't your ex yet, the teacher/student relationship that makes the rest of the faculty give you the stink-eye. The temptation of the wild and untameable -- and honestly, isn't that some part of what made people start telling stories of men and women being lured into the woods in the first place?

Or alternately, elf cougars -- it's not like they're not already associated with a run-into-the-ground feline symbolism anyway. But I like to think I have some scraps of pride remaining.

I'll quickly admit that I'm not thrilled to be spending Thanksgiving in Georgia. It's not really home, despite actually owning this current house rather than renting. No family in the city, and the oldest friends in town are, sensibly, not in town for the holiday either. It's a problem we'll maybe fix next year once we get a vehicle that can transport ourselves + dogs back up to the mountains. For now, here we are.

But at the same time, though I'd certainly rather be home, I'm pretty satisfied to be where I am. Despite being uprooted and thrown into the dismal heart of suburbia, Aileen and I are probably as tight a team as we've ever been. There's not much call for a giant feast, but with just the two of us, we don't need the gluttony aspect of the holiday. We get some days off, time to spend at our own pace. We can eat some nice food anyway, call the folks as well. All in all, we have it pretty good.

One of the most challenging things about running a generic D&D game is the question of ethnicity. Normally most D&D settings tend to approach ethnicity in one of two ways:

- Option A: Nations tend to be general analogues to "real world" nations or cultures, and are arranged accordingly: the pale-skinned raiders with the longboats are in the North, a darker-skinned culture with scimitars and genies can be found near the equator, even darker-skinned people are farther off but may make their way around;

- Option B: Everyone is white.

Yeah, so there you are. There are a few exceptions, of course; the World of Greyhawk, for instance, tracked four specific ethnicities that were not quite analogues to the European fantasy model, and actually handled all their migrations and stuff. If I were more awesome, this is what I would have done, but anyway.

More recently, you see some trending toward a more modern melting-pot approach; humans are assumed to be all the various "ethnicities" that they present in the real world, but with no real emphasis put on "this nation is white guys, this nation is black guys." In practice the art often defaults back to mostly white, but in the setting there are no implications about, say, a black man serving as captain of the guard in a vaguely Italian-inspired nation. No explanations necessary for why his family's there instead of that original land designated as home for his particular ethnicity; he's just one of the people.

It's basically color-blind casting, and it's remarkably appealing, all things told. Given that one of my favorite DVDs to pop in now and again is Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, wherein Denzel Washington utterly nails the role of the charismatic Italian prince, I suppose it's no surprise. When my brother was running a D&D game set in kind of a "settling the New World" premise, he based a prominent NPC on Slim Charles from The Wire, knowing that the actor had a presence that would immediately get reactions from me and Aileen.

Part of the appeal is undoubtedly my own laziness; D&D is just one of my hobbies, and I really don't feel like devoting the kind of hardcore scholarship to it that would require tracking migration patterns for all kinds of ethnicities for all kinds of races. It's a lot of work to figure out not just something that maps to our own world's natural complexity for human ethnicity, but for dwarves and elves and all them to boot. (Seriously, I'm not going to tackle the idea that not everybody is white and then assume that some PC races are.) And if this isn't one of my major interests, will I be doing it justice?

And that's really the question at hand. Color-blind casting may not be doing the matter justice, either. It doesn't quite respect the culture aspect of racial identity we have here: in a way, it opens it up so that all cultures belong to all skin colors, with maybe a slight bias to Earth expectations (somewhat more Mediterranean complexions abounding in a "Grecian" nation, more Arab and Semitic-looking people than white people in an Al-Qadim setting). You get lighter skins toward the poles and darker skins toward the equator in general, but with plenty of opportunity to go beyond medieval historical analogues. The somewhat Three Kingdoms-inspired Phoenix Empire game I'd like to run might wind up looking more like Dynasty Warriors, with some characters looking markedly less Chinese. While saying "If you look like you do in real life, any of these cultures could be yours" it also sort of says "none of these cultures are specifically yours." 

Now to be fully honest, this is really an issue only for me. My gaming group's diverse in a "white people" way but not really ethnically. So if I did Option A nobody would mind. (Thankfully, Option B would irritate my wife at the very least.) So it's hard for me to sit down with players and talk about totally theoretical "But if you were Latino, would you feel more at home or less in this setting?" issues. It's entirely intellectual, and many years of White Wolf work have made me awfully leery of well-intentioned decisions making a setting seem less accessible. Even if it's, in this case, completely based on fantasy.

But I really like the image in my head. If it can work for Branagh, then I feel like I want to try casting Idris Elba as the Asgardian god of vigilance myself.

Let's start with the joke that came out of last Thursday's game session: If you put a 1st-level wizard in a box with a cat, you will not know if the wizard is alive or dead until you open the box and observe. Unless the wizard's only spell was detect secret doors or something, in which case he's definitely dead. That's the concept of Schrödinger's Wizard. (If you didn't play D&D back in the olden days, suffice to say that a housecat was, according to published mechanics, the rough equal of a beginning-level wizard character, if not outright superior.)

Okay, now let's move on to this thing here. The short version is that the author is pointing out a rather serious shift in RPG design, that he describes as "numerocentric" and "protagonocentric." This is actually kind of a serious version of Schrödinger's Wizard. I'm not really convinced about his use of terms, but the concept is fairly clear. Where I would change the wording is as follows:

Some RPGs use mechanics to model a reality independent of any observation, and some RPGs use mechanics to model the interface that takes place at the moment of observation.

To go into more detail, many games (including most that I've worked on) generally treat mechanics as a sort of objective truth. If your character has a Strength stat of X, then he can lift Y many pounds (or kilograms, for you weirdos and your kilodecidecacenti systems). Once a mechanic is established as "true," that's a consistent feature of the world. This consistency is the draw of the system for the players who value such. Of course, since most of these numbers are established as judgment calls and you need some abstraction to make a game playable at all, such games do run into trouble when something fails to simulate the intended effect despite working totally in keeping with the rules. A lot of exceptions are key to making games like this work, because reality itself is frequently inconsistent in weird ways. You also have to accept some level of abstraction — witness any system that utilizes hit points.

Now, the other way of approaching things — one that, interestingly enough, the industry leader shifted over to with D&D 4e — is that mechanics represent a specific time period of interaction. They aren't reality, they're the interface. In a way, they are the "observation" phase: the moment that mechanics become relevant is the moment that all these abstract possibilities represented in the game crystallize down into one specific result.

I should note that the observation analogy is a good one, I think, but it's probably more accurate to say that this is the moment of adjudication. Mechanics arrive only to provide a ruling: their rulings are not constants in the world because mechanical adjudication is not perpetual. A rule is a tool to interface with a fictional world, not a physical law of that world.

Most NPCs in a system like this don't have stat blocks until they're necessary. A blacksmith does not have "hit points" until someone takes a swing at him because hit points are a mechanic particular to the moment of resolving that swing. The rest of the time, the prevailing "truth" of the universe is that it behaves in a way according to the GM and the players' expectations. No mechanics are needed to explain the blacksmith's phobia of crows or his tendency to rub his belly when he smells a particularly large profit involved. There is a moment of adjudication, basically, as the GM chooses the "correct" response that showcases these personality traits, and this is true of all RPGs: but overall, this approach of mechanics-as-adjudication rather than mechanics-as-consistent-feature moves almost everything into a similar headspace as personality traits. In a way, it represents how we often create fiction in other media as well: you don't simulate everything in a protagonist's life, you use the medium to depict specific points of interface. Even unscripted fiction like improv theater (or RPGs) uses a mechanic as adjudication: you apply a mechanic like "Clive Anderson reads you a scene from a hat" to select a moment to crystallize.

Full disclosure: I love the mechanics-as-interface approach to gaming. Love it. It suits my running style, and I like that the consistency is up to the group to maintain rather than a ruleset. But I do understand how many other people prefer the first style. And the two styles are so different that they're prone to trigger really strong reactions from their partisans. Someone who's used to the consistency of mechanics that represent universal truths may feel as though he or she is standing on shifting sand in a game where the mechanics say "that's not important" and fade away like kuroko the moment nobody's looking directly at them. At the same time, someone who likes the idea of mechanics staying the hell out of the way may become frustrated in a game where they're ever-present and given precedence.

It's not just a style issue, I think: it's a trust issue. That's why people get kind of crazy about it. Going all Schrödinger's on a system can be perceived as a lack of trust in rulebooks and in people who like rulebooks. Preferring mechanics as universal constants can be perceived as a lack of trust in one's fellow gamers. This is not a small thing, I should note: the roleplaying hobby is freakin' rife with trust issues. You could even claim the early days trained people to have trust issues, with a high-lethality game where you had to think like the DM in order to bypass the traps was the main way people played — even before you add in the crap GMs who doled out save-or-die (sometimes without the save) at their whim, often just as part of a power trip.

Varying tastes in style are inevitable, of course. And I think it's a good thing that the hobby supports two styles of play. I find it unfortunate that they're so at odds, though. Anything that adds to the fractiousness of this hobby is sad to see.

Though even that may be somewhat hypocritical of me to say. I love my rules-as-interface style of play. I would be happy to work on more objective-mechanic style of games in future, but when it comes time to run? Give me the wizard stuffed in a box with a cat. That's my thing.

For someone who's worked on a hell of a lot of horror games, I don't consume a lot of horror. Don't go to horror movies (especially slasher or torture porn flicks, which just completely do nothing for me), don't read much horror literature apart from the occasional classic. It's an odd choice to make, given my profession.

I think it has something to do with my perception of the genre. As I see things, there are two general breeds of horror, both of which tend to involve watching terrible things happen to helpless people. One of the breeds is, as I perceive it, true horror. This is horror wherein the helpless people really don't deserve what's happening to them, and the audience is expected to empathize with it. This seems to be rarer than the other breed, which has kind of an element of revenge porn to it. Scientists play God and suffer for it; teenagers have sex or act like bitchy teenagers and suffer for it; macho jocks act macho and suffer for it, and so on.

The thing is, true horror is really hard to watch. It's bleak and uncompromising and doesn't leave you in a good place. It's more Cormac McCarthy than Bram Stoker. The revenge porn aspect of more mainstream horror is what leaves the audience able to leave the theater laughing. So naturally the hardcore, uncut stuff that offers no reassurances is less popular, and the stuff that leaves you feeling "well, at least the virginal girl escaped" or "man, those people were dumb and deserved to die" is more popular.

I guess the trouble I have is that it's awfully easy to read more into the revenge porn aspects and be a little creeped out. Take this last year. You've got Piranha 3d, admittedly not even close to taking horror seriously, which is about the yucks of watching beautiful people get mauled by fish... and I know I'm probably overthinking this, but the question to me was "Why do I want to watch people die for being attractive and in swimsuits?" The meta question was just a bit creepy. Or there's Splice. The hidden message of Splice, which seems either just really poorly thought out or horribly misogynistic, was enough to make me say "You know what? My 'revenge porn' is seeing how little money this movie made."

Interestingly, I think that targets the appeal of the old World of Darkness lines to some extent. You're the horror monster, and you pick your victims. You determine how much you want them to "deserve it" or not. Hell, Werewolf: The Apocalypse was practically a love letter to revenge porn, the ability to tear limb from limb people who really deserve it. Thus you automatically get catharsis, the ability to experience horror as bad things happen to you and yours, but also the ability to project that onto the deserving victims. You can't necessarily choose who lives and who dies, but you can certainly choose to exert your will, and dice-rolling, to influence the results.

This is probably why horror RPGs and other media are such a divide to me; quite fond of the one, meh on the other. When it comes to other media, I'm really more with the fantasists like Bradbury. There you wind up with horror, but it's more fabulous... in the literal sense, mind, not in the sense of Queer Eye. I tend to find the meta-thinking there a little less troublesome as a whole.

Last Wednesday's Tanglestone session was probably not a fantastic one in terms of Major Conflicts. It seemed fairly low key in some respects. But it hit four of the major reasons for gaming, and right on the nose.

Exploration: It opened up with the PCs interrogating... something between an NPC and a computer archive, maybe? This entity knew a lot of secrets about their mysterious setting, and it also didn't know (or technically, it did not have archived information for) a frustrating number of other secrets. For about an hour, I think, the players didn't do much other than speak to this construction and expand their knowledge of what's been going on with The City, and what their antagonist has been up to.

Tactical Gaming: The fight on the assembly floor was surprisingly tough. (who knew mephits could be so dangerous? Probably I should have, since I was making their stat blocks...) It wasn't heavily dramatic, as there wasn't much of a history between the players and their enemies, but apparently it was quite satisfying: the players were talking amongst themselves about their tactical choices, and how they managed to pull of a resounding victory from a very rough start. (This is one of the reasons I like 4e so much, by the way; its very gamist combat system is very satisfying for the players, and adds extra meaning to any combat encounter important enough to actually play through.)

Putting One's Stamp On The World: One of the "rewards" for stamping out the infestation on the assembly floor was that the PCs found a not-yet-activated clockwork, without any of the identity-defining trappings yet attached: a blank slate, ready for them to choose an identity for and activate. They did so with enthusiasm, and added a new face to the world: well, technically he has no face, but that was part of the choices they made. Considering that they had previously seen all of two of these particular clockwork people over the course of the campaign (one being a PC), not only were they adding a new NPC built to their own tastes, they were adding a rare and individual one to boot. They loved this as well. The dynamic of a guild-clan will now be altered a bit, as this new entity joins the cast.

Continuity & Closure: I was going to make this a piece about three hits, but I realize there was a fourth: the group did go looking for one more fight just to top them off at the end. Naturally, they found the revenant band composed of a couple of NPCs the players had shown an interest in several sessions back, only to find out said NPCs had vanished in the course of the exploration of the Clock Tower. Foreshadowing meets closure; something that rewards a group who's paying attention. (Though actual closure may have to wait until next week, what with Fell's escape and all.) 

It's funny how you can walk away from a session saying "Well, a couple of things went over really well" and then, in retrospect, find out that even more things went well. It's gratifying, to be sure.

Last night was a bit of a long dark night of the soul. All right, more sort of a short dim evening of the soul, but all the same...

About a year ago, Aileen and I had to go down to Lake Lanier (it was "down" at the time, whereas it's now sort of "up") for a company thingie. The company thingie was not quite forgettable, but about as useful as you expect them to be — if anything, I learned that some people on your team-building "team" will forget that you exist, and that you absolutely cannot rely on certain other co-workers in events like this. But along the way, we hit an office supply store, and I picked up a rather nice journal, sort of a "faux-Moleskine" with softer covers and less artsy paper, done up in graph paper layout.

This thing practically became my idea umbilicus. I took it with me all over the place, filling it sometimes with notes about the houses we were looking at but mostly about notes for, you know, The Hobby. My attempt to prove that I could have 20 different D&D campaign pitches, enough to roll a die for — and then 30. The original list of those was in there. So were my notes for Pulses when I was brainstorming the possibility of Soul Amplifier. A sketched approximate floorplan of our favorite Italian restaurant in Asheville, before it moved next door so the Fresh Market could expand. My brother's infamous quote of "You realize that one third of a question mark is either a squiggle or a dot." (Context available upon request.) It had notes on video games, work ideas, and most of all page after page of weird cramped lists of treasures, bogeymen and other ideas for gaming. All it lacked was those first few notes that would eventually become Geist: The Sin-Eaters (those were in a different sketchbook, that eventually became purely dedicated to my Azuros game). We would go out shopping, and if there was a possibility of a sit-down meal in a restaurant, Aileen would always ask "Do you have your book?" It rode under the armrest in the pickup, and sometimes I'd put it on the truck cap when I went to get the mail.

Yesterday, I forgot I'd left it there. Then we went shopping. You know where this is going, I guess; we came back and I stopped suddenly in our driveway, dashing out to see the poor journal in the street, where it had been run over and soaked in a thunderstorm. I felt, oddly enough, like a negligent parent. Aileen removed most of the absolutely soaked pages and set them out to dry, and left the rest of it alone for a bit. And I went looking online for the proper brand. Just in case I couldn't find any tomorrow. Sure, I could order them cheap online but then I'd have to wait for delivery.

This morning, while Aileen was having her blood drawn, I went over to a Staples nearby — I hate those goddamn commercials with a passion, but my principles of "don't reward shitty advertising" apparently are as nothing compared to my principles of "get your goddamn book so you can be ready to write shit down at any time". Fortunately, they had just what I was looking for: I almost grabbed all four (even if they were at nearly twice the price I'd found online), but settled for just two (one black, one in a brown I hadn't known was available). With a box of my favorite pens to boot, and within an hour we were having brunch at a diner, and I was writing again. Oh man, like getting a fix.

So now it's time to start transcribing the soaked pages of the old demolished journal, or at least the things that are necessary. Notes on old game sessions already run: probably don't need them. Notes on the houses we didn't buy: nah. The sketches and doodles are pointless to replicate anyhow. Some of the contents will go into the new journal. Some into the files on my computer. I still feel kind of bad for doing poorly by this inanimate object (there's that primitive animistic instinct again), but in a way it's a fascinating new experience: the dried, removed pages of soaked, blurred writing on yellow graph paper are like treasure maps, a sheaf of leaves from an old philosopher's mad notebook. I am now an archaeologist, delving into the forgotten past of my own brain.

Can you believe that some people use office supplies as a codeword for banality? Freaks. Pens and paper: this is the stuff.

Me: "You know, in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, one of the themes is the main character's inarguable, much as he tries to argue it, love for his ex-wife. And the character of the ex-wife reminds me of you. So I liked it."

Her: "You know I'm going to read it, right?"

Me: "So... any flaws that the character of the ex-wife exhibits you're going to tally up as if I was criticizing you for them?"

Her: (that "tread carefully" smile)

So since the move, I've been casting covetous glances at the used bookstore not too far from here. Very close by the old mountain standards: only about ten minutes, a little over. It just hasn't been on the way to anywhere, so it took me a while to go visit.

My fascination with used bookstores is probably understandable. In a way, it does feel like cheating, though. The recent arguments about the video game industry and the used game market do make me feel a bit guilty; buy something at a used bookstore, and yes, you're not propping up the author or the publisher (in cases of someone representing a worthy but dead author). But a used bookstore is also home to the out-of-print, and most importantly of all, it's buried treasure.

Admittedly there's a lot to sift through, and it's not all going to be things that you want. Case in point: I sort of felt like trying out some Jim Butcher, in case someone had given up the first book of that Roman-Empire-meets-elemental-Pokémon series. Nope, no Butcher in the science fiction room. A pile of Brooks, but, well. After devouring The Man Who Was Thursday last night, I was definitely intrigued to see if there was some more G.K. Chesterton — nope, kind of a long shot there, I guess. Okay, maybe a Fighting Fantasy paperback? A real long shot there — and no. It's kind of nice being surrounded by so many books, but a little disappointing when there are waves of things you'll never purchase. The mounds of paperbacks containing exactly one Shakespearean play. The Dan Brown and Robert Jordan.

But really, it's not about the stuff you're looking for. The most delicious thing about used bookstores is the unplanned things. There were some gorgeous volumes of Sherlock Holmes that I would have snapped up in a second if we hadn't gotten a couple of omnibuses (omnibi?) a year before. Is that a cheap collection of Kafka in a nice old hardback? Score! Battered old paperbacks are all over the place, but it's really about seeing what you can get that's cheap, worth reading, and maybe worth holding onto for a bit. (Though of course I'll take a battered old paperback if it's something rare and wondrous; probably not going to make another find like Zelazny's Lord of Light any other way.) 

So I wind up thinking of it as sacking and pillaging. Swag. Plunder. Booty. Loot the corpses, carry off the illuminated manuscripts of Lindisfarne. Yes, I appreciate Amazon as much as anyone else does, but only at the used bookstore do I have a shot of carrying out a bag containing Kafka, Aristophanes, Zelazny, Anne Brontë, Longfellow and Chabon. There is no way that's going to be the shopping list you wrote up ahead of time.

Well, okay, maybe it is. I don't know you. You may be laughing at me for not seeing the common thread to them all. But the point stands.