On Horror and Victims

I just wrote this for a thread entitled "Horror Needs Victims; Good PC Victims are Awesome" on the Wanton Wicked forums. I thought it belong here, as well.



We're playing a horror game, friends. If you are not hunting monsters, being hunted by monsters, being a monster, trying to stop someone from being a monster, or otherwise not feeling psychologically affected by the game you are playing, you are doing it wrong. Now we make some conciliations in chat RP, of course, we can't all be experiencing horror all the time. These games are written to be experienced in once-a-week (or whatever) sessions that essentially cover an episodes worth of a TV show. The persistent world setting is different because we experience more of our character's lives than just the horrific parts. Than just the plot-relevant parts.

In the tabletop, its up to the ST to make you feel horrified, but in this environment, its up to you to bring the horror to the online table.

When you're playing a vampire, don't be afraid to somehow show your character's struggle with their Beast. Can you feel the horror of the monster inside you, the monster you know you will inevitably become? Look up at those elders, see the madness in their eyes and the hunger in their limbs, and know your destiny. Vampires, you are victims.

Really think about what its like to know about the Spirit World, to know that every tiny action and emotion here in the Flesh World throws into existence new beings of terrible sentience in a place a hair's breadth away. The weight of that responsibility is horrific, yes, but what is most horrific is that you're starting to feel as connected to those alien beings as you are to the people on the subway around you. Werewolves, you are victims.

Learn that everything, everything around you is just a facsimile created to drag you into despair. Open your eyes to the tugging strands of fate while you talk with your girlfriend, and watch the strands between you begin to unravel. Taste the acrid winds of a foul world devouring our own, and know it was you who brought the winds there as you shatter the walls of this world before you. And sometimes, before you fall asleep, ask yourself if you've really learned anything, or if it is all another smokescreen. Mages, you are victims.

Lovecraft famously said that mankind's greatest and deepest fear is that of the unknown. And its true that staring into the spaces between the stars can frighten us, but the root of that horror isn't not knowing, I think. The root of that horror is helplessness; our deepest cores fear that what we do is meaningless. In life, you can not face this fear, but in these games, you can. You can live the character, face and drown in this horror, and though your character may not, you at least will survive it. Your character will always serve their purpose, if you let them: to be in a story.

Do not shy away from being the victim, from feeling the horror and the helplessness. You may not know it yet, but its why you're here.

Crossposted from my more personal online journal: destiny

First, I apologize for not posting here more lately, even though there is no more pathetic a sight than someone apologizing for not posting in a blog. As it so often does, life responsibilities have interfered with my play of online chat games, and so I have had little to write about. I thought maybe something I wrote in my personal journey today might have a place here, though. Without further ado.

I know I haven't written anything intimate here for some time, but tonight was as near-perfect an evening as I could ever achieve, and I feel driven to chronicle it. Look here, now, as I use words like "chronicle". More on that later.
As anyone who still bothers with reading this online journal should know, in a month and some change I will be embarking on a new life journey. And, this time, a literal one. On nothing but tens of dollars and some baseless hopes, I am moving halfway across this nation to Portland, Oregon, a city of misfits and rejects such as myself. And as excited as I am, I am also terrified.
Until I was twelve years old, I moved every other year or more. In fact, by the time I was twelve, I had moved twelve times. Each new place I left I was forced to learn to adapt, and this is a trait that has served me well in life. But also in each new place I was forced to start over, to build up a new network of friends. And, all through my elementary school years, each new place I was also an outcast, as "new kids" often are. Oh, it is true, I made my friends here and there, several of whom are still my closest confidants today. But overall I was rejected by my peers, as many children are.
That all changed when I moved to the strange little town of Reedsburg, WI. Perhaps it was the burgeoning maturity that middle school brings on, or perhaps it was just the nature and environment of Sauk County, Wisconsin, but this place was the first place I was ever truly accepted, overall, by the other students. By my peers.
I did not realize this at first, of course. Until my middle school graduation, I still believed myself an outcast. Though I had friends and was finally generally popular with the other students, I believed in my heart of hearts that it was all a trick. In the night, before I slept, I told myself that I should not trust it, that behind my back the other students laughed amongst themselves and said, "Oh, that Jeff Bauer. He thinks we like him, isn't that hilarious? Isn't that the greatest mockery we could make of him?" For the three years of middle school I lived in dread and fear of the day I would overhear them mocking me, and it would all come crashing down.
It never did. Instead, middle school graduation occurred. For most people, this is hardly a milestone, but for me it was different. Because in the cafeteria, as young girls and boys on the cusp of truly beginning the transformation to women and men were drinking soda and awkwardly slow dancing, I finally overheard several of my fellow students talking about me behind my back. They were popular kids, people I knew, of course, but had not really formed any true connection to. Today, ten years later, I don't even remember their names. But I remember what one of them, a lovely young woman, said. "Jeff is pretty cool. He's different, yeah, but it doesn't drag him down. He's really meant for something."
As you do during puberty in this nation, I didn't ever confront them, or thank them. I went to the bathroom and cried in a stall. Finally I knew what it was to feel equal, to feel respected.
Since then, I have built a wonderful and wide network of friends here in Wisconsin that I hold so dear, I consider them on the level of family. Indeed, when all my plans for the future came crashing down around me over the last month and half, all my friends from all over reached out in different, small ways that together could certainly enable to stay here in this state. They offered me money, a car, jobs, a place to sleep, a life to continue to live. And again, like I did ten years ago, I realized what it is to be loved and respected by your peers. My friends did not mock me for failure, or accuse me of all my personal faults that have again brought me to this low point. They just laughed, in kindness and love, and offered me a helping hand. Yesterday was the celebration of Thanksgiving, and though I spit upon the historical context of the holiday, I assure you that I know what it is to be thankful. I am so eternally thankful for this, my friends, my family.
Still, I'm leaving. Physically, anyway. I have no real reason to anymore, but it still feels like what I must do. And why? That brings me to what happened tonight.

In fourth grade I was living in Berlin, Wisconsin, and was already deeply embroiled in my fascination with the immaterial, the imaginary. I understood, dimly, the concept of a roleplaying game, and had over the last two years made many attempts to emulate whatever it was that my child mind thought Dungeons and Dragons was. I encouraged my friends to "play pretend" with me, and created vast imaginary worlds all over the playground for us to cavort in. Already I was a storyteller. That Christmas, in fact, would be the year my parents (specifically, I believe, my father) would buy me the recently released "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Starter" boxed set. Tiny little purple miniatures, I am sure several of you remember it. But before that, around my birthday in October, was my first true roleplaying experience.
Sensing my love of acting, of stories, and noticing how close my birthday was to Halloween, my parents decided to do a "How to Host a Murder" for my birthday party. For those unfamiliar with the concept, each guest takes on a persona of a possible suspect in the murder of the party's fictional host, and you take it in loose turns to suss out information from each other before the big reveal of the true facts of the case at the party's end. Its rather like a more freeform, acting version of Clue.
My family and the families of the other children went the whole mile for me that year, creating costumes and turning our home into a place reminiscent of a haunted house. Today it amazes me that my parents did so much for me then, as at the time my mother was suffering from a debilitating illness that almost completely disconnected her from reality, and my father was forced to live several hours away to work his job which supported us, leaving the younger me to fend for my younger brother and myself. I am thankful they did, though, that they made punch complete with a frozen spooky hand of dry ice.
It was the first time I ever really pushed people to delve entirely into a fictional world, to participate with me in a story that wasn't their own, but that could belong to them if they so chose. It was a formative moment in my life.
This year, for my birthday, I wanted to relive in some small way that How to Host a Murder party of my youth. So I bought a boxed set, and began to organize the event to occur at the beginning of this month of November. Then my life and my plans quickly began to fall apart, and I became too overwhelmed to finish the invitations, the preparation.
Unbeknowst to me, my announcement of my imminent departure to my roommates inspired them to work even harder to make this moment of my childhood come alive again. Two groups of my friends, almost entirely unconnected to each other, coordinated and organized without my knowing. When I returned to my home in the Garden of Madness (our name for our house) here in Madison tonight, I was beset by a group of people in costumes who had prepared a dinner, music, and costumes for this event. They had even prepared a makeshift costume for me, immediately forcing me to dress in it.
We ate, we drank much wine, we suffered through terrible puns and crafted some of our own gleefully cheesy humor. We played pretend, as adults, with no hint of shame or hesitation. We reveled in a fictional unfolding mystery. I still intend to have a grand going away party, but this, I think, will be a memory that I will hold with me for my life. To think that people I feel like I am abandoning would go out of their way to create this experience for me... it brings me to tears.
All my life people have told me I am meant for something, that they sense it within me. And all my life it has frustrated myself and the people who love me when I fail to live up to my potential again, and again, and again. Always I've thought that "something" must mean something "real": a doctor, a politician, a lawyer, a writer of novels.
Now though, still tipsy on wine, drinking Earl Grey and smoking Arabic-coffee flavored hookah as I sit in warm blanket and cool darkness in my subterranean room, I look back on my life and see what it is truly building up to. I will never find my destiny being who I am not, for even if I am many things, what I am most is a gamer. I am one who, as Lovecraft coined, dwells ever apart in the realms invisible.
In more ancient ages I may have become a shaman, but in our modern era there is no word for this person who takes people into the immaterial world. The world of our imagination and subconscious, of our fears and hopes. Or perhaps there is a word for it. Perhaps "roleplayer" is the word now, "storyteller", "dungeonmaster", "gamer". The social stigma of these words has, largely, fallen away over the last two decades. Thanks to the prevalence of electronic gaming, the financial success of World and Warcraft, Second Life, and G4TV, gaming-chic has come into style.
More and more, we dwell in a world defined more by the human mind than by our environment. This is a trend that, barring apocalypse, I believe will continue. Yes, I do have it in me to become a lawyer, a politician, a doctor. But I would just be taking a role. I would just be playing pretend. If playing pretend is who I am, than so be it.
Watching an anime as I drank my tea and smoke my hookah, reflecting, a line stood out to me. "Trying your hardest to be something is a talent all in itself, don't you think?" Well, don't you? And I have certainly been trying. But I have been fighting who I am, fighting my destiny, trying to pigeonhole myself into a mainstream society that doesn't have a place for me. My destiny isn't there. It is in who I truly am. A gamer.

So, I am going to Portland. It is a kingdom of slackers and alternative lifestyles. Do not think I also don't see the reality of the situation, that it is a place of sloth and hedonism, that it is a real place and not some fictional paradise I have created in my head. It is just another place, with people. To quote another anime, "Wherever you go, people are people, and there is the sky." But also, the Pacific Northwest is where the grand majority of games electronic and paper-and-pencil are created today. And it is with those games that my future truly lies.

I will be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, a knight, a baron, a detective, an actor, a storyteller, a villain, a hero. I will be all these things, if only for a little while, and more than them.

Tonight I rededicate myself to my purpose in life, which I have been so reminded of tonight. I dedicate myself to transporting and transforming people to other worlds. To bringing fiction to life, and using it to teach lessons about nonfiction. To create feelings in people they are afraid to feel, and have them act out those same feelings in ways that some would say are "imaginary". In the moment, though, feelings are always real. They may fade and warp, but when you feel them that first time, they are true, and they teach you lessons you will never forget.

This, more than any other way, is how I have learned to help other people, and myself. And I excel at it. No longer will I reject my destiny.

Comment During a Conversation

Roleplaying is a whole new form of hobby, never really conceived until the end of the last century. Nevermind trying to integrate the internet into that. sure, there are analogies to be made with old-time storytelling traditions, but they aren't truly the same because they lacked rules and structure. They usually weren't framed as games, but rituals. For us, its both, and its hard to consolidate that with the medium we play in, especially when people so freely deviate from the style and theme of the core games in their own homebrewed TTs, without informing the players or maybe without even knowing themselves they're "not doing it right".

Its only natural we don't have all the answers, yet, is my point, and it bears effort and experimentation.

Why We Play WoD (Not Written By Me)

In the dark past before history began, humanity learned to fear. Huddled in the darkness on the plains of Africa, our earliest ancestors listened as lions stalked through the night around them. Deep in the caves of Europe, later men kept watch around their fires in the snowy winter, telling stories of horrors living hidden in the gloom outside. In the Middle East, just as the Sumerians began to scratch cuneiform on stone tablets, farmers sacrificed their livestock to demons they believed lived in the desert.

Over time, we’ve learned to control our fears. To take them down to size. The lions in Africa were held back by fences of barbed plants, then hunted down with guns to near extinction. The horrors in the snowy winter of Europe were cast aside by the retreat of the glaciers and by the flaming torch of human progress. The demons living in the sand lost their sacrifices as time went forward.

In the twenty first century, we have the internet, we have half-mile high buildings, we have networks of roads spanning continents and air traffic going around the world. We look to horror stories, thrill rides, and late night television gore-fests to satisfy our psychological need for fear here in the western world. It’s almost like fear is a toy for us now; we only know true fear a few times in our adult lives.

But all of those terrifying stories our ancestors told around fires? All of the things they saw when they looked out into the blizzards of the ancient past? They aren’t gone. Where the lights don’t reach, where the shadows dominate, they still live. They crawl in their eternal crypts, dreaming horrible, dark dreams as the ages pass them by. Outside of the range of cell phones, away from all the commercial flight paths and shipping lanes, where no one can see, they build their kingdoms. Underground, they feast on whatever crawls by them. Nightmarish masses of twisted flesh and muscle, dark even against the darkness, they wait.

Because one day, the lights are going to go out again, and they aren’t ever going to come back on.

–
Credited to DigitalMadness.

The Justification System is Broken

Most persistent world online World of Darkness chats have a system for spending experience. In fact, all of them use the same flawed system: the Justification System. In this system, when you want to spend XP you make a post to your character thread in the forum or email the proper ST(s), stating what you want to buy and why your character should have it.
On the surface, this is a reasonable system where players are forced to develop their characters in terms of fluff when they develop them in terms of crunch. The intent is to challenge players to think creatively and constantly push themselves to be a better roleplayer. As with so many things, however, this idea is merely de jure. De facto, this system has consistently devolved into repeated favoritism.
It isn't even intentional favoritism most of the time. Some people RP great whenever they log on, and are dedicated members of the setting, but simply don't have the time IRL to write several forum posts about how their character is practicing kung-fu. In addition, this system is often used in an attempt to "balance" a game, that is, keep people from achieving "dangerously" high stats too quickly. This is a false premise, caused by the inherent lack of trust between STs and players online. In reality, you can approve a character with Strength 5 and Weaponry 5 and he probably won't kill a single important NPC, let alone several or even many NPCs. In my nearly five years of consistently playing on these online chats, I've never seen any hint of a character going on some kind of random rampage thanks to the stats on his or her sheet. It just doesn't happen, and we need to stop acting like its a danger.
A second part of this issue is that the rate of XP accrual on chats does not match up with the rate at which you can spend XP. Many chats require you to spend a month or more learning the first dot of a single skill, while in that month you acquire enough XP to learn several low level skills or master one of your already possessed skills.
I think we should take a hint from our friends in the Exalted chats. Yes, Exalted and WoD are very different games, but that doesn't mean we can't take ideas from one to place into the other. I propose that instead of the faulty and easily abused justification system, we apply a training time system. This can even be hardcoded into any website with relative ease. When a character wants to spend XP, they state that they begin learning whatever it is they want their character to learn. After a certain amount of time has passed, they get it. No justification required.
Naturally, some particularly potent abilities could be flagged for requiring ST approval. Its only natural that a character should require some explanation for things like the Allies or Status merits, or for particularly powerful or unique abilities (like Devotions in Vampire).
This system can be easily customized from game to game, to account for their XP accrual rate and for how long term they desire their game to be. In a chat intending to run for a year, training times might be low, where chats with no definite end point could set training times months longer (although hopefully still matching up with XP accrual rates).

Morality in the World Of Darkness

I think a common mistake people make when creating characters in the World of Darkness is playing them at the morality they want them to be at instead of the morality they are at. That is a big reason why so many themes of the game are lost. A starting character in the World of Darkness is supposed to be unlikely and unwilling to kill a man, or to steal from his peers.

Of course, sensible games allow a player to start at a lower Morality, sometimes in exchange for XP (something I've never understood). I think a character should be able to start at any Morality they like, usually somewhere between 4 and 8.

Games like Vampire and Mage are about, partially, a slow descent into madness. But if you start out mad, how can you possibly play that out?

Problems Pt. 1

Too many people get into this for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't be starting a game because you're angry at another game, or because you think you can do it better. The only reason to start a game is to provide people with a place to be creative and have fun. Any other reason will just be impetus on a long slide into debacle and corruption.

Sadly, this is a cycle that has been occurring since the idea of running these sorts of games online first cropped up. Granted, I wasn't exactly active in the community then, but I was at least aware of it and have discussed those times at length with people who were there. It seems to me that in the last decade or so of playing in these games, we've really made very little progress on creating a sustainable system of play and play management.

I'm going to list some common issues, later entries will discuss them at length. They are in no particular order.

1. ST/GM/DM Burnout
Inevitably, there are too few people trying to run the game for too many people. Part of this is the idea that for a GM (that's the term I'll be using as I find it the most generic) to be effective they have to sacrifice twenty or thirty hours a week to the game. Another part is that GMs are not properly trained. I have never seen a game that had a training program or period for GMs. In addition to this blog I am in the process of writing a "ST Training and Management Guide" geared toward World of Darkness chat games, although many of the ideas expressed in it would be useful for any system. I'll post portions of it here occasionally.

2. Cynicism
People have been trained by failed game after failed game, by each corrupt ST and each immature player. They have been taught that in this online environment, you can trust no one. They have been taught to approach games with utter caution, lest their hard creative work and desire to have fun be mercilessly mocked. They have been taught that no one can seperate IC from OOC, and we must either band together into flocks of vitriolic hecklers or tread silently through the virtual world, maintaining careful mediocrity to avoid notice. This is a shame.

In addition to retraining our GMs, we must retrain the players into realizing that we are a community. When we encounter a bad player (yes, I believe there are good players and bad players, and you should too), we shouldn't knock them down further. We should offer our aid. It only takes a moment, and its not only beneficial to them, but to you as well. Everything that improves the game you're playing in is beneficial to you, and more quality players means more quality play.

3. Metagaming
Some metagaming is good. For instance, if I and a few other players in a Mage game want to create a cabal together, we're going to have to talk OOC about the goals of that cabal as well as IC. We're going to have to create situations where our characters will meet and bond, which requires OOC manipulation of the game. These are good things, they add to the game.

Some metagaming is bad. Sometimes a bunch of players create a clique in order to maintain control over the game. Sometimes this happens because the GMs and Admins aren't doing their job, sometimes the players are just jerks. Its easy to tell whether metagaming is good or bad. If the metagaming benefits only you personally, its probably bad. If the metagaming benefits the game as a whole, then its good metagaming.

Just as frustrating as people who do metagame are people who don't. People who refuse utterly to consider any IC action from an OOC perspective. While I laud their immersion, I observe that this just really causes hassles. Do we really need to RP out the minutiae of my character calling yours to organize a coffee date? Is staying true to your character worth leaping at that other character's throat and triggering a mass combat that will serve little purpose but to annoy the people who busy doing other things? Is staying true to your character worth causing OOC strife amongst your friends? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes no. Its a hard line to discern.



There are many more issues, but these are three big ones in my opinion, and the first I will be writing about at length. I've introduced some basic ideas and solutions above, but will be elaborating on them in future entries.