Left Hand of Darkness

The voyages of the USS Lyonesse continued this week along with its intrepid and slightly green crew (not literally). The end of the first session saw us needing to call a breakdown service as we stalled out of warp bubble rather embarrassingly on our way to DS3, a tiny presence on the boarder of the Black Cluster Nebula. Thankfully it was a flaw in one of the Dilithium crystals which required a complete dis-assembly rebuild by our very hard working engineering team. In other words not my characters fault, still if you are going to cause a sleepless night to someone it may as well be a Vulcan - they just seem to get slightly more stoic than usual.

More interestingly we subsequently set off on mission to investigate the whereabouts and or otherwise fate of the Vulcan Exploration Ship (VES) Sunak and whilst narrowly missing a space whale whilst negotiating an entrance corridor into the area we finally detected a beacon, although the crew have been experiencing some cognitive dysfunction possibly due to a wider telepathic field. It's an interesting situation and there is a nice balance between caution, discipline and risk. Curiously enough as a pilot myself the game triggers all the same sort of feelings - pilot training is rigorous, repetitive and highly disciplined so when things go off plan, the brain already has a scaffold of checklists that go to work immediately - it not only quells panic but narrows the decisions one has to take. The added advantage of a Starship is that we can regularly call meetings and re-assess anomalies which is a valuable safety net.

However as a pilot I wouldn't deliberately fly into a large black telepathic cloud which is where the intrepid Starfleet training would superseded my own I would presume. Navigating in unexplored Nebulae brings its own challenges as to the traditional left hand rule of dungeon crawling so I think it really would take a Vulcan to optimise a search pattern when flying blind - perhaps that's where the ears help.

Inhuman

Not being human can be a slippery slope for a roleplayer. I have never really reflected on all of the non human characters I have played as generally speaking there always tends to be appropriate background material,  or indeed they retain a large proportion of their humanity genetically speaking. Half Orcs are basically part feral and exhibit neanderthal characteristics I feel as they tend to be low intelligence, uncooperative, strong and short tempered but what is interesting is that their general temperament still exhibits human traits skewed to different sensitivities. Vampires, like Cyborgs begin as humans but generally speaking have their empathy removed - Vampires prey on humans so empathy cant really be a trait, certainly when they are hungry and otherwise it is lost over time as their human memories fade. Cyborgs perhaps like werewolves still have a human element that is either trapped or subservient to an overriding force, being either a compromised brain or curse respectively.

As in media an audience needs a handle on a character in order to engage a story so it's necessarily a case to offer recognizable dilemmas - same for reolpleyers as a metaphorical human bone has to be tossed to a player in some form. In playing the recent Star Trek Adventures we have a range of non human characters in play including a fluorine breathing Zaranite which will be interesting. Whilst there are some great episodes such as The Devil in the Dark and Darmok where our finest human characteristics are pitched against our darker impulses the outcome is, as always with Star Trek, optimism in the finest humanistic tradition.

I think the role playing border controls stop at the truly alien characters. Cyberpunk notwithstanding, I wonder if a truly alien character is viable at all ? The handle would have to be its behavioral context respective of the other party members as there wouldn't be any recognisable psychology involved although it would have it own motivations of course.  Perhaps the outcomes become irrelevant in such a game and it becomes more about painting a portrait than changing people. It could be the case that all characters can be derived back to through evolution as anything alive must start with a drive for survival either mechanically or intellectually. I am drawn to Alex Garlands films, Annihilation in particular although playing an amorphous glowing blob might keep people up at night.

Some Re-Assembly required

This coming Monday will bring the country back to something like normal working hours as non essential shops are allowed to re-open. Actually I am not sure if that includes pubs and clubs but even if it does there will still be social distancing rules of some kind in place. The quandary for us is how we can resurrect our meetings and to be honest, I don't think there are really many options; the whole point of a role playing game is to sit around a table together and build a world in which to argue. The Belmont Railway Club always seems to be running on fumes, financially speaking, but I don't know the whole story as its a member of NARC and I would guess there is a supporting freehold covenant somewhere in the background as the building itself is Victorian and wholly owned by some entity that clearly isn't profit orientated. Perhaps it will always be there like the cave paintings of Lascaux.

More pressing are the finances of the Dice Saloon that is completely dependent on a social space. Whilst it was in transit to the Emporium on London road I can only hope that the respective landlords and contracts are flexible as its clearly a long term sustainable business despite a hopefully short term pandemic. I think its all going to come down to a vaccine ultimately as who is going to linger in any enclosed space until then.

I'm not sure what plans if any we can make and I suppose it will depend on our individual circumstances - on line play will just have to keep us all sane as well as possible for now and whilst I am beginning to get used to it, it's not a substitute although as a role player it should be theoretically possible both to run a scenario and roleplay all the characters oneself. Is this mad ? I can't tell anymore.

History and Mystery

It's an odd one. The so called golden age of science fiction was allegedly over the war period or more specifically '38 to '45 and whilst science fiction has long grown past its moody adolescence, the early pioneers have remained among my favourite universe builders. Asimov features predominantly in my ebook collection and as prolific and scrawling as he was, he did eventually sew his core novels together into one great canon. Frank Herbert's Dune will of course always remain a tantalising epic and Arthur C Clarke worlds were novel and occasionally prophetic.

I recall the iconic artwork of Chris Foss that always adorned the Asimov covers and notably the recent Tales from the Loop from Amazon, whilst a little dry on content has a production backdrop inspired from the same visual themes and has now just been released as an RPG. Now if my memory serves the first roleplaying game didn't emerge until the 70s, namely the iconic Dungeons and Dragons of course which leaves somewhat of a mystery. So what was going on between the mid 40s and 70s ? Well the western world took its first free breath after the war of course and it must have taken a while for the entertainment zeitgeist to relax, unwind and dream. Perhaps the rise of the TV was too captivating for everyone but it seems a genuine puzzle as of course as not only do we have RPGs from even earlier works such as Lovecraft but fantasy mythology has been inspiring narration for millennia and role playing could have emerged at almost any point in history.

If roleplaying wasn't discovered then was it truly invented in a light bulb moment by Gary Gygax ? Although it likely emerged from his war gaming and subsequent creation of Tactical Studies Rules Inc could it have only have been born at that moment ? History will keep some of its secrets its seems but a mythological origin to mythological media seems somehow appropriate.

Roleplaying Drunk

This last week has seen further revelries on Tabletop Simulator as more of our esteemed members have made it into theie latter half century. Monday saw a marathon session trying to get kicked out of Colditz, then subsequently trying to get kicked out of the Red Dragon Inn and finally, although I had to give up after seven hours and lick my eyeballs, ending  up with a game of Seven Wonders. The more I play TTS the more impressed I am with it as a gaming tool; given the breadth of games and community available I very much suspect that its going to comprise most of my retirement when I eventually get there. Having spent an unforgiving amount of time playing computer games over thirty years, there is definitely the sense that themes and mechanics repeat themselves and pretty much every genre has been done to death from my perspective. But giving board games a lease of life on the internet is a new experience and I had almost forgot the feeling of seeing something original.

Whist our extremely poor rolling made for a slow game of Colditz, my introduction to the Red Dragon Inn was a delight as it's fairly straightforward mechanics of trying not to let your falling fortitude dip below your increasing intoxication whilst retaining enough gold to keep in the Inn is constantly challenging. It seemed like we had all the expansions on the table as there were a huge variety of characters to choose from that both affect ones play style as well as open up lots of tactical avenues of play. In fact its really a role playing drinking game.

In other universes the last details of our Star Trek characters were tweaked and it looks like we are all on for the first session this Saturday. I doubt that this will be a drinking game though I do note that the doctor in the pilot episode used to carry around some drinks in his medicine bag and Romulan Ale notwithstanding, Starfleet did eventually commission a bar on the Enterprise. Perhaps I can see another Red Dragon expansion coming soon - The Ten Forward Inn..

Trekworks

Having done some prep for the forthcoming Star Trek game it's reminded me of how unwieldy its canon can be. Whilst I am more a fan of the episodic original series, the Trek canon has built up in layers over the years of course but it hasn't been immune to the whims of corporate forces. As we are generating back stories for our characters it's quite easy to go down rabbit holes and pick up loose ends as so much of the Trek context is just dropped randomly into various bits of dialogue across the seasons - it's not particularly a complaint but it has been difficult to reference even some well known entities as much has been incidental and also inferred.

To be fair it's a breeding ground for the imagination and not necessarily a bad thing but unlike Lord of the Rings or Dune for example, the detailing for Star Trek has not been s singular vision. This is why in part I am an original series fan. It's not so much that they were consistently focused on major issues on a purely philosophical level and arc agnostic but because Rodenberry was alive to own it all. Naturally as it's been franchised out over time, it's become a victim of its own successes and failures but I cant help feeling that Warhammer has kept more of its integrity than Trek but perhaps that's because it's purely prose rather then having to follow the Hollywood fashions.

Nevertheless I still watch it all and whilst there is always a feeling that although it has been done to death after hundreds and hundreds of episodes role players can have a special place as curators here as we can keep the vision intact and hand down our own stories that help sew the universe together.

Fame and Fantasy

 

As our long walk across the RPG desert continues we still are fortunate to happen upon a simulated tabletop or two but already the first brief conversation of when we avengers will assemble again at our usual base has been had. It seems, sadly, that it's far too early to tell if there is any way back to the way things were. At present I would be pleasantly surprised if the Railway Social club will even be viable again given that it's been running on cold quiche and questionable beer for years. I've also been worrying about our local Dice Saloon RPG community as its was just moving to a more stately venue on London Road just before the plague hit. Even when people start venturing back to work, I can't see social spaces recovering any time soon - but people's imaginations are not going anywhere so our time will come again.

Having been sentenced to YouTube for several weeks, I have just started to notice the star lineup we have in our hobby. I did write an article some time ago regarding Vin Deisel's passion for the dice but had no idea that Stephen Colbert was also a long time sleeper agent for Wizards of the Coast. It was in his interview Joe Manganello  on his show that he completely turned the tables and surprised everyone with a passionate ten minute retrospective of his own teenage years dancing with fate. What followed for a red nose day special was Matt Mercer running a one on one session for Colbert's Bard Kapo and his familiar companion Eric, a bee of great renown.

Turns out that the Dare Devil leading lady, Deborah Woll was also a closet gamer until she was hooked up to a group by her manager and now GMs regularly. Mike Myers was part of the Worldwide DnD Game Day back in 2006 and less surprising to me the Rock Dwayne Johnson has the alleged habit though the Jumani movies tend to give this away. There is Wheaton and Whedon of Star Trek and Firefly and not to forget the creator of Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon, whos DnD episode in the series Community is truly legendary.

Monsters and Media

Whist the pandemic lockdown still seems like a surreal drama in a parallel universe it has afforded some deep drift into the digital soup. Clicking round the roleplaying nebula I have discovered that you can now buy professionally made roleplaying soundtracks. I have noted before that some GMs like to bring along some Bluetooth speakers for background music and augment their games with audio context  - whether shopping in a town market to whimsical browsing melodies or chopping in combat to a rousing action theme, I do think its a nice touch. But if you want to enjoy reminiscing the drama in your own time then Midwinter Minis is doing a digital pack "Death by Dice" Vol 1. If you really enjoy getting into the ambience then I suppose you can get dressed up and go Larping in your own lounge too - here is their slightly sarcastic advert:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS09LMcQwCE&feature=youtu.be&t=26

Also I was initially pleasantly surprised to find a hitherto undiscovered roleplaying series on Amazon no less: "Dungeon Life: A Dungeons and Dragons Documentary". Having said this I do think its a bit of a cheat in that each episode is only about 3 minutes long and I am aware the some of the major streamers are uplifting some of the better youtube content creators. It seems like a lot of webisodes to me but it does feature some notable movers in the scene and a very contemporary assessment of the genre - its a 90 minute documentary chopped into bite size chunks.

As I have also been using Discord a lot as the comms to our Roll 20 game I did discover that one of the other Brighton roleplaying groups also have a discord running - whilst ours is 14 members and overly serves a small group I think, it usefulness is readily apparent when scaling up. The facebook group "Role-Playing games in Brighton" which is Simon Appleton's backend to the Craft Beer Co based meetups have, if you join, an open link to their discord community which is already just over 120 lively members and has a thriving turnover of games. That's a lot of people to argue with as a GM.

Exile

During our time locked away have been adapting well to the on line gaming tools, notably Roll20 among others but the boardgamers are also hosting regular sessions on Tabletop Simulator. GM Dave's tongue in cheek D&D has us hunting for ancient puns whilst fighting Kobolds and GM Kryzs has carried his ongoing campaign straight into the cloud and there is also a Star Trek brewing out in the nebulae. More interestingly I had to inform a virtual passer by that our meetup games are currently suspended but this really deserves much more thought in retrospect.

Whilst we are in a good spot with games and membership at the moment I am always trying to consider where we will be in a thousand years time and in this respect are we at a point where we go global ? By that I mean do we preserve or indeed promote our online play ? It's  a tricky one as it's clear that many of us deeply appreciate the social get together as to be fair, it's been in our DNA for millions of years. Roleplaying has not been in our DNA for that long but is necessarily subject to the forces of evolution so as members rotate out of the club over the years, albeit very slowly, I can't see clearly where and how new members will be joining us. Perhaps the whole process is so glacial that concerns are not really warranted.

However telling someone that our club wasn't running at the moment wasn't quite accurate and it was an opportunity lost to make a new friend; it has left me slightly uneasy. The issue is that there isn't a process yet whereby we can introduce people via on line gaming and I am unsure what to do about this. I think it's one of those moments when I need to climb an ancient mountain and consult the highest level Buddhist I can find.

Turning the Tables

Having fun on line has taken on another dimension this last week. As much as our Roll20 campaign is bedding into the virtual space it is worth a blogging moment to bear in mind that there is now a significant board gaming faction to our club. To be fair to people who turn up early for a drink I wouldn't expect anyone to sit around twiddling their thumbs but the board game faction has landed like a large drunken flying saucer in the middle of what was once a purely sociable meetup. Each to their own I suppose but whilst I do like to chat to people in general the lock down has afforded me the chance to engage with some of the systems that drive these cardboard and plastic fanatics.

And to be honest I have been extremely impressed with Tabletop Simulator available on Steam. Its simplicity is its brilliance which is not to under represent the technology but the provision of basically a simply physics engine on a virtual surface with rendered models suddenly means that any board game or indeed RPG can be visualised from the simplicity of draughts through to the heavy model and positional based games such as Warhammer 40k. This, like a lot of digitisation, divides the community into those who love the touch and feel of owning a real game and those for whom the convenience and perpetual availability of global play makes it the only game in town.

For our part, three of us cracked open a virtual copy of the classic Escape From Colditz. Originally published in the early 1970s the idea is that one player sides with the Germans and tries to prevent the other players, the Allied forces, from escaping. More specifically the game itself, whilst having some questionable game phases, was quite far ahead of its time in terms of a complex environment and uniquely challenging strategic elements. More to the point the board itself is quite sophisticated and there are several card decks, several tokens for prisoners and guards as well as various other markers for items including a virtualised clock for game countdown and rules documentation. All objects were rendered very faithfully within the simulator and once one got the hang of basic manipulation play became very natural and transparent. Of course the session depends on the organiser not getting disconnected but beyond this I feel a very large universe has just opened up. If you have ever wanted to play Russian Roulettte with the actual Russian Mafia from the comfort of your own home, then that time has now come.

Meta Fun

A sense of humour is wonderful thing when wielded appropriately. The issue is that it's actually more like an intelligent magical sword that wields itself according to its own whims. Political correctness has attempted to mandate jokes over recent years but I sense that its finally on the wane now and the fog is slowly clearing on social responsibility and, broadly speaking, someone is always the butt of a particular joke. Truth can be lost in the heat of the moment as extreme humour is often used ironically to make the protagonist the true target of ridicule rather than the content of what is said, Homer Simpson being the iconic example. But what has all this got to do with roleplaying ?

Well, spare a thought for the players of Mark Shelton's eight week campaign based in Seattle. Apparently a wonderfully detailed and engaging Pathfinder scenario that took all his invested players through its maze of challenges to the climatic finale that turned out to be nothing more than a ridiculous pun. Now the extent to which this is funny really depends on whether you were in the game or not - when absolutely everyone around the table is the butt of the joke then you should really be prepared to die by your own sword whether it is intelligent or not but it is a timely reminder that if you are not sensitive to people's passions then you have to respect the true chaotic neutral outcomes of your own sense of humour and be prepared to take the consequences.

There is a natural balance when it comes to social circles, ours included, in that like minded people will tend to stick together so we can muck around within a game to a degree. Indeed this is much of the pleasure as impossible worlds are full of wonderfully slapstick and ironic moments and indeed many games specifically nod to this - the Rolemaster critical strike tables being an endless source of demise- "Foes head is no longer available" etc. Many environments however require a more sombre, serious or sinister ambience such as Twelve Candles, Star Trek or Cthulu respectively but to be honest its all a matter of balance both in game and out. As long as people enjoy themselves then I'm fine with that - just don't be too precious about your precious.

One

People will always be people, in the same was I suppose that Dwarves will always be Dwarves. It also transpires that belligerent Dwarves who need to calm down and have a drink are just as belligerent on line as last week I experienced my fist dose of GM Dave's Mystery in Brighthelm.

A marvellously tongue in cheek take on current events the game ironically mirrors real life in a fantasy setting. It seems that our party is on the trail of someone who is stealing 'parchments' in a town in lockdown governed by I presume by now, is a very unwell Mayor Boris. The point of this bloglet is that its the first role playing game I have ever played on line. 

I know that GM Jon is considering the same for his upcoming Star Trek game that was provisionally arranged for the Dice Saloon and we will see if we can go full lcars but whilst we were looking at just the Roll20 system initially we ended up on the DnD Beyond website for party creation. The heavy integration makes character building and management very slick indeed and gives the GM full oversight. For the actual play we used Roll20 which is hugely popular.

Whilst the first session of a new adventure is always a bit wooden, Roll20 seemed to work reasonably well as a substitute for actuality. Inevitably, some players got more mic time than others and some were louder depending on their tech but having said this everyone seemed to get their oar in. GM Dave had a small library of characters at the ready but we didn't really lever the interface bar a single roll from my character - a singular critical fail - a 1 by any other name. I think with a visualiser or otherwise video integration it will really feel like a communal experience but it was an encouraging start.

Roll Online

So war is the mother of invention they say which may well be just as poignant in our current circumstances. We are battling a molecular enemy and are all on the front line - its a bit like some gigantic co operative board game.  Home working has its equivalence in home playing as far as our role playing club is concerned and as much as I drag my feet over technology, GM Dave and trusty sidekick James have digitised me into the seedy world of on line Role playing.

There is definitely a red vs blue sense of a divide in the club between those who find IT systems inconvenient and confrontational and those who find them supportive and communal. In a sense the global social network bubbles seem to replicate themselves in smaller social circles which is a fascinating field for future cyber psychologists but with respect to the technology, our on line GMs are putting their time and effort into supporting us in confinement and staving off madness and we have lawful good duty to support their efforts. Next week I'll report back on our roll20 and DnD Beyond experiences.

Whilst it was interesting and slightly creepy to listen in to the Tabletop Simulator app last week, it did seem to work. It was great fun to listen to a long conversation that made absolutely no sense whatsoever though that would also be a normal evening at the club for me. Nevertheless I am happy to report that the virtualised drinking game Red Dragon Inn seems to simulate most of the nonsense required to capture our atmosphere bar the barkeep. I think for now we will get away with not being real.