Yudhishthira’s Dice

So it was, two days after chargen, that my wife, my mother in law (MIL), and I sat down to play Pagan Shore with HeroQuest rules. If you have not read the post about character generation you should read that, then come back here.

It was my plan to run a game that started out simply, with some daily life in the rath to establish some conflict between the Christians and pagans in the town, between the generations that are going and those coming into their power, and between the powerful nobles of the tribe. I was then going to have a cattle raid, which was a common thing in the time, to get some early action and let the characters do a bit of adventure while dealing with family in trouble and the politics of desperation. Then the game was going to kick into high gear as the old chieftain died, and the nobles introduced all started to make their bid to become chief – which would involve politics, religion, sex, and family killing itself. King Lear meets The Book of the Dun Cow. I made a big relationship map with people of the rath fucking and hating and owing blood debts to each other, and the druids and priests and representatives of the kings who were all waiting and eager to jump in and drive those conflicts to fuel their own agendas. All of this is tied to both PCs by blood, love, and family as well as the NPCs they had created to be critical to their character. Good grabby stuff. (If I ever find the notebook, I’ll post it all in Random Encounters.) This was, in retrospect, very much overambitious, but hey, go big or go home, right?

We played the game in the living room of my MIL’s cabin, which is a nice comfortable space. It’s homey and close, and well setup for gaming in general. However, I didn’t have any specifically applicable theme music, and we only had one candle – which nixed the possibility of playing by candle-light or firelight (no fireplace either). Because of this I quickly became aware of how much I’ve come to depend upon things like mood lighting and music for my games. The “other space” you can set apart with different lighting and music is a very helpful thing, and without it I always take longer to get into things and never manage to stay as deeply embedded for very long.

Compounding my slow start-up was my wife’s hesitancy, as she believed there was a lot of potential for badness with the religious themes of the game being played out in conjunction with her mother, and my MIL’s newness to game which gave her a certain level of apprehension that isn’t typical for her personality. As a result we fluttered about and took longer than I would have liked to get started. Finally, however, I found the Lord of the Dance soundtrack – which is at least quasi-Irish – and put it on and started the game.

Those that have played with me can testify that one of my trademarks as a GM is a certain level of poetry in my poses, especially my opening poses. (La Ludisto once referred to it, half in admiration and half in disgust as “pulling poetry out of his ass.” ) So after a moment of focus, I opened the game with a narrative segment that went like this:

“It is a hot wind that blows down the ridge of the eiscirs towards the north and west, and that makes it an ill wind, the wind of the pale lords who ride with black and shining eyes, the lash of their unbound hair singing dirges just beyond the ken of mortal senses. It blows across the caked-mud tracks that in previous seasons would have been streams and over the sere and shriveling heath to howl about the stones of your ancestors’ cairns where they watch you from atop the granite-boned drumlins which guard the lands of your people. It sweeps past the lean cattle and the bo-aires who stand in the meager shade of fading trees, hiding from the hottest summer that even the oldest of them can remember. Eddies catch the dust of the packed earth of the rath’s walls and send them spinning down the streets, where children watch listlessly and adults fret at the length of the summer. It is a lean time, a hungry time, and a hot time – but winter will come, and without luck or blessing, many of the people who you call kin will not see the next spring.”

At this point I took a moment to explain to my MIL what a bo-aire is (a warrior and rancher owing service to the local noble family, a freeman but with duties of honor – much like an English yeoman). I then asked, thinking my wife would answer first, what their characters were about on this day, showing the way they interacted with the tenuously regular life of the rath (the fort that is the center of their tuath, or tribe).

My wife, however, hesitated for a second and without missing a beat my MIL stepped in, and very confidently said (as close as I can remember):

“In whatever narrow shade I can find” (pause as I said it would probably be behind the chieftain’s house, and she took to this idea inventing a porch behind the house that was used by the women of status to do work related to the maintenance of the tuath) “In the narrow shade behind the chieftain’s house, under the rattling eaves of the porch, made of sod and now dry and hard as bone, I am trying to churn butter. The milk is thin though, taken from cows whose dun hides cling to their protruding ribs, and with the heat she pumps mostly in futility, churning up only a thin rim of cream.”

She then looks at my wife and asks if that’s okay.

I was good, and didn’t laugh my ass off. Okay?! I’d never seen a player take a riff off one of my opening poses like that, nor try to throw it back at me. It wasn’t okay, it was exciting and wonderful. Not having played before, I guess she simply took my verbosity as the standard.

My wife just said, “That was great! You did way better than most long-term gamers I know!” I then ask my wife what she is doing, and from a combination of not wanting to upstage her mother, nerves, and off-kilterness she stumbled for a moment or two, and then made up a quick story about a negotiation with a chieftain to the south who she was sent to work out water rites for a nearby river with. She is just returning to the rath to report, and stops at the gate to speak with the gatekeeper, a distant cousin of hers, about what has transpired while she was gone. This worked well for me, as the gatekeeper was a powerful guy in the community, and one of the core folks on the relationship map, and so getting him and his issues in early was all for the best. I introduced him as a bit pompous but generally friendly, but with an overbearing wife who kept his balls in a bag.

We then cut back to the MIL, and who should come upon her unsuccessfully trying to churn milk but the mother of the gatekeeper’s wife – the most prominent and devout Christian in town, who happened to also be of my MIL’s character’s age, status, and rank n the clan. A battle of word ensued which mostly consisted of the Christian trying to alternately bait and shake the faith of the PC, while the village children gathered around to watch the women that were god-mothers to most of them have at it. The other woman said that the reason for the drought was that the pagan gods had no power anymore, and the only way to save the rath was to turn to the Christian God. My MIL, however, would not either be baited nor shaken, but also would not put the woman in her place. She turned the confrontation around and made a contest to tell a story of Brighid (her patron goddess) as a child and how she overcame the strife and bickering of her elders to lead them to a holy state that brought them peace and plenty. My MIL then proceeded to actually tell the story, rather than recount an outline. When it came time to actually roll for the contest, my MIL continued her earlier instance on having/using only the “right” trait. She didn’t care about trait levels, but was very specific about what the name of the trait was and that it fit exactly what she wanted to do. At one point she even suggested that one of her traits, which I thought was fully applicable, be penalized because “it wasn’t quite right.” This, I must say, is something I have never, ever seen a veteran RPer do when playing HQ. They may accept it when I penalize them, but they don’t suggest a penalty for themselves.

Two other things came up at this point. Much as she did a very good job with the story, my MIL obviously struggled with it and (I found out later) felt very much put on the spot. At the start of the story I told her she didn’t have to make up the whole story, that she could just give a simple outline of it, but she passed right over that and went into a sort of “I must say what my character would say” mode that refused any abstraction. Later on my wife would summarize a poem she wrote, rather than making up the whole poem, and my MIL reacted with astonishment and wondered why she didn’t just do that. To be honest I wasn’t sure then, and am not sure now, as all of our talk and play to that point had been sprinkled with OOC summaries, back information given out of character about in character events, and so on. I think there must have been some combination of my MILs storyteller nature that wouldn’t let her back down from the challenge, even if it was uncomfortable for her, and something about really getting into a character in an immersive fashion that got her locked into a channel that she didn’t really get out of until she saw someone else successfully do it another way. From this I have to conclude that the whole “don’t speak out of character or summarize, show everything and tell nothing” aspect of immersive RP that we often blame years of actor stance only RPG guidelines enforcing has some basis in the instinctive mode of play for some (many?) new players.

This was also the first instance of what would become an ongoing theme with the character: she would want to win, but would want all of her victories to be moderate, humane, and unifying rather than overwhelming, crushing, or leadership forcing. She never wanted to prove her opponents wrong or force them (or the onlookers) to accept her as the authority, the leader, or the spiritual center – she always wanted to come to a compromise, to show that there were other ways of doing things, and to leave onlookers to decide for themselves what they thought about things. Needless to say, this is something of a change from the traditional RPGing goal of “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women” and while it was all good and fun, it could occasionally be interesting to adjudicate – as the character’s goals would usually end up requiring what would normally be a minor success or so. However, as HQ’s system depends upon you getting a degree of what your goal was, this either meant that the character had to be less effective because she was asking for more moderate results (if you ask for the world and get a minor success, you get America. But if you ask for a Big Mac and get a moderate success you get a Big Mac without cheese), or having to find a way to swing it around. I started, by the end of the game, deciding that one of her primary goals (which she would never fully state) was moderation and peace – and so that would be part of how successful she was. If she won, she’d win, but it would often be a rough and untempered victory unless she got higher levels of success. Thus if she gets a minor victory over Mrs Christian-face, she accidentally makes her look bad in front of the children, resulting in a pagan win but not a temperate one – but if she gets a full victory she can hold her own, make everyone see both points, and leave everyone to slowly ponder out what they really believe about things. Ironically, perhaps, it started feeling more real than most HQ contests. Really, which is harder – brining massive force down to crush the enemy, or getting the enemy to freely and openly acknowledge your points while getting everyone to honestly question and consider their own emotions and thoughts?

Once the Christian woman had been temporized by my MIL’s major victory, and the children sent off to ponder the mystery of Brighid, the PCs hooked up as my wife’s character rode up just in time to hear the end of the story. They chatted for a few minutes, but as neither player seemed comfortable with that (probably due to a lack of chat-RP experience or focus from my MIL, who was highly story oriented, and from a lack of comfort with the setting and the emotional oddness of playing with her mother for my wife) I moved on with some action. One of the older boys comes running into town, yelling that there were raiders heading for the tribe’s cattle. As loss of cattle = starvation, my wife’s character, who has some warrior/messenger functions to her role in society, gets ready to charge off to stop it. My MIL, on the other hand, decides this isn’t something for her priestess character and goes to make sure the children are okay. I ask her if she wants to be involved OOCly, she says yes, and so I have one of the children tell her that her foster-child was out with the cattle, as he was just now old enough to start watching them with the men. Her character freaks out, chases my wife’s character down the street yelling for help, until my wife’s character finally wheels about, scoops her up onto her horse, and heads for the pasturelands.

The characters then do a cool pose where my wife uses her horses magical ability to ride on water to ride up the river to the pasture, while the priestess puts a flowing silken headscarf on so that it blows out behind her – making them look like a fae lady rushing up the river to attack the raiders. Their dice, however, sucked and neither wanted to spend a Hero Point (though, in retrospect I’m not sure my MIL, or my wife, fully understood how to use Hero Points – which is my fault), so the raiders only ended up hesitating for a moment. I then lay out the scene: the raiders outnumber the tuath’s defenders 20 to 1. The most powerful warrior in the village and the bo-aire that my wife’s character has an emotional connection with are trying to hold them back while the young men, including the foster child, try to get the cows down to the river and along its banks towards town and reinforcements. Just as the PCs ride in, one of the bulls panics and starts trying to gore the foster child – who grabs onto its nose ring and holds on for dear life. So now the PCs are faced with hard choices – save the warriors, save the cattle, save the kid and you probably can’t do all of them.

This is when things get bad for the first and only time in the game. It also gets bad on just about every level, and takes some work before it gets good again. However, I am once again back to 4 pages, and so I shall once again call a pause. Part 3, the Cattle Raid Disaster: filial fears, hostage taking, making conflicts rather than judgments, and Brand’s post game, shall be coming soon.

My wife and I just got back from a 3 week long vacation in which we went to her family’s cabin in the woods. There we laid on the beach, went camping, went to Mackinac island and ate fudge, and played a game with the HeroQuest rules set in the Ireland of Pendragon’s Pagan Shore with her mother, my mother-in-law.

To introduce my mother in law: She’s Irish (very) Catholic and the daughter of a miner. This means she has a rather tough attitude towards life, a sort of no-nonsense practicality, and willingness to cuff your ear that’s right out of a Michael Crummey novel. Despite this, she also is artistic, does photography and painting, and has done work with drama in the past. She had never played an RPG before, nor done any kind of collaborative fiction, computer RPG, or any such thing. But because she always wants to understand and be involved with her daughters she had read parts of the Tribe 8 books years ago so that she could see what Mo and I were writing. Ever since then she’s been trying to wrap her mind around gaming so that she can explain it to her friends, and I finally decided the only way to get to it was to do it. So when we went up, I brought games for my wife and I to play, and some more to see if her mother would play with us.

I have to admit that I had a certain amount of trepidation approaching the game. Though my mother in law has always been exceedingly nice to me, she’s a formidable woman. Plus, the whole concept of playing with ones mother in law was a bit out of the box. I mean, it shouldn’t have been, she’s just a person – and a creative person at that. And yet, I realized that I had not played with anyone over 40 my whole life. I played with my dad once when I was a teen, mostly so he could see what the games were like, but that was while he was still in his late 30s. I was now going to play with someone that was a full adult long before RPGs came onto the market (she would have had a 7 year old daughter before the first D&D set came out), who was mostly focused on education and mainstream activities, and even in her youth was a lifeguard, swim instructor, singer, and very much non-geek. It wasn’t just that she was my mother in law, or a senior citizen, or a non-gamer, it was that she was very much from a different world than I am, or the majority of people I’ve played with have been. I have inducted many non-RPGers in RPGing over the years, but they were mostly young geeks with interest in computer RPGs or something similar. I have also played with kids, but kids are easily lead and often into many of the “geek” tropes that have infested mainstream media, and so have a little bit of geek interest a simmering. Most of the “us” traits that my gaming groups have traditionally relied upon were absent this time, and so I wasn’t fully sure what to expect.

To make it more interesting, she has a thing about violence – in that she thinks that the gratuitous saturation of the media in every conceivable place is disgusting and the product of lazy minds churning out toxic garbage for easy thrills. As we all know the place that violence usually takes up in RPGs (99 pages of combat rules!) this lead to me immediately deciding that I had to use a game that was not in the traditional mold and a system that could encourage multiple avenues of conflict and resolution – not just the big fighty-fight.

I think that she was even more uncertain about the whole affair than I was, and when we approached her about it her concerns mostly centered around how much time it was going to take, and if once she started she’d have to play a 2000 hour long game or not. This is quite reasonable when you consider that the game she has probably heard the most about is my wife’s Exalted game, which has been going on for over 3 years, with games twice a month at about 5 hours each game. I assured her that was not the case, and that in fact I was getting a little weary of long lasting games and wanted to do this as a one or two night deal. Thus reassured we went through the games that I had brought, quickly discarding the vast majority of them as being unsuitable. You’ve never seen Mutants and Masterminds, Exalted, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Unknown Armies get tossed off a table so fast. Honestly, this wasn’t a surprise to me – no geek from her, no love of comics, a distinct distaste for horror, a mild enjoyment of fantasy at best, and a complete unfamiliarity with anime make for a very different desire in RPGs than that which I’m accustomed to. Dogs got taken off, I think, because the she wasn’t a big western fan, and possibly because my wife didn’t so much want to be between the Catholic mother and the Mormon husband in a game about religious judgment. Which is, I must say, totally reasonable. Unfortunately she didn’t identify that fully, and this would lead to issues.

In the end the very Irish Irishness of those sitting around the table lead to us picking Pagan Shore, which I proposed running with HeroQuest rules as I’d somehow forgotten to bring Pendragon. The was probably partly on purpose, probably, as Pendragon is very focused on the knightly combat aspects and even with the passions and traits doesn’t give as good of coverage to the other aspects, but I can’t remember if I ever made a real decision about the issue or just didn’t bring the book. My wife and her mum were familiar with Ireland, having been there multiple times and still having family there, but not fully familiar with the time period. So we spent an hour or so talking it over, with me running down the basic themes and conflicts: the old vs new, pagan vs Christian, the independent tribes vs the growing septs and confederations, the instability of Irish law especially around succession to the chieftain’s throne, and so forth. We decided to set the game in Ulster, as that’s where they have family and had spent much of their time in Ireland and so would at least be comfortable with the geography. My mother in law had also spent a couple of days in a historical-recreation rath, and so had a good idea of what common life during the period looked like. With this, and the help of the pictures in the book, we got started on making characters.

My mother in law immediately proclaimed that she did not like the nasty great septs, and wanted to play an independent tribe who were struggling to not bow down. My wife and I were all along with this, and so I asked about religion – figuring that we’d end up playing members of a Catholic/Christian tribe. But no, my mother in law immediately identified that she wanted to be a pagan and to be opposed to the nasty Christians. At this point I felt a faint alarm in the back of my skull, and looking over at my wife asked her if she’d be good with that. She squirmed, said yes, and we moved on. The thing about it was, she wasn’t alright with it at all. She just didn’t want to get into why in front of her mother, and so went along with it. I knew parts of this, and so when the whole aspect of paganism vs Christianity came up I felt a twinge. I should have followed my instincts.

LESSON TO BRAND: Playing with family can bring up issues that people are not comfortable dealing with. Extra sensitivity is required.

The process of creating a character was interesting. Almost immediately my mother in law dove in with some very clear ideas she had about the character she wanted to play. She wanted to play an older woman, established as a figure of respect (but not deference) in the community but who was still physically capable enough to “get into it” if necessary. After that she spent about 30 minutes building up a story about how her character was a wise-woman of some kind who had a child that died years ago. She found a child at some point, under mysterious circumstances, and started to raise the child as her own in order to make up for her guilt over the death of her actual child. She quickly then added that she wanted the focus of much of her characters conflict to be through and about the child – her character was strong in her ways and the pull wouldn’t be about her changing or not changing so much as it would be about her guiding her adopted child in a semi-representative way showing how mothers and the women of a community guide (and fail to guide) the future of the community and the choices that children make. She further developed her take on the religious struggle: her character was not adverse to many of the ideas of Christianity, and did not think that “the religion of her mother is perfect, it can be improved, but the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater.” When I asked her if she wanted to deal with the difficulties of syncretism she said yes, but with the caveat that she wasn’t interested in converting, but would be interested in seeing how people with all the best intentions make their choices in the face of overwhelming change.

It was fascinating to watch the process of her mind at work on this character, because she approached it from a full opposite of how most experiences RPers do. She didn’t start with numbers, or with background – she started with conflicts: identifying where her character was pushing and where she wanted her to be pushed back. From there she developed background and personality, and pretty much ended up letting me fiat her numbers. After we finished she told my wife that she was worried she had taken too much of the story away from me, and that it was going to be all about her character. The funny thing is that by the time she was done making her character I had more gameable ideas and bangs running through my head than I’ve ever had for a more traditional character. I think some part of my mind had been wanting to run an RPG set around communal conflict, with an emphasis on women’s rolls for some time, and had traditionally been denied the outlet by the adventure-male-freebooter model traditional to RPGs. This character fell right into a role that guys like John Kim talk about as being difficult in most RPGs, but which worked perfectly in this setting and with a system that could give weight to the traits that such a character would use to effect the setting through the game rather than just by GM fiat.

Also, while she wasn’t concerned much with the numbers of the game system, my mother in law was very concerned about the specific words used to describe her traits. A word that was close, but not exactly what she was looking for was never good enough. Each trait had to be exactly and specifically worded to give the proper connotation of her character. At one point she was coming up with a trait that generally reflected her ability/personality/community position that allowed her to stand up for what she believed with the weight of feminine communal power behind her. We spent almost 20 minutes on this one trait, going through ideas for names from “overawe” to “generative force” and “pillar of the community” only to have her veto them one after another. When I suggested that we just write down “strong willed leader of the community” and come back to it later, this was also vetoed. Her mind had seized onto the trait and couldn’t let go of it until it was right. This, BTW, explained a lot to me about the way my wife creates characters – it’s pretty obvious that she inherited her specificity about language from her mother. Finally, after much ado, we came up with name “Hearth Fire” which played into the characters association with the cult of Brighid, the matronly control of the hearth, and the idea of a fire that warms and has the strength to build a community without being blinding or burning. This kind of specificity would come up again in play. In both cases it was clear that to my mother in law what was important was not the rating or numbers of the trait, but the definition of character that the name and style of the trait gave her. I would, by the end of the play session, come to think that there was a degree to which some level of that pov is needed to make HeroQuest work.

After all the work on my MIL’s character, my wife says to me, “I think I want to play an Eachlach who is also a bard, and does satires.” I say okay, and tell her he keywords, and she writes them down and starts coming up with a list of her non keyword abilities. Her mother starts and says with a degree of apprehension and annoyance (somewhere between “did I do this wrong?” and “what the hell was that?”) “So I spend an hour working on my character and she says five words and is done?” It took some time to convince her that no, my wife wasn’t done, but that she was fleshing out her character on paper and she and I were going to talk about her character’s conflicts later. In retrospect I think I should have forced my wife to do this more transparently, so that her mother could see the similarities and differences, but at the time it was getting on to 1 in the morning and I wanted to let her get to bed.

We quickly did the numbers for both characters, which in both cases mostly consisted of the women letting me tell them what levels they should take things at as they both saw their traits as being more important than the level of their traits, and then my mother in law went to be while my wife and I went to the beach to talk about her character’s conflicts. She ended up playing an Eachlach, which is the special messenger, diplomat, and spy of a chieftain who was also a bard famous for her satires. This position put her in something of a bind between the place of men and women (as she is a woman who is also a warrior and traveler, in a social position that normal women of the time would rarely have considered and that men often reacted with mixed emotions towards), between the world of politics and religion, and between the chieftain and the people. I found the contrast between her character, who was a woman in a moderately male role who got her power partly through the patriarchal structure of the clan (and partly on her own abilities, given by the gods and semi-separate from social ties), to be a powerful comparison/contrast with her mother’s character whose status in the clan was fully related to being a mother, a skilled priestess, and an established woman of the community.

Two days later we played, but I’ve gone long on this one, and I’ll save that for a second post.

Between massive deadlines, vacation, and personal low energy, I’ve not posted in a bit. The blog is not dead, however, and in the next week I’m going to write a post about an experience I had on vacation: running a game of Pagan Shore (Arthurian age Ireland) for my wife and her 63 year old very Christian mother who had never played RPGs before, as well as setting up a game (that unfortunatly didn’t get played) for a 10 and 11 year old very normal and very non-geek cousins of my wife who had never played and the way the focus between the two games differed both from each other and from “normal” RPGs.

But first I’m going to see if I can get the mother to write me an email about her perspective on the whole issue.