Never On Sunday

Looking at the world through someone else’s eyes can teach surprising lessons. Even when the someone else is fictional. Even when it’s your own RPG character.

Let’s see if I can get through this briefly. Our current campaign is another variation on the “secret magical war” so successfully pioneered by White Wolf. Everybody who’s anybody in this game has a tether: an invisible, archetypal friend who grants them supernatural powers and may just be an externalized manifestation of psychic powers that everyone ought to have but may not have the right mental (im)balance to conjure up. Lots of “what the heck is going on here?” story.

My character, known only as “Deacon,” is a hard-eyed killer, our group’s premier fighter as well as self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner. He quotes biblical passages a lot, and subscribes to an Old Testament view of punishing the wicked, though in truth his moral perspective has more in common with other ancient codes of law other than with the ten commandments. He contributes a lot to moving the story toward decisive action. He contributes almost nothing to figuring out what the heck is going on here.

That’s very unusual for me. I’m a puzzle-solver by nature, and working out what the heck is going on is generally my favorite role-playing activity. Creating a character who doesn’t try to work it out usually takes a deliberate decision to play against type, and ongoing discipline to maintain that decision. But I found a lack of curiosity easy and natural for Deacon—so easy and natural that I didn’t even realize he had none until a fellow gamer wrote up a couple pages of speculation: what we know so far, what we might reasonably conjecture, and where we might go for further answers. Since I felt very much at sea at the time, it came as a real surprise just how much we did know and how much structure Dave’s analysis lent to all that data. “Oh, yeah, I remember that. And that. No, it makes complete sense that they’re causally related.” It’s the kind of thing I usually do, or have to fight to suppress. So why didn’t I?

Searching my soul, and Deacon’s, for the answer, I found that Deacon simply hadn’t been paying attention to “the small stuff,” actually quite important. And in doing my best to stay in character, I hadn’t really been paying attention to it either. He (I) was busy scanning the metaphorical horizon for threats and passing judgment on everyone we met. Making sense of it all was a job for the psychiatrist/anthropologist with her sophisticated education and for the oracle with his mystical insight (neither of which, it might be added, was Dave’s character). And at the core of this attitude lay faith: faith in experts, faith in prophecy, faith that everything would unfold according to God’s (the GM’s) plans if I just stayed true—Deacon true to his principles, me true to my character. Without deliberately deciding to stop thinking, I had simply drifted into it, lulled into complacency by the power of simple conviction.

Faith makes life a lot easier. It also makes you stupid.