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I would like to register a complaint concerning the use of the word “faith” as a synonym for “religion.”

This is incorrect. Faith, technically speaking, is a belief in the absence of supporting evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. Faith is the opposite of reason. It has nothing to do with what you believe, but why you believe it.

If you believe that two plus two equals four because you have spent some time counting things, and one pair of things with another pair of things keeps coming out to four things, that’s reason. If you believe two plus two equals four strictly because your kindergarten teacher told you so, or because it makes balancing the checkbook easier when you imagine it to be true, or because a universe wherein arithmetic is variable is too horrible to contemplate, that’s faith – whether or not your belief is correct, and regardless of whether it could be logically verified or contradicted with sufficient effort.

If you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God because the skies rolled away and a host of angels singing “Holy, holy, holy” descended while a booming voice came from the heavens, that’s reason. If you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God strictly because your priest told you so, or because people are nicer when you get them to believe, or because a world without a caring creator is too horrible to contemplate, that’s faith – whether or not He exists, and regardless of whether his existence could be proven or disproven.

Faith has become synonymous with religious belief largely as a response to discoveries challenging the Bible’s factual accuracy. Once the church was the upholder of reason, since reason was understood to prove God’s existence, and to allow us to understand His desires better. As we learned that the universe may have taken somewhat longer than seven days to create, discovered that other cultures have equally persuasive holy texts, and refined our understanding of ideas like infinity, which underlay theologians’ arguments, some Christians have shrugged and given up their fathers’ religion; others have adapted to a more metaphorical doctrine, and some simply decided to believe no matter what scholars might conclude.

This last group, unable to justify their beliefs with verifiable facts, are engaged in the philosophical equivalent of covering their ears and shouting “Lalalalalala I can’t hear you!” And, being told that they were arguing from faith, embraced faith, took it as a valid foundation for belief, and have used the word interchangeably with religion for so long that the malapropism has supplanted the original meaning. Irresponsible atheists no doubt helped the process along by declaring all religious belief equally shoddy and founded on nothing but faith.
Language evolves. That’s hard for a traditionalist to accept, but I can grit my teeth and – generally – deal with the fact. I have a very hard time with the loss of a word’s meaning, however, when there is no synonym to fill the gap. Philosophical arguments with friends or Jehovah’s Witnesses keep tangling themselves on the snag of “faith,” which people take to mean “theism” even after I take the time to define faith very carefully for the purposes of the argument. Unfortunately, I have no other option; there is no other word for belief in the absence of supporting evidence. And when people have become so used to misusing the word that they can’t keep an argument straight, the misuse has gone too far.

Posted by at 3:01 PM | Permalink

I’ve got a cool idea for a campaign in Zeus: Master of Olympus. Setting aside sandbox scenarios, which offer no serious challenges, three major obstacles are the workhorses of scenario design: a shortage of exploitable flat terrain, a variety of disasters (including monsters and hostile gods) that destroy a city’s economy, and military attacks that threaten an outright loss of the game. Rarely do scenarios make significant use of resource limitations. Oh, you may have to sit patiently while you accumulate enough of some good from a trickle of available trade, but rarely must a player do entirely without something. So my scenario idea explores such shortages to the limit; it places the player on a barren waste – no fertile land, no timber, no marble or bronze. Everything the city needs must be exported, and no cash can be raised by exporting native products.

That’s quite harsh. So how does the player earn money for these exports? Taxes will cover the salaries of workers from high-end housing, but not by a large enough margin to pay for the goods necessary to support high-end housing. The city must import olives, grapes, and bronze, and export oil, wine, armor, and weapons – those it doesn’t need for itself – and survive on the added value of industry. If necessary, I could even prohibit the building of tax offices to keep the treasury sufficiently meager.

(On a related note, I wonder if it’s possible for a city to support itself entirely on the taxes of a huge elite population and just enough workers to staff its supply chain and cultural services. Let’s see, 80 elite houses need… 9.6 fleece, wool, oil, and wine… plus armor… workers for five, eight, four, seven…. Taxes come to… Yes, it is possible. How about that? A whole new scenario idea.)

Answering why anyone would found a city in such a wasteland starts to provide a back story for the campaign: the city’s leader has been ostracized for some crime against his home, and his brother put upon the throne. The campaign involves, first, setting up a manufacturing-for-export economy, and, second, using the profits to build an army and retake his old city. What will really sell the story is its unusual presentation of the protagonist as a villain. The last scenario could allow the player to run his large, prosperous home city after slaying the rival who drove him out – until the harpies (standing in for Erinyes) begin to attack. The last scenario forces the player to build Apollo’s temple while the harpies lay waste to everything in sight. Once this is accomplished, “winning” text in the conclusion will inform the player that the oracle explains the harpies will not be satisfied until the blood crime of killing a relative is repaid; since they will hound the protagonist to his death, he must commit suicide to save his city. Dramatic, no?

Posted by at 3:25 PM | Permalink

My high school chemistry teacher – who, I hasten to add, was no “captain video” – had us watch an old BBS series called “Connections.” It was terrific. Every episode traced the unpredictable paths leading to technological innovations that changed the world.

As an example: efficient trade ships encouraged the mushrooming Atlantic trade in the age of sail, and increased demand for pitch to protect all those boats. English forests could not support the demand, and one inventor turned to coal tar as a substitute. In development, the boiler he was using to make the coal tar exploded, and another inventor was inspired to use the explosive vapors to power gas lighting. Gas lighting was such a success that waste products of coal gas got out of hand. Collecting these wastes cheaply, a third inventor turned them to dissolving rubber and creating the rubber industry out of the easily molded solution. He pressed for more rubber plantations in the British colonies, but was hampered by the treat of malaria to colonizers. Seeking an artificial medicine to treat it, a fourth inventor instead accidentally discovered artificial dye. German chemists pounced on the discovery, and the German industrial revolution was powered in large part by its chemical works. Industrial growth created a food shortage, since Germany was dependent on foreign nitrates for fertilizer, but chemists found a way to synthesize nitrates – just in time to fuel World War I, since those same nitrates made high explosives, and Germany could not fight for long without a native supply of explosives. A byproduct of this nitrate process was acetylene, and attempts to make something useful from the acetylene led directly to plastic.

So ships made gas lights made rubber made aspirin made dye made large-scale farming made war made plastic. Got all that?

There are ten episodes to the series: one introduction to the notion of how dependent we are upon capricious technological changes, and how vulnerable we are to breakdowns of our technological systems; eight historical analyses like the one above; and a final exploration of what to do about our dependence and vulnerability regarding technology. The deep questions of episodes one and ten stand in sharp contrast to the wit of the intervening stories of invention. And, while James Burke’s fashion sense may be horribly dated, the show remains very current.

The show was successful enough to elicit three sequels, none of them very good. “The Day the Universe Changed” treats philosophical landmarks instead, and feels more nebulous than “Connections.” “Connections II” reduces the show from sixty minutes to thirty, leaving almost no time between introduction and conclusion for a chain of inventions. “Connections III” returns to a one-hour format, but is the weakest of the lot, because the connections are no longer causal. Sometimes, the connection is as weak as two important figures living in the same city.

What I can’t understand is why all these later titles are readily available to the public, in PBS catalogs and the like, while the original is not. Local libraries may have it, but often only part of the whole series; repeated viewing destroys the VHS tapes, and “Connections” predates DVD. If you can get your hands on a copy, do so; it’s worth the investment. Then tell me where I can get mine.

Posted by at 12:26 PM | Permalink

We just saw a pre-screening of Hostage, the new Bruce Willis flick. The movie house picks out a couple hundred people matching their target demographic and offers them free tickets, on the understanding that the audience will fill out a survey afterwards, and perhaps participate in a live discussion. The audience’s answers help determine how the movie is marketed. Perhaps, if audience response is strong enough, it can even have an effect on the movie itself, if all that’s required is a quick splice job to remove a redundant scene or retrieve some vital scene from the edit room floor, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

This was our second pre-screening – the first was for Kill Bill – and I enjoy them very much. Watching a movie for free is nice, but the real reward, for me, is the opportunity to critique. The two-page survey isn’t much to work with; about half is taken up with multiple choice reponses: “How was the movie length (too long, just right, too short)?” or “Which age groups would you recommend this movie for (mark all that apply).” Questions requiring short answers provide no more than two or three lines for response; that’s sufficient for brief praise or criticism, but not enough for a considered analysis. Which, I suppose, is what the marketers want. It’s a lot easier to reason “Six hundred eighty-four out of eight hundred twelve viewers complained that the shower scene was too long. Cut twenty seconds,” than to process eight hundred twelve different reasons as to why the shower scene should be altered, and how, and what else might be done to make the existing length more appropriate. Still, it’s fun to imagine that your voice represents a hundred thousand people, and that you could have a real impact on a movie’s success.

The live discussion of the movie is much more interesting. We were fortunate enough to be picked for the Kill Bill session, and could offer more than two-sentence answers. Even better, we could offer opinions not directly addressed in the survey. I had to work to suppress a tendency to focus on the negative; constructive criticism naturally seeks to correct the problems, rather than preserve the successes. A pity that giving everyone a chance meant that no individual could really make more than one or two coherent statements, but the opinions were generally well-considered and clearly expressed. I wanted to continue the discussion somewhere afterwards.

The only part I didn’t enjoy about the live discussion was the representative leading it. While he was willing to seek details behind complaints, he could barely suppress a sort of cheerleading urge. Questions were always framed positively: “What most caused you to identify with the heroine,” rather than “Did you identify strongly with the heroine,” and accompanied by a lot of eyebrow-raised nodding. It made me feel like I was watching a motivational speaker, or a kid listening to Officer Friendly telling a class to look both ways before crossing the street.

Market surveyors must have it rough. Directors perpetually critique themselves and their cast and crew. Producers need to weigh the market with a discerning eye. Marketers must perpetually desire and ask for honest answers, yet they also fervently desire and perpetually signal that the honest answer should be “yes.” Living in that shadow zone where things are true because you wish them to be so would gradually push me into neurosis.

Posted by at 12:10 PM | Permalink

I spent this morning and yesterday afternoon at “World of Warcraft,” a morpig (from MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role-playing game) adaptation of the roundly successful Warcraft game. Eileene bought it for me for Valentines’ Day after grossly overestimating my interest level, but WoW has enjoyed much critical buzz, so now that we own it, why not take it for a spin?

A day’s experience isn’t much – I’ve only seen two regions, one being the “starter area” for gnomes and dwarves, and have only sampled one character – but it’s enough to get a feel for how the developers feel the game should play. In short, it plays like a morpig: wander around a fantasy world slaying hostile creatures and loot their corpses for cash. Slaying creatures earns experience, which improves your abilities; cash is spent on stronger equipment. Both exist only to allow you to slay bigger enemies. To add some direction to the bloody path you will walk, inert people will respond to your hail by offering to pay you to accomplish designated missions: “slay six trolls,” “carry this package to point B,” “collect materials to construct a widget.”

I have minimal experience with morpigs, but what I’ve seen of World of Warcraft runs smoothly, with a minimum of interface hassles. A well-oiled gaming engine must count for a lot, because, apart from a few clever rules designed to level the playing field between adults with little free time and teens who play eight hours a day, WoW uses every cliché of the genre. It is a thoroughly well-implemented imitation of all that players have come to expect from a morpig.

Which brings me to my point: it bores me. Immersive online games hold enormous promise, and I will continue to watch for something that meets that promise, but this can’t be it. Play is shallower and more repetitious than any micromanagement simulation game I’ve ever handled. Walk up to a monster. Kill it. Rest to full health. Repeat. Unfolding character abilities don’t broaden the game so much as increase the size of the numbers that pop onto the screen as you slug it out with some new hapless monster. (“Ooh, now I’m facing elder rockworms!”) I would love to see an online game that explored a complex system – political perhaps, or a rich trade network – but, curiously, morpig fans generally disagree. Critical praise is heaped onto games that streamline all the tedium between combat iterations, rather than those that consider fighting a dangerous risk attached to some other activity. Games, such as Star Wars Galaxies or A Tale in the Desert, which try to expand the noncombat repertoire into equally interesting subgames attract a brief flood of curiosity, but retain only a fringe of niche gamers while the rest return to butchery. The market actually discourages richer game worlds. Adding insult to injury, the very term “rich” has been twisted to mean “holding a large database;” reviews that praise a rich setting mean that you can equip more items and face more opponents than in other games, not that there are more styles of play to explore.

Since morpigs are by definition multiplayer, there should be some reason to play with others, rather than merely next to them. Although you can team up with other players around the world to take down creatures neither could singly, that’s about the limits of what World of Warcraft allows. You can also, in theory, chat with other players, but there isn’t much point. The tiny window allotted to communication isn’t good for much more than choppy dialogue abbreviated to a quickly-typed jargon. Even if you’re willing to take the time to type in full sentences, chances are slim that you’ll find a similar partner headed for the same lair of monsters. For the time being, morpigs don’t seem to offer any more than single-player hack-and-slash computer games. (I refuse to call them RPGs.)

Yet the genre remains extremely popular, and players thrilled with the current incarnation still, somewhere in the backs of their minds, are looking forward to the next one, just the same as the last one. What am I missing?

Posted by at 3:53 PM | Permalink

I bought Eileene a new copy of Lost Cities for Valentine’s Day. We had one, but she left it at Expedior when the company died, so we haven’t played for a few years. This two-player card game deserves more attention than it gets. Play is swift, elegant, and a fine compromise between depth and simplicity.

The deck is composed of five suits. Each suit has cards numbered from 2 to 10, plus three “investment” cards, which multiply your score for a suit, positive or negative. Each suit represents an archaeological site, and players are archaeologists staking their professional reputations on uncovering significant portions of them.

Play proceeds by playing one card, then drawing one card. Cards may be played face-up into a player’s own stacks, representing continuing work on archaeological exploration, or discarded face-up into five discard piles, separated by suit. Cards are either drawn from the face-down deck, or the topmost of any of the five discard piles. A game ends when the deck is exhausted (which means the last card never comes into play), and scores are tallied.

For each suit in which a player has played cards, his base score is the total value of cards played, minus 20. Twenty points of excavation is considered an unremarkable performance; more earns some professional reputation, while less is a professional failure. Each investment card played in a suit magnifies this score: one investment doubles the score; two investments triple the score, and all three investments quadruple it. If a player is so fortunate as to play eight or more cards in a single suit, he earns a 20-point bonus. Any suit the player plays no cards in scores zero; he has staked none of his reputation on the dig.

The catch that gives Lost Cities its interest is that cards must be played in ascending order, and investments must come first of all. Playing a large card shuts a player out of the opportunity to add a smaller card to his scoring stack, should he draw it later in the game. Playing a small card, on the other hand, leaves the player susceptible to the chance that he won’t draw sufficient large cards to reach the 20-point dividing line between a positive and negative score. Investments are even riskier commitments than low cards, both because they are score multipliers, and because they reduce one’s ability to predict whether the 20-point limit is attainable – a player only sees the eight cards in his hand at a time.

The key to the game is timing and minimizing risk, committing to developing a suit only when sure of scoring. Unfortunately, the eight cards in your hand only hint at what you might be able to score, rather than offering any solid information. Players often wish to play nothing at all, so they can see what the rest of the deck has in store, but, of course, they must play something. Discards can help hedge your bets by avoiding a commitment, but they are unsafe ways to buy time until late in a game, since a suit a player is unsure of scoring in is likely to be one his opponent holds in strength. Only once an opponent has played his green 6 can a player safely dump his green 2 and 5. Discards also create a small reserve of time at games end – drawing old discards slows the shrinking of the deck, so a player can avoid getting caught with two unused 10s in hand.

A game of Lost Cities takes no more than five minutes; we prefer to total the scores for three or more games in a single competition, to dilute the effects of luck. It makes a swell pick-up game, though the space required for fifteen potential piles (five per player, plus five discard) makes the game unsuitable for waiting rooms and bus stations. Lost Cities is an excellent diversion for players who don’t like getting enmeshed in deep strategies, yet does not rely too heavily on the luck of the draw for excitement.

Posted by at 3:41 PM | Permalink

The BBC World Service had a terrific zinger lead-in to an article this morning. I didn't catch the words exactly, but these are pretty close: “North Korea announces that it already has nuclear weapons, and that it doesn’t want to talk about them.”

I sat down with the intention of expounding on this headline, but that pretty well says it all, doesn’t it?

Posted by at 10:46 PM | Permalink

Okay, so Weyco, Inc., a Michigan health care company, fired four employees for refusing to submit to a medical test for cigarette smoking. Not for smoking in the office, not for allowing cigarette breaks to interfere with their work, not even for smoking at all. Just for the suspicion of smoking. Off hours. At home.

The employees have filed a lawsuit, on the grounds that compelling employees to abandon legal behavior in the privacy of their own homes is a flagrant abuse of labor, but Weyco is sticking to its guns. According to MSNBC, “Company founder Howard Weyers has said the anti-smoking rule was designed to shield the firm from high health care costs. “I don’t want to pay for the results of smoking,” he said.” Apparently, Weyco is unable to adjust salaries to reflect the inclusion of health insurance among employee benefits, so the company must suffer grievous, even business-threatening, financial losses insuring the smokers.

Well, good for Weyers. Why should his company pay one red cent more than it has to, simply because employees have a life beyond the office? But I say his policies don’t go far enough. Any employee receiving health benefits should be regularly policed for the slightest health risk and fired for the slightest infraction – or indeed, for the slightest suspicion of infraction, including a refusal to be tested. Executives and owners, I suppose, might not depend on company health benefits, but this does not excuse them! Indeed, company executives should be held to an even higher standard than mere rank and file. Quite apart from any moral obligation to set an example, hours lost to health problems are far more serious among management. The time they put in is far more valuable per hour than employees’; that’s why they earn higher salaries. Any executive who has ever smoked a cigarette should immediately be jettisoned without further compensation.

But are cigarettes the only threat to our health? No, no, a thousand times, no! Weyco executives should submit to weekly tests to see if they have consumed red meat, or eaten a bag of potato chips. High-fat, high-salt foods pose a serious risk to long-term health. If an executive should miss an important meeting while being rushed to emergency bypass surgery, Weyco’s profits will suffer. This is inexcusable.

Caffeine increases heart risks. Weyco employees should be tested weekly to determine if they have been ingesting this dangerous, if legal, drug. A single coffee, in the office or out, is grounds for immediate termination, as would be an unwillingness to submit to tests.

Skeptics will question whether chemical testing for all these health risks is reliable. They are quite right to voice their concern. Where simple urine tests are insufficient, Weyco should hire watchdogs – literal and figurative – to police its employees, and a fully-armed strike team, reserved for executives’ private homes, should be prepared to shoot any violators. Weyco’s stockholders should demand no less.

Don’t forget insufficient exercise. Any Weyco employee unable to run five miles a day is not everything an employee could be. Why should Weyco foot the bill for flabby, listless workers? The health benefits administrator, realizing the importance of this program, will surely be willing to raise the bar with a ten-mile run each morning.

Marriage has lasting health benefits, reducing stress and prolonging life. All Weyco employees should be required to be married. Any employee not married within a year deserves a pink-slip.

Religion, too, has a statistical correlation with long life and lasting health. Any Weyco employee unable to provide two witnesses to weekly attendance at the church of his choice should be fired. Any administrator unable to do so should reimburse the company fully 1/365th of his annual salary for each service missed. If the health benefits administrator is negligent in this important duty, he should be shot through the head.

I am sure any sensible person will recognize the enormous financial benefits of these policies and their thorough enforcement. Their adoption will no doubt boost investor confidence and cause employee morale to skyrocket, knowing their employers take such keen interest in their welfare. Widespread use could cause a veritable renaissance in corporate America. But my program will only work if applied from the top, where poor health has a disproportionate impact on profitability. I sleep better at night knowing Weyco management, undoubtedly more conscious of health benefits than I, must be preparing to place itself under the strictest of health programs, the better to serve Weyco.

Posted by at 3:33 PM | Permalink

My daily routine begins with listening to NPR news as I eat breakfast and read email. Often, I’ll get involved in whatever is on my computer, and the radio will continue to play past ten o’clock, when Brian Lehrer’s phone-in talk show comes on. This is a mistake. By this point, the radio is at best the distraction of mild noise; more often, it’s an extreme irritant.

Call-in programs attract idiots. On NPR, you get a higher class of idiot, but idiots nonetheless. A college degree, alas, is no proof of critical thinking. Holding Lehrer responsible for listeners who like to hear themselves talk wouldn’t be fair, though I do feel WNYC is doing us a disservice by hosting a call-in program at all. Unfortunately, it’s Lehrer himself who typically gets under my skin. His liberal bias is that flagrant.

For the record, I lean to the left, myself. Our voting records above the municipal level probably look quite similar, though I will cast my ballot for very moderate Republicans. Any candidate who wraps himself in the flag, waves the cross, or tells me that trampling civil liberties is the only way to preserve American ideals – and that includes a frighteningly large proportion of politicians – instantly loses my vote. I favor gay marriage, gun control, abortion rights, and corporate watchdogs. Holding these positions does not excuse me from regular, critical, and skeptical consideration of individual policies. Nor does it excuse Brian Lehrer.

In principle, he invites guests from different political camps to speak, alternately encouraging them to elaborate and challenging their posittions. In practice, only liberal views get a full hearing on the show, because Lehrer doesn’t play fair as a host, largely by offering only token challenges to guests he agrees with. Asking a stock question along the lines of, “Your opponents say your position is wrong because X-Y-Z. Are they correct?” is standard practice. Guests expect this question, and have long ago developed stock answers to X-Y-Z. A good host will press the issue, questioning the assumptions behind such pat answers, and denying evasive and vacuous responses. A fair host will ask followup questions of all guests. Lehrer does not, expressing real doubt only of conservative views; for liberals, he takes pat exchanges as asked-and-answered.

When he has a strong opinion about the topic at hand, he may break in on a guest in mid-sentence. Sometimes, such interruptions are appropriate, as when a guest loses the thread of the discussion but continues to expound on verbal autopilot, or when a question is being evaded. At other times, such interruptions prevent a guest from presenting a fully reasoned argument; he is unable to finish explaining his reasoning. Lehrer frequently interrupts guests he disagrees with, sometimes with justification; he rarely if ever interrupts a liberal guest for any reason, especially not once the guest trails off into a lecture about the evils of a system that represses homosexuals, racial minorities, or the poor.

Most insidiously, Lehrer probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. (I am indebted to my wife for this observation.) Disputing an outrageous claim before it gets eclipsed by subsequent conversation is natural and desirable; I expect Lehrer feels he is pouncing on unsupportable claims when he interrupts a conservative guest, without a moment’s awareness of the dubious liberal ideas he lets slide. It’s easy to feel that a pat answer from your camp is sufficient, even when it’s not. And yet, while the pat answers are coming from my camp, they don’t sound sufficient to me – a sure proof that the program is merely preaching to the converted.

Liberals can, and should, do better; after all, liberalism is grounded in a belief that everyone can distinguish truth from flim-flam, if they get a good, thorough examination. More to the point, it is a lot harder for the opposition to write off our opinions as partisan when we stick aggressively to real analysis of the whole issue. Leave “echo chamber” politics to the Ditto-heads. We don’t need it.

Nobody else needs it either, for that matter.

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink

I read the “White Out” comic today, a four-issue murder mystery set in Antarctica. It was excellent. More to the point, it confirmed a point I was already considering writing about. Flush with vindication, I will now.

A large majority of RPG adventures take place in the frontier. For fantasy games, that’s tombs and ruins and temples to evil gods set in the wilderness, a short trip from border towns beset by goblin hordes; as the heroes tame the wilderness, action moves to the outer planes where even natural law no longer holds. For space opera games, the action lies in the outer rims of galactic empires, where Starfleet is spread too thin to patrol effectively. For historical games, players stave off barbarians at the edges of civilization, or carve nations and empires from the hinterlands. Even among contemporary games, in our own safe, predictable world, the usual practice is to place the characters in some kind of dangerous subculture – the criminal underworld, the secret wars fought between vampires, black op missions – where civilized law does not apply.

There are city adventures, of course, and landings on the capital planet, and invitations to the French ambassador’s ball, all intended to spice up a campaign before returning to the frontier. Nor do all campaigns lie beyond civilization; campaigns set entirely within cultured society exist. Taking adventure to the frontier is the norm, however.

This has several causes. Partly, it’s easier to justify weird and wondrous stories where the map reads, “Here there be dragons;” dragons appearing in Mrs. Winscott’s parlor stretch the suspension of disbelief, so GMs who want dragons need to point players in that direction. Partly, the frontier is ingrained in the American psyche, so US games, at least, may head for the frontier subconsciously. Partly, it’s Joseph Campbell’s thesis of the hero pattern; if the players want to perform vicarious heroic acts, they need to take the hero’s path beyond the familiar.

But more important than all these causes put together is the need to maintain the players as protagonists. Drama – and RPG adventures seek to create drama – demands conflict. When something goes wrong in comfortably civilized societies, the authorities take care of things; police catch murderers, the army fights off invaders, and hospitals isolate and cure disease. If a handful of concerned citizens, like the player characters, face a significant chance of failing to meet the challenge, they call on the authorities, and rightly so. If the player characters are representative authorities and face a significant chance of failure, they send a request for further assistance. The problem is whisked out of the players’ hands and fixed by trained professionals.

That’s boring. So how do you prevent the responsible authorities from producing anticlimax? The obvious answer is: remove the authorities. Maybe the state marshal could round up Black Bart’s gang, but if he won’t get here within a week, the players will have to face up to Bart on their own. Maybe an imperial frigate could carry emergency medicines to Epsilon Eridani before a plague gets out of hand, but if the players’ jury-rigged trade vessel is the only ship in starport, then they have to make the twelve-parsec flight and save the day. Maybe the National Guard could destroy the tentacular monstrosity from beyond time, but if the local commander won’t believe the creature exists, players will need to gather their resources from the occult underground themselves. Much more interesting.

Playing in the frontier offers another huge advantage: players gain some leeway in how responsibly they respond to the threat. Charging in with swords and lasers drawn, snatching the princess from certain doom, and taunting the enemy is considerably more fun than a measured, civic-minded response to danger. And the frontier will forgive risky behavior, as long as it saves the day, far more readily than civilization, with its reckless endangerment lawsuits, will.

So the protagonists must be cut off from the civilized world. Single-episode stories, like movies, can get away with stranding the hero for a few hours by putting him in a terrorist-filled building, or dumping him in a desert town without a working phone. Serial adventures, like an RPG campaign, need to maintain this isolation far longer, without straining credulity, so off they go to where there be dragons.

Posted by at 11:30 PM | Permalink

Larry Niven tells a story – a true story, he says – of a burglary in his mother’s house. The thief was fresh out of prison, and obviously unready to deal with the pressures of free life. Not only did he return immediately to a life of crime, but he came unprepared. He stole a pillowcase to carry his loot, and made a half-hearted swipe at the jewelry box, drank some liquor, and generally farted around before leaving. The jewelry he threw away, reasoning that anything that easily accessible must be fake. Police found the (quite real and valuable – Niven’s grandfather made a fortune in oil) jewelry, and the thief shortly afterwards. Niven says it makes a hell of a story, and admits to being unable to mine it for original fiction, despite several attempts. Gracious in his frustration, he offers the tale to any writer who feels he can make a story of it.

I’m experiencing the very same trouble with a song dubbed “the Hungarian suicide song,” for its connection to a string of suicides – lyrics quoted in suicide notes, primarily, and the eventual suicide of the composer. The song was good enough to inspire several translations, appearing in America as “Gloomy Sunday.” It was a popular lament for a lost lover, just the thing for a smoky jazz lounge and Billie Holiday.

There’s more, but of dubious authenticity. Several governments, including Hungary and Great Britain, are supposed to have banned the song, for fear it would inspire further suicides. (I guess the charges of heavy metal leading to Satanism are just part of a long tradition.) Descriptions of the composer’s suicide have a strong scent of urban legend. The more credulous you’re willing to be, the better the story gets. And, since inspiration need not bow to historical fact, a song that drives people to suicide is a terrific seed for a story, or, in my case, a role-playing adventure.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as I can get: a song that drives people to suicide. With a hook like that, an adventure ought to craft itself. Maybe the original recording, far deadlier than commercial versions, is about to go into mass production, and our heroes have to stop the printing and erase back copies. Or maybe the players have to look into a string of spectacular suicides with no more in common than scraps of paper with lyrics on them, and have to recognize and find an antidote for a song that kills. Maybe the protagonists hope to use the song as an untraceable weapon, and need to find a way to get their well-protected enemy humming it to himself. See? Loads of possibilities. And I just can’t get the idea off the ground.

So off it goes to a text file I keep full of ideas to build adventures upon. There’s about two dozen in there; some are useful ideas that only wait their turn at the next convention, but most are just stubborn, like the green tomatoes that took weeks to ripen in the brown paper bags in the sun last November. If only writers had artificial accelerants to ripen ideas.

Posted by at 8:08 PM | Permalink