The Death of Imagination

First game session with the full complement and I'm full of good feeling. All of us (including the GM) seem equally new to the game which makes for a very forgiving and supportive environment. I expect it will grow less gentle with time, but for now we're getting plenty of good breaks. I can even quantify that thanks to a Savage Worlds mechanic called "bennies". You start each session with three of these little chits and the possibility of earning more if you roleplay well or otherwise impress the GM and you can spend them to redo a die roll or save yourself from dying. So far, everyone's ended the afternoon with at least three. (I spent one today to buy a spectacular finale but I'd earned one earlier for making myself a cell phone. Literally.) With so many tanks in the group, my strategy of "don't get hit--like ever" seems to be working out for me. Eventually I'm sure to draw a short straw, but maybe by then I'll be able to buy up some more protection.

Interestingly, no one seems to be in the barrel yet. I'm not sure if that's because we're all just such nice guys or if it's simply that we're not familiar enough for that sort of contempt. The natural choice would seem to be the sweet child playing Mastermind. He's the benjamin and the least-seasoned gamer (from what I can tell). He also has the fewest allies; the Ewok just met him online recently. (By way of comparison, he and the guy playing Dr Lazarus have known me nearly twenty years at this point.) It also doesn't help that his character is kind of annoying and apt to rush into things. But you never know: all this could just as easily evoke a protective response from the mother bears in the group.

I'm also pleased with how receptive the GM is to player input, since this was always one of my favourite features of the Kengame. With time, princeofcairo trusted us enough not to be munchkins and we imbibed enough of his sensibilities (and his psychlims) to know what sort of suggestions would sit well with him. With the Ewok, we seem to have started off on that foot. Since this isn't a licenced game, the background is relatively unpopulated, encouraging Lazarus to spin out ideas for superhero teams which the GM eats up. In fact, at the game today, he had us toss all our character names into a pot and take turns drawing. Whoever you picked, you need to come up with a concept for his nemesis. How will they come into play? We don't know.

First session of the new biweekly supers game I'm playing in and it seemed to go well. It was remarkable we played at all given the week the GM has had. As it was, I hadn't had a chance to meet with him ahead of time to work on my character. I'd done the best I could without the powers supplement, but I was very conscious of holding up the game, frantically trying to find some way to represent my character conception within the existing framework.

Essentially, my problem is that I've created a pulp villain for a four-colour milieu. It's not the "villain" part that's the problem--we're all villains. It's that her powers aren't the splashy kind and I don't want to play her as a caricature. The interesting fiends are those who have a complex worldview and a well-intentioned motivation--which just so happens to be completely immoral. I've worked hard to give her anarchism some philosophical underpinnings but being misunderstood just comes with the territory.

It doesn't help that I'm playing a system I've never heard of before (Savage Worlds) with a GM and players I've never gamed with before. On the positive side, I've known two of the guys a combined 38 years, give or take, and the rest seem like a decent bunch. It's also, as I admitted to JB, the humpiest gaming group I've ever been in. (That's no diss to the rest of y'all, but even at its best the bear ratio in those other games was never over 30%.) So it feels comfortable even if I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I roll the dice.

You also can't hardly beat it for convenience: four blocks from my house. The merits of that were immediately obvious today, as it was snowing furiously when I left (a little early in order to catch up with JB over lunch beforehand) and the mercury was plunging as I came back. It was light out, however. In fact, I even considered hiking a block up to Clark Street for a better view. Then I felt the wind whip into my face and decided doubtless there'll be other opportunities.

Game Night was okay. The new guys who made it a bit more interesting last month weren't there which meant that the haunted house game I played with them was absent as well. It was good that I passed on the Cards Against Humanity pre-game; apparently my pal neglected to ask his roommate for permission to use his deck and when he showed up he was well pissed off.

In any case, I insisted on playing something geekier than Catchphrase, so we banished most of the attendees to the bedroom so we could have the coffee table for Munchkin Cthulhu. A cute game, but not without its flaws. Keeping track of other players' boni so you know when to intervene in their combats is a job of work, something that cries out for an app. There is an official app--one of the players had it loaded on his phone--but all it keeps track of is your own character's advancement (something the rest of us were able to do with a ten-sided die), plus give you a "boon".

The whole idea of someone paying a fee to gain an advantage in an off-line game didn't sit well with a couple of us. I can see how it must seem perfectly normal to someone raised on MMORPGs rather than tabletop games and how it's a predictable outgrowth of the kind of crazy secondary market for cards spawn by Magic the Gathering and its imitators (not to mention capitalism in general). But when it reaches the point where you can buy t-shirts which confer a bonus to play when destroyed during a game session the cynicism in the face of antiquated notions of good sportsmanship is too much to bear.

I came close to winning but got hosed on a technicality--my fault for not reading the rules ahead of time, but I just wanted to get playing. After that, we called everyone back in for an all-inclusive game of Catchphrase which went better than expected, although the huge differences in background and ability are still an issue. At one point I got The scarlet letter and said, "It's by Nathaniel Hawthorne. You read it in high school." One of my teammates got it in two (first guessing Seven gables) and from some of the reactions you would've thought we'd used witchcraft. Same as when I got Gone with the wind from the clue of "Four words, a book and a movie" and someone blowing.

Just back from Game Night in the more obscure burbs. (So far, no one I've mentioned the name to has known that northern Illinois had a "Bloomingdale".) The place was crazy big; my first thought on seeing it was, "That's a lot to mow" and that was before we were shown the back forty. There's an entire pond on the property!

Getting out there went pretty smoothly despite the lack of anything resembling a direct route. You have to zig and zag up and down three different expressways, but at least the last mile is easy: one turn off a major thoroughfare and you're there. When the conversation flagged, the driver pulled out his iPod and treated us to Tim Minchin.

I played three games, two for the second time (Guillotine, Hex Hex) and one for the first (Quelf). Catchphrase was going in the den, but thanks to the sprawling split-level architecture, we hardly knew anyone else was in the house as we huddled around a card table in the master bedroom. We lost a couple people after Hex Hex--the rules were just a tad too "complicated" for the less-serious gamers--so we decided to go with a real "party game".

Quelf is Cranium-like in its combination of different challenges, but I think it tries too hard to be wacky. It's like they were aiming for the feel of a balls-out adolescent truth-or-dare session, but grafting on enough rules to encourage lawyering, which doesn't make for a happy marriage. Bizarrely, I made it through almost entirely unscathed while others were forced to sit on the floor or under furniture or observe various crazy taboos and geasa.

It ended up being one of those games which ends with exhalations of relief rather than paroxysms of joy; not sure how willing I'd be to play it again, even after 2+ drinks. I especially felt bad for the young woman who spent the evening in various stages of isolation from the rest of the players. "Please don't go back and tell all your friends that we're misogynists!" I begged her on her way out.

The other evening, I told monshu about this site, an amateur attempt to catalogue the most popular card games by nation and region. His response was to ask, "So what's the most popular card game in Azerbaijan?" Sadly, that is not one of those listed. But you can find entries for Turkey, Iran, and Armenia. And you will find listed which countries are strongholds of Sipa, Pitty Pat, and Voormsi, respectively.

As you might expect, North American regional variations owe a lot to the local settlement history--e.g. Boo-ray (a descendent of French bourré) in southern Louisiana, Sheepshead (Schafkopf) in Wisconsin, Hola in areas of Ukrainian settlement, etc. But there are also some surprises, like Literature, "an advanced game of the Go-Fish type that is played in Toronto but seems to have originated Tamil Nadu, India." And I'm still looking for an explanation of why Euchre is ubiquitous in most of Canada, the American Midwest and Northeast, the West Country and Channel Islands in the UK, and the Antipodes, and mostly unknown elsewhere.

In the third of his Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), Wittgenstein famously tackles the definition of "game" (Spiel), demonstrating that--while we all know what we mean by the word--there is no simple definition which captures everything we assign to the category of "game" and nothing which falls outside of it. His student Eleanor Rosch built upon this discovery and twenty years later came up with prototype theory, one of the central pillars of cognitive linguistics.

Although "game" isn't a coherent category in the same way that "bird" is, this doesn't mean that we don't have equally salient prototypes for both. (What I mean by this is that, just as when someone says "bird", you're more likely to think of a robin than a penguin, when someone says "game", you're more likely to think of checkers than quarters.) Of course, it's possible for one category to have multiple foci, with subtle differences in context influencing which is brought to the fore. And it's also possible for prototypes to shift. If you worked as an Antarctic research station and started casually referring to the local rockhoppers as "birds", pretty soon it might well be the case that penguins were prototypical birds to you.

When I was a child, our "games" mostly took place outside and involved running around. Hide and seek, freeze tag, PacMan (yes, we actually came up with our own live action version), and make-believe under various names and guises. (Favourite locales included the Okefenokee, the Burmese jungle, and--for obscure reasons related to my curious reading habits--the Adirondacks.) As I got older and more sedentary, tabletop games began to predominate, until it reached the point where "gaming" became synonymous for "playing tabletop roleplaying games". (This still is the case for my older brother. I had to remind myself last time I was on the phone with him--when he asked "Have you done any gaming?", he wasn't really thinking along the lines of my night of Forbidden Island and Guillotine.)

Nowadays, RPGs are no longer in the picture, so I'm back to my adolescent prototype of board and card games. That must be attributable to the fact that I'm a Luddite who hasn't bought himself a computer game in decades--not because I don't enjoy them, but rather because I do too much. Sad as it sounds, the only thing I've ever felt myself becoming addicted to was Sid Meier's Civilization. I asked my boyfriend to hide it from me and have never really looked back since; now I refuse to allow anything on the computer more sophisticated than Minesweeper. But I'm increasingly getting the feeling that for many of my fellow humans, the "computer" in front of "games" is as superfluous as the "colour" in front of "tv". More than once now, I've found myself slightly bewildered by a question or conversation-starter about "games" until it dawned on me that what they had on mind was not something you could stuff in a box.

A Facebook FoaF posted the other day that it feels like "a more violent 1989" and as I sit here, regularly checking to see if Egypt still has a government, I know what he means. Today I read that King Abdullah II has called meeting of various government officials to work on political reforms--not a bad plan of action when you've been widely tapped as the next domino. Mubarak, on the other hand, still seems to think he can brazen this all out, even as Bedouins control the border with Israel-Palestine and looters run rampant in Cairo. I'm shocked at how quickly and completely public order broke down, leading me to credit rumours that the police have deliberately withdrawn in order to teach the people a lesson.

After hours of obsessively checking news feeds, I felt I had to do something to force myself away from the computer, so I threw on an overshirt and headed over to Touché. Apparently it was the welcome party for Mr Chicago Leather. Not an event I've ever heard of before; when I saw the size of the crowd I could see why. But I had a reasonably good time, first chatting with an extremely inebriated social worker (no prizes for guessing his area of expertise) from the Lower East Side and then a big ol' daddy bear from the suburbs. The latter just lost a hundred pounds due to a gastric bypass, so though I'm 90% certain I've matched him up correctly to a guy I've seen around town for years, it's hard to be sure.

Tonight it was easier as I had already scheduled the next Bear Game Night. We were whittled down a bit due to illness--Manguito was out with a cold, as was JB's better half, and monshu is still getting over his. ("This is the first day this week I've woken up without feeling like shit.") That still left us with more than enough people to play Gift Trap, Forbidden Island, and Guillotine. Mr Bear Cookbook smoked us all at the last one, which we put down to his French ancestry. The second was a cooperative game which we all won, and in appropriately cinematic fashion. (After Dr Max' helicopter pilot had spirited us away clutching our relics, I insisted on completing his turn to see which island tiles flooded and the result was everything but the landing site itself.)

The first was, in some ways, the oddest of the bunch. You actually compete to see which of you is the best at buying gifts for each other. Confusingly, you gain points both for choosing appropriate gifts and for receiving them, which necessitates two sets of tokens on two distinct tracks. Add in some intermittent colour blindness (who knew pink and orange were hard to distinguish for some people?) and you end up with a lot backtracking and uncertainty. I did surprisingly well given what a pain I find gift-giving in general (I deliberately forced myself to choose quickly in order to avoid endless dithering) and only narrowly lost. What we all took away from that game, however, is that none of us should ever be put in the position of having to buy something for Dr Max.

Catering was a snap because I didn't cook a thing, I just bought three boxes of buns from Chiu Quon. Such a pleasure to surround myself with men who love pork as much as I do! (Did that come out right?) In contrast to the last time, we hardly touched the bourbon--just one Manhattan for JB. I splurged and had a ginger sojutini, substituting Koval for half the crème de gingembre, and it worked beautifully. If you really wanted a ginger kick, however, you could always take a piece of candied ginger from the cuánhé and dissolve it.

Tomorrow I'll be crouched here once more poring over each new shred of reportage from Suez and Tahrir Square, but right now I'm considering throwing on a bar vest and seeing what Touché has to offer. I'm not at all into beauty contests, however, and it could mean a cover charge. But it's five minutes away and I know that with this much alcohol, sweets, and barbecued pork in my tummy, bedtime is still an way's off for me.

In my dream, I was scrambling to find five ten-sided dice. The party were facing their first encountre with my younger brother as GM, and somehow I'd never gotten around to rolling up my character. The only skill listed on my sheet was "Dodge +1". I thought to myself Maybe I should figure out if he's even got decent dexterity before I spend my points on that. The method for generating scores was: roll five ten-siders, drop the lowest, and add the total to 19. I quickly reckoned that this would give PCs and average score of 41 in every trait. My attempts to scoop up five ten-siders kept netting me a few six-sided dice. I was thinking about giving my character animal-training skills because he had a companion mastiff, but my older brother was already playing something of a beastmaster and I didn't want to overlap. I was thinking of my character as "Viktor", but then I remembered that I'd found that too generic a name and wanted something different. Something more German. In my half-awake state, I considered that "Sigo" would make a good choice, sit it could be an abbreviated form of any Old High German name beginning with the element Sig- "victory". "Sige" is the setting demanded Middle High.

Six years since I've played a role-playing game of any sort and I still have dreams like this.

What I didn't get to finish telling you about Clark Market is that, not only did they have yut-nori, but that they were branded through and through by San ("mountain") brand soju. These were far better than the cheapie I got my nephew. The mat was cloth rather than paper, the tokens were much nicer than roughly die-cut plastic discs, and it all came in a handsome zippered carrying pouch. In fact, I'm kicking myself for not buying a second one.

Even the cashier remarked on how nice it was, right before pointing out that it was a "back door" set. Back door? She unwrapped it to demonstrate. Oh, paykto! To is the name of a toss of one or a move of one space in yut. Payk is in fact a transcription of English back (as in New Korean paykmile "rear-view mirror"). However, the flat side of one of the sticks is marked (with the San soju logo!). If this turns up, then the player has to take one step back after completing movement. (It occurs to me that this makes every roll of yut worth 3 instead of 4. However, you still get to toss again, so it's not the same as a kel.)

We haven't tried playing this variant yet, though. monshu and I wanted to get the regular game down first--and he did, beating me in three out of four games the first time we took it out. "I like this game!" he said. "Finally, a game I can win!" (I tried getting him to play gomoku again, but after two losses in a row, he begged off.) Our lifetime scores are tied, though, and I won the "demonstration match". It was intended to kick off the game-playing Saturday evening, but ended up becoming a lone aberration in the face of three lethargic fogeys and one jaded young man.

The party, btw, was a resounding success. To that I give all credit to the bearded old man. Without his assistance, I don't know how I would've managed! You're a hero, Guan Gong! Oh, and monshu helped, too.

I finally got around to digging out my old OA campaign notes last night--an inevitable consequence of seeing Onmyoji last weekend. I'd been scribbling notes on the train all week. Monday I got a terrific idea for--

Know something odd? I don't want to post it. Not out of embarrassment (I am so beyond that at this point), but out of fear of spoilers. See, even though the campaign has been lying dormant for over ten years at this point, I've never entirely given up on it. Me and my brothers still game and still see each other from time to time, so there's always a chance we'll start things up again, isn't there? I'd hate to have bunj know what was in store because he read it here first. Silly Da!

As usual, I got distracted by the names. When I first drew the map, I didn't know crap about Japanese--and the GM who drew the map it was based on knew even less. So what did I do? Try to rationalise them, of course! Sure, I could just rename everything properly, but that would be too easy. I have access to such good reference material now that I can spin out suitable and interesting names without half trying. There's more challenge in tweaking these naïve creations.

For instance, one of the villages was called Yeijo. (The syllable yei doesn't even exist in modern Japanese.) I sat down with Nelson's and went through almost every character with the on reading ei or jo until I found two I liked that worked together: "wide pillar" and "barn; villa". Now suddenly the village has the sketch of a history: Clearly, at some time in the past, someone important built a large, noteworthy structure there. Who was it and what became of the building? More questions to answer, which in turn will add depth to the setting--even though it will just go back into the folder within a few days to be pulled out again next time something makes me think of it.