Digital Alterity

Some time last week, I had an idea for a new D&D character that just wouldn’t let me go. Those of you who are writers probably have some inkling of what this is like. Suddenly, I was hit by character background, common phrases he would utter, appearance, cultural history — essentially everything I would need for a really detailed character background. After days wasting brain cycles on this thing, I eventually had to commit the character to paper.

Belgar is definitely a player character. I have no desire to “waste” him as an NPC when he strikes me as really fun to play. He’s very definitely a 4e character, but I’m tempted to fire up some kind of 3e warlock if we start lowbie characters sometime soon in my Gainesville gaming group.

Does this write-up inspire you? Feel free to use Belgar in your game. Heck, feel free to play your own version of Belgar. I certainly wish I were.

The Story Thus Far

In the early days of the world, when the world itself was still cooling from being forged by the hammer of Moradin himself, the Primordial Chaos was always one short breath away. Looking with boundless love upon his dwarven children, the Soul Forger gave unto them the mountains filled with sturdy stone, precious metals, and the finest of gems. Unto us he gave the bountiful stone and the wisdom to harvest the mountain’s bounty and even the sacred runes to inscribe the song of the earth itself. One thing he did ask of us: Delve not into the secret core of the mountain for that knowledge is not for mortal minds to keep.

If history were merely a record of the greatest deeds and most frightful tragedies of a people, then the tale of the Hammerforge clan of dwarves would be on the lips of every mortal alive. In their efforts to uncover ever more pure veins of precious metals, those ambitious dwarves delved too deep, opening a portal into the very Elemental Chaos that the gods had pushed aside to order the world into the realm we know. There in that realm of madness, the Hammerforge dwarves made the acquaintance of an eldritch being built from purest, most draconian evil. With honeyed words, the fiend convinced the dwarves to exchange their servitude for the power to drive the giants away from their mountain homes. Thus were born the first of the dwarven warlocks.

When the church of Moradin saw the success of Clan Hammerforge in their campaigns against the storm giants, they began to inquire into the sudden and overwhelming victories. When the bishops detected the brimstone stench of devils upon the Knight Generals of Clan Hammerforge, however, the mountain itself was torn into a vicious civil war. The church emerged victorious in the end and systematically purged all records of the Hammerforge Clan and even of the war itself.

Belgar Stonebreaker was born in the mountain halls that marked the ancestral home of his clan for countless generations. However, at a young age, his family was chased out of their caverns after a siege by frost giants and settled in a predominantly human township. His family, indeed a large number of his clan, maintained a close-knit dwarven culture in the town, creating something of a dwarven ghetto. The humans gladly took the dwarves in, viewing the weaponsmiths and gem-cutters as a welcome boon to trade with the neighboring settlements. The cross-cultural relationship over the years has been a strong one born of mutual benefit.

Belgar was always an apt pupil in the subject of history, looking to connect with the dwarven heritage that he felt deprived of. He spent nearly every spare moment in the temple of Moradin, digging through old birth records, military histories, and census data. The dusty tomes and delicate scrolls became a refuge for young Belgar, a home that no giant could ever drive him away from. The lay priests welcomed Belgar’s dedicated efforts and came to depend on the bright young scholar’s efforts to categorize the mountains of information that the church had become the caretakers of.

In leafing through a shipment of uncategorized tomes sent from a distant temple, Belgar stumbled upon the tragic tale of Clan Hammerforge, a legend that gripped his heart in a way that wouldn’t leave him. The fascination quietly became an obsession, and Belgar kept an eager eye open for any scraps of forbidden knowledge related to the Hammerforge Pact. His search eventually led him far afield of his town and his clan and into the libraries of the larger cities. After two years of searching, he found the keystone that pulled together all of the secret knowledge he had gathered thus far. Belgar had found a timeworn ritual that claimed to be the exact rite that the Hammerforge clan had used to bind the infernal powers to do as they bid. Secretly gathering together all the materials for the rite certainly proved to be an ordeal, but Belgar’s obsession wouldn’t leave him until he at least tried the binding.

In dark shadows of the mountain he believed to be the exact mountain the marked the genesis of the Hammerforge Pact, Belgar scribed all the right ritual circles, chanted all the right liturgies, and burned all the right herbs as incense. When the apex of the ritual beckoned, convinced by the swirl of arcane energy he could feel coursing through his spirit, the dedicated scholar thrust his left hand into the very embers of the ritual fire, expecting that the magical energies would certainly protect him from harm.

Since that day, Belgar commands infernal forces as a warlock of the Hammerforge Pact. No being has contacted him to collect on the bargain, but Belgar now understands that ritual bound him to service and not the other way around. Belgar remains committed to the side of ordered civilization and dwarven virtue, but he knows full well the danger of the powers he has dealt with. He intends to use evil’s own power against itself, and if he has to sacrifice himself to save the world, he’s willing to go down fighting with a dwarven curse on his lips and the taste of ale in his throat.

Mannerisms and Minutia

• Belgar has been away from his clan for going on three years now, but he maintains strong ties with his family and with the remnants of his larger clan. His letters home, entrusted to caravans and merchants along the road, tell of the faraway places and interesting cultures he encounters in his travels.
• Belgar always wears a pair of black leather hand gloves that he uses to hide the lingering scars on his left hand from the binding ritual that gave him his powers.
• Like all members of his clan, Belgar is trained in the use of warhammers and chain mail.
• When Belgar inflicts an enemy with his warlock curse, a ghostly pentagram appears on their foreheads.
• The infernal forces that power the Hammerforge Pact are bound to the lower planes by Moradin’s own hand. In order to affect the world, they can act only through the warlocks that serve as their agents. The fiends depend on their warlocks who in turn depend on their devilish patrons for the power to affect the world.

Technorati Tags: D&D, Warlock, Roleplaying, RPG, Dwarf

While on a recent vacation, I bought the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook. I immediately launched into reading it during a marathon Starbucks session. After finishing up the PHB, I went down to the bookstore and immediately bought the other two core rulebooks. I’ve made my way almost halfway through the Dungeon Masters Guide, and I finally couldn’t bear not sharing my thoughts here on the site.

Save versus Wall of Text…

Things I Like About 4e

Rudimentary tanking is built into the core game mechanics. As readers of this blog and followers of my life likely already know, I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately. One of my favorite parts of any MMORPG is the specialization of roles that PVE combat provides. Generally speaking you have a heavily armored tank up front taking hits and generally keeping monsters interested in / hating him, so that your damage dealers can kill off the monster with relative safety. Add in a dedicated healer to keep the tank from dying, and you’ve got the holy trinity of online RPG combat. The first time I experienced this style of combat, it felt like an absolute revelation.

The problem is that this style of combat has never really worked in D&D. Generally speaking, as a DM, you tried to target the healers and the mages since they were the biggest threat. This inadvertently shifted fighters into more of a damage-dealing role. In other words, rather than attempting to hold the line and take the hits, D&D fighters typically have had to just attempt to kill the monsters before they start chewing out your wizard’s spine.

In 4e, fighters and paladins can “mark” or “challenge” individual monsters. This doesn’t explicitly force the monster to attack him, but the enemy is at a rolling disadvantage (-2) when attempting to attack anyone other than the figher or paladin that marked him. In addition, fighters get to take a swing if this happens, and paladins get to deal radiant (holy) damage. This strikes me as kind of a “free market” approach to tanking. The invisible hand of the game system guides monsters to attack your defenders.

Skill challenges provide non-combat encounters with the drama of D&D combat. I have a habit of playing characters that are somewhat gimped with respect to combat. Some of my favorite 3e characters have been purely designed for roleplaying and therefore supporting roles in their party. My rogue/wizard/cleric might not be able to singlehandedly down a dragon, but he can probably con the local duke into sending a garrison of troops to do the dirty work for him. There’s not a lot of drama in this though, and it also has a very real tendency to become a one-man show. While one character is making skill checks against various esoteric DCs, the other people at the table are tuning out.

Enter the skill challenge. Everyone at the table rolls initiative — just as they would for a combat. The catch? They take turns rolling skill checks applicable to the situation in an attempt to meet a threshold of successes before they accrue too many failures.

An example is probably in order. Your party is trying to convince the local church of Lathander that a murder cult of Cyric has infiltrated the city.

DM: Okay. This is going to be a skill challenge to convince the bishop of Lathander that the cult is here in the Dalelands. Your key skills for this one are going to be Religion, Diplomacy, and History. You need to get eight successes before you get four failures. Everyone roll initiative.
PC1: Okay, I got an 18, so I go first. I’m going to use my Religion skill to remind the duke of the dark tenets of Cyric’s faith and how serious this matter is. I rolled a 21.
DM: (Checking against a DC of 20) The bishop nods his head. “You’re right on that one, lad. Cyric worshippers are not to be trifled with.”
PC2: Okay, my initiative was 14, so I’m up next. I’m going to use History to speak about past incursions from the Cyric worshippers. I got a 25!
DM: (Checking against a DC of 18) You remember that Cyric himself was active during the Dalelands during the time of troubles. When you tell the bishop this, he gets a pained look on his face. You can now use the insight skill once in the course of this challenge.
PC3: I’m up next, and I have Insight trained. I’m going to use my Insight check to see what’s wrong. I got a 16.
DM: (Checking against a DC of 15) It seems to you that the bishop might have lost someone important during the time of troubles. You remind him of those dark times.
PC4: I’m not really trained in anything relevant to this sort of thing, but I’ll try a Diplomacy check try and convince him that we can help with this problem. Aw crap! I rolled an 8!
DM: (Checking against a DC of 18) The bishop seems a little darker. “I see how this is…you come butter me up with honeyed words so that you can get paid to solve a non-existent problem.”
PC5: No no no! I’ll attempt a Diplomacy check to convince him that we’re not con men. Whew…Natural 20, so…28.
DM: (Checking against a DC of 18) “Okay, lad. I believe you’re being honest with me, and we all agree that Cyric is a serious threat. But how are you so sure that we’re dealing with a Cyric cult?”

This is the end of the round. The players currently have four successes and 1 failure. See what I mean about exciting non-combat encounters? Can’t you feel the drama? Skill challenges engage everyone at the table, and they turn dry skill check rolls into something memorable.

The DMG includes tons of actual general-case DM advice that I wish I had years ago. The first few chapters in the DMG have almost no 4e-specific information. Instead, they seem intent on helping novice DMs understand player types, group dynamic, and game management. The breakdown of player types is fair, helpful, and non-judgmental. The concrete advice on how to track initiative is the sort of thing you always wished some other DM would share with you. Moving all the magical items out of here and into the PHB opened up space for more DMG-appropriate information.

Building encounters seems a bit easier and more formulaic. I really like charts. I’m less of a fan of calculation. Yes, I could and did calculate out encounter levels for monster groups in 3e, but 4e really seems to take almost all of the work out of it. The DMG even provides handy charts of different (relative) levels of monsters that you can throw together to build just the encounter you want. Everything is broken down by monster roles, and they even include some rudimentary tactics for the squad. I honestly feel like I could throw together an impromptu night of gaming with just an hour to prepare.

At-will powers make all characters feel exciting to play every round of every game. If you’ve ever played a low-level wizard in previous editions of D&D, then you know what it’s like to feel useless. When you’re all out of magic missiles for the day, you get the joy of sitting back and rolling to hit with your crossbow against monsters designed to challenge the fighters and paladins. 4e take a novel approach to fixing this. Every single class becomes something like the sorcerer.

Every class gets daily powers that they can only use once per day, encounter powers that can only be used once per encounter, and at will powers that can be used without worry about running out of uses. Wizards and clerics don’t have to pre-memorize spells. You just choose a power off your list and use it. Wizards can use magic missile every single round of combat. Indefinitely. Likewise fighters rarely have a reason just make a basic melee attack. While just swing for damage when you can swing for damage and do damage to an adjacent enemy at the same time for free? Even when your encounter and daily powers are gone, you’re not reduced to doing things your class simply isn’t good at. No one chooses to play a wizard because they love standing in the back and having a 25% chance to hit with a crossbow every turn.

Combat seems like it would really fly. Early levels in 3e fly. You have limited choices for actions, and you only get one or two things to do each round. As you begin to near epic levels, however, full attack actions start taking a bit of rolling to resolve. In addition, you have so many spellcasting choices that it can take some time to decide your best course of action. Of course, our characters need to become more powerful and more useful as they gain experience, but what’s the best way to do this without drastically increasing the time spent resolving combat? 4e seems to approach this game requirement through the use of powers. Powers allow for a game that scales up as you go up in level without having to give each character 6-7 attacks. Rather than making multiple swings, 4e scales up the damage of your powers as you level. In addition, powers seem to just target one defense rather than requiring a to-hit roll, a spell resistance roll, and then a will save roll. And for those times when you really do need an extra action to finish off a dangerous enemy, you can always just spend your action point and take that extra action.

Things I’m Not Thrilled About in 4e

The lack of certain classes/races in the PHB makes me fear an avalanche of supplemental books. The number one thing I hated about 2e was the sheer amount of books full of kits and strange races and optional rules. When 3e came out, I was thrilled as could be. The game was enjoyable with just the core rulebooks. Nearly any character you could dream of could be created with some weird alchemy of multiclassing. Shaman? Sounds like a druid/sorcerer/barbarian to me. A samurai? I think you mean a monk/paladin. I’m not really a fan of supplements. The economic side doesn’t really bother me since there’s no real requirement to buy them. No, the part that bugs me about them is that they’re generally not as playtested for balance. This is especially true of third-party supplements. Yeah, there are some awesome gems out there, but there’s also some totally imbalanced stinkers. As a DM, you have to keep a very watchful eye on which supplements you allow. With no druids, bards, or monks, I fear what people are going to whip up in the interim while we wait for the PHB2.

Converting 3e characters is a practical impossibility. I think it’s quite fair to say that 3e D&D had more flexible character building options. You could multiclass all to hell. You could take cross-class skills. You could spread your skill points all over to build just the character you dreamed. Now, it’s not at all a negative thing to have less flexibility in the character design of 4e; frankly, it’s a design decision. Heck, even if you’re trying to convert a single class character, moving that character into 4e will seem like an out-of-body experience. If my gaming group converted to 4e and we wanted to have our favorite PCs available for high-level 4e play, we would really have to resign ourselves to treating our characters as completely new entities that coincidentally have the same life experiences as our old 3e PCs. I’m reluctant to even put this on the negative list because I actually respect the clean break aspect. Unfortunately it adds a bit of inertia when it comes to considering the switch.

Technorati Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, 4e, D&D

I finally got exalted reputation with Orgrimmar in World of Warcraft this morning on my day off. I promptly zoomed off to the orc capital city and got my spiffy new timber wolf mount.

I have spent so much of my gaming time working for this mount that I actually feel like I’ve accomplished something. I understand that I just increased an integer in Blizzard’s database(s) above a required threshold, but that tiny little SQL update feels like I just earned something.

And, yes, people I don’t know, this in my main character in WoW. I’m the last person alive who doesn’t have a level 70 character.

me: is it sexist that i’m tempted to re-roll my orc shaman as a male?
when there’s no difference whatsoever between the sexes?
Allyson: are you sure you don’t want to rick-roll her?
that might be sexist.
no boobies
me: i can’t rickroll her because there’s a very real chance that i will “run around and desert [her]” for another toon.
Allyson: Hah

Just in case anyone reads the blog and wants to visit me in World of Warcraft, I figured I would include some character information. Introverted I may be, but I promise you I won’t bite if you want to send me a tell or an in-game message.

All characters are listed in order of the amount of time I usually play them. In additiona they’re all the US Garona server because that’s the server my friend Richard was on when I started the game.

1. Hemlock, Tauren Hunter. Hemlock is Beast Master spec for ease of leveling and pure pwnage. At this moment he’s around level 24, and I play him far more than any other character. Moo.
2. Barga, Orc Shaman. I started up this toon primarily because I had never been one of the hybrid classes and because I had been reading some of the Warcraft novels focusing on the orcs. Barga seems to be fun, but I’m not a big fan of running out of mana. I need to work on my skill rotation for questing, but that’s a level of committment I haven’t reached with this alt. I’m almost level 12 with this character after completing my fire totem shaman quest.
3. Hrok, Orc Rogue. When I get frustrated with my other characters, I log onto this character to kill things very quickly with lots of big numbers. He’s still hanging out in Razor Hill at level 10.
4. Marilyn, Human Priest. Marilyn used to be a holy-spec priest. I used to level her that way. It hurt. Now she’s full shadow and able to level pretty easily. I’m sure I’ll go back to Marilyn a bit eventually, but right now I’m enjoying the horde side so much that she’s likely to stay at 36 for a while.
5. Mugwort, Dwarf Warrior. I like Mugwort fair enough, but he’s not as fun as my other characters. I’m sure he’ll guilt me into taking him out of Wesfall eventually.

I’ve included links over to the Armory so that you can all look at my gear / talent builds and laugh.

When I got my brand new blindingly fast Mac Pro, I had a weekend by myself with the new computer. You see, Allyson was heading out of town with my mom and sister for a “girl’s night out” sort of deal, and that left me alone in the house with the fastest computer I have ever owned. I got all my software installed. I ripped a DVD or two to illustrate the raw speed I was dealing with. And then I did something almost unthinkably dangerous.

I re-installed World of Warcraft.

After checking in with my old characters, I fired up a new dwarven warrior, which I played while I chatted off and on with my friend Richard all that weekend. I played pretty much all weekend and had a great time. Unlike most people who leave MMORPGs, I had never really gotten frustrated or even bored with WoW. When I quit playing, it was primarily so that I could do other things with my time. Nonetheless, I was blown away by all the enhancements they had made in my absence, leveling via questing — which has always been one of the great successes of WoW — was even smoother and faster than I remembered. The server economy had really blossomed, allowing even low level characters with gathering skills to make a comfortable amount of money. Also, with so few newbies/lowbies around, competing for mobs seemed to be a thing of the past. In essence, all the strong parts of World of Warcraft seemed to have gotten even stronger. WoW really seems to fly when compared with when I played before. I think that they increased the XP rewards and the speed with which you progress from level to level. That makes sense when you think about it from a game design perspective. I was playing WoW right when the game first started as a result they had an influx of people they were trying to slowly build to 60. Now that nearly everyone who plays has at least one level 60/70 character, they’re mostly dealing with people leveling alts. With fewer people in lower-level zones, it makes sense to give a boost to soloing and leveling in general.

Over the next several weeks, I reverted to my usual WoW form, starting lots of new characters of various class and race combinations with one or two primary characters that actually progress out of the starting zones. I’ve never had a character above level 36 (my trusty human priest Marilyn). For an extremely casual WoW player like me, I’ve found that it’s good to have several options for playing on the table. When I can’t bear to cast another Shadow Word: Pain, I put Marilyn on the shelf for a while. When I can’t bear to hit Mortal Strike one more time, I put Mugwort the dwarven warrior on the shelf.

What is slightly different this time, though, is that I’ve switched over to playing mostly on the horde side. I had pretty much always played on the alliance side because Richard’s main toons were both alliance. Then on a whim, I started a Tauren hunter, and I’ve really been consistently having a blast with that combo ever since. Hemlock the Tauren hunter is now level 23 with Nightweb spider pet, which looks frighteningly like a giant real-world black widow. I think I’m digging my hunter because they’re one of the ultimate solo classes. Because hunters have a pet, it’s almost like you’re something of a group even when you’re going solo. Your hunter is free to be your DPS damage dealer while the pet tanks for you. For someone who was stupidly insisting on leveling a holy-spec priest back in the day, this is truly heady stuff.

I’m really enjoying playing again, and I figure I’ll keep regularly playing until that changes and/or something shinier crosses my path. Feel free to send me a tell if you see me on the Garona server.

For the Horde!

I can’t just play games. As much as I love chaos, I love full and complete understanding of the math behind systems even more. I end up thinking like a powergamer most of the time just because of my incessant drive to break whatever game I happen to be playing. I don’t like challenges except insofar as I like absolutely destroying them with creative thinking and/or logical deduction. Games like Trouble or Sorry have absolutely no appeal to me. Games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Neverwinter Nights can take over my life.

The current object of my obsession is the Marvel Trading Card Game for the PSP and, more generally, the entire Upperdeck VS System. After getting my ass kicked repeatedly by computer opponents, my geek pride was bruised. I started digging deep into strategies of powergamers in a quest to find the distribution of character cards to plot twist cards and nearly got overwhelmed by the sheer variety of decks and strategies possible in the game. What I needed was a way to quickly try out scenarios, so that I could see the difference in the overall curve that adding or subtracting a card would cause.

I reached for Excel. I understand that, as a Unix geek, I should probably be whipping up a script in Perl or Ruby or something, but honestly, Excel is my happy place when it comes to quickly banging out mathematical formulas. In fact, when I’m needing to work out an algorithm for heavy calculations, I’ll usually work out the math in Excel before I start coding in the appropriate language. I did some research into the calculations I would need to work out for the problem at hand and found out that I was looking at a hypergeometric distribution. Conveniently, Excel has a function just for this sort of thing. To calculate out the probability that I’ll draw the card I need on an appropriate turn, I just do something like this:

=1-(HYPGEOMDIST(0,6,6,60))

In essence, I’m calculating out the probability that I won’t draw a certain card and just subtracting that from 1 to find out the probability that I will draw at least one of that card. In the above formula:

• 0 is specifying that the number of cards that I want to test for. (Remember that I’ll just be subtracting this probability from one so that I’ll get the opposite probability.)
• The first 6 is the number of cards I have drawn at this point. Since I’m calculating out round 1 without taking a mulligan, I will have only drawn 6 cards by this turn. If I invoked the mulligan rule, I will have drawn 10.
• The second 6 is number of a certain type of card that I have in the deck. (In this case, 6 2-drops.)
• 60 is the number of cards in my deck.

I basically set up a grid of these calculations, allowing me to calculate the following probabilities:

With this distribution, I have about a 75-80% chance of hitting each of my appropriate drops (with the exception of usually worthless 1-drops). That’s a chance I can definitely live with. I’m not adding in any 8-drops because I fully expect games to be over before turn 8. My final deck will consist of 36 character cards, 4 locations, and 20 plot twists. Now, I’ll have to see how playing such a deck shakes out, but math tells me that it would have to be more successful that my current decks (which hover at around 50-60% rates).

See what I mean? I did all this for a game that I’m playing for fun. And the part that will seem truly odd to some of you out there is that these calculations are a major part of the fun for me. If I can’t ponder questions like this, then I’m much less likely to be interested in a game.

Now I’ve just got to win enough games so that I can afford to buy enough cards to fill out this distribution…Then comes the fun of real world playtesting!

Technorati Tags: VS Card System, Marvel Trading Card, PSP, Video Games, Math, Geek

As a child, my first exposure to tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) wasn’t a fantasy setting like Dungeons and Dragons but rather a TSR gaming system called Marvel Super Heroes that was based on my favorite comic books. I first played the game over at my friend Darren Deloach’s house, and I really got into it. In fact, the name of this site, Bactroid.net, is taken from the first character I rolled up. I saved up enough allowance money to buy the boxed set and, soon after, the Ultimate Powers book. During weekend visits, Darren and I played through various adventures of our own making.

When I moved away from Union County to Jasper, I left behind the only people I knew who played the game. Alone in a new place with people who felt foreign, I started just rolling up random characters quietly by myself. I would stage little battles between the characters according to the rules of the game. The time I spent playing alone worried my parents, and a preacher friend of theirs eventually convinced them that RPGs were evil and that I was playing games with the Devil. They made me throw out all of my gaming materials, and I felt even more alone and disconnected than ever. I resorted to making up my own gaming systems for my made up battles. After all, how could the games be evil if I were just quietly making them myself?

As an adult, I’ve played D&D, making a whole new set of friends that I otherwise would never have known, but I always wished that I still had the Marvel Super Heroes RPG materials that had been a part of my childhood. I dug around online a few years ago but found nothing beyond a few scattered references from people who played the game back in the late 1980s. After a stray mention of the game got scattered recognition and ebulliance at the local comic shop during one of my weekly pilgrimmages, I decided to do some digging again, and this time I hit paydirt. Several fans of the game have put all the now out-of-print books on the web in PDF format. A frenzied slew of downloads later, I had all of the books I had as a child along with all the books I wanted to buy but couldn’t afford.

Reading through these rulebooks and rolling up random characters has been a welcome walk down memory lane, an acknowledgment to my disquieted inner child that, no, you were never evil but you did have evil inadvertently done to you. Just having and reviewing the old books has been enough to make me feel more at peace than I have in a long time. Suddenly I understand why I’ve been drifting in an out of comic book stores with stacks of colorful pages in my hands these past couple of months. By returning to comic books, I’m acknowledging a part of myself that was dormant for far too many years, a creative part of myself I was too afraid to embrace.

As time goes on, I discover new interests and embrace old parts of myself that I chose to lose in growing up. I’m ignoring old and irrelevant limits and discovering opportunity in all of my creative ideas. With each passing day, I’m coming closer and closer to reconciling the vision of the man I’ve always wanted to be with the man I am right now in each present moment. Every day I change. Every day I am born again.

Technorati Tags: Role-Playing Games, Comics, Marvel Super Heroes RPG

I’ve spent the last two weeks at work absolutely busting my rear to get an application moved into production. I was hardly unique in this regard as there were five of us on the team, and all of us were tying up loose ends and fixing stuff that our wrapping up had managed to break. I stayed late at work on Thursday and Friday, and I was extremely drained by the time Friday night rolled around to start my weekend.

And now it’s Monday. For the past six months or so, Monday morning has meant the biweekly project status meeting. In the wake of (hopefully) successfully moving our app to production, I feel like it’s time for a party or something. In fact, I feel like it’s time for the project manager to dole out the experience points and treasure for our adventure while we all sit around eating nachos and drinking soda.

If I’m ever the lead on a project, I’m going to insist on being called the Dungeon Master, and our project wrap up meeting will involve me rolling random treasure from the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

“Michael, I was really impressed with how you handled that data backload. I’m giving you a Gem of True Seeing.”

Technorati Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, Work, Geek

I play lots of mind games with myself. In many ways, this is a learned writer’s hack to keep myself writing about the stuff on my mind instead of leaving it to fester and come to nothing. I recently played one such mind game with myself while wandering around Best Buy. I asked myself a question: What is the one thing you would change about your life right now? The answer that came immediately to mind was surprising, and I’m not necessarily sure what to do with it. The index card in front of me with my hasty scrawl says simply “Play D&D again.”

Gaming was a creative outlet for me that encompassed the best parts of acting, writing, and self-discovery. By indulging the most indignant, severe, and dark parts of my personality, I created Lucanth Abrugael, an elven wizard/rogue vigilante who believed in a Machiavellian approach to good, a character perennially just one step away from losing the spark of goodness that offered him hope of redemption. By turning off my sarcastic intelligence for a while, I gave voice to Durga Wulforge, a human fighter/ranger who accepted others and believed strongly that others were basically motivated by good intentions even when they made severe mistakes, a character who saw his acceptance and love returned a hundredfold when an affliction of lycanthopy forced him into unspeakable acts. By ignoring my own depression, I took on the role of Gawain Gladestalker, an elven bladesinger who saw history on a macroscopic scale, allowing him to fully live in the present without guilt or regret.

I quit gaming because I just plain didn’t have two nights a week to devote to it anymore. I wanted to give my attention over to other hobbies, pursuits, and creative exercises for a while. I played Neverwinter Nights single-player campaigns more than any man should. I got into World of Warcraft for roleplay that never really existed even on RP servers. Eventually, I forgot about gaming to a large extent. Oh, sure…I would occasionally experience intense pangs of wanting to invent new stories with a roll of a D20, and this would usually lead to 15-30 minute explanations about gaming to my poor long-suffering wife.

This weekend, my friends Jason and Richard were in town, and the topic of D&D came up. I can’t even remember how honestly because it all got lost in the sense of possibility and excitement that followed. I would be happy to run a little one-off gaming session if anyone were interested. Yeah, I could work up something from my books and some free modules. I would just get something ready in case anyone was interested, but you know, no obligation. Before I knew it, I was up at five in the morning, digging through my source books and immersing myself in both lore and mechanics so that I could run a game that would be fun even for people who had never played before. It didn’t work out through some combination of a lack of time and a lack of interest, but the topic was there in my mind, ready to sprout forth when I asked my seemingly innocuous question.

My old gaming group has moved on, of couse. They game with new folks in new venues, and this is a natural part of reality. Nothing stays the same, and that’s beautiful. In an ideal world, I could game for 2-3 hours per week without having to run the game with a group that would indulge my roleplaying tendencies toward character development, making me feel appreciated but not needed. Am I really reaching for something new that I’m missing or just trying to re-live past visions of informal and boisterous sessions in friend’s apartments and hotel rooms?

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