In which Silverway finally reaches its heroic tier finale

The heroic tier finale of Silverway has finally come and gone, after much delay and party-winnowing.  I was pretty happy with it.  Unusually for me, this encounter had been in the planning for several months, and its final iteration was quite different from the original conception.  Instead of fighting through a giant map of a ruined university quad, the entire finale ended up being nothing but talking.  I thought this was fitting, since we’ve had a lot of combat set pieces in Silverway lately.  This has been driven by the fact that the D&D rules continue to be better at making a combat game than making any other kind of game - I figured that since I was running a D&D game (and I actually like the D&D 4e combat game), I might as well embrace it.  This is also a significant departure from my other current game, Skyfall (which follows a more traditional Natalian mix of lots of character work occasionally punctuated by very short, very sharp combat), so it offers me personally a nice balance.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think that roleplaying is about fighting.  It’s about storytelling.  As a DM, that means manipulating the emotions of your audience (the players) while they are at the table in order to guide the production of a desired experience.  As a player, that means inhabiting the headspace of the game in order to experience the collectively shaped experience.  So much of the essence of the game takes place in the players’ heads (which is one reason I like to talk to my players about their experience - even as the DM, there is much of the game that I am not directly privy to).  Sitting at a roleplaying table merely as an observer, even for an entire session, is like hearing about a Broadway play from your friend who just got back from New York.  Hearing about a roleplaying session after the fact is like hearing about that play from your friend’s friend.

While the D&D combat game is fun, it is not particularly good at facilitating different emotions (in fact, I would highlight this as the key difference in design philosophy between Silverway/D&D and Skyfall/PhE combat).  Indeed, one reason I’ve had so many set pieces in Silverway is that I’ve been experimenting with different ways to make the D&D combat game an emotionally resonant experience.  For the finale, though, I ultimately decided to go with something more purely in the players’ heads.

Ironically, this meant throwing out months of half-baked encounter plans, so virtually the entire session was improvised.  This too was a throwback to my usual style of DMing, which I think was a nice touchstone for me.  For me, improvised sessions and well-planned sessions are like the difference between social dance and choreography.  The one feels natural and spontaneous, and there is the thrill of touching and adapting to something vital and alive and instant.  The other can be technically impressive and may be artistically affecting for the audience, but feels dead to perform.  So it was nice to gin up ten ghosts’ worth of plot-critical conversation on the spot (including two new ghosts whose presence had not been foreseen until literally seconds before they appeared in the narrative).  Then I had to gin up an audience/interrogation with the pantheon, which harkened back to an experience in my very first D&D game with Twilight, and was even more improvised than the university encounter.

This conversation with the gods was probably the biggest moment of player choice I have ever managed to pull off.  The party was presented with two stark options, and they actually pretty much stuck to those two instead of trying to find a hidden third, this-was-not-actually-hidden-and-it-destroys-all-the-plans option (I held pretty much all the cards in the scenario, but then again, the DM never holds all the cards).  I have had lots of player choice in my campaigns by now, but I have never before had a single choice that so defined so much of the game.  This choice determined not only the goal/narrative arc but also the setting for the next ten levels.  And then I all but told the party they would have to give up their classes.

Whenever I need help planning Silverway I turn to Twilight, Ayudaren, and The DM, and I had a lot of conversations with them leading up to this moment.  Class is fundamental to the D&D game.  The challenge of the game is built around a proper mix of classes.  It’s baked into the way players design a character, and is often the most important decision a player makes when designing a character (even dominating such seemingly non-mechanical choices such as personality and motivations).  In fact, many character concepts in a D&D game begin with class: “I want to play a paladin,” or even just, “I want to play a character who casts spells.”  If the party made one choice - the choice they made, as it happens - they would find themselves cut off from all magic (I wouldn’t even have let Neani become a psion, except that I really could find no way to make a martial incarnation of her character that felt right).  This would invalidate virtually all of the class choices my players had made, and force them to play new versions of their characters as interpreted through the lens of a brand new class.  It gave mechanical bite to a momentous roleplaying decision, and clearly marked a major transition in the mechanical progression of the game with an emotionally memorable event.  It was the right decision.  But would they go for it?

I guess you never really know what’s going on in your players’ minds, but I think they really did.  It was angsty, but it was supposed to be.  These moments are among the most satisfying for me as a DM - when you do something that requires you to trust your players, and they go with it.

Skyfall

One of the things I have tried really hard to do in Skyfall is to not make it about Chaos. I think the Chaos gods are one of the best and most original pieces of both the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes, and I really, really like them. Ultimately, though, I do not think they are a credible threat as villains (The DM might disagree, given that to all appearances one of the Chaos gods is the ultimate threat in the Circle, but Monica [Jasmine]'s response to that is essentially to disbelieve the threat, which is basically mine as well). This is both for inherent reasons, which I don't want to sidetrack the post into just now, and because I feel like the Chaos gods are the ultimate villain of every 40K story. I wanted to do something more original, with an Ultimate Problem for the party to solve that was a believable threat to everything they hold dear, and without Skyfall sending the message that 40K is ultimately about good and evil.

So it is with a mixture of delight and disappointment that I note how much questions of who is and who isn't Chaos-tainted have dominated the psychology of recent sessions. On the one hand, all the roleplaying involved has been delightful, and I feel pretty good about the general way Chaos has been used - more as the Chaos Question than the Chaos Threat. And yet, the fact remains that Chaos is beginning to dominate my game.

This may be because of the way I run games. This morning's session, for instance, was entirely improvised - I had absolutely no plans for what to do with it. I actually run most of my games without any clear notion of what I am going to do in a session before I do it; rarely do I even have 25% of the events of a session in mind before they happen. This is not so much because I am lazy as because planning out sessions in detail doesn't make sense to me - roleplaying, to me, is essentially oral, and thus essentially improvisational. That doesn't change just because I'm a DM instead of a player. A good aoidos doesn't go into a performance already knowing what words he's going to sing, only generally what he's going to sing about.

So - perhaps because this last session sprung entirely out of the moment, and I find Chaos endlessly fascinating even if I also think it has serious limitations as a storytelling tool - the party at last answered one aspect of the Chaos Question. The name of Nurgle was spoken. I think it went reasonably well. One problem with using a known horror figure as an object of horror is that being known and being horrible are sort of antithetical. The known can still be horrible, of course, but generally only in spite of being known. In order to properly present Chaos - in order to properly present anything in 40K, I think - one has to present it as utterly horrible (and utterly reasonable, but one thing at a time). So far there hasn't been a lot of horribleness, only creepiness. The transition can be tricky but I think it went off pretty well, in no small part thanks to Neani. And more or less by accident, too.

Now, perhaps, I can stop being such a cliche and get back to what this game was supposed to be about. But who knows what next session will bring? I certainly don't.

Skyfall

And then there's Skyfall, which is in many ways the opposite of Silverway.

I really love the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I've been trying to figure out why. 40K is the quintessential gothic science fiction, which I mean surprisingly literally - gothic in the sense that it combines horror, a romantic preference for evoking rather than detailing (not to mention a fixation upon its own twisted version of medievalism), melodrama, and parody. But unlike The DM, I have no particular love for gothicism. I think, for me, the thing I find most compelling about 40K is that it's endlessly deconstructible. At some point when I wasn't looking, I became a pathological deconstructionist when it comes to my sci-fi (and to a lesser extent, all my art) - I just can't stop saying, "Well actually, if you remember this tiny detail you said or implied two hundred pages/two hours ago, what you're suggesting now doesn't make sense ..."

Precisely because 40K is so gothic, one can deconstruct it in this way ad nauseum and simply be filling in the gaps, like trying to bring a pointilistic painting into photographic focus. But I also love the way 40K handles the issue of good and evil. Lots of fictional milieus have "there are no good guys" as a feature, but I think 40K does it more entertainingly than most. All the good guys in 40K can be deconstructed to be shown to be evil, and all the bad guys can be deconstructed to be shown to be good. You can be a hero in 40K and still be a terrible person.

Earlier in my life this probably would have just seemed eye-rollingly silly to me, but right now, as a Christian, I find it immensely appealing. I wouldn't call 40K Christian fiction, but I do think you can't really understand Christianity without rejecting the notion that people's essences fall on some kind of good-vs.-evil spectrum - to say that people "are" good, "are" bad, or "are" a mix of both is all to miss the point.

So anyway, I find 40K immensely appealing, but I've struggled for some time to find a way to run a roleplaying game in the 40K universe. Unlike Twilight, the immense scale of 40K doesn't appeal to my narrative sensibilities. The stories that most appeal to me, even if they have cosmic consequences or take place against the backdrop of cosmic events, are ultimately very small. In the words of Mordin Solus, "Can't anthropomorphize galaxy. But can think of favorite nephew." And although I love warfighting in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium (where, as the tagline reminds us, there is only war), I didn't think I could run a roleplaying game about soldiers without an entire party of Xenophon clones (which would be awesome, but is unlikely). I could come up with the story, but I don't think I have the right players for it.

What I finally realized was that I love looking at 40K most from the outside - and thus Skyfall was born, a game that explores what happens to the people caught in the endless wars of the grimdark. It is the 40K story I have always wanted to tell - not in terms of the plot skeleton, but in terms of how it presents the setting.

As always happens when you introduce players into a plot, actual events have not gone precisely according to script. But in a larger sense, I am immensely pleased with the oppressive sense of inferiority that pervades the game. The party consists of three individually very capable characters with a diverse range of skills, and after twenty-six sessions of gameplay one would normally expect them to be developing normal adventurers' bravura. In Silverway, for instance, the party will cheerfully tackle any challenge, even a dragon that is twice their level. To my Skyfall party, a squad of cooks presents an unthinkable challenge.

This leads to all sorts of delightful roleplaying moments, where characters - even Philippa, who in any other game would be considered quite the badass fighter - routinely do the sensible thing and run away (if that doesn't seem unusual to you, you haven't DMed enough). Nor does the party merely have a pessimistic view of its chances in a violent encounter; the whole game has a wonderfully gothic, hopeless tone to it. Everything seems like an almost insurmountable obstacle - fighting, figuring out what is going on, even moving through the rain forest (I apparently still had "green wastelands" on the brain when I chose the setting for Skyfall's opening acts).

It is extremely difficult to hammer the collective psyche of a group of players so hard that they feel their characters' helplessness, and I think Skyfall is my best hammering to date. But besides the technical achievement I think this represents (and not just on my part, mind, but the players' as well), artistically I think it ties the game together. As gothic science fiction, 40K has a heavy medieval flavor to it, and Skyfall is self-consciously set on a feudal world. In part this is because I was re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire at the start of the game, and I wanted to try my hand at a totally straight medieval setting (I've done science fantasy, near-future science fiction, Hellenistic, and Dark Ages, but never medieval), but it also blinds the characters to certain realities about wider galactic society that the republican players are less blind to, and I think part of the DM's art is to manage the gap between player and character perspective to create dramatic irony.

I'm also really very pleased with how much people are enjoying Skyfall's dearth of combat. I never planned for the game to be combat-heavy (especially as I am running the game using Phoenix Earth rules, if the party were to engage in even semi-routine combat I would have to fudge things so much to keep them alive that it would spoil the tone of the game), and the party's own self-imposed risk aversion has even avoided some combat that might otherwise have happened. In twenty-six sessions, there have been ... I think five combat encounters, and only one of those was longer than two rounds (the party combatants also unequivocally lost three of them). The entire rest of the game has been nothing but ... well, living. This was a major structural experiment for me: not only to play a game with much more roleplaying than combat, but also to play a game in which the mundane features heavily. In Skyfall, the conversation a maid has with her lady while combing out her hair at night or the silent barbs traded over a family dinner are fairly significant "on-camera" events. To my great relief, nobody has been bored. Quite the opposite, they seem to enjoy the chance to live their characters in a fuller way than usual, and I think this pays real dividends when it comes to how well players inhabit their characters in the more dramatic moments. Skyfall also hands-down wins the prize for the best use of sex in a roleplaying game that I have personally run, which I also don't think is a coincidence.

Of course, I picked the Skyfall party specifically because I wanted players I knew I could count on to immerse themselves in the lore of the game world and who were attracted to playing people, as opposed to any of the other perfectly valid reasons to roleplay. I know the lessons I've learned running Skyfall's roleplaying elements are applicable to my other games, but I'm not sure exactly how far.

In re Marriage Cases

I've read the opinion in In re Marriage Cases, which I kind of felt like it was my responsibility as a lawyer to do. And now, like Kaylee (provisionally so named), I'm going to comment on it. Even though, like Kaylee, I don't really need to.

Except that I do need to, because I feel like this is one of those issues that besmirches the honor of my religion, and I hate it when people besmirch my honor.

So what do I have to say about it?

First, for people (like me) who haven't bothered to keep up with this, it's important to understand that for purposes of California law there is no difference between the rights of married people and the rights of registered domestic partners. That's right, none. You get into the relationships differently (though not substantially so), but the actual rights, privileges, and responsibilities are identical in California. This has been true in this state for five years, ever since the passage of the Domestic Partnership Act. We are not one of those states where domestic partnership confers only some of the benefits and burdens of marriage.

Nevertheless, as a result of Proposition 22, passed in 2000 by 61.4% of California voters, marriage was defined in California as between persons of opposite gender.

I mention this because it's important to understand that In re Marriage Cases was not dealing with the the issue of gay marriage as a question of rights. For purposes of California law there is no question of rights; there hasn't been since 2003. The question was, instead, one of names. Simply put, the question was this: given two essentially identical institutions, does the California Constitution permit them to be called by two different names?

The answer our supreme court has given us is no. Strictly speaking, the court has only ruled that they have to be called the same thing, whatever that may be. Of course, they're both going to be called marriage, but please note the technical detail.

Much of the majority's "analysis" is, I think, either deeply flawed or simply superfluous. The majority opinion reads to me like the justices were trying to make a statement in anticipation of the fallout. I understand the necessity of that but it's distasteful, and I'm glad the dissenting justices called them on it.

Nevertheless, I think the majority has a solid core argument. Stripped down, the majority opinion boils down to two points. The first is, given that the California Constitution guarantees Californians the right to marry, does the Prop 22 scheme violate that right? The second is, given that the California Constitution guarantees Californians equal protection under the laws, does the Prop 22 scheme violate that right? The California Supreme Court has answered yes to both questions.

It's the right to marry that's the thorniest problem, I think, because the analysis of the equal protection claim really depends on the definition of marriage for technical reasons that I won't bore you with here unless you ask. If the two-name scheme reminds you of "separate but equal," it probably should; it clearly reminded the majority justices of that as well. The majority tackles the question of the right to marry by analogy to interracial marriage cases. The dissent tackles it by analogy to tradition.

The essential question is this: what does it mean to marry? Leave aside Prop. 22. Does marry mean, as the majority would have it, to establish with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life an officially recognized and protected family? Or does the word inherently carry the concept of opposite gender, as the dissent argues?

To understand the legal difficulty here you have to understand that this is not a question of rights, policy, equality, or justice. This is a question about language. The dissent argues that the word marry means an opposite-gender union. That is, after all, what it's traditionally meant in California. I point this out because it's easy to see words like "tradition" in the gay marriage context and dismiss it as homophobia or merely being hidebound, and I don't think that's what's going on in this case. How else are we to understand the meanings of words, if not by tradition?

The majority argues by analogy from interracial marriage cases, from which they infer that the California right to marry is not the right to marry an opposite gender person of your choice, but rather the right to marry a person of your choice. That is, certainly, the way those opinions were phrased. Of course, opposite gender was understood.

Which side has the better argument? To be honest I don't think it's clear. I go back and forth myself. I am in favor of legalizing gay marriage as a matter of policy, but that doesn't tell me what the Constitution says, and what the Constitution says - not what it should say, not what is just, not even what is right - is the question in this case. On balance, I find the majority's argument slightly more persuasive than the dissent's, but only by a hair. And of course, I am biased towards the majority's result.

The reason I discuss all of this (besides the hope that some of you might find it interesting) is because I've seen some sentiments reported in the media about this case that just infuriate me. In re Marriage Cases is not, in my strongly held opinion, a case of judicial activism. Yes, ultimately, I think the justices had to make a judgment call about what they thought the right to marry means. But that is what justices do; you can't get more judicial than deciding what the Constitution says. If the decisions of justices change the law of the land, that isn't a result of judicial activism. It's a result of having a common law regime. Judicial decisions change the law in this country by virtue of their very existence. That's a bedrock principle of American law.

As for overturning the "will of the people" ... so what? In the first place, justices are not bound by the "will of the people." They are solemnly charged with ignoring the "will of the people" in favor of impartial application of established legal principles. In the second place, as the majority rightly points out, the Constitution is the will of the people. If the will of the people contravenes the Constitutional limits they have placed on themselves, there are but two recourses: change the Constitution, or leave the state. Prop 22 was neither.

I should be clear: I am not the guy you want at your gay pride rally. My views of homosexual sex are strictly "conservative" and, I hope, strictly textual. That's an uncomfortable fact, and I admit that, but I'm not Christian because it's comfortable.

But what, I wonder, do the opponents of gay marriage fear? I can only conclude that it's one of two things: they can't bring themselves to willingly grant rights to something they think is morally wrong, or they fear that the dignity of their own marriages will be impugned by giving rights to something that they think is morally wrong.

The latter is, I think, just bigotry, and suffers as well from a serious defect of understanding as to whence comes the dignity of marriage. That topic needs no more discussion.

The former possibility I think is not bigoted so much as narrow-minded. The fact of the matter is that we already grant affirmative rights to things I (they, we) think are morally wrong. That is precisely what American religious toleration is - and frankly I think a person's religion is a far larger moral issue than a person's sex life. And yet here I am (here, presumably, we are), holding simultaneously to our views that Christ is the one and only savior of mankind and supporting freedom of religion. Why? How?

This is a question I wish America's politically active (and inactive) conservative Christians would give considerably more thought to before they speak another word against the cause of gay marriage. For me, I can hold the views that I do about religious toleration because I don't think establishing Christianity as the state religion of the USA would advance the Kingdom of God. In fact, I'm convinced that doing so would be extraordinarily counter-productive to that goal. People do not fall in love with Jesus Christ because his church has more rights than other churches.

Similarly, I am at a complete loss to describe how prohibiting gay marriage is going to cause people of any sexual orientation to fall in love with Jesus Christ. Given that, I am in favor of the option which grants the most dignity* to the most people, which in this case means being in favor of gay marriage as a legal institution (I'm also, in case you're interested, in favor of gay marriage for a variety of social policy reasons, but all of those are secondary to the Christ issue).

As I said, I'm not the guy you want speaking at your gay pride rallies. But I hope I am, as The DM said, an important demographic - a conservative Christian who may disagree with the content of gay marriage but is nevertheless ideologically wedded to the idea that it must be allowed. If my co-religionists want to oppose legalizing gay marriage, well, that's fine by me - so long as they can tell me how doing so causes people to fall in love with Jesus Christ.

* It is, of course, people falling in love with Jesus that is my primary concern here. It isn't people's dignity, or even the gender of people's sexual partners. Pastor Jack used to say that his advice to legislators was simply, "Get to know Jesus, read the Bible, and make your own decision." I feel similarly about the issue of gay sex, and particularly the people who wrestle with being Christian and what the Bible seems to say about gay sex. I don't want to tell anybody who they can and can't sleep with. I want them to get to know Jesus, read the Bible, and make their own decision. And I wish my co-religionists would focus more on helping people fall in love with the God we fell in love with than trying to tell them what to do.