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

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.

Be'riduurok

Having alluded a number of times to Mando'a now, and finding myself in more of a blogging state of mind lately, I thought I would meditate a bit on what exactly I'm getting out of all of this. Twilight observed recently that the whole Mando thing for me seems bound up in my relationship with Thayet, which is an accurate observation, so I thought it appropriate to determine the traditional Mando marriage vow. This consists of four first person plural declarative sentences. Owing to the time-elasticity of the Mando'a "present" tense, these are both statements of identity and promises of future behavior, but I'll translate in the English present tense.

Mhi solus a tome. Mhi solus dar'tome. Mhi me'dinui an. Mhi bajuri verde.

We are one together. We are one apart. We share all. We raise warriors.

The exchange of these statements is all it takes in Mando law for two people to marry each other. Neither witnesses nor synchronicity are required - if you want to explore the boundaries of what's legally allowed, you can think of it as a sort of offer and acceptance. For example, it wouldn't matter if one person makes the statements via text message on April 3, and the other made them via Skype on April 14, so long as the person who wanted to be married on April 3 still wanted to be married on April 14. Obviously this has not happened in my life, though fortunately for me I don't expect the validity of my marriage to be challenged under Mando law any time soon. And while an exchange of this kind would be super cool, the real significance for me of all this is as a shorthand to encapsulate what I think about marriage.

Mhi solus a tome.
We are one when together. We will be one when together. The value here - and this comes across better in the Mando'a than the English, I think - is as a declaration, a promise. I promise that I will be one with you when we are together. How so one? Not as halves of a person, surely. We are personal, but we are not a person. Only I, only you can be a person. I fall back on the only model I have of the super-personal: if I am to become part of something without diminishing my personhood, it must be something like my heart is part of me. My heart is my heart, separate and distinct and completely described as "my heart," but it is also part of me - and, crucially, while my heart is not less a heart if it is not a part of me, I am less a body if my heart is not a part of it. Of course a heart cannot survive without my body, so the analogy breaks down there. Call it like a family, if you are fortunate enough to know what it is like for a family that is a living, breathing, entity in its own right. I can survive apart from my family (as my heart cannot apart from me), but my family is nevertheless less my family - indeed, less a family, period - if I am not part of it. But - and this is where the heart is perhaps a better analogy after all - while I can survive apart from my family, I am diminished by not having its blood pump through me. Think of it like the Godhead, if you're used to thinking of God as a super-personal entity. God is still God if the Son is not part of God. And the Son is still the Son if it is not part of God. But God is diminished by separation from the Son, and the Son is diminished by separation from God.

When we are one, I think it is because we are part of a super-personal entity that is diminished by the lack of either of us. I am still me whether I am married or not. But I should also diminished by not being part of - by not being one with - that marriage. How so diminished? Not in that I should lack anything I possessed, or was, before I got married. More as if something good and vital pumped through me and is now pumping through me no longer. I cannot think of a very good analogy, but I am reminded of Lewis' observation that Christians have always pictured divorce as more like cutting a body than anything else. Cut off from my marriage, I am still me, but my riduur's blood, which surged through me and nourished me, surges through me no more.

How so together? Together in space and time, certainly. We are never one by default; we must choose to be one and God must give consequence to that choice (more on this in a later post, perhaps?). When we are together in time and space, when we have the opportunity to hold and touch and speak, then of all times we must choose to be one. But also together in beliefs and temperament. When it is easiest to be one, we must choose so to be.

Mhi solus dar'tome.
We are one when apart - or more literally, "not together." As we must choose to be one when it is easiest, so we must choose to be one when it is hardest. When we are not together in space and time. When we are not together in beliefs or temperament.

This is one of the must significant portions of the riduurok to me, and one of the things that drew me to Mando'a when I first discovered it. This sentiment already had a Natalian expression: "I will love you no matter what you do, or who you are." That is essentially how I understand God to love. This is not really even about love so much as the nature of promise. Suppose I promise to make it to my daughter's school play, or fencing match. What conditions are entailed in that promise? What if traffic is just really bad? What if a client has a problem that came up unexpectedly? What if I'm the only person who knows enough to fix it? When do I get to say, "I didn't break my promise. I never promised to make it if X happened."

Maybe some contingencies are implicitly included in a promise like that. If I miss a fencing match because I stopped to help the victim of a hit-and-run to the hospital, I didn't really break my promise, did I? I imagine a lot of people would say I didn't. I think I actually prefer to think that I did break my promise, and hopefully Meshparjai would forgive me.

But what if it isn't a promise to make it to an event? What if it's a promise to love somebody. What contingencies, if any, are implicitly included in a promise like that? One cannot know who another person will be in the next moment, let alone in years to come. If you love dancing together, what if that person later stops dancing? If you love that person's sense of honor, what if their sense of honor evolves to something unrecognizable? If you love their faith in something, what if they lose it? What if their personality changes in a way you would never have predicted and find utterly monstrous? What if? What if?

I recently saw Finding Nemo with Meshparjai, and I am reminded of Marlin's question to Dory: "How do you know something bad won't happen?" Dory's answer: "I don't." We never do, and God certainly offers us no assurances. "Nothing bad will happen" is not among the promises that God makes. So we have two choices. We can either try to anticipate all the things that will make it too hard to love somebody, and carve those out of our promise either explicitly or implicitly, or we can promise to love anyway.

Of course, no matter how thoughtfully we approach the promise, the time will come when we look at our beloved and wail, "I didn't sign up for this!" Something will come up over the course of a love relationship, probably more than once, that causes us to say, "I shouldn't have to love you like this." And we will be right. It will be something that nobody should have to love anybody else through. But for myself, I am ashamed to seize the excuse that fairness offers when I remember that Jesus had the opportunity to do as much for me, and refused. Why? Because he promised to love me, no matter what. Even when it was unfair. Even when it was unjust. Even when he got nothing out of our relationship. Even when acting on his love was to his personal detriment.

Insert the obligatory caveat about God being perfect and us not being perfect and not being God and blah blah blah here. But by God, I can try. Mhi solus dar'tome.

Mhi me'dinui an.
Share. We will ... share. Share what? Property, certainly. I think separate property regimes are fundamentally at odds with what marriage is. To be honest, I don't feel nearly as much pride about the fact that California recognizes my right to, say, religious freedom as I do about the fact that California recognizes that I do not earn income. We do.

So property, yes, of course. Do we share dreams? I don't mean hold dreams in common, though may there ever be dreams that we do. I mean do we tell each other about our dreams? Do we share our feelings? Do we communicate? We won't by default. It must be promised. What about when we're trying to avoid a fight? What about when what we have to share is only anger and hatred for each other? What about when we are empty and drained, and have nothing to share? Do we promise to share all, even then? I think we should. Mhi me'dinui an.

Mhi bajuri verde.
What makes a warrior? The silent workmanlike butchery of the Spartans? The refusal to admit defeat of the Romans? The passion of the Picts? Is it skill at arms, a strong spiritual core? Is it to embrace the desire to see one's enemies utterly destroyed? An ethic of victory that offers mercy to the vanquished? Esprit de corps?

I like to meditate on this question, but if I had to put down an answer, I would say that a warrior is praus as Jesus was praus (link). My understanding of that begins with a true assessment of what is a threat and what is not. I understand Jesus to have been a person who knew that many things that most people would think are threats in fact are not, and thus require no violent response. I also understand Jesus to be somebody who would fuck your shit up if you actually were a threat. I don't want Meshparjai to be a "violent" woman. But I do want her to be a woman of force. I want her to be the kind of woman who is serene in the face of things that would drive others into fits - but when she is presented with a real threat, I want her to have the will and the skill to obliterate it with absolute finality, with utter suddenness and unfettered by notions of fair play.

But of course, not just Meshparjai. And not just her siblings, God willing that she have any. I do not rear only the blood of my blood, but all children who come into my life. And as the childrearing lessons I teach my children are passed on to their friends, I rear those children as well.

So how so bajuri verde? On the one hand, by teaching her the skills of force. I would identify these, at least, as skills of force: How to kill, how to explain one's beliefs, how to question one's beliefs, how to acquire new beliefs, how to pray, how to engage demons. And on the other hand, by teaching her how, when, and why to use those skills. By teaching her just who Jesus was and was not, and in what way he was praus.