Some Theoretical Discussions, Mostly With Myself

Since I didn't really have anything useful to blog about today, I'll write a bit about roleplaying. As usual, if I bore you, you might feel like hugging a dinosaur instead of reading my blather. Actually, hugging dinosaurs is recommended anyway, on account of dinosaurs and hugs both being awesome inventions.

I hereby proclaim myself the king of random links, incidentally.

Lately I've been noticing a lull in my planning things. Those who have seen me work in the roleplaying-happy mode have probably noticed that I spit out a handful of ideas every week, write down a few random settings, hooks, characters, plots, or stories - mostly as part of an ongoing campaign or chronicle, but sometimes just loose ideas that I might incorporate in a game sometime in the future.

However, most of the games I've been running for the past month or so, excepting the AE-campaign over New Years', have been more or less entirely improvised. Adding to that, some of the best games have been entirely improvised, like the last session of Berlin, or the whole Mutant: The Mutationing storyline. This has made me awfully insecure when I plan things, because I feel as though a lot of the time my planning doesn't really amount to anything. And, when I sit down to plan something out, I find that I can't really think of anything because I'm getting used to thinking on my feet - complicated 13-step plots just don't come as naturally anymore.

I've been thinking I should probably do things more the Berlin way, letting stories grow out organically - basically playing and seeing where the story ends up, just writing down new setting details and NPCs on the fly. The problem with this is, I rather enjoy having a master plan which is good to fall back on, plus, I can't really work on my favouritest hobby of all times without players if I'm to improvise all the time. So I don't really know - people tend to say my improvising usually turns out better than my planning. Does this mean I should plan less?

I also have some difficulties figuring out how to plan things up ahead; I want to give players as much freedom as possible, but obviously the only way I can maximize freedom is by not planning at all, or nearly nothing at all. Locations and people generally require people to actually visit them, which needless to say is nearly impossible to plan out without enforcing things. Usually there's no problem with, say, "The treasure map leads to Mount Dumb", but it becomes boring very quick if there's only one route to Mount Dumb, giving no choice whatsoever about how to get there. Or so I think, at least. The solution here is obviously to plan a lot, which can be fun but also frustrating.

Events are highly different, because they can be thrown in when the action stalls - things like "Your girlfriend bursts in, crying 'Max is dead!'" or "Suddenly, the assassins sent by Xiao Bong leap towards you!" The problem with events, though, is that they usually don't happen in a vacuum. I can't really plan the above events out without having some reason for the characters to be involved with Max or Xiao Bong. That is where plans get really tricky - core characters like that are part of the setting, and the setting doesn't really come alive until the characters have interacted with it. Hence, I can plan a setting but I can't plan for it to live, and a setting that doesn't feel coherent or relevant just won't work.

In conclusion, then, I think location-based games (like most fantasy games and games with a tactical element) are handled easily - for more freedom, plan more options. This is fine, and I rather enjoy it usually - but few games are entirely location-based, unless they're vanilla dungeons. NPCs can work this way, too, but they tend to become very flat if they're just part of a plans-web; they simply need an element of personality, and if you try to dodge stereotypes and make NPCs unpredictable (which makes them feel more real), the problem is it becomes very hard to plan them. Thug #3 just attacks you. Ariel Hanna Seraphina Hummerstungerdoppelbergsson might on a whim decide she likes you if you snap a comment which suits her personality. Big difference in the theoretics behind those two characters there.

I suppose the solution with events could be to plan a bunch of events that seem to hang together coherently, and then prune them away as they become irrelevant. It's sad, but it's much easier to cut things out on the fly than add them on the fly. And, well - planning things definitely keeps them from becoming completely stupidly sucky, even if it's no guarantee for a great game.

Back to the writing board then, I suppose.

Self-Reference

This blows my mind. Me and Björn had a discussion about Internet flame-hate-wars-things, where people dedicate a lot of time to hating and insulting each other, and came into webcomics, which are a hot potato. Encyclopedia Dramatica points out that lulz and anti-lulz complement each other, which seems to be true in the case of webcomics as each webcomic with a fanbase has a complementing anti-fanbase of approximately the same size. For everyone who loves a certain comic enough to read it often, there is someone who hates it enough to spend lots of time bashing it.

Now observe how self-referential our culture has gone. This is a truly stunning example of how impossibly convoluted Internet Culture can be.

First we have the webcomic, Dominic Deegan. Following this up, the people of the Internets have made a parody on Dominic Deegan, called Dominic Durgan., presumably due to disliking Dominic Deegan and wanting to poke fun on it. Then, this very same guy has made a review of his own comic which is done to parodize his review of Dominic Deegan. And then, finally, this.

This baffles me to no end. Our entire culture has gone ouroboros. It's like we've built up this cultural tower, slowly, during the centuries, and now are speed-building a rickety cultural skyscraper on earlier foundations. Now it's culture to bash people who bash artworks which in turn are impossible to understand outside our cultural foundation. If we finally make contact with aliens, they'll have to read, watch and play every work of fiction since the Bible to even make some sense out of us. Wow.

Simba won.

Indeed he did.

Isolation

So I had another dream, a very vivid dream, which made me think of Stephen King's "Secret Window" or if it's called "Secret Garden", I don't remember.

I dreamt that I was out with my grandmothers' brother, beyond Arvika, beyond Dalen, beyond Här slutar allmän väg, about as far out in Värmland as it is possible to venture, the middle of nowhere. I've been there something like once or twice before, but it's peculiar that the memory should be so real in my mind.

It was strange, because nothing really happened in the dream - I was just there, pondering what would happen to it after my relatives there die. Who wants to live there? Who wants to live as far away from the cities as that? The closest place where you can buy anything at all is a gas station, the closest community even resembling a city is Charlottenberg, four and a half kilometres away. Their home is in the middle of the forest, and I think they have about one neighbour that you can at all see from their house.

How do they survive like that, I thought? Two old, old people - my grandmother is in a service home, chrissake - and then it struck me, that people have been surviving like that for most of this country's existence. And they've been doing well.

I can't even begin to get into that frame of mind, though. I could say it would be nice to live a while like that to clear out your mind - get inspiration, write, draw, et cetera, since there's no internet there, no connection to the surrounding world save telephones and mail. Yes, that would be an interesting experience.

But what is it like to live that way? I don't think I'll ever know, and I think there are very, very few of our generation that would be able to survive that self-sufficiently. It's not like they run an active farm, like everyone else they go shopping about once a week, it's just that they can't pop down to the store in between if there's something missing. They can't even pop over to a neighbour save the one old guy who lives a little further than a stone's throw away. And they've been living like this for their whole lives, including almost 20 years of retirement. 20 years of not leaving the house except for once-a-week-shopping and special occasions.

I know a lot of people my age who have grown up relatively isolated, true. But you guys, correct me if I'm wrong, have always had other people around. I mean, at least you've gone to school. I don't know if you can identify with this old couple - it would be interesting if you say you can - but myself I know I could never get into that frame of mind. I'm not particularily oversocial, but I think my imagination would begin to turn the place into Salvador Dali's nightmares after a few months. There's nothing around, a mind-blowing amount of nothing, and - well - it blows my mind.

I find it fascinating. Don't you?

Which Disney Protagonist is the most awesome?

I think I've included every options for which people are going to vote. If I missed anyone, I guess you'll have to cast your vote in a comment instead. Some more obscure movies are kind of missing.

An Awesome Dream

It's not often you have dreams worth remembering, but I'd say, I had one tonight - so not to forget it, I'm writing it down.

It started with me trying to get into a strange warehouse to find out what was going on. I was peering through windows and stuff when I suddenly found the walls had disappeared, and with a peculiar type of concentration I could make everything static around me vanish. Nobody seemed to be noticing, so I walked into the house and found a large boat.

More peculiarly, I kept testing this "make-things-disappear" and it seemed like nobody saw me while I had it active. For some reason my first thought was that I might've become a vampire, but after some experimentation I found out that I'd somehow learned how to become ethereal. The things didn't disappear, I just made it so that I could walk straight through them - I just couldn't perceive them while I was doing so, for some reason.

Then I met the guy who owned the boat, and found that he could see me, even when I walked through walls. He was this short black guy who sounded a little like Chris Rock, and I think he had some kind of x-ray vision, though he never told me. I tried to hide from him in a church, but it was sort of disastrous since I accidentally made the whole church disappear from my view, so I couldn't find anyplace at all to hide - or couldn't find out how the church was built up. So he caught up with me only to tell me he was in hiding too, from some agency that shortly caught up with us inside a mall. I tried to flee, but I failed to work my wallhack powers while under stress, and I was cornered in a hardware store and had to give up. The agents were two - one man in a suit, and one short girl dressed sort of like the Crocodile Hunter. I found out that these "powers" manifested in about one individual in a million, and that the girl also had them - but she didn't say what they were.

The agent-guy showed us to a men's urinal at that very mall, which had a concealed passage into a base of some sort - stocked full with supplies and accessible only via a secret door and then a skilift-like elevator, where you had to hang on to a small red round plate attached to a cable. Once in the base, I found out they paid people to get rid of their powers in order to protect the public - I was offered two units of money for mine, which I somehow understood was a great amount of money, though it was only offered in the form of free access to all the wares at the mall (it was pretty big, thought). Apparently the pricing was based on which body part the power originated in - my black friend was offered eye surgery for two units, I was offered surgery in some kind of weird gland which I think might have been the pineal gland, though I'm not sure.

Before I could say yes or no to a laser surgery relieving me of my powers, something happened. A guy with a dog (I remember the dog, but not the guy) somehow started the self-destruct power of the place remotely, meaning there was a total panic and utter stampede. I got away alongside the Crocodile Girl, fleeing by making the elevator shaft intangible and for the first time succeeding to work my power under stress, fell through it, and climbed up inside the mall - where I was caught by the cashier for having "shoplifted" Ahlgrens bilar, that had somehow wound up on me at the base. I tried to shift the cashier woman away in order to vanish, but at that point I woke up.

The scary thing was, during the whole time I dreamt, I was able to shift buildings and objects away, but I wasn't able to shift them back again no matter how hard I tried. Things that I "vanished" were simply gone to me, though not to everyone else. Also it seemed like shifting made me turn invisible, though I'm not sure if I was actually invisible or if I was just on the other side of a wall or something.

Regardless, a very cool and exciting dream, and one of those nasty dreams in which you make new friends that seem awesome but, upon waking, you find they never existed. It's sad, really.

About the Chinese One

So I was asking her what to blog about, and she said "ABOUT ME!". I'm pretty sure she wasn't serious, but heck, I don't have any better idea.

Actually I don't have any idea what to write about her either, but I'll try. Living with Eva is kind of like living with a five-year old who is also more responsible than yourself. It's kind of strange to watch her alternate between "MOVIE! MOVIE NOW!" and "We need to take care of the laundry, this instant!" but it seems to somehow mysteriously work, and we've got a running household. I don't know how well it'll work this year when we'll both have a bunch of school to do, but hopefully it won't be a problem even though we have kind of little time for each other (which is of course a pity).

The combination of childyness and responsibility is mostly practical and cute, but can sometimes be a little hard to cope with since she's got an energy level that's pretty high, which can sometimes make me a little tired of all her oversocialness. I don't mind locking my mind into a book once in a while, but it can be hard if Eva is going on with some project - depending on how energetic she's feeling, it can range from something as majestic as arranging a LARP to something like "Brush teeth! Brush teeth NOW!" which, needless to say, is sometimes a bit bothersome - especially when "Brush teeth now!" occurs, say, four in the morning.

I know that the above statement about energy is going to be subject to a lot of innuendo, and I would suppose you're all dying of curiousity regarding how we go together on the purely carnal, despiccable and sinful plane. The answer is, of course, that we sort of compromise. I'm gonna leave the rest unspoken, but suffice to say that Eva is probably a whole lot less pron than you all think. Didn't see that one coming, did ya?

What else is there to comment about, without getting sappy? The power of the sad face? The complete failure of us both to eat and sleep on reasonable times? Or the fantasticness of finally having found a girl who not only understands, but actually likes, gaming? Or how sometimes, I like being alone, but this is due to me being an INTP?

I'll leave the rest unspoken, leave my loneliness unbroken, leave the bust above my door - take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door;
quoth the Raven - I can has cheezburger?