The Seven-Sided Die

For June’s Blog Carnival, Johnn Four kicks it off by asking, “What inspires your games?”

I’m often inspired by images I find online, either because they reflect what’s in my head or send sparks of ideas into the back of my brain. There are a lot of good places to find images, and I want to share some of my sure-fire sources.

Pictures speak to me

I am, in many regards, a very visual person. As a roleplayer I am very invested in the aesthetic socket: as a player I seek out wondrous and strange places in the game’s setting to immerse in them; as a GM my campaign preparations and inspirations are often a compelling images that I want to realise.

Often enough the images behind a campaign I want to run are just in my head¹ The inspirations might have their roots in a videogames I’ve loved or places I’ve been, but the real driver is an image on its own as it encapsulates senses of place, time, emotion, and theme.

Other times I’m inspired directly by images, or I’ve found images that come close to what’s in my head.

Show your players

The wiki for the one setting I have online, the country Tayel, is peppered with images that I found inspiring or reflected the imagery in my head. The Serpent River slips green and placid through the wood for which it’s named. The Swift Valley farmers grow fields of bright red amaranth for their grain, oil, rich red dye, and greens.² The Winter Weald is a frozen forest year-round. The Briarwind Hills are windy forage land below the Sunset Mountains for the hardy shepherds who call it their home. Belying their name, the Spine is a string of low, wooded hills that define the southern boundary of the Swift Valley and offer fertile hunting grounds.

All of those images helped me put what was in my head when I was building Tayel in front of my players. They also serve me as reminders of the particular diversity of the landscape within the small country, keeping me from using mental shorthand and picturing every acre of forest identically.

All of those images are also freely available—every one I sourced from Wikimedia Commons. For example, the representative hill of the Spine is a hill in Aizu, Japan. Although the paddies below the hill are rice in the image, at that distance they serve admirably as amaranth paddies.

When I already know what kind of image I’m looking for, the Search box at Commons is one of the first places I turn to. Usually it will give me some images or categories that are close enough, and from there I can start browsing the categories, looking for the image that will convey the idea I’m looking for.

Feed your creative process

Right now my desktop has this image on it. (Choose a screen resolution below the thumnail and click Download to open a new window with the image full-size. It’s really worth seeing at high resolution, and full-screen if possible.)

It’s an image of a very tall stone house on a hill overlooking a road and a plot of cultivated yet scrubby trees, with a snow-scrubbed mountains rising above it, glowing (or glowering) under a portentous sky. It’s incredibly atmospheric, and makes me want to play that, right now. I don’t know what kind of game “that” is, but it makes something primitive and creative thrash about in me. I like that, and when I need inspiration for a location I can tap into that.

I have my desktop wallpaper on a constant cycle, randomly filling it every hour with an image from a selected folder. Any time I want a quick dose of awe, I can just swipe all my windows out of the way and soak in the atmosphere of whatever has been hiding behind them.

The images in my current cycle have all come from one site, Interfacelift. Originally I was simply drawn by the way you could set the image filters to match your screen aspect ratio and resolution, but I was blown away by the number of images that are perfect for feeding the creative beast.

Beaches, mountains, lonely buildings, and bodies of water seem to be very popular with the photographers that contribute daily to Interfacelift, and that just so happens to be exactly the kind of imagery that works for me and my focus on fantasy settings. There’s an RSS feed that I’ve subscribed to as well that keeps my folder updated with the most recent pieces that fit what I find inspiring.

Share your inspirations

The current blog carnival has just started, and we can always use new sources of inspiration. If you blog, share your own sources of inspiration and link back to Johnn’s June Blog Carnival article.

If you don’t have a blog your inspirations are welcome in the comments here or at Johnn’s article.

What gets your creative juices flowing?

Apparently the satire I wrote about the GenCon icon needs to be explained to a depressing minority of people. (Mostly men, funnily enough. [And by "funnily enough" I mean "painfully predictably", of course.])

I’ve been accused of being offensive and over-the-top. “Thank you,” I must reply to that because that was the fucking point. The satire in this case is meant to take a belief or argument that is considered acceptable, break it down to its underlying structure, and populate that structure with equivalent items that highlight how inappropriate the original thing is. Y’know, to make the reader question calcified and antiquated assumptions.

Like this:

Here, an icon representing an insult is used to illustrate a textual expression of an inclusive intent. The combination image is flatly contradictory bullshit. (Those are technical terms.)

The point of the satirical icons was to show the reader that these things are all the same in kind (if not degree), just with different groups of people who are marginalised by modern Western culture (i.e., our culture). To accomplish this, the images slowly ramp up the degree of blatant insult encapsulated by the image until the contradictory bullshit is undeniable.

Let’s start with the most blatant and work our way down:

This image is just so fucking offensive it’s unbelievable that I could bring myself to create it. It’s incredibly over the top. It’s unbe-fucking-lievably complete bullshit, and I hope all the readers would agree. This is indefensible if GenCon did it. Which is why I created it, to get us all on the same page that some things are just wrong. I could have gone all Modest Proposal on y’all and included baby-eating and worse, but I think this image goes far enough to make sure we’ve established OMG fucking wrong without a doubt. Baby-eating would have just been gilding the lily.

The inclusive intent in this image is pretty awesomely good: everyone is welcome and racial issues will be sensitively addressed! That’s pretty sweet! We need more of that.

Now, the icon is really, really bad. OMG so bad. Not only does it depict a blackfaced man and/or the most egregious caricature of black men in our collective memory, but it is using this image to represent all people who would care about racially-inclusive events. “Race” in our culture is almost synonymous with “black”, which is a crock. White is a race¹ too, yet only things about “coloured” people are considered to have anything to do with race. Worse, this image manages to lump all “minorities” together as if they’re a homogeneous group.

A fucking crock that is!

If the icon was funny to someone, would that make the image OK? NO!

If in the privacy of your own home you called your black friend a racial slur and you both thought that wasn’t offensive because it was “just in jest”, would that make this image OK? NO!

I hope the structure and its relationship to unacceptability is becoming clear.

So that’s the most offensive and over-the-top icon explained for the humourless and empathy-impaired. Let’s say that image gets 6 out of 5 WTF?!s because it is just completely unacceptable.²

Next up:

Now I think we can all agree that making GenCon accessible is a good thing. That text there in the image is pretty good as far as inclusive intent goes.

I think we can also all agree that the image is really fucking offensive. (Do I really need to explain this? Because I want to move on to the commonalities of structure. OK, moving on.)

So again, the combination of the insensitive insult as expressed by the icon with the positive inclusive intent expressed by the text results in a contradictory pile of steer manure. It makes the image as a whole offensive, and any organisation using it in naïve earnestness would be guilty of being insensitive assholes. (Also a technical term.)

If someone somewhere laughed when they saw this icon, would that make it OK for GenCon to use this image in their schedule? NO!

If you and a buddy regularly called each other “retarded cripple” as a term of endearing affection, would that make an iota of difference in the asshole-itude of GenCon organisers if they chose to use it in their schedule? (Hint: still NO. I mean, really? Do I have to spell that out?)

Let’s give this image 4 out of 5 WTF?!s for the sake of argument. Clearly it’s not as unbe-fucking-lievably outrageous as the blackface icon (though it’s pretty ridiculously bad), and we need some room lower down on the scale for the rest of the images.

Next image:

Is accommodations for GenCon attendees larger than a #6 dress size actually a problem? I don’t know, but let’s assume for the sake of explaining this satire thoroughly into the ground that there are attendees of GenCon who feel marginalised due to their physical size. Given this possible state of affairs, efforts to make these people feel more welcome and accommodated would be great.

It would be especially great if accommodating such people didn’t backhand them by calling them a big fucking whale. Because that’s what the icon does. See that tub of lard who can’t go a second without shoving something down the gullet? Man, that is a giant radius on that ellipse. Let’s all point and laugh!

NO! you insensitive assholes who are actually laughing. You can laugh and point privately (asshole), but that still wouldn’t make it OK for GenCon to paste this up on their website.

If you and your Widdle Shnooky-Wookums sweetheart at home are weighty people and decide to affectionately call each other “my giant tub of love-lard” and “my overflowing cup of fatty joy,” that’s your business. Would your private feelings that it’s “just a joke” make it OK for GenCon to actually use this icon on their schedule? NO!

Have we got the pattern clear? Is there any confusion about how this satirical structure works? No?³ Good.

Let’s give this image 3 out of 4 WTF?!s.

Now we arrive at the image that GenCon actually used on their schedule:

Let’s see what we have here. An expression of inclusive intent in the text of the image? Check.

A term that is used widely as an insult in the icon? Check.

Do I really need to step through this structurally to show why there’s a problem with that combination that results in contradictory bullshit?

Sigh. Alright then: Accommodating spouses of gamers at GenCon is a great fucking idea. It sounds like the program is very successful as evidenced by the growing number of attendees signing up for SP.A. activities each GenCon since the program was started. The more people attending GenCon and enjoying their time there, the better! Yay! Cake for everyone!

It would be especially great to have such a program that didn’t deliver a backhand slap to the attendees who are actively being welcomed by insulting them and their relationship to their gamer spouse. It would be even better if such a program didn’t assume that women are strange, special creatures that need very specific, women-y activities for entertainment, and didn’t further assume that… Oh fuck it, I need bullet points to enumerate the assumptions buried in that one single image:

• Gamer are all men
• Women aren’t gamers
• Women only like crafty, dancy, stripper-pole-y activities
• There are no male spouses
• There are no gay gamers and spouses
• Non-gamers should have an activities ghetto
• Men universally consider their wives a burden
• All married couples think this joke is funny
• All women think this joke is funny
• All men think this joke is funny
• Everyone thinks this is appropriately professional and respectful
• GenCon is run by insensitive assholes more interested in their own in-jokes than in being fucking professionals in their work
• Women are fair game as the butt of a corporation-wide joke
• Women don’t mind being repeatedly insulted by their con schedule so long as the insult is “minor” and some people think it’s more funny than insulting (Hint: it’s still insulting even if its funny quotient is greater than its insult degree.)

Now, I’d only rate this image 1 or 2 out of 5 WTF?!s, but only because making women the butt of jokes is still considered normal in our society and not very WTF-worthy to most people. Jokes about black people and the disabled were just as common not so many years ago, but we fucking know better now (and those who don’t are considered disgusting and vile people).

There are still “fat” jokes everywhere, and as a culture we have a really unhealthy relationship with weight (high and low) and the issues around it. The jokes mask attempts to shame and ostracise people who don’t conform to (constantly shifting) ideals of health and beauty that are mostly made up by people who don’t actually know what a good ideal of health or beauty is.

We only don’t know better when it comes to jokes about women because we’re in a time of transition between an era where women were considered domestic labour not worthy of education or regard (or the vote, or working outside the home, or pleasure, or human rights, etcetera ad nauseum.⁴), and an era where women are given equal regard and rights to men.

So, y’know, catch the fuck up. If you wouldn’t laugh at a black man being called a monkey by a large corporation like GenCon, then you really shouldn’t laugh at a large corporation like GenCon calling you or your partner a device of shame and incarceration. (Do you think there are any black men who laugh at monkey-black-man jokes? At all? If there were, would that make it right?)

Conclusions for the short of attention-span

A lot of people consider jokes about women harmless, having been brought up in a culture where it’s just normal to hear and makes jokes at the expense of women’s dignity. Many women do, even, because they were brought up in that very culture that says making jokes about women is the way to show she’s not “stuck up” or “full of herself” or “can’t take a joke”.

To illustrate that there’s really no reason to condone the ball-and-chain icon except due to one’s own understandable blindness to a common injustice, it is compared to a structurally identical image that is slightly more obviously inappropriate; then to one that is very obviously inappropriate; then to one that is so very inappropriate that it is undeniable and possibly shocking.

The hope is that the reader can connect the dots with a crayon.

If the reader can’t, then isn’t it convenient and comfortable (and dare I say, privileged) to live a life that doesn’t include questioning one’s assumptions such that it might lead to giving up such an immeasurably important thing as a trite and tired joke.

GenCon organisers have been making efforts to accommodate the non-gaming partners of the thousands of gamers that flock to Indianapolis every year. Critical Hits highlights GenCon organisers’ efforts, bringing to our attention all the non-gamer activities on the schedule for women¹ in all their varied glory.

Activities such as dancing lessons, fitness classes, yarn and needle crafts, jewelry-making, cooking (for your gamer), the ever-empowering pole dancing lessons, scrapbooking, bellydance, and self-defense are helpfully marked for easy identification with this icon:

Ball and chain! Haha! Those super-smart geeks sure can come up with intelligent and respectful humour when poking gentle fun at the women they purport to love!

This is a great first step for GenCon to make everyone feel valued and welcomed to the convention, but I think GenCon organisers can do better. I propose that GenCon adopt the following icons for appropriate events to make sure that no-one is left out:

Don’t you hate it when you get to a table and the chairs are all too small? Or worse, all the tiny chairs are overflowing with immense gobs of geekflesh streaked with Dorito dust?

With this icon the “Big and Tall” gamers would know which games had the capacity to accommodate their corpulent selves comfortably, and the skinny-jeans geeks will know which games to avoid!

This forward-thinking and progressive icon would help the physically and mentally disabled (because that’s all one homogeneous group, remember) find games and events that can accommodate their unusual and specific needs.

Normal gamers would no longer have to deal with weirdos in bulky wheelchairs breaking the suspension of disbelief in LARPs, or the awkward and resentful responses to their short series of perfectly well-meaning questions about how a disabled person became disabled.

Everyone wins!

In this post-racial world it’s important to constantly highlight and emphasise how minorities are welcome everywhere normal people are. If GenCon organisers adopted this icon, minorities of all colours would be able to quickly and easily identify the games and events that are welcoming of and sensitive to their quaint subcultural customs and non-English languages.

Similarly, people who don’t want to get into uncomfortable discussions of race when they’re trying to enjoy their escapist fantasy of many lands full of white, muscular men and white, bustin’-out-everywhere women can rest assured that avoiding events with this icon will do the trick.

I for one hope that GenCon will consider these icon suggestions and take them as a celebration of their efforts so far, and as encouragement to further develop their sensitive and inclusive scheduling policies. I think this issue is so important that I missed my Parent and Tots knitting circle to write this article!²

Last year I sent a slightly snarky email to Paizo in response to their virtual Christmas card mailing, which was a picture of the Pathfinder RPG iconic character Seoni¹ done up as a sexy Santa. As an afterthought I turned the email into a post because hey, why not get double duty out of that text I spent time writing?

Unsurprisingly in retrospect, but completely taking me by surprise at the time, that turned into a huge mess when the post was linked to on the Paizo forums.

I hesitated to write a follow-up post for a long time. When the next Christmas came around I considered writing something but ultimately skipped it just because it still left a foul taste just thinking about it. Even now I’m not really interested in analysing it, but a recent experience trying to explain male privilege to a friend and the resulting sensation of banging my head against a wall reminded me of that post and my undischarged duty to a commentor on it. That I’ve been reading the excellent Border House Blog that bankuei recently blogged about probably has a lot to do with it too.

Response

When I wrote that post, one of the first comments was from Ravyn of Exchange of Realities, asking that I post a follow-up should Paizo respond to the email. They never did so I never did, but I did (eventually, when my anger with the invaders had cooled) go and read through the entire long Paizo forum thread that discussed my post.

The male privilege and cluelessness about same was predictably rampant, but there was a surprising number of eloquent people arguing my point to the rest of the forumers,² which was great to see. Most of them were more gentle and better-written than I was, but that sadly didn’t seem to change any more minds than my angry arguing in the comments of my post did.

There were some very disappointing posts in that thread, and the most disappointing were the ones from the Paizo staff. So Ravyn, here’s your answer:

LOL.

—Erik Mona, Publisher #

All I have to say since I ordered the Holiday Pin-Up Seoni is I LIKE IT and “pin-up” was in the art order description!

—Sarah Robinson, Art Director #

I don’t think that Christmas Seoni is “bad” or sexist or anything of the sort. I think Paizo’s done a great job at being open-minded and getting all sorts of genders, races, sexual orientations, beliefs, and all that good stuff out there in a non-discriminatory way. In other words, the only thing I discriminate against is bad writing, I guess.

—James Jacob, Pathfinder Editor-In-Chief #

The only thing to say about Erik Mona’s response is that if the head publisher of a company is going to respond at all I would expect more of them. He could have said nothing at all, but he chose to respond and chose that to respond with? It seemed to be much more a response for the sake of the bulk of the forumers—”don’t worry, I’m not taking this seriously either”—than for me or any of the forumers who brought up criticism of Paizo’s representation of women.

The art director’s answer is just tiring. That she asked for it doesn’t mean it wasn’t sexist. If she’d said, “I asked for a black slave naked except for Rudolph antlers and nose, with a white man’s Santa-style boot on her back,” that would have been plainly wrong.³ It is the content of the art direction that matters, not whether or not it was asked for or even whether or not the art director happens to be female. Women can absorb and transmit oppressive cultural values just as easily as men can, because having the right bits in the pants doesn’t provide magical brain-immunity to the culture that we’re soaked in.

James Jacob’s response I cared less about and I included it for the completeness of Paizo’s response, paltry as it was. (Unlike the others though, he participated in the thread conversation beyond this response.) Still, it’s annoyingly self-congratulatory. If the detractors are ignored and you make a point of stating your point of view over theirs, then you’re selecting for self-congratulatory feedback. It’s entirely possible to have done a great job on diversity and still have a lot of room to improve, and it’s so much easier to overlook an area where there’s a huge lack of improvement when you simply assert that there’s no problem.

And of course, there were Sean K Reynold’s self-serving responses in the comments of the original post, but the less said about those, the better.

So that’s it.⁴ The people at Paizo don’t take concerns about sexism in their art seriously because they think their art is already not sexist.

Edit to add: Now that there have been a few comments in the moderation queue, I can see that this post is going to attract some of the same Champions of Men that the last did. I have only a little bit of interest in arguing with people who don’t know—and more to the point, don’t care—about the fundamental concepts that a conversation about inequality starts from. If your comment ladles a big helping of male-privilege condescension on top of the cluelessness I’m not going to approve it.

Yes, I’m going to police the comments.⁵ You might really want to add your opinion to the comments, but opinions saying that there’s no problem are pennies a gallon and they get old fast. I’d rather keep the thread welcoming to all, no just the ones who ironically and loudly insist that there’s nothing to talk about.⁶ That said, you’re welcome to add vitriolic comment to the original thread, where it would be in fellow company with all the other white men saying that they don’t see what the problem is.

Otherwise, I’m happy to converse with people who are genuinely curious and make an effort to be respectful (not to me, but to women and PoC who are in the audience). I’m not setting the bar high—the least indication of having thought about it and being willing to keep thinking about it is all that’s necessary.

One of the best reasons for not updating a roleplay-gaming blog is being too busy with the actual hobby—busy roleplaying—to have time to update.¹ One of the not-so-best reasons is that I used to blog when my son napped and he’s stopped doing that. Tonight is one of those rare nights where I’m not gaming or prepping for a game, I’ve slept well the night before, and I have a post in mind that shouldn’t take more energy to write than I have left but is still worth posting.

So, on with it.

Greywulf wrote a post on why the D&D 4e Powers system is good. I didn’t find myself agreeing, but he wrote a follow-up comment that illuminated a dynamic between the Powers system and player creativity that I hadn’t thought about before. One commentor was unhappy with the way players seem to prefer invoking powers over creative tactics. In part j_king wrote (emphasis mine):

It seems that whenever my players get into a combat, their most difficult choices are: where to move and which power to use. And perhaps whether to use an action point once in a while. I find that it’s rather rare that they think of clever ways to gain the advantage over a monster; especially if the encounter is balanced so that the party is likely to win. More often than not, once an encounter gets past the 15 minute mark it devolves into “Great cleave, 18 — hits, 12 damage. Marked.”

Could just be uninspired players. However, I think the system could do more to encourage more imaginative thinking rather than purely tactical.

To which Greywulf replied:

4e does rather hand it to you on a plate, doesn’t it? I think the key is for the GM to present situations that can’t be solved using their Powers alone – a 100′ chasm or trap’n’monster setup, for example which just begs for the players to stretch their imagination a notch. Once they get the hang of using their brains rather than just what’s written on their character sheet, it will soon become second nature.

The parts I emphasised are about the role the character sheet has as a tool for creative play. A character sheet has a lot of stuff on it, and what that stuff is varies tremendously from system to system. Often enough most of it is just pre-crunched math that is collected on the sheet for easy reference. Increasingly in the games I read and play I’m seeing another category of stuff present on the characters sheet, things I’m going to call levers.

Moving the world

Levers are things that a player can look at on their character sheet and yank on for effect in the game, often (but not necessarily) as a response to a problem that needs a solution. One of the most common types of lever is the skill. How often, as a GM or player, have you seen a player confronted with a crisis immediately look down to their character sheet to scan their list of skills for the magic bullet that will solve the problem? The player is looking for a lever—something they can yank to make the game do what they would rather it do.

Skills aren’t the only kind of lever that show up in systems. An example of a lever that has mixed mechanical and story effects are Aspects in FATE. These are short phrases like “Twitchy as a ferret” that can be called on to influence a roll in the player’s favour, or to bribe the player into making a choice that’s probably not in their character’s best interest for the sake of a more interesting story.

Power are a major type of lever in D&D 4e. Powers are the primary mechanic through which characters can have significant effects on the world and through which players can have significant mechanical impact on the game system. There are a lot of options, and the character advancement system is set up so that Powers are a large part of defining and refining a character. For any given situation in combat it’s likely that the character has (or could have taken) a Power that would optimally exploit or solve the situation. Need to whack a badguy but you’re a bit low on hit points? If you’ve got a Power that strikes and lets you use a healing surge, that’s a lever you can pull to solve that dilemma.

Creative impulses

It might be obvious by now what I think this has to do with creativity. When you’ve got a problem on the one hand and a lever that fits the problem on the other, the obvious choice is to pull it. In a game with few or no levers there are few or no ready-made answers to the game situations, while in a game with many and varied levers there is always going to be one or more that are good enough to apply to the situation.

Whether pulling that lever results in a creative addition to the game or not depends greatly on the game system that lever is part of, and I think this is part of why the Powers system in 4e leaves me cold. Not only does it give a player many levers to pull in combat, but the system doesn’t ask anything more of the player after the lever is pulled. You can get creative with the use and description of a Power, but you don’t have to in order to make the game’s engine run.² 4e provides lots of levers, which makes it easy to just pull a lever. Of course this could be waved away as an example of lazy play—but who’s going to stop that lazy player, and haven’t we all been that player at some point?

So levers can be creativity inhibitors.³ Given a choice between McGuyvering up a solution to the challenge and using a Power that is obviously going to do the trick, pulling that Power’s lever is going to win out for most players in most circumstances.

That’s not to say that levers are inherently bad. They’re not. A system can also provide levers as a kind of story bribe: “Here, you can pull this thing for powerful effect, but before it does its magic you have to add a bit to the story yourself…” Levers of that sort work as a bribe for the player to add to the ongoing story because their in-game effect is partly undefined and needs that bit of player storytelling in order to have a defined effect.⁴ Levers like that have a coin slot—you can pull the lever, but you have to pay into the story before the lever will let you effect the game.

Which leaves the other way that levers can encourage players to be creative: by not existing. A lever that isn’t there is a lever that doesn’t offer a short-cut to solving the problem. Are you an untrained schmuck with a rusty sword and nary a stealthy skill to your name peering down on the four bugbears guarding the cave entrance you need to get into? Without a skill or a fighting chance there are no levers to provide obvious solutions, so you have to get creative.⁵ Shoving boulders onto them from above, luring them away with a clever strawman silhouetted against the moon, or some other unorthodox solution is going to be fun to play and memorable after the game.

Full circle

Which brings me back to the insight that j_king and Greywulf’s exchange gave me. The abundance of easy levers on a D&D 4e character sheet don’t prevent creative play, but by being there they make it easy to just pull a lever rather than get creative, and the system doesn’t make up for that damping effect on creativity by making those levers require creativity after pulling them. Since I’m personally not interested in the tactical combat side of D&D 4e, the abundance of purely mechanic levers in 4e explains why as a system it doesn’t excite me.

Greywulf’s suggestion to j_king that the way to solve that is to set up situations where Powers aren’t the answer to the challenge is a good one for people who already like 4e but want more opportunities for creative problem-solving. From my perspective, the Powers system is what makes 4e different from the stacks of other games I own—having to write scenarios to work around that core of the game seems to me like a reason to use a different system. As I wrote in my comment on Greywulf’s post, the core system of a game shouldn’t be an obstacle to creativity that needs to be GMed around to make the gameplay good, and the contents of the character sheet should be inspirational rather than creativity-damping.

There are a lot of other half-formed thoughts bumping around in my head about how the lever metaphor can be used to understand what makes different games tick, but those will have to wait.⁶