Author: Joshua Macy

You want to know what manner of man is Joshua, What manner of man, you want to know.... A man of the moment is Joshua, and when the moment leads, there do I go! I live to love, I love to live!
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In Praise Of Evil

Why is that so many of my role-playing persona have antisocial tendencies?

Because I’m such a nice guy, that’s why.

There, I hope that’s clear. If not, read on. You see, there are many possible approaches to developing a character concept. I should know—I go through characters faster than almost anyone I know. Partly this is because I take the roleplaying seriously. I have let characters walk straight into fatal traps that I knew were waiting for them, simply because my character would have no way of knowing better, and I couldn’t come up with any plausible reason why the character would act differently.

Admittedly, most of these characters come from my Friday night gaming at Mac’s. In her house rules, all character stats are randomly assigned, there are no re-rolls, and you play what you get. Such a system makes it easy to roll new characters—I can usually do it in 10 minutes or less with only minor consultation with a rulebook. But it also does not engender any character loyalty. When your character has one hit point and no stat higher than 9, you’re rather tempted to kill them off immediately. I treat my useful characters (eg. Analin the Ranger School Drop-Out) and characters that take a long time to create (eg. James Jadwin of Deadlands fame) more carefully. But I digress.

I’ve seen a number of attitudes towards character development:
1) hero fantasies – think of someone who only plays lawful good characters, who live only to do “good deeds”
2) ditzes – I’m not certain what the motivation is, but someone dear to my heart seemingly plays the same
character again and again in different milieu – the flighty, scarcely sensible Teabull under a variety of names.
(Maybe this is why Sor Teresa is such a refreshing change of pace—plus that sexy accent—grrrowl!)
3) competency – somehow this person’s characters always do the sensible thing, regardless of their intelligence
or wisdom stats, and always have just the right magic item stashed away in a magic sack.
4) real life – the one time that Rachel and I role-played with my father-in-law, he insisted on playing a character
with the same name, skills, and occupation as himself.

My own attitude is that I want to play a character as different from myself as possible. When I look back at the last three years of characters, I have perhaps played two wizards or mages in that entire time. I actively avoid them, even though I make my living doing the modern-day equivalent of magic, and intelligence is probably my defining trait. But after a week of slogging against quantum mechanics, Lagrangians, and code algorithms that just don’t work, the last thing I want to do on my weekends is play a smart, logical, problem-solving magic user, even though when I do play such a person I find them understandably easier to play. It’s just too BORING!

My favorites tend to be thieves and rogues. I would play them much more frequently if they weren’t so generally useless in typical game play, and if it weren’t so hard to come up a good rationale why my character keeps going on all these “feel good, do good” missions with the would-be heroes. I want a chance to rob, steal, and plunder, and to get away with it. Now I never engage in such activities in real life, but if I wanted real life, I wouldn’t be role-playing, now would I?

It’s actually not easy to be evil. The biggest problem is that my fellow gamers, or at least some of them, often tend to be do-gooders. (I wonder … if I want to play evil characters because in real life I’m so nice, what does that say about people who only want to play good characters?) I often find myself stretching to find some reason why my character goes along on the heroic quest, instead of just stabbing everyone in the back, and I probably wind up being a good deal less evil than I mean to.

I think it would be rather fun, actually, to roleplay with a group of criminals. Screw adventuring—our party’s aims would be to rob, steal, assassinate, etc., and to try and get away with it. Escaping from the cops, running from the town watch … what could be more fun?

Is it any surprise that my favorite video game is ‘Thief’?

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Not the Sunday Group Game

but because it should be recorded for posterity, Scott recently broke his personal best record for shortest lived character when (in our friend Mac’s D&D game on Saturday) his character was PK-ed before the adventure even began. For some reason shortly after Scott’s character introduced himself Walter became suspicious of him and cast Know Alignment; upon finding out that Scott’s character was evil–I almost said Scott was evil, but that goes without saying–Walter and Mike refused to go adventuring with him. After a bunch of pointless argument, Scott’s character drew his dagger and had at Walter’s character, and a couple melee rounds later Scott’s character’s head was rolling around on the tavern floor.
Scott was understandably a bit miffed at this, and I have to confess that I was a bit puzzled, since I had thought that there was an unwritten group rule to the effect that players weren’t allowed to refuse to go adventuring with other players’s characters over something as trivial as alignment. I had certainly felt compelled by Mac and the group to continue to adventure with Rachel’s character Polly when she was obviously ripping off the party in her dealing with her criminal family (and my character was easily smart enough to figure it out)–granted when Polly died nobody expressed any great remorse or suggested that we try to figure out a way to raise her, but that seemed to be the extent of the reaction against her character’s actual transgressions. Why Scott’s new character’s alignment was such a sticking point I really don’t know; in fact, now that I think about it the same group had been happy enough to adventure with my previous (now deceased) character, who was also evil. Maybe the only difference was that they didn’t realize that my character was supposed to be evil, since he didn’t live long enough to do anything bad.
Of course, at that point, neither had Scott’s character. Interestingly enough, though Scott insists that he wasn’t playing the character as obviously evil and halfway suspected Walter of using Out-Of-Character knowledge in deciding to cast the Know Alignment spell, my character simply presumed that Scott’s character was evil but just didn’t care. I’m not actually sure why I supposed that, since I know that I didn’t have any OOC knowledge; either it was something about Scott’s manner, or maybe it was just that he got along with Rachel’s character….

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More quotes

(Because I want to get this little piece of paper out of my life…)

They prefer to be known as “Americans of Necrosis”. — Scott

I am Cornholio Kobold! I need TP for my bunghole! — Fitch the manic kobold

I will sing an irresistible Kobold love song! — Fitch the androgynous kobold

What if it’s infinite because it’s fractal? — Josh, on Infinite City
Then we stab you! (*chuckle, chuckle!*) — Scott, on Josh

I have healed the building with cleansing fire! — Doug

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Why Bandits Are Not Generally Renowned As Theologians

I’d just like to point out that James Jadwin’s analysis of the situation in which his Deadlands party finds itself (as reported by his player Scott) rests on his unquestioning reliance on what is technically hearsay.

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Thoughts on World Destroying

The Deadlands Adventurer’s group will forever be known as the party that destroyed the universe. Really. Here I intend to explore some of the theological ramifications of this turn of events.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, our Sunday night Deadlands campaign took a nasty turn when we discovered that an Evildoer(tm) was building some kind of doomsday clock that would destroy the world. As we were led to understand, if the clock ran down, the world would end.

So after careful investigative work (which my character James Jadwin predominantly did at the local whorehouse), we tracked down the Evildoer and her clock to an abandoned mine. There’s the clock—sitting still except for one whirring gear. You might as well have painted a bullseye on it, Josh!

I am relieved to say that I didn’t fire the fatal shot. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t have, perhaps. Our Mormon character Cal (played by Paul) took aim, tossed in his blue chip for good luck, and fired before we could do much of anything. My first inclination had actually been to shoot at the Evildoer and her minions, figuring that the clock itself could wait. But Cal’s shot was true, and the clock stopped, destroying the entire universe.

Now, hindsight is 20/20, but when I think about it, I still don’t think that Cal’s actions were all that unreasonable. The threat as we understood it was if the clock were to run down. What better way to prevent the clock from running down than from stopping it prematurely. Think about it—the ticking clock cliche is that when the clock reaches a fixed time, something explodes. The way to prevent this is to stop the clock, or pull the wire to the detonator, or something equally silly. This is best done with one second to spare. But in general, you WANT to stop the clock one way or another. Cal and the rest of us can hardly be held culpable for assuming that the Doomsday Clock would work this way.

After the End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It, our party found ourselves in another universe, which we eventually discovered was ruled by a goddess named Althea. All of us except Sor Teresa, that is, who wound up going to Christian Heaven. Here’s where things get weird. First, Althea actually appears to us—something the Christian god in the universe we just destroyed had never bothered to do, even when we were on the brink of destroying all of creation. Then she’s afraid that we will destroy her world as well, and we are politely ejected from this universe.

Next thing you know, Sor Teresa is back from heaven as an Avenging Angel or some other weird shit, telling us that God is giving us a second chance, and wants us to reconstitute his universe. We’re given time-travelling clocks to make the job easier. Although the full mechanics aren’t clear to me yet, it sounds as if we we’re supposed to be gathering occult artifacts which we will use to make a barrier around the abandoned mine, containing the explosion.

A whole slew of nasty theological questions has arisen:
1) What kind of God would make a universe that is so easily destrotyed by a .22 slug?
2) Having destroyed said universe, why would this God trust the very people who destroyed it to put it back together?
3) Why does God need us to put the universe back together? Can’t God just do it himself?
4) Why are we playing along with God’s plan? God clearly isn’t who he claimed to be—not the only god, apparently, not omnipotent, and definitely not very wise.

My character James Jadwin was never a very pious fellow to begin with. However, I find his attitudes taking a strange turn. Now on the one hand he knows that there really is a God. On the other, God is a bumbler, and not very awe-inspiring. Should we succeed in putting the universe back together, I wonder if we can have a final showdown with the Big Guy himself.

Parenthetical note: Did I mention that in the course of recovering one of the artifacts (an obsidian blade), our party accidentally committed a human sacrifice on one of the natives? And that this allowed us to recover the artifact in a very straightforward manner? But that is a story for a different time.

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Authors Link

I’ve added an Authors link on the left hand side to take you to the Movable Type control panel, so that you can easily add entries even if you discarded the url that I originally sent. You’ll probably have to log in first, and then select the BlogRiPpinG blog as the one that you want to edit. After that it should probably be obvious, but write if you have questions.

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The Rambling Bumblers

Scott complains that my characterization of the group currently in the Spice Islands as the “Rambling Bumblers” is harsh. Well, it may be harsh, but the epithet isn’t mine: “Rambling Bumblers” is what Wendy’s been calling the group since the fiasco in the “Pandora’s Box” dimension. If the group would like to pick an official name for that campaign, I’m open to suggestions.

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Notable Quotes

Tell me I’m going to hell – James Jadwin, requesting a bit of roleplaying on the part of the working girl at the local cathouse, whom he’s first had dress in a nun’s habit…

Jou are goin’ to hell, jou know – Sor. Theresa’s favorite phrase

Demons always operate without a permit – Sor. Theresa

Freakin’ Benjamin Franklin shit! – Paul

You’ll find me at the bar, engaged in a round of “Scrub the poop-deck, you drunken Darbi” – Zobar

Touch my substance! – Magmar

The trunk is booby-trapped, and despite my nimbleness, I appear to be a booby. – “Fingers”

You can have some Raspberry Death Twist – Rachel

We should let evil people do what they want – Doug

Yes, but I can’t steal, so someone else will have to take these things – Sor. Theresa

I want to offer those sailors my services – Amos the Greater

As the only person in this room likely to actually invent a time machine… – Scott

This is the 4th or 5th time tonight that the phrase “Everybody did” or “Everybody does” can be translated as “Doug did” – Scott

Well, generally there’s violence involved…and then some sailing – Seth the Lesser

I actual have a 4 in camping skill, so bite my ass! – Rachel

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The Neng Campaigns

I currently have several campaigns set in Neng, although they have varying degrees of frequency.

Russell has a two characters Carlys eal Tharstorr and Salaomer ein Ringoral (who drop in on the other campaigns when he’s available generally once or twice a year); when one of us visits the other, we usually get in a solo adventure for one of them.

The Rose Tower campaign is the one that my Sunday group played for about two years, before we decided to put in on hiatus. One of our players (Rob Barrett) left, and three new ones joined (Scott Oser, Rachel Hartmann, and Mike DeSanto) and there seemed to me to be a real divide between the characters who had been adventuring together all along and the new characters; the campaign was big on politics and continuity with past events, and the newer characters tended to not have the ties that the others did and the players tended not to know what was going on unless someone stopped and explained it to them frequently. I thought it would be best to start everyone with new characters, at least until the new players got “caught up” enough on world events and developed enough of a backstory not to be put in the shade by the established characters.

The Rambling Bumblers campaign was the result of the decision I mentioned; the characters all started as students attending the same boarding school in Neng, although they were free to leave and adventure after that. The Rambling Bumblers was the name the group gave to itself after its first couple of adventures in alternate dimensions led to horrible, horrible things happening in those dimensions. I had meant for the dimension hopping to be a short diversion, and give all the players an equal footing as far as knowing the history of the place; in retrospect, it was a mistake, and afterwards they never really fit into the Neng setting, plus they developed a bad habit of running away from any trouble they stirred up–generally to a new dimension. They are currently semi-stranded in the Spice Islands, far to the south of Neng proper, and since Rachel and Scott are leaving for Canada at the end of the summer, if we continue with Neng we may revert to the Rose Tower campaign.

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The Campaigns

Campaign System GM Status
The Rose Tower FUDGE Joshua Hiatus
Rambling Bumblers FUDGE Joshua Current
The Sun Also Rises Exalted Paul Current
ClockStoppers Deadlands Joshua Current
Millenium City Homebrew Mike Defunct
Infinite City D&D3E Joshua New
Fallout Faded Suns(?) Doug Defunct
Camelot 1999 Nobilis Rob Never Got Started
Hack Em Up! Hackmaster Joshua Defunct
Dende D&D3E Joshua Defunct