knowledgeplayer-blog

[knowledgeplayer-blog]

Step 1: Make a Plan...

Step 2: Fail catastrophically.  Hello world.  I’m back from silence (if nobody is reading what I write, what counts as silence at that point?) after my inaugural post dedicating this blog to the Pathfinder TTRPG.  And I was having grand thoughts about wanting to make very regular posts and content on here, producing a companion YouTube channel, and providing my thoughts and ideas a platform.  And then a few months passed, I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, my girlfriend graduated college, a fridge fell on me and tried to ride me down stairs (true story).  Also attempting to build up a Twitch channel from scratch, it’s been a time.  But now that I’ve moved into my new place, I have a bit of time on my hands while I’m looking for work.  And talking about my favorite game is a great distraction from counting the hours and filling out applications.

Now, I’ve made a few claims in the past about wanting certain structure to all of this, but right now I kind of just want to talk out something I’ve been thinking a lot about in fictional settings.  It just so happens to effect us IRL too, so all the better.

Class, race, and prejudices that crop up betwixt.  

I find that when I’m running games, I don’t lean too hard on including hard racism and hate in my NPC’s, or the infrastructure of the world for that matter.  Part of that has to do with the make up of my current gaming group, I think.  A good GM should always think about the content they prepare, and how well it fits with the comfort levels of their group.  Prepping a gritty, black-and-white noir detective story for a group that wants to stroll through a small farming village and establish themselves as noble guardians there will be a bad flow. 

(I’m aware that compassionate, experienced players can roll with those kinds of drastic changes and work with the GM on whatever they want to run.  That is a niche case full of people far luckier than I’ve ever been.)

So keeping the tone of your game consistent with the desires of your group tends to be the safer route.

(Your players could quickly become an angry mob, shanghai you into running the game they want anyway, and all you’ve learned is that you need to wear darker, more absorbent pants when you run for that group.  Or that you need a different group.  Which ever is easier.)

So when my group is largely made up of players that are watchdogs for that behavior and subscribe to the call-out culture of our modern age, all I’d be doing is inviting a large amount of game sessions chewed out into rants on political correctness.

But..hang on...

They’re getting offended by racism.  That’s a good thing, that’s the right response.  Why is this somehow a problem for me?  Am I a hateful bigot?  God, I hope not.

But is a given NPC a hateful bigot...

There’s the rub.  

Because there’s something that I think all game’s should strive for, and that’s the verisimilitude (believability) of the world.  And I know that making a world believable helps to root your players into it.  It helps them sit in the skin of their characters and get personally invested in the story.  

The local alchemist has a chip on her shoulder towards orcs?  A fellow PC made an off-hand comment mocking the length of elf ears?  The BBEG just started an unholy crusade to wipe gnomes off the face of the known world?  Your mileage may vary.  

And your mileage is directly proportional to how important racism needs to be to evoke the desired response from your players.  

To pull out of hypotheticals for a moment, I’d like to show a real-life example.  For those that know the history of the United States, you all know that the Civil War was to settle the matter of slavery within this country.  That conflict was a very, very heated one.  And it inspired people on both sides to fight tooth and nail for what they thought was right.  That passion, that righteous fury.

It makes for very powerful story-telling.

And that story would not exist in a world that was presented as idyllic and lacked racial prejudice.

(Disclaimer: slavery is an abominable act, racism is people being afraid of the unknown, and our world is a very sad, lonely place right now)

The fact that I even had to put that disclaimer is part of the problem if you ask me.  The fact that the desire to put those events under a mircoscope and weigh all sides fairly can be described as sympathizing with some of the worst parts of U.S. history baffles me.  How else can one prevent such atrocities without understanding them? 

Rant over.  

Back to gaming.

What were we talking about?  Oh yeah, racism in games.

It’s a touchy issue.  On paper, in practice, and is something that I think people need to understand, not plaster over and move on from.  

Which is why I think racism in a fictional setting is very, very important.  It puts this real issue in people’s faces and allows them to experience the very minimum of how it feels to be discriminated towards because of things outside one’s control.  How can your players explore those ideas if you don’t present them faithfully?  How can they feel the loneliness of being the one human in an elf town?  Or the camaraderie  that gets built up by the next human that person meets?  Or the next one?  And then suddenly every human feels united.  And then they become a force strong enough to achieve the type of social reform they want and the world as a whole grows.

That little story right there only exists because of that racist shopkeep.

And it’s a great story with a great message!  Combat hostility with brother-and-sisterhood.  Push bad ideas back with good ideas.  Build a better future instead of continuing the things that made the past bad.

So I think I want to try to be more racist towards the characters in my games.

Because I want to help my players think about social problems.

[knowledgeplayer-blog]

So I Needed to Make an Initial TTRPG Blogpost...

The title says, it.  New blog requires an inaugural post.  Standard stuff, who am I, why this blog matters to a reader, a browser, or a reading Bowser.  Who am I to assume?

Let me start off a bit about what this blog will provide.  The host of letters in the title, for those who don’t know or didn’t google it, stand for “Table-Top Role Playing Game.”  Ever heard of Skyrim?  That’s an RPG.  Deus Ex games?  Same deal.  Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout, the list goes on.  

Any game where you level up a character and customize your playstyle across levels and through the various powers and items you acquire, create the character you want.  

The versatility and diversity of these games is about half their appeal, the fact that there’s really no “right or wrong way” to play the game.

(Regardless of what internet forums say.)

As the player of the game, you can be perfectly happy playing the game your own way.  I won’t go super in depth, since hopefully none of this sounds new.  I’m just covering bases and defining terms up top.

Now take the concept of those games.  Those massive, world-spanning games with fantastic or dystopian settings spinning grand tales of heroes, reluctant heroes, or just people caught in the middle of larger than life forces trying to survive another day.  

Mystery, intrigue, warfare, love, drama, any genre can see use here.  Now imagine those games and stories being told with a table-top game.

That’s right, we’re using Monopoly to tell campfire stories here.  We’re retelling the events of Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit or Star Wars with dice rolls.

...We’re going to talk about D&D.  

Dungeons and Dragons.  

The hallmark of hobbyists and nerds (a term of endearment as far as this blog will ever use it) for decades.  

Fun fact, D&D is a fairly old game.  You know how they were playing it in Stranger Things?  Yeah, in 1983, the year the series begins in, D&D was already almost a decade old.  

It’s gone through so many versions, editions, and iterations that by now in 2019 there are a myriad of ways to play this classic style of game.  And just like any other RPG, you can play it any way you like.

Now, here’s for the divisive piece...

 In that scope of time, people have been given a full field of options for what their preferred game system or edition is.  Some stay true to course, only play the various editions of Dungeons and Dragons (there are five and a half editions of D&D in case you were wondering).  

Others like to strike out as mavericks and play games that feel completely different from Dungeons and Dragons.  And you’re all perfectly justified in your tastes.  But with choices and options so diverse, people find favorites.  

And nowadays, people are very good and pushing away things that are not their favorites.  

So I don’t want any players of games out there (or prospective players of games) to feel like they aren’t welcome to this blog because I’m talking about topics that don’t apply to their preferred system.  I won’t disparage your choice in game, period.

That said, please don’t disparage me for mine.

Because I play Pathfinder, baby.  

And I love every minute of it.

(Image is very much not mine, but boy does it look cool)

For those who don’t know what Pathfinder is, welcome.  I will be your guide.  

For those who do, welcome fellow dice roller. 

For those who don’t play Pathfinder and have no interest in it, but are still fans of TTRPG’s fear not, I’ll also have something for you.  

For those that wash their hands of these table top games and care not for the trappings of such pass times, but still love the trappings of fantastical settings and stories of bravery and sacrifice, I gotchu fam.  

So there you have it. 

This is a Gaming Blog.  A Table-Top Role Playing Gaming Blog.

Focused on the Pathfinder gaming system, but has a wandering eye for some other systems.  I plan on making regular blogposts here covering a wide array of topics all centralized, or adjacent to, this game I love.  

I’ll also be posting some of my writing here, retelling some of the events in these games from the perspective of various characters as though they were chapters in a book.  

Also, as a companion to this blog, I’ll have a YouTube channel running where I do comprehensive breakdowns of various pieces of the Pathfinder game: the setting of the game, the rules of the game, and every race class, and customizable option therein.  

Feel free to take a peak at those, I’ll try and keep them palatable for experienced gamers and new bloods alike.  

Because I love the game of Pathfinder.  

And it’s helped me in a lot of ways.  The way it engages me creatively, emotionally, and tactically is incredible.  

For my money, nothing can match the way it makes me feel.  

And it can be hard to dive into as far as hobbies go.  

I’m going to help by providing discussion and breakdowns across both mediums here to make it as easy to slide into and start playing as possible.  I also want to try and enhance the knowledge of my fellow players who need an easy way to remember the random and seemingly absurd rules that make up the game.  

And as a fiction writer, I’ll also post my written retellings of game sessions, or examples of such if my group happened to not play a given week.  In a perfect and fundamentally ambitious world, I’d like to have at least two blogposts here and two videos up on my channel each week.  I’m confident that I won’t run out of things to talk about, but hope that I can hit that margin each week.  

That’s it for now, happy gaming and good luck to all of you.

-Ryan from Knowledge (Player)