I Hate President Snow

I was reading a social media profile by someone trying to sound very smart, and he tried to make the point “President Snow doesn’t exist, but I hate him.” It’s a powerful statement in lack of self awareness that runs right into the soul of writing. Characters aren’t real.

From my perspective it illustrates a thin line of warning that demonstrates a step towards riding a dangerous wave of peer pressure. Does the character really exist? Is he in the room with you right now? Did the author manipulate you? Is it just bad writing?

We create emotional attachments to fictional characters, some so strongly that we treat them as real people. In the case of Sherlock Holmes you’ll hear phrases like “the greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes!”, with no awareness that Holmes never existed.

The sadder reality is that the author behind Holmes lost a fortune to con artists posed as mediums in a pursuit to speak to the dead. The legacy of the character exists in the literal personification of the character as infinitely clever, with no regard to the actual creator of the character as lacking good sense.

From writing to film, we are upset at the death of a character, and even mourn them. As natural story tellers, our human brains lead us to either empathize or sympathize with their situations. We learn lessons from stories about impossible talking chickens, magical fish, and worlds behind mirrors. In some way the lessons and allegories of fiction help to shape our ability to navigate reality.

For me, there’s some problems here. The inability to connect an author to a character is the biggest red flag that a popular wave could lead to something dangerous. I cannot connect with hating a fictional character. The ability to have that visceral reaction shows a willingness to not ask why.

Let’s take President Snow, or Draco Malfoy, or the generic lead cheerleader in the more traditional high school drama. These are projections of the author. They are sometimes strawmen, one dimensional caricatures of something the author wants you to hate, who regularly turn into a trope known as “strawman has a point.” They are not just fictional characters, they are the author putting part of themselves, something they hate, into the entirety of the role.

When fans blindly hate the character as the boogey-man, because they were told to, it is scary. What if this strawman is an unfounded stereotype of someone the author just didn’t get along with. What if the man the pop culture zombies learned to hate is just Joey from Full House? Did we internalize an allegory that was an unjust hate to someone’s perfectly normal rival?

When the strawman is a piece of self, it is bad writing. When the strawman is a political whipping boy, it is bad personality, and bad writing. When the strawman is unresolved hate towards someone that an idea represents, it is dangerous. Regardless of all of those qualifications, when the strawman is all powerful, it is a bad reader for giving him that position, and not closing the book.

Remember, the same writer that set up this bad guy to scowl at on the stage with your hands clenched in fists of rage, is the same person who locked your protagonist in the closet and beat him as a child. The big bad evil guy didn’t do that, the author did. Leveling cities. Burning down orphanages. Threatening a worldwide genocide. All the author.

So I propose viewing these manipulations for what they are. Be careful before you hate a character in a book. Never do so just to become a fans. Think critically about what’s before you.

I started early with “from my perspective” because acknowledging how much I viewed an “insurmountable foe” as bad writing gave me the perspective that helps me with tabletop games and RPGs. Setting up evil with nothing but luck and a chosen one is just manipulation, but setting up evil when there is an opportunity to overcome it works.

Our heroes in a campaign get the opportunity to make that change. They aren’t limited to rereading the book and wishing chapter 2 went differently. They get to shape the solution and learn from what’s in front of them. And if they want to be that evil, so be it. It’s their world to shape.

I’ll end with one last observation.

When I see tabletop gamers express how much they hate a character, it’s usually something from a canned adventure. It’s an unfair creature. It’s a rule that feels like cheating. It’s some badly written NPC that wasn’t allowed to interact with their free will because “it’s technically not a spell.”

When you start to isolate the way the content is consumed. You can view that people who internalize hate for characters, often just hate the way it was given to them. Take away the manipulative author and they will happily think critically and build on the world with choices and imagination.

P.S. I irrationally hated Donald Sutherland for repeating “sandman viper command” a bajillion times long before you irrationally hated him for portraying President Snow.

Table Basics: Alternative Feats on Fantasy Grounds

The exciting new way to earn player Feats, Table Basics: Alternative Feats, is now available on Fantasy Grounds VTT client, the easiest way to play 5th Edition D&D games online. Once you have your copy from the Fantasy Grounds Forge, update and activate the module in your campaign library.

It was such a fun and unique challenge moving from layout and design tools, and even programming in other VTTs, to the user tools in Fantasy Grounds. I learned a lot, making this a really exciting release. Creating your own modules is a lot like creating your own campaigns. From beginning to release, the process is different than other indie publishing tools.

For various reasons I tend to have email threads with someone from each VTT option. It’s clear that most don’t understand how powerful interaction with their users is at setting expectations. A rude and dismissive interaction shines a spotlight on any flaws in the system. Helpful and pleasant communication opens doors and makes creators flock to their system. The FG team is not just nice, but very supportive, especially in their social media.

Expand your character options, let your GM know today to check out Table Basics: Alternative Feats on the FG Forge.

Table Basics: Astonishing Magic Items

In the newest addition to the Table Basics series, treat your 5th Edition players to a new array of magic items. This tome of 118 new weapons, armor, and goods gives brand new powerful legendary items, as well as a large assortment of low magic equipment to treat your players with new abilities, without affecting the long term balance.

While the 5th Edition magic items tend to focus on long swords and spells, Astonishing Magic Items aims to give martial classes new combat choices, flavor the world with an armory of axes and blunt weapons, grant spell casters some melee options, and to view magical equipment through the lens of daily life in your campaign.

You can get the PDF here, only at Giant Slayer Games. Check out the Trailer below!

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Your Audience is Fragile

As many beloved franchises flail about, abandoned by their base, excuses appear left and right to blame the problem on everything except their plummeting quality. Uninteresting people write themselves in first person and anyone who correctly points it out as terrible writing face waves of accusations of the most vile insults. Today’s laughable insult: “your masculinity is fragile.”

No, your audience is fragile. No matter what you produce, soft drinks to video games, if you make New Coke, you eventually have to admit that New Coke sucks. Your audience trusts you to do one or two very narrow things. If you falsely believe your audience trusts you to do 10 others, you will be standing in the graveyard of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

The first rule of comedy is to know your audience. You work the crowd. You don’t tell drunk people 5 minutes stories with a zinger about Mozart running late to deliver a sheet of music but still keeping proper time. You don’t tell the knitting circle poop and fart jokes.

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What’s Important in RPG groups?

It’s a broad topic, and everyone is out there telling each other the “right way” to be a game master, but something that has come up in conversation is what is important in a game.

If you go looking at all the advice online it’s research, it’s engaging players, it’s letting them live, it’s letting them die, it’s fudging dice, it’s never fudging dice. Anything and everything that contradicts another idea is the “most important.” I don’t buy that.

So I wanted to just cut things down to basics. What do you need to play a tabletop RPG?

#1. You need a group, and someone willing to GM. That is literally the most important part. Even things I have stood on the soup box and called the most important part, are several rungs on the ladder below having these 2 things.

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GM’s Discretion – A Top 10 Countdown

In my experience, the term “RAW” didn’t have purpose in D&D until 5th edition. It means “Rules as Written” as opposed to “Rules as Intended.” The simplest example is the net weapon. It is implied that the net can be thrown 5 feet normally, and 15 feet with disadvantage. However, rules as written state that all thrown attacks are ranged and have disadvantage in close combat. No matter how clear intention is, the rules were written this way.

Although there is a lot of value in reading the material, RAW vs. RAI is not about clearing the rules to better understand them. It is about following rules, even when they are nonsense. What seems to make it more important is that 5th edition requires the phrase to be said a lot, since so many general rules are incredibly separated from the content they govern.

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Why Can’t You Ask Questions?

Alright, I’ll bite. The intentionally provocative tabletop issue of the day is “combat wheelchairs.” Akkadian Rhythms already has something like this. It tackled a similar issue years before. As someone who thought of it first, I only have one thought on the issue. “Why can’t we ask questions?”

The text for the D&D wheelchair supplement is written in an angry tone, intentionally trying to exclude people. It basically provides instructions on how to provoke and then kick out people who don’t agree. It has created yet another divide of angry fans in an already fractured hobby.

Possibly the first question everyone in the hobby has always asked is whether it’s historical. In 2nd edition D&D there is a note explaining the historical context of Bards, and some explanation to why they deviated from the historical use. All of the weapons in the first 3 editions (AD&D-3e, including earlier editions and Basic) have historical uses considered and special properties based on their historical use.

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New Book! Table Basics

To help bring new adventures to groups that are familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, 5th edition, I’ve launched a new line of supplemental books. These expand on the rules, and provide new options to explore. The first book in the series is Alternative Feats. Over 80 new Feats to replace the traditional list, and give more connection between a character concept and their improvement over time.

You can get it here only at Giant Slayer Games. Check out the Trailer below!

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The Fantasy Cutoff

Behind the scenes I’ve been working on a project that has to do with Germanic word origins of modern English words. It has been very interesting to see old Germanic words for battle and how close a lot of words are to modern English. With that background I had the good fortune of stumbling into a conversation on the origin of words and fantasy creatures. To boot, I’ve even recently made a video about Fairy houses. That inspires an article about modern fantasy words.

Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Faeries, Trolls, Goblins… We have a mental picture for every one of these. Elves are fair, graceful, and magical. Trolls are big, and regenerate. Goblins are small and green. Orcs are big and pig faced. Dwarves live under the mountain mining and carving great mazes. Where did we get these pictures.

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Monsters not Knight Eaters

If there is anything that puts me off about modern fantasy role playing games, it’s the obsession with making monsters defined exclusively by how they deal with adventurers. You never encounter a strange bear. You encounter a bear with anti-platemail can opener attachments and the ability to cast spells invented by humans. Why isn’t it just a bear?

What this really means is that games often are limited by their combat system, and both unwilling and unable to have traits outside of combat with people. You end up with horses with no hit points and tigers with tentacles.

Speaking of, the displacer beast is the most significant example of this. A large cat has tentacles specifically to prey on knights. No, tentacle cat it is not a repository for your source code with a funny mascot. It’s something people seriously use to define their franchise. Dragons, chimeras, and hydras were not interesting enough. They needed tentacle cats.

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