Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Tragedy is when it happens to me. Comedy is when it happens to someone else. In this most recent case, however, I cannot help but be amused despite the fact that it happened to me. I have long suspected that there’s ‘toon blood in the family tree somewhere, and this sort of incident is exactly why.

Last night, around 11:00, I went to get out of the shower, and couldn’t. The shower doors had jammed, and the top rail of the track had come unstuck from the mastic and gotten into a definitively not-level-in-any-direction position. The shower doors are about 6 feet tall, perhaps a bit more. I’m under 5 feet tall, so anything that involved the top rail–other than cursing it, which can be and was done at a distance–was right out. Instead, I went to work on the doors, which were very much out of alignment because they were still partially attached to the top rail.

After twenty minutes, I was still trapped in the shower–naked, wet, chilly, fingers having been pinched in various escape attempts, and increasingly frustrated. Mind you, I had been trying to work my way out all this time, and hadn’t been even the least bit quiet about either struggling with the doors or telling them what I thought of the situation. Ed slept peacefully through the entire episode, not more than about fifteen feet away. When I managed to get out of the shower, I felt like Houdini…for about two seconds, when I stepped into a largish puddle (did I mention that the bottom of the doors were apparently crooked too?) and yelped as I damned near fell right back into the shower when I slipped. Ed slumbered on, oblivious. I was so annoyed that he hadn’t woken up to help that I had to wake him just to tell him to shower in the other bathroom in the morning. He made a vaguely affirmative noise and went right back to sleep. My sole consolation is that he missed the show, so I won’t have to listen to his firsthand account until senility sets in. (Either one of us; I don’t care.)

One of the things that technical writers have to deal with in the course of our jobs is prying information out of the developers, and keeping the information up to date as development progresses. I’m both the developer and the technical writer on my current project, which means that I’m very well-informed as to what’s going on. I have also discovered that it can be downright tedious having to pause during development in order to document what I’m doing. However, any tediousness is far outweighed by being able and come back the next day and know what I was doing.

The down side to being both the technical writer and the developer is that although I know what I was talking about, I am not convinced that the documentation speaks to the end user. I’ve dropped off copies and am awaiting feedback. Fingers crossed that it makes sense.

Well, I asked the question and now I have to answer it.

GMs can spend hours designing an adventure and have their players take off in an entirely unexpected direction. How does a GM handle this?try and steer the players back to the designed plot, or hang back and see where the adventure goes? How does a player handle this? Stay on target or go with the flow?

This question originally came up in a discussion I had with Cathy. We were discussing exactly how much planning you have to do for a game anyway, and what do you do when the players throw you for a loop. (Calling a bathroom break is always a good delaying tactic, especially as people tend not to disturb you.)

Personally, I like to have a plot outline. Events X, Y, and Z will happen at some point, but the details can be determined on the spot, as needed. This works because events X, Y, and Z are not GM goals in and of themselves, but a means to develop the plot. The nice thing about this trick is that it can work in a one-shot, a limited-term campaign, or an open-ended campaign. (Doug pulls this off amazingly well.) My favorite way of getting characters through a plot line is to appeal to whatever makes the character tick–greed, curiousity, thrill-seeking. (Failing that, the player’s curiousity is always a good target.) Of course, I’m a very lucky GM in that I can count on my regular players to run their characters consistently, even when it’s not beneficial to the character.

When it comes right down to it, I suppose it’s just that I like free will. I think that players should be allowed to attempt whatever they want. However, they should realize that the NPCs also have free will, and while the inmates may very well run the asylum, there are a lot of competing inmate factions.

I love working from home. I love not having to drive to work. I love the comfortable surroundings. But most of all, I love the quiet and the minimal interruptions. Even today, when what I’m working on is necessary-but-boring and I’d welcome interruptions, I’m grateful for their absence because then I’d never get the darned thing done.

Ballet Internationale is about to open its season with a performance of two one-act ballets, Interzone and Carmen. As it happens, this weekend is Rosh Hashannah, so mom and I went to the dress rehearsal tonight. There’s an old theater saying about how a bad dress rehearsal means a good performance. If it’s true, then this weekend’s performances of Carmen should be stellar.

As an aside, I ought to mention that it’s not the same Carmen story as the opera. The names are the same, but not a whole lot else.

Both ballets are very modern; Interzone is billed as modern dance on point, although it really isn’t. The music is by Art of Noise, the production design is excellent, and at the risk of jinxing tomorrow’s performance, what I saw of it was very good. Someone needs to tell the lighting director that the lightning should be before the the thunder, but otherwise, it went well.

Not so for Carmen. The thing about a dress rehearsal is that you can hear the director interacting with the dancers. He was completely silent during Interzone; it might well have been a live performance. Carmen was peppered with director commentary in both Russian and English. I wish my Russian were better, because I’d like to know if the director and I were noticing the same things. Also, the woman playing Carmen was a good enough dancer, but there wasn’t much in the way of acting. She might as well have been brushing her teeth; there was no heat whatsoever in her performance.

I missed talk like a pirate day, but I’m going to go ahead and plug the best pirate song ever, The Last Saskatchewan Pirate, by the Arrogant Worms.

About this time last year, I had my first pomegranate. Not knowing any better, I ate the seed kernels instead of spitting them out. This year, I have found something much better…pomegranate juice. Better yet, I found it in a local supermarket (Kroger at 65th & Keystone, for you locals). Yummy!

Well, the person for whom I was substituting made it back in today, and if all goes well, she won’t need to go out for surgery again. This is great, because today, my contract was extended for four weeks to complete work on the database I’m building for the client. Even better, I’ll be able to work from home some of the time. Woo-hoo!

From Ginger & Meera…

Does what you do for a living have any impact on your gaming? Have you had occupational details intrude on your descriptions of how something works? Have you ever dared a player to go ?Hotwire a car, then, if that?s how you think it?s done??

I’m a technical writer for a living, and I would say that the main carryover into gaming is that I have a tendency to take notes during games. I’ve never run into a situation in a game where that particular skill set affected my in-game actions or decisions. If I ever decide to play a journalist, I suppose I might call upon my experiences working in radio and TV, but I’ve been a tech, not talent, since junior high.

As fo jobs that I would like to have that would be useful in gaming–hmm–stage magician, professional gymnast, mad scientist, stunt woman, pyrotechnician, and computer genius come to mind.

As part of my job-that-isn’t-mine, I’ve been working on a modest little Access database for document control. Today, I found out that the client is looking for the money in the budget to extend my limited engagement for four weeks, in order to fully develop, test, and document it. Not bad, given that, as they used to say in my graduate department, it’s a little bit out of my area.