An Essay (Tirade) on D&D and Being a Part-Time Orc Slayer

I lost my table top roleplaying cherry when I was 21 to a room full of boys who’d been playing D&D for the better part of their cognitive life. I’d no sooner been asked to describe my character to the room than something clammed up in my chest and I froze, like a terrified actor on a stage, and was simply unable to make a sound. I had to leave the room to compose myself. I was almost brought to tears. I’m sort of embarrassed by this story because I’ve spent the rest of my role playing life fighting to be more than just the girl at the table with an unhealthy attention to what my character is wearing. The fact that I didn’t kick open the proverbial doors, pull up a chair and throw down at my coming out party is humiliating. But there it is. When I was presented to the group, I got stage fright and had to be given a pep talk before I was able to simper back into the room.

Since then I’ve played D&D 3.0 and 3.5, Warhammer, Little Fears, World of Darkness, Vampire, All Flesh Must Be Eaten and other games. I’ve enjoyed them for the most part, preferring high fantasy to the fru-fru fan fair of Vampire (in any of its incarnations). I’ve even run a couple of games, though not well, and enjoyed the world creation process for the most part. I am married, I have a normal job, plenty of friends, and healthy hobbies, but I kill orcs on friday nights and relish in getting my halfling cat burglar intoxicated while carousing after a day of dungeon crawling.

Now that you know my geekery background, let me segue into the topic of my marriage. One of the things that brought Ryan and I together was our mutual interest in roleplaying games. He was my first DMwhen I moved back to Omaha and we blossomed our romance by playing footsie under the gaming table. Our marriage is amazing, and we have a strong enough respect and admiration for each other that translates into hardly ever fighting. Withthe exception of PMS days, we hardly ever argue longer than a moment and we nearly never get into full on heated arguments. That being said, there is one topic of conversation that, for some strange reason, gets us into the worst fights we’ve ever had. We fight, we scream, we call each other names, I usually end the argument by drowning it out with my hysterical sobs. Here’s the secret: If it weren’t for D&D, my husband and I would have precious little to disagree about.

But we fight like vicious, savage animals over D&D. It usually starts out with us talking about the game, pondering a certain rule, class/race combo, or some aesthetic of the game. I start critically analyzing it and suddenly my husband turns into a crazed lunatic who immediately takes the devil’s advocate side of the analysis and works tirelessly to prove me wrong. Sometimes the fights are just about how quickly he turns on me, other times the fight is about the analysis or rule or the game itself and eventually builds into his turning on me. It is particularly bad when he takes a position against me when he’d taken my viewpoint in a previous conversation. I become like some ridiculous monster of the deep, flabbergasted, frustrated and outraged. I can feel my brain boiling as I try to reason with him, “But YOU are the one who taught me about this problem in the rules! My opinion is based on your teachings!” and he proceeds to irrationally prove why the problem is no longer true since I took up the mast.

We haven’t been able to narrow down why he does this or why it makes me so crazy. I suspect that I don’t have enough street-cred to talk shop with him like he does with his friends who’ve been playing since they were old enough to no longer be reading big print books with full page spread of pictures. (Funny enough, D&D is just small print books with full page spread of pictures) Or maybe it’s because I’m a girl, despite his religious adherence to gender equal playing table. I’d like to think it’s not because I’m a girl, though I suspect it has more to do with the fact I’ve not played any D&D game before 3.0. The reason that I suspect this is that many of his examples for disproving my opinion are drawn on what D&D has done in the past, which seems like a serious persuasive fallacy that I can’t seem to stop him from using.

This is sort of the hipster’s answer to the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. It means “after this, therefore because of this” and can be heard in any gaming or music circle around the world. Because of what happened in the first edition (insert: first album, first band, first appearance), regardless of how good an idea, how well written, how well performed, how well accepted it was at the time, it is now the measure by which everything that comes after it can be contextualized. So for gamers, in order to talk about 4th edition, you must subsequently talk about first edition or the cycolopedia in context to 4th edition. And any thing about 4th ed that is annoying that can also be found in the first edition in some incarnation removes the right to find the thing annoying. Since I think this persuasive argument is ridiculous in all its forms, I end up beating my head against the brick wall my husband has constructed between me and him and his roleplaying bookshelf. He holds the cyclopedia up like armour and I consider setting him and the book on fire.

So the last time we fought about D&D was when I started reading the new player’s handbook for 4th edition. I hate it. I really do. I hate 4th edition, not so much for its rules but for it’s attitude and the delivery of the new material. It’s so commercial, dirty, greedy, cheap. The book is either poorly written or poorly edited, I can’t decide which. Perhaps that says more about me than it does about the game, but at some places I just can’t get past it. For example, I was reading a section that was describing some powers (I think it was a racial power, but I can’t remember the exact page) where it listed an example of something (which I read and reread trying to figure out if it was something I was supposed to know) and then when I read the paragraph bellow it, discovered that the explanationfor the example was under it with the sentence, I swear to God: See above for an example of this type of listing. What the hell kind of editor would have thought this was a good way to set up a book? Put the examples first and then the explanation. And let’s not forget that most of theexplanations and descriptions come with a handy message to see another chapter for more info or my favorite, see another book. Hope you have access to that book, or you’re going to have to punk down $40 more dollars for the rest of the paragraph.

4th edition is dirty. It’s the first time reading a roleplaying book where I really felt like it was a commercialized game and not an atmosphere or state of mind in a bold new world. The book repeatedly breaks the pleasant fantasy atmosphere to remind you that it has every intention of rolling you for as much money as it possibly can. Enjoy your game, asshole.

Anyway, I digress. The last time Ryan and I fought it was about how much I disliked the game. Ironically, we’d had this discussion dozens of times previous where we were both on the same page, disapproving, disbelieving, cynical. Out of the blue he decided he really liked the game and I became enemy number one who must be taken out immediately. The up coming game was canceled, we fought mercilessly for days, and barely spoke a nice word to each other for the duration of it. Eventually we stopped fighting about it, but he informed me he’d be running the game whether I was playing in it or not, so grudgingly I got on board because having no game to play in was worse than playing in one written by a bunch of a corporate monkeys in need of a better editor.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I can now tell you that I’ve made my first D&D 4th Ed character. A halfling ranger, mostly because I’m partial to archers and one of the few things I love about 4th Ed is their re-mastering of the halfling race. I’m so enamored with their new write up! I have a ton of complaints about the game, but I like the halflings and sometimes that’s good enough. I’m surprised to be admitting this, but character creation was not half as terrible as I imagined it would be. Oh it was difficult to break down my resistance, but I managed and I’ve got a fully constructed character to show for it.

I like the new break down of allignment and I like that I am now unalligned. I miss the Gods that I grew to know and love and I really dislike their unnecessary need to rename things for the sake of renaming them (some of the Gods are obviously ones from 3.5. Renaming “Attacks of Opportunity” to “Opportunity Attacks”, etc) Some of the powers were cool, though I’m a little alarmed at the idea of having to keep track of so much stuff. I’m a story player…I rely heavily on the story and character development being really good. Constant record and housekeeping might get in the way of getting into character (funny, considering my original stage fright) but I’m hoping that I memorize everything pretty quickly and am able to keep track of a lot of it in my head. I was a little angry to discover that “a pot” is no longer an item on the equipment list that you can buy (or at least know the price of). Like I said, I’m a story person, and if you’re going to cook food on an open flame, dammit you better have a good pot. In fact, there are quite a few items no longer on the equipment list. I would have hoped they would have expanded it to make the world more rich and varied, but instead they got rid of a lot of useless detail equipment and made it more streamlined, to the point that now you can, apparenly, walk into a general store and buy a basic adventuring kit with all the things you’ll need to make your way in an adventuring world. I hope it comes in a decorative keepsake box that says “My First Adventurers’ Kit” on the outside.

I like that at first level I’m going to get to hit two enemies with two arrows at one time a-la-Legolas. That’s pretty fancy schmancy high fantasy there. I can get behind looking cool, though I will kind of miss starting out as a hard scrabble pioneer in search of treasure and mischief armed with barely more than a working set of leather armour, a standard issue weapon and a sunrod.

So now that I’ve gotten a lot of back story and anecdotes out of the way, I suspect I’ll be sharing many more gaming stories withyou, a little opinion, a little verbal violence, hopefully some other things I discover that I love. I’m going from a group that has 3 women and 3 men in it to one with five men and me, the loneliest girl in the world.

Coming soon.

-Sommer

“Foggy” art, last week’s Illustration Friday

Last week’s Illustration Friday that I never got posted. Oops.

Click on the picture for the full size.

Illustration Friday: “I’ve had enough.”

My friend L. has had more bad luck in the past few months than anyone I know. Probably every black cat, broken mirror, and full moon has come her way, making some emotional and mental damage nigh irreparable. And oh, she’s so sweet and soft and lovable that it nearly breaks my heart. The sorts of things that have happened could be best sellers. They really could.

So when I sat down to do this week’s Illustration Friday with the topic “enough,” I thought of her. In a few weeks she’s jetting off to grad school in a new state, a new world, a new adventure and she can (and I really do hope this) leave behind the people and things that cause the most trouble in her life. So this is dedicated to her.

It is a large piece, please click on it to see it better. It is acrylic on watercolor paper.

“I’ve had enough,” she said. “We’re flying away from all this.”

I wish I had more to say. Art is on its way!

The dining room walls are all done and boy do they look beautiful. I’ve just about fixed all the trim in the room/hallway/foyer. That will be done this week, likely this night.

I did a piece for last week’s Illustration Friday under the topic of “Foggy” but never got it posted up. I was on vacation. I have an excuse.  I do have this week’s finished, just nowin fact, under the topic “Enough.” It is dedicated to my friend Lydia because it’s been that sort of month for her. I’ll say more when I post it. It’s done in acrylics, which is the first time I’ve done that for IF, I think. I did it in my watercolor notebook, of all things, and it’s just black and white. You’ll see. I like it. It has one of my new fancy cartoonish characters in it. And an origami bird.

I have several new art pieces done at home that I desperately need to get photographed and posted. I am so very, very proud of them. I’m getting ready to hang them up, in fact, in the dining room. They are going to look supa-dupa-fine.

My husband’s sister is coming to live with us for a couple of months starting at the beginning of August, just days before my 29th birthday. I’m very much excited because I like her a lot and I hope we can become friends. It is going to be fun, and a little strange. We’re used to having someone stay the night every once and a while, but to have someone there all the time will be odd.

We got to go to a sneak peek of “The Dark Knight” last week. It was incredible. Loved the movie so much. Go see it. Go see it now.

On the merits of painting rooms.

I hate painting rooms, soul sucking, physically exhausting, messy, smelly endeavour. Hate it. Hate it.

Which creates a certain sense of irony in my house when you consider how often I repaint rooms. I can’t stop myself. All I need is one good HTML click to benjaminmoore.com or sherwinwilliams.com and I’m done for. I think I have low color self-esteem: everyone else’s room colors are so much nicer than my own. Gotta have it. Now. This makes my husband insane because he likes consistency, sameness, everydayness that changing a room constantly does not lend itself to.

Yesterday, my best friend and I repainted my dining room/entry way/hallway/basement stairs from dark olive green to a color called Abingdon Putty by Benjamin Moore. The colors watch makes it look like a greenish putty color, like ecru, but the reality is not really like that at all. It’s much lighter and brighter than the color swatch, and a little more true on the online swatch, which I find hysterical. The actual color on the walls reminds me of Vanilla Ice cream, which I think should be the name of the color. It’s like swimming in a big bowl of the stuff. Absolutely delicious. Or vanilla creme. It’s so rich. There is depth to the color. “Vanilla ice cream?” my coworker said, “Isn’t that, well, white?” No no no not at all. There’s nothing “White” about this color. It’s got depth and dimension. I swear, its one of the most beautiful wall colors I’ve ever seen and set up next to the chocolate brown trim? My dining room is the color of dessert, I swear to it.

Still, these are the online color swatches, and they don’t match either color very well at all.

    

When it got dark out and the artificial light started hitting it, we discovered the slight green undertone come out more. It’s sort of a springy green color, a surprise. Always moving, always changing, always growing. it is actually inspiring me to bring the great outdoors inside and really play up the natural, growing world within design. Listen to me! I sound like an HGTV host.

Here’s a funny thing. When I was at Ace Hardware store buying my Benjamin Moore paint, the guy working told me to get Ace Hardware paint and have them match the Benjamin Moore color. Cheaper, and good quality paint. So I said sure. And you know what? Ace Hardware brand paint is absolutely amazing. I love it. One coat of this stuff was almost perfect. It’s thick and creamy with excellent coverage and about $10 cheaper than the name brand Benjamin Moore paint. I highly recommend this stuff. Paint match, you’ll be thankful you did. I never found anything great about the Benjamin Moore paint and I think it is ridiculously expensive. But I never found anything wrong with it either. I like Sherwin Williams paint the best, but my new favorite is the Ace Hardware brand. Also? No smell. Not at all. You couldn’t even tell we’d just painted most of the house.

We are going to finish the second coat tonight and begin to put the rooms back together. Once I’m done with that I’ll post pictures. Art on my walls? Can’t wait! Before the walls were just too dark green to hold my art very well. There was too much weird contrast. Now? Can’t wait.

We have lived in this house for a year and a half and it has always felt almost finished but never complete in any room. All the rooms remain somewhat disorganized with no style, and nothing felt finished. We made the worst mistake a home buyer can make in that we painted all the rooms before we moved in. I hated most of the colors after we moved in and Ryan hated some of them (but is mostly indifferent to these sorts of things). So for a year and a half the house never felt complete. The olive green is still one of my favorite colors, but it made the dining room, hallway, entry way feel closed in and the artificial light turned the green a yellowy pea color. I never hung up any art, I never finished the rooms. I hated it. Now? I love it and it finally feels like home. It feels like a space I live in and not one I avoid. I can hang up my art, I can move some pieces into the room to finish it off. After a year and a half…it feels like us. I’m so in love.

-Sommer out

Pink blossoms in her hair….

Two new watercolor pieces, both are about pink blossoms! Click for actual size

Illustration Friday: “Sour Puss”

I apologize this week’s Illustration Friday is coming in so very late.

The topic is “Sour”

Please meet Mildred Q. The question is, is she a “Sour Puss” or is it that letter she has just read that makes her look so dour? We may never know. As soon as she tore it into tiny little pieces, she swallowed them all up!

These are a few of my favorite things

There are some brilliant, intense people in this world, but while we live in an era where everyone is special and no one is special and there is plenty of money all around to support talent that is both mediocre, out of this world, and really, really shitty, few people really stand up and out. With so many voices, it is all too easy to be drowned out by the clamoring masses. Sure, places like YouTube have made it easier for the little known creative director to really show off and do experimental things, they are one in a zillion amongst crapcrapcrap. Who else would like the era of Everyone is Special and Everyone Wins to be over? Man, do you remember when poets were household names and writers of philosophy were widely read?

Thankfully there is brilliance at the end of the tunnel, if only you can wait it out that long. Most of it can be found right here in your internet home, cherished and blogged about to your heart’s content. I’ll tell you my favorites, how about yours?

1. Roadside Projects

I about peed my pants when I discovered this artist. Her name is Jayme McGowan and she’s absolutely irresistible. There is something about the faces of her creations that does it for me, not to mention how very much I like circus themed art. I’ve purchased three of her prints, three from her circus group (two are shown below)  and oh, how I want to own the fourth too. I can hardly wait till they show up. The originals, I have no doubt, are beyond beautiful. She creates in 3D paper, which is both very easy and very hard to pull off. The cutting out and gluing down of paper pieces is easy. The concept and execution is fundamentally difficult. That’s why I can’t say enough about artists like this. You can, literally, feel yourself climbing into them. How cool is that?

 

 

 

 

2. Abney Park

Steampunk. This is either a beloved subculture or one that is completely foreign in every sense of the word. Steampunk is a subculture that combines the romance of steam technology- think goggles, dirigibles, brass and oh, steam, with Victorian elegance and dreamy literary references. Military coats combined with long drawn Victorian dresses, tall hats adorned with cracked leather goggles. It is a world wholly its own in which many people trespass and carry on. There are many conventions, many fairs that tip its hat to this genre, and most Anime conventions and Comic Cons can be see filled with them. I love them something terrible. (Check out the book “Court of the Air” by Stephen Hunt for my current foray into the Steampunk genre)

Well it’s not just creative clothing and funny accents that gets us there. It is also music like Abney Park which is so very rich in texture, story and sound. And let’s not forget to mention how incredibly good looking their lead singer is. Particularly their newest CD, the songs are filled with the clicks and whistles of steam technology, rubbed with the velvety goodness of romantic, dark, foreboding vocals and delicious stringed instruments. I get a little warm just talking about them. They even have a track on the deliriously beautiful Mirrormaskmovie by Neil Gaiman.

3. Bitey Castle- Brackenwood Movies

Ooooh. I love this man. Adam Phillips is so brilliant I want take him home and devour him. I found Bitey Castle several years ago when he’d just started his film “Waterlollies” and honestly, I thought the man would never finish. But it’s done now and it’s fantastic. They are all fantastic. They are short flash movies and so worth the time.

Illustration Friday

Oh I am also deciding to return to my watercolor journal to do mini-paintings. I miss it. Expect to see me posting on Illustration Friday regularly starting this week.

This week’s word is Sour. I am a little stumped as to what to do. We’ll see.

Midnight in the garden of books

I check on my vegetable garden nearly every day, and every day I come away a little sadder. The storm that rocked us so heavily last weekend left most of my plants in tatters. I mean that literally, the leaves of my cabbage looked like the clothing of a poor orphan in 18th century London. My tomato plants, while miraculously still standing, look battered and war torn. One plant is growing two tiny tomatoes, but otherwise not a single new growth as far as I can tell. I wonder if they will grow at all.

My pepper plants are doing alright, I suppose. Some of them are growing peppers, though some of them remain tragically barren. Some of my basil plants struggle just to remain up right, while some are still growing, plodding along with strength and guile. I haven’t harvested any of them yet, though I very much want to.

I admit, I was not fully prepared for the life of a gardener/farmer. It is taxing. I cried over my damaged garden more than I think some of my neighbors cried over their broken fences, damaged houses and uprooted trees. Perhaps I am too emotionally invested. I don’t mind eating their fruits, but I am sorely wounded when mother nature gets callous.

The Fourthof July came and went this year with little, excuse the pun, fanfair. I’m not big into fireworks, I find them noisy and annoying as most of the people in my city set them off for a week before the holiday and at least a week after, so you’re always entreated to banging and booming. The cats get fidgety, and there is always so much debris and waste littering the sides of the road. I don’t get it, I’d rather just grill food and celebrate that way, if at all.

I have purchased a few new books that I will aprise you of.

Two of them are by Jane Austen. “Sense & Sensibility” and “Pride & Prejudice”  I have seen many a-movie that these books have been made into, but I haven’t read them, which I deeply regret and feel a sense of shame at having not even tried to read them. I love the time period and all the authors in it, and I love Jane Austen. So I have no idea what took me so long. I have read “Northanger Abby” which is a real treat to read. Parodies of the time period are funny and I enjoy them. I can’t help it.

The other is a surprising find. When I was at The Bookworm getting my new David Sedaris book signed, I looked over their sci-fi section while I was waiting. It was ridiculously small, smaller than any of my bookshelves at home and embarrassingly understocked, but they did have one new book that I was curious about. I liked the cover art, which I think does it for me when it comes to finding books I’ve never heard of. It is sort of the color and texture of tea stained parchment with a pencil and ink drawing of a hot air balloon with a boy clinging to a rope as it flies high into the air. I attempted to commit the name of the book to memory so I could look it up when I got home, but of course the moment we left the store the book’s author and title flew right out of my head.

That is, until I discovered it, again, inside the Boarders bookstore last night. Having a 25% off coupon helped with the decision, and I got it right away, lest I forget the name again. It’s called “The Court of the Air” by Stephen Hunt. It is absolutely delightful. “A fantastical tale of high adventuring, low-life rogues, and orphans on the run.” 

Seriously, I don’t think our society uses the words “low-life rogues” nearly enough as it is.