Normally I regard Chris Mathews as a destructive force in the US political conversation, but here he uses his powers for good instead of evil. Watch him, sniffing out the telltale scent of historical ignorance, mete out a cruel, relentless, and utterly deserved humiliation.



(If you prefer, here's the unedited version of the same segment, with the comments by the second guest, Mark Green, left in:)

One of my favorite roleplaying settings of all time is Deadlands – a juicy little setting that combines westerns, steampunk, Cthulhu, alternate history, time travel, and zombies into a rich, tasty package.

Unfortunately, Deadlands is also the poster child for a style of roleplaying I love that is always doomed to failure.

But lemme fill you in a bit on the Deadlands history first. See, in 1863, a group of Indians had had enough with being beaten down by the white man, so a batch of them travelled secretly to the Hunting Grounds and broke the bonds on all the evil Manitou that had been bound there to release magic back to the world.

The first the white men found out about this was on the field of Gettysburg, where the North and South shot at each other. And as each man fell, they rose as zombies and chewed both sides to bits.

The Indian nations, fueled by magic, suddenly thundered forth to carve out a territory of their own, and both the North and South found themselves fighting on two fronts, unable to make headway. Ten years later, they’re still at a grudging war, brought to a virtual standstill.

The white man’s also learned to use magic, which they do by playing cards with the Manitou, betting their very souls to cast spells. And they’ve also learned how to fuse magic with mad science, creating all sorts of crazy ghost rock-fuelled gadgets.

But the Manitou are evil, and their end goal was to turn the world into a place of utter fear and terror so the Reckoners could be unleashed. The wars were good, but they wanted more – so they created the foulest monsters, dredged up from the subconscious, and now all sorts of ghoulies and critters are roaming the Weird West that need to be defeated.

Enter the heroes.

The nice thing about Deadlands is that it clearly has a Story, and each sourcebook advanced that tale a little. You’d get the latest supplement and discover “Oh, the North’s now in control of Shan Fan,” or find that in fact the plots that Character X had to make a railway to the West Coast had fallen apart. And there were rich secrets to be discovered (my favorite? Discovering that the leader of the Southern Confederate Alliance had been taken over by a doppelganger bent on hell and destruction).

Things happened when you weren’t around. Which was an incentive to pick up the new books. You had movers and shakers in the Weird West that you got attached to, and wanted to see what happened to them.

Now, Deadlands isn’t perfect. It has perhaps the most flavorful mechanic system ever devised, using both poker chips and a deck of cards – so cool - but the mechanics are complex and difficult to learn. Worse, some of the characters are outright useless (I played a Huckster, the guy who plays cards with demons, only to have them admit in later supplements that you wound up getting fried three times as often as the other PCs).

And Deadlands is the deadliest game around, if you play it straight out of the box. You have to make Guts checks every time you encounter a monster, which pretty much kills you, and every firefight is deadly. They have pre-planned adventures, but looking at them and the stingy rewards you get at the end of them, one wonders how any PCs survived to the end of any of them.

But the real problem with Deadlands? It has a Story to tell.

See, I’ve been rereading the supplements lately (when I’m down, RPGs are my comfort reading), and I couldn’t remember how the story ended. I remembered that everything did in fact get wrapped up and the Reckoners were disposed of, but I was surprised given how well I remembered the rest of it that I couldn’t remember the ending.

So I read Unity, the final Deadlands supplement. And remembered how terrible it was.

The story was actually pretty good. It wrapped up things. But as an adventure, which it was supposed to be, it sucked.

Unity is pretty much this:

“Go here and fail to save this important character who does better things than you do, who must die to advance the plot. Then go here and have another important character save your bacon from the hordes of evil armies. Then a third important character handles the Reckoners for you, and you play his errand boy.”

The thing is, I like dynamic worlds. As a reader, I like RPGs that have some movement – the world of D&D isn’t that interesting to me, mainly because it never really changes. Deadlands is great because it feels like history.

As a player, however, I want the ability to affect that. And when you have A Story to tell, you can’t really knock it far off-track. If you somehow, via a Herculean effort, manage to kill the mayor of Shan Fan and take control, you have now diverged from the official storyline and all future supplements don’t apply to you. And if you can’t do that, then what’s the point of roleplaying?

As a GM, I try to allow my characters to attempt anything. There are some things they’re vastly unlikely to succeed at, and some things that are downright foolish – as in, “If you do this, I am not going to attempt to pull your fat out of the fire, which may lead to a TPK” – but they can try anything. And in some cases, they’ve succeeded wildly.

When you have A Story, however, that’s hard to do. The PCs can’t stop the Modron March, or if they do then whoops the future supplements are worthless. That’s a bad place to be in. You have to leave the villains there for other PCs to fight.

Deadlands tried gamely to fight this. They had the rule of “If you stat it, they will kill it,” so wisely they did not give statistics for the biggest and most vital player characters. And they held votes from various groups around the world – if enough PCs succeeded in this module here, then the official storyline would reflect that victory. If they failed, then the storyline would reflect the failure.

But in the end, Deadlands, though a compelling read, is ultimately a failure as a roleplaying game because it puts the characters in a little box. And that’s never fun.

Sadly, my favorite game, Planescape, did that as well… But that’s a story for another day.

A trip to any other country and you could be forgiven for letting the travelogue slip for one’s last couple of days. But this is Germany. You’ve got to be methodical.

Tuesday — Wind down day for the con organizers. As the catered lunch is prepared, I see what seem to be little white pills laid out on each plate. For a moment I think I have found the secret — the supplement Germans consume to counteract all that fatty cheese and salty mineral water, so they don’t drop like flies from heart disease and hypertension.



Nope. They’re Uncle Oinker’s Bacon Flavored Mints, the remaining supply of a tin brought to the show by Charlie Krank.

I’m happy to oblige a request to run a game for the team. Con runners deserve a chance to play, too. Here’s the challenge — Fabian has requested a game set in the world of the American Empire series, which he knows from this blog. American Empire wasn’t designed for a one-shot; it had a huge chunk of introductory exposition. It begins with considerable player frustration and confusion as the players struggle to understand the alien culture their cybersoldier PCs are required to interact with. A few minutes in I realize I’m overdoing it by having the aliens speak semi-incomprehensibly, as they did in the original campaign. There’s enough verbal confusion with a group playing in a second language. Due to the compressed time scale, the aliens were a little more Vancian this time.

The soldiers are sent to train a tank battalion in the boondocks, only to realize that the trainees are absurdly ill-motivated and reluctant to actually use the tanks. After successfully forging an optimistic Power Point presentation to headquarters, covering their asses no matter what they do, the characters are left at loose ends. After an ill-fated intimidation run against the local villagers, it somehow all winds up in a climactic fight with a six-headed alien dragon. It’s fun to watch the players used to more traditional games as they discover the open-ended possibilities of the new HeroQuest system. Afterwards I discover this is the first tabletop experience ever for one of the players, who until now has been a freeformer only. How daunting.

All in all I found it interestingly odd to do a sequel to a completed series for a new group of players. The material developed during the original certainly made me prepared to be spontaneous for this unexpected revival.

( More travelogue after the jump. )

“Polyamory doesn’t work,” said my friend. “I’ve just seen too many of those relationships crash and burn. You just can’t make it work.”

The problem with that is, of course, the goal of polyamory. What is it? It’s pretty clear for the other side, but poly’s a little more mutable.

See, as a non-poly guy in a monogamous relationship, I have the luck of not having every sexual interaction I have be the trial for my entire relationship style. When I had, oh, fifty failed relationships before I finally latched onto my lovely wife, I didn’t have to hear about how each of those fifty crash-and-burns were proof that monogamy’s innately substandard. (And thank God, because with fifty failed relationships, I evidently had enough problems floating around.)

Yet monogamy also has a culturally built-in end-goal. See, I got married. That’s what monogamous couples of all stripes are supposed to do – heck, there’s a war being waged so that gay couples can share in my monogamous uniting process. And marriage is designed to be forever, thanks to that whole “‘til death do us part” clause.

So if I make it to the end with Gini, and one of us dies before we get divorced, then I score a win for monogamy! I am now proof that monogamy works, because we clung to it all the way down. And that’s regardless of whether I actually signed on for that victory condition or not!

Isn’t that grand? Especially since we get to ignore the vast majority of people who don't get there, or the multiple failed relationships that generally precede a victorious marriage?

But poly has no clear end goal. I mean, is poly supposed to be eternal? I’ve seen any number of poly relationships end not with a bang, but with a whimper, as two people slowly lose interest in each other and move on without any hard feelings. It’s not a breakup, just two folks evolving in opposite directions.

Is that what poly’s supposed to do? Well, according to the monogamous goal of capital-F Forever, no. But should we judge polyamory by a one-relationship standard? I’d say not.

And more importantly, is every breakup bad? I’d say not. Certainly there are any number of marriages that fail not because the people involved are evil, but because two healthy people continually grow and change in the course of their lives. Sometimes, what you needed at age twenty is not what you need at age forty… And sometimes, two people diverge.

That doesn’t mean that your relationship failed. It means things changed. Ideally, your partner evolves along with you, but sometimes that’s not healthy. Sometimes, you can have a short relationship that doesn’t work out yet is entirely satisfying for what you needed then.

It’s not cool to say that your divorced ex-partner is still a good guy and you still love him – just not enough to stay. In a monogamous society, you’re supposed to find the blame and assign it straight away so you can figure out who broke the monogamy. Because it’s clearly a fault with you guys, not the system.

Which is not to say that poly doesn’t involve high drama from time to time. ‘Course it does! You’re juggling more people, and more people means more opportunities for things to go wrong. When poly relationships crumble, often they do so in an avalanche of hurt feelings as not just one, but several people are pulled into the maelstrom. Poly’s trickier to pull off in a stable way, and I don’t think anyone really debates that.

But I don’t think that every breakup is a sign of unhealthiness…. Just as I don’t think that every end-goal victory for monogamy is the sign of a strong relationship. Certainly we all know two desperate people who’ve latched onto each other and refuse to leave. There are a ton of radically unhealthy dynamics that can cause two people to unhappily superglue themselves at the hip through life, though one suspects they’ll be kicking their heels off in heaven once they’re finally released from that damned contract.

That’s not really a score for monogamy. If anything, it’s a checkmark against it, in my book.

The problem is that I’m loath to say that any relationship style flat-out doesn’t work. I’m not particularly comfortable with BDSM master/slave relationships in my own personal life, but I do know a few people that it seems to work for. And I’ve seen some long-term poly relationships that would terrify the shit out of neurotic, clingy ol’ me, but appear to be just fine for all involved.

People are individuals. I tend to think any blanket statement on any lifestyle statement is just a way of quietly asking others to tell you that what you want is not just okay, but actively good.

You know what doesn’t work? People. People are fucked beyond comprehension. And any time they manage to interact properly for any amount of time that makes them happy is something I have a hard time dismissing globally, y’know?