Category: blog

I’ve never been someone who goes to sleep early, and I only wake up early when I have to, but I had a 7:30am call the next day, and I was in a lot of scenes, so I’d closed my bedroom door and turned off the lights at the relatively early hour of 10pm. I sighed, reached up to the shelf above my bed, and pressed play on my CD player. I put my head on on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. I listened to the disc spin up, and then the mournful guitar that opens the second disc of The Wall began to play.

Hey you… out there in the cold getting lonely getting old can you feel me?

Hey you… Standing in the aisles with itchy feet and fading smiles can you feel me?

Hey you… Don’t help them to bury the light. Don’t give in without a fight.

Before I realized what was happening, tears began to run out of the corners of my eyes. I was so lonely, so sad, so frustrated and so unhappy. I imagined myself like Pink, in The Wall; an artist who felt trapped by success he wasn’t ready for, and the expectations of everyone around him to maintain and expand it.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as the complete breakdown Pink has, of course, but I was a hormonal teenager. I was a dramatic artiste, and until a few hours earlier I had been staying at a beach house with my best friend and his family, in a house full of the girls from his mom’s drill team, including the girl I liked. Oh, she didn’t like me back, and was was never going to like me back — she was cool and confident, and I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, I was a total weirdo even when I was trying hard not to be — but I could dream that someday I would graduate from Duckie to Blaine.

I laid there in my bed, listening to Pink Floyd, and I cried. I cried because I was lonely. I cried because I was frustrated. I cried because I was in almost everything on the call sheet for the next day, but I didn’t so much more than say “Aye, sir,” and that was all I’d been doing for what felt like a long time. I cried because, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, I felt like I was having my childhood taken away from me.

I let myself feel sad. I let myself miss my friends. I let myself wallow in the unrequited love that is so outsized when you’re a teenager. I stared at the ceiling until the CD was finished, and then I listened to it again, finally falling asleep during the second time through, sometime before Comfortably Numb.

So, obviously, I got better.

And I haven’t thought about that night, late in the summer of 1987, in over twenty-five years, but earlier this afternoon, it came back to me as clear and viscerally as if it had just happened. I’ve been playing classic NES games on my RetroPie, and 1987 was the summer that we were obsessed with The Legend of Zelda. We played a lot of Blades of Steel, Double Dribble, and Lifeforce, but we were obsessed with Zelda. In those days, we discovered secrets in the game by hearing them repeated from kids who knew a kid who knew a kid who went to camp with a kid. We pooled our money and bought big strategy guides that we couldn’t really afford, even though it felt like cheating, because that was the only way to get help when we were stuck. We made maps on graph paper, and kept notes about the different weapons, their damage against different enemies, and all the rumours we’d heard about secret levels and hidden dungeons. That was the summer we stayed up all night more than once, listening to Depeche Mode, Van Halen, New Order, and The Smiths while we ate enough junk food and drank enough Jolt cola to kill a muggle. That was the summer that I started to figure out who I was, and began figuring out who I wanted to be, and on this particular night that I’m remembering right now, I wanted to be with my friends.

Playing these old games has been like unwrapping memories, gifts I’d hidden for myself and forgotten about, and just accidentally knocked off a shelf. When I remembered how to beat King Hippo in Punch Out, though I hadn’t thought about that game in decades, and had completely forgotten that he ever existed, I felt like I’d punched a hole through time and watched myself, thirty years ago, doing it for the first time. The same thing happened when my hands took over and made me a spectator to a game of Super Mario Bros. that was played almost entirely by memory.

I have my system set up on the floor in my office right now, because I haven’t figured out where my RetroPie can live permanently, and my 44 year-old hips can’t handle sitting on the rug like their 14 year-old version could (though my 44 year-old self has a 100% better chance of actually kissing a girl before the end of the day than my 14 year-old self ever did) but I’ve spent hours there over the last few days, revisiting these games I loved when I was a kid, and letting the memories they reveal wash over me.

Building and updating and configuring and running this RetroPie (which is currently in a tiny, NES case that I made on my 3D printer) was a fun and rewarding experience, but the real joy that I get from Retrogaming isn’t from playing games from my youth, in some cases for the very first time. The real joy — in fact, the real magic — is when the animated goal celebration in Blades of Steel unlocks the memory of my best friend, Ryan, scoring against me in a two-player game to tie the score, standing up and mimicking the 8-bit characters while saying, “He who dances last, dances funkiest!” It’s when I instinctively remember how to get to the graveyard in Zelda, hearing the music it plays when I get there, and then getting knocked over by a sad memory like the one I wrote at the beginning of this post. These memories are priceless to me, and Retrogaming is not just the key that unlocks the chest where they’re stored, it’s the treasure map I use to find it. I feel like there is power in these memories, though I don’t know precisely what that power is, or how to use it.

I guess I’ll just have to keep playing until I figure it out.

We dropped out of hyperspace somewhere near the edge of the outer rim. I was looking at the scanner, so I was the first to see the freighter. It was inside the Ghost Nebula, and appeared to be disabled.

The comm crackled to life. Between bursts of static, we heard “…distress … oxygen … please help…” 

Our mechanic wanted to help the ship. I was convinced it was a trap. Before we could come to blows about it, the captain ordered me to run another scan, which confirmed that the ship was, indeed, venting oxygen into space.

“I’m a droid,” I reminded them, “I don’t care about oxygen the way you meat sacks do. Pull up close to the ship and I’ll go investigate.”

Cap pulled us up alongside the freighter. We attempted to raise them on the comm, but they were silent. A quick scan showed weak life signs. “If anyone is alive in there, they won’t be much longer,” the medic said. The captain decided that we’d connect our airlocks, so we could evac the survivors more quickly. I volunteered to go first into the ship. I’m big, I don’t need to breathe, and I’m built to kill, so if it was a trap, I wanted to be first in, to protect my crewmates.

The airlock attached and I cycled through. The ship was dark inside, except for flickering lights.

“IG, what do you see?” The captain asked me.

“It looks empty, at least on this deck,” I replied. 

“What’s the oh-two situation?”

“Irrelevant to my existence,” I said. I sometimes make jokes. I’m not very good at it and my timing is usually bad, they tell me.

“Just check the level, Iggy,” he said. That’s not my name. My designation is IG-426. They call me Iggy. Biologicals are curious that way.

I looked at a scanner. “It’s … one hundred percent. The ship is perfectly pressurized,” I said. Before the captain could reply, a group of humanoids revealed themselves, blasters drawn.

In under a second, I scanned them all and identified their leader. In the next second, I raised my disruptor rifle. Before the third second had ticked by, I fired.

+++

Last night, I started a Star Wars RPG campaign with some friends. We are playing as a small rebel cell, five years before the events of Rogue One. My character is a reprogrammed imperial assassin droid (yes, because I think K-2SO is cool) who was given to this cell by a mysterious Rebel agent, which allowed me to drop into the campaign three sessions after it began, and fits into my real life situation of knowing one of the players very well, and being barely acquainted (until now) with the rest of the players.

I haven’t been a PC in a campaign in years, and I’ve never played a Star Wars RPG until now, and I’m already looking forward to playing next week, because it was so much fun. We’re using the Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion rule books. Our GM has us focused on narrative, instead of tactical minis combat, which is my favorite way to play any RPG, because it’s about the collaborative storytelling experience, rather than the boardgame experience.

It’s a really fun system, and there’s a ton of material that I’m looking forward to reading and incorporating into my character. I shouldn’t like the primary dice mechanic, because it requires proprietary dice, but it’s so well-designed, I don’t mind. Check it out:

The core mechanic of the Age of Rebellion is the skill check. At times, the GM will have the characters roll pools of dice to determine whether their actions succeed or fail. Whenever you roll a skill check, you compare a pool of “positive dice” and their results against the results of a pool of “negative dice.” Positive dice help your character accomplish a task or achieve beneficial side effects. These dice may reflect his innate talents or abilities, special training, superior resources, or other advantages that he can apply to the specific task. Negative dice represent the forces that would hinder or disrupt him, such as the inherent difficulty of the task, obstacles, additional risks, or another character’s efforts to thwart the task.

If your character’s successes () outnumber his failures (), the action succeeds. However, the situations of Age of Rebellion are rarely simple, and the game’s custom dice do more than determine whether an action succeeds or fails. Even as the dice indicate whether an action succeeds or fails, they determine if the character gains any Advantage () or suffers any Threat () as the result of the attempt. The sheer number of possibilities provides opportunities to narrate truly memorable action sequences and scenes. Nearly anything can happen in the heat of the moment; even a single shot fired at an Imperial Star Destroyer might hit some critical component that results in its destruction. Players and GMs alike are encouraged to take these opportunities to think about how the symbols can help move the story along and add details and special effects that create action-packed sessions.

Even for someone like me, who has the legendary ability to roll dice in a statistically improbable and terrible way, the dice don’t get in the way of the fun, and instead of simply deciding if you succeed or fail, they sort of land you on a spot that’s in a spectrum between total success and rolling two 19s in a row doesn’t get you out of the acid pit for some reason not that I’m saying Chris Perkins deliberately murdered Aeofel because he is a monster.

cough

I really owe a lot to Rogue One, because it reawakened a love of Star Wars that I’d forgotten I had, after the disappointment from the prequels and the cluttered mess of the EU that never managed to land on me in a meaningful way. But after seeing Rogue One twice, The Force Awakens twice, and playing in this game last night, I have this desire to not just watch the original Star Wars films again (get the despecialized editions if you can because they are amazing), but to also dig into Rebels.

One of the inherent challenges in posting something new for 31 straight days is finding something worth sharing or examining or just talking about every day that feels worth the effort. To be honest, I don’t feel like writing a single word today. But I did get to play my friend Chris Kluwe’s upcoming game, Twilight of the Gods today, and it has me thinking about tabletop gaming.

Other than what we tested and played on Tabletop, I haven’t played a lot of games this year. Early this year, my group was broken up and scattered to different states and countries (thanks for taking another thing away from me, 2016), so when we were able to get the gang together, we only played Pandemic Legacy (which I highly recommend). We also played a little bit of Codenames and Splendor, but that’s pretty much been all we did.

It’s a weird feeling for me, to go from playing games almost every day (and at least once every week) to not playing really at all, and not really wanting to. I feel like a big part of my life has been put into suspended animation, and I have to decide if it’s worth taking it out of hibernation to make it part of my job, again. On the one hand, it’s really great to do what you love for your job. On the other hand, taking my favorite hobby and making it my job left me without something fun to do when I wanted or needed to unwind after work, and I know this is a first world problem that nobody cares about. So much has happened with Tabletop in the last year or so that is upsetting, I almost don’t want to play games at all, because it makes me think about stuff that makes me sad. I created Tabletop to put more gamers into the world. That was all I wanted to do, and I think we did that. I didn’t want a lot of the other stuff that came along for the ride, and I hope that, someday, I’ll be able to find my way back to the joy that I wanted to share in the first place.