The rusty bottle opener of truth

I have an OkCupid account. Combination of it having an interesting match algorithm, and the fact that I am at least vaguely after a relationship, and there's a (tiny) chance something could come from there.

Today I got a message from them telling me that someone has rated me highly (4 or 5 out of 5). I look around said persons profile. They don't particularly grab me as someone I want to get to know (not 'they're terrible', just not getting the 'Oooh, interesting...' response). Because they look vaguely familiar and I want to work out if I know them through LARP or somesuch, I google their user name. No links appear, but as I'm about to click the search closed, something catches my eye; the google title for their OkCupid ends '24 / F / Brooklyn, New York'.

*…isn't she supposed to be in London?* I think. So I check, and yes, her current profile reads '27 / F / London, United Kingdom'. *Must be an old profile* my thoughts go. But curiousity wins out, and I click through to view the cached version of that page. Google tells me said page was cached on the 8th of November 2012, suggesting that this user has aged three years and moved three and a half thousand miles in the last two weeks.

I understanding caching can be weird, so there's still a possibility that it's from earlier, just that cache has been held onto or somesuch (though it seems unlikely, especially given the cached page mentions 2012 in various places). But now I'm intrigued enough to have a look through both versions of the profile, cross comparing them. (Compare for yourself; cached and current)

One is from Derry, the other Belfast. One mentions a fourteen year old daughter, the other doesn't. There are a few differences in the huge list of liked books/films/music. Beyond that, it's pretty much identical, and in some ways that's its own strangeness — in both New York and London she says she's working simultaneously as a hairdresser, sound person for film, and in a bar. Different hairdressers and bars (specifically named), but the same three jobs. Impossible? No. Unlikely? I'd say so.

So, cache weirdness, extreme self re-invention in the search for love, or something else? What do people think?

So, today I successfully passed my First Aid at Work course with St John Ambulance. The last three days have not only involved the dreadful thing of having to be arriving for 9am after 30-40 minutes travel to (rather than my usual arriving for 10am with 10 minutes travel), but it's basically been having huge amounts of information poured into my head, with liberal stirring from practice sessions in between.

It was somewhat nerve-wracking waiting to do the assessment, and immediately afterwards you dwell on all the tiny things you got wrong. But like everyone else in my class, I passed - they were teaching us to a level considerably above that which we were being tested at.

So, the inspiration for this particular post was redhillian asking "how you feel having taken a point in green-hat levels, and what you think you'll do with it?" (for those that don't play Maelstrom, Green Hat is a term for the first aid crew there).

How do I feel? Rather tired, and like the information is leaking out of my ears, because we covered a lot of stuff in the last few days. But beyond that...

There's part of me that's now analysing the world in a new way, looking for risks, wondering what you would do where, etc. It's similar to having done drama GCSE when I watch a play, having studied graphic design when I look at type, or having been a traffic warden when I'm looking at parking spaces; when you've learned a chunk of specialist knowledge, it lets you 'look behind the curtain' in a way you don't do otherwise, and it creates a new set of possible situations for your brain to model and consider.

I certainly do feel more confident that, if there was some kind of accident around me, I'd be able to get involved, help people, do something rather than run, gawp, or otherwise be useless. What I did, would I get it all perfectly right? 'course not. But I'm confident that I know enough both to judge where to get involved, and what to do where I am.

What am I going to do with it?

Well, firstly, since my work paid for it, I'll be using my First Aid at Work course to be one of the First Aiders at work. There will now be three of us, which means we've got our twelve person office fairly well covered. I'm quite glad of this, because it means someone else should be around who knows what they're doing if anything does go wrong, but given of those three, I'm the one most often in the office (as both the others do rather more external events than I do, and one uses flexitime to not be in every day), in the long run I'll probably use it somewhen.

Secondly, at LARP. Maelstrom and other big events already have their dedicated First Aiders, so I'll be having a chat with them about what I should and shouldn't/can and can't do, but in the case of an accident basically I'd guess I'd mostly be doing the very immediate assessment, sending people for help with information, and stuff where it's best to have someone doing something immediatelly - applying pressure to a bleeding wound, opening someone's airways, CPR should it be apparent that was needed. In the Odyssey, where I crew, it might also involve helping with some of the simpler stuff where we're doing things in the forest a long way from them - giving someone an icepack for a sprained ankle or whatever. Assuming I'm not advised otherwise, I'll be looking into getting a LARP-appropriate looking pouch that I can fit a first aid kit in, so I can have one with me when I'm playing.

Smaller systems that I play in? I'll play it by ear; I'm quite wary of becoming anyone's dedicated/official first aider, in large part because that means I likely have less time to enjoy the game, assuming my qualification even covers me for that.

Beyond that, I already have a bag of many pockets and spaces, so I'm most likely going to keep the first aid kit I bought after finishing the course with me, unless it really proves to be too big/awkwardly sized (at which point, I might look into changing my bag - I've been considering such for a while anyway, as I think I could find a better one for how I use it), if it does, then I'd work out some smaller bag I could fit what I really needed in.

So, yes. I have gained a point in an ability (maybe I should've been saving up my xp to put it elswhere, but ah well), and while I'll be quite happy to never use these skills, I also feel calm about the idea of doing so, if it was needed.

The one thing I'm curious about is why St John Ambulance tell us not to use burn creams, then sell us a First Aid kit with burn cream in it.

('In defence of' seems to be becoming a running theme in my blogs. Probably because it works well when a post is a reaction to something)

My first introduction to RPGs was through D&D. A rather badly run, contest game that me and my friends had been sent off to as we were basically the geekiest. With one of my friends putting on a painfully bad voice throughout, as he was playing a female druid.

I think it was probably… four to six years before I played it again. When I was introduced to roleplaying more fully, via the Old World of Darkness. And for year or two after that, I'd not played D&D at all, and all I saw and heard of it failed to impress me — the huge split between the rules for combat and for everything else, the focus on combat, the tendency for it to seem too much based on mechanics and little on roleplay, all those things put me off.

And then, I forget why (might've been because one of the people running it was a good friend and the only other gamer on my Economics course, the other runner was shakalooloo who I knew well and got on with, and I knew most or all of the others playing), I joined a game, D&D 3.5 in a specific setting, and played in a game that lasted an entire university year.

And had a blast.

It was a fairly crazy game; we played from level 1 to 20, it was relatively high optimisation (without us taking the piss), and we averaged about 1.5 character deaths a session. Yes, this reduced the depth of character and the length of stories those characters told. But they all had real personalities, real drives, wants, places they would go against what was best for what they wanted, or what they believed in.

And it added a real feeling of realism, of tension, of challenge to the game. When we stood outside a dragon's lair, as we did several times across the campaign, we knew that most likely, one or two of us weren't coming out, and it could be more, it could be all of us (we had one Total Party Kill during the year of play).

The other thing I liked about it was the tactics of the battles — most of the games I've played have very description-based battles. Whilst this helps them sound awesome, lets you do cool things in them (though sometimes losing track of where everyone is, what they're doing) it also means that your descriptions are mostly there to provide coolness (and by doing so pick up stunt bonuses if you're playing Exalted), whilst picking from a relatively small array of actual combat actions.

In D&D, you can add in the cool description (though I will certainly agree that the game doesn't particularly promote you doing so that much), but where you approach the bad guy from, what combat actions you take, how everyone is positioned matter far more, and in a way that's easy to interact with. Plus, for those D&D games using a battlemap, while the DM can certainly pull something out of his arse and have the bad guy disappear, it makes it harder to fudge things into "You don't quite catch him" — once the battlemap is laid out, it restricts the DMs options as much as it does the players.

This can also apply to wider things; the thing that prompted this post was the Monday evening Pathfinder game I play in. We don't use a battlemap, but things still get very tactical, and it's all about using our fairly wide array of abilities appropriately against our opposition. Sometimes we steamroller it — we managed to liberate a city by assassinating five hill giants in one night, and two dozen mercenary guards the night after, with none of the battles taking more than two or three turns — though that was largely because we spent more time planning our approach than we did on the actual combats.

And sometimes we don't do so well — as our characters are now rulers of a fairly large area, assassination attempts are par for the course, and today we lost a party member to such. And he loved it; it was a really challenging encounter, where it really could've gone either way, myself and the third PC teleported in the round he went down, and the assassin decided to finish the job rather than survive himself.

I actually think it's a strength of the particular set of adventures we're playing, that they build in a chance of that happening — yes, the DM/ST of a game can always set assassins on people if they do specific stuff to deserve it, but when it's a more general thing, the question of who they're targeting, when they'll do it, whether other PCs will be there, and so forth are all very relevant. Whereas a rolled chance of them being set on a random character keeps you unsure, makes it a surprise, and makes it feel fairer

Now, you can take all the above and say "Yes, well, that might be fun, but it's rollplay, not roleplay."

To which I would reply with two things; firstly, the fun is a very important part of it. Secondly, I have played in deep and heavy roleplay D&D games. It's not a game I would use with the intention of "This is how I'll introduce people to the roleplay aspect of gaming", but if you play it with decent roleplayers, they will roleplay well within it.

Secondly, whilst it's somewhat ligher on the encouragement for roleplay, the tools are still there — the skills cover their areas sufficiently, and there are a plethora of noncombat spells and spells with noncombat application.

It's not the game I want to play the most, it definitely wouldn't be the "If you could only ever play one RPG forever more, what would you pick". It's the action movie, not the deep and moving epic.

But sometimes, the fun and carnage and action and explosions of an action movie are what you want. And thus, sometimes, D&D is the game I want to play.

[Poll #1877682]

Inspired partly by a suggestion from omniscient_fool, today's post is on morality.

I don't believe in morality, at least insofar as an absolute thing - I don't believe in there being 'true' right and wrong. I believe that there are actions that are harmful to others, and indeed, harmful to the larger communities that we live in, and that cultures have over times developed extensive and detailed moral systems to (amongst other aims) promote the survival, prosperity, and happiness of the communities within it.

For people that have a belief in a god or gods, I can certainly see why they would believe in absolute morality. But for people who don't? I really don't see it, I don't see where it arises, what could back up its existence. I'm not saying that I think being nasty doesn't matter, that it's fine to do things that would be described as evil or wrong. Just that 'evil' and 'wrong' are terms we have created for a group of actions, most of which are harmful to us, and/or others, and/or to the overall community (but some of which aren't).

To develop the thought a bit further, I don't actually consider myself a good or moral person. I'd say I mostly act in a way that'd be considered fairly reasonable compared to baseline morals of the population. But I don't do so from thoughts of good or evil, or because I feel that I should. I do so due to a combination of factors; because a general look at most actively nasty actions done for gain suggests that the gain is rather outweighed by the risks and results of getting caught/fucking up, as a sub-reason of the previous, because I care about my friends and wouldn't want to hurt them or bring problems down upon them, and (the most directly moral I get) I don't like to cause pain without a good reason.

In terms of 'good' things I do, a lot of it I think comes from an idea of efficiency. If I'm walking down the street, and I see someone looking lost, then if I'm in the Kings Cross/Tottenham Court Road/Soho/Picadilly Circus area, or other areas I know pretty well, I'll probably actively approach and offer directions, because I know these areas pretty well, thus can fairly quickly and easily point them in the right direction. But if I'm in any kind of rush? Nope, probably even if asked for directions. I think my interest in electoral reform might also flow from this, as the current system is inacurate/inefficient at getting a democratic and effective government, thus should be reformed, ditto stuff like the effects of Lobbying on government.

So, there's my thoughts on morality. Does my lack of any feeling of what is right or wrong make my a psycho/sociopath? No idea; possibly one of the 'light' ones that fill many board rooms. And hey, it works for me.

This was going to be a post on why I'm very glad Exalted is getting a third edition, but it turned into one on why I enjoy the game. I may well come back to the third edition thing later

White Wolf has always been the most major company in my gaming experience — I've done a certain amount of D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, and other D20 games, I've done a smatteriing of other things, and I'm currently giving a try to games like Fiasco, and other more narativist games (my rough opinion on the latter being that I like them as an occasional thing, but they're not something I'd want to do every week) — but throughout all of that, I've done a lot of oWoD and a fair amount of Exalted.

I've always liked Exalted for many reasons. It has the Storyteller system, which I'm used to, and I find the Attribute + Ability rolls make sense, provide a wide array of different possible rolls for different situations, and set the base assumed difficulty in the right place; if you have 4 dice (e.g. Strength 2, Athletics 2; the dice are d10s) you've got a pretty good chance of succeeding at a difficulty 1 roll (i.e. roll one 7+ on those dice).

But beyond that, it has a big world, that is noticeably different to the majority of Western fantasy, as they decided to actively avoid the Tolkeinsian style, a world with a lot that's happened in it and a lot that might happen. It's a deep world; whenever I play D&D it feels like the rest of the world is sort-of our there, and it has dragons and heroes and dungeons and treasure in it, but it doesn't really matter, there's not really anything going on there, it's what's happening with you that is what'll change anything in the world. Whereas Exalted has this huge world (about 50% more landmass than Earth, IIRC) with so much information on what's going on where, and so many different schemes, wars, rivalries, tensions and so forth all ready to blow.

It has player characters powerful enough that you're pretty big fish in that world, you can make real changes in what happens by your actions — sure, there are people more powerful than you, but you are a valid threat, a useful ally, not a bug to be played with or squashed at a whim. One of the things I want/enjoy in roleplaying games is that ability to effect change, to see the world different than what it would've been if my character wasn't there (I think it's one of the things that somewhat puts me of Fiasco and similar; they're more about creating an overall story that's interesting, rather than individual character's influence on the story/world), and Exalted gives me that.

Another thing that I like is that it doesn't assume that you're good. Exalts are heroes, but only in the sense that they are very definitely willing to use the power they are given, they want to do things with it — to chage the world, just like what I want out of roleplaying — and this means I can play my default style of character more easily.

Anyone who's played in more than one tabletop RPG with me will probably have noticed that I don't play nice people. I don't play out and out evil, it's usually just amoral. Despite this amorality, I'm generally on the side of the good guys, partly because that means I actually get to play that character in the game, rather than being killed or left behind, but also because, to quote Spike from Buffy, "I like the world" — that which the bad guys are doing to it will likely interfere with whatever I want to do in the world.

I think I enjoy the amorality due to a combination of it allowing a directness of approach I enjoy, and because it lets me just take the limiters off and be blunt, be nasty if needs be, and take the expedient solution rather than the one that society deems best. Exalted allows that; to some extent it even encourages that, whilst still allowing Big Damn Heroes who actually are actively good guys.

The other main thing I like about it is that it has lots of relatively simple and narrow powers, rather than more broader ones, and that those powers are cheap to pick up — when I played more old World of Darkness stuff, it got quite annoying how long it took to save up for the higher level powers, whereas in Exalted you're only ever 2-3 games away from a new power, it's just that those powers build more incrementally to the big combinations.

So yes, that's why I like Exalted. What about you, what's your favourite roleplaying game, and why?

Why do I blog? I'm not actually that much of a sharing person; I don't feel the need to share my life, my thoughts, my feelings with people too much, but yet I do blog.

Part of it is an emphasis on 'that much'; I do have some desire to share.

But a lot of it is a desire to share interesting things with people, to go "Look at this! Isn't it awesome/interesting/terrible!". And whilst a lot of that can be covered by my linkposts, or by the amusing photos I occasionally link, I do also like writing out something that'll hold people's attention, that they'll find interesting, I just often find myself stuck for a starting point.

Like, for instance, twenty minutes ago, when I was going "What the hell do blog about today?" And whilst andrewducker's suggestion "Your inability to think of interesting things to write about?" was initially annoying, it sparked off this, which is something worth spending a blogpost about.

So, I'm going to ask you — my dear readers — for suggestions of subjects for the rest of the month. I've already had the suggestion of talking about my work, I'll probably delve into it at some point but any specific questions people have about what I do or the nature of Unlock Democracy would be a help with that.

But beyond that, what do you want to read me pontificating about?