Da-da

The first words on the lips of children everywhere fill their parents with nothing but hope, delight and prayers. It is rarely if ever the often heard "NO" but the quiet suplication that equals either "ma-ma" or "Da-da" filling the hopes and dreams of one parent while dashing the other's.

Mine was pickle

DADA!

There isn't much of an update this week, a little bit has to do with LAZYNESS! More of it has to do with the fact that running our sunday night gamining sessions has fallen into my lap. I like my lap and things that fit within it so I have taken this new found responcibility and decided to nurture it.

Someone made a refference to the Dada movement the other week and it got me thinking (by some one I mean specifically Sasha) of the peculiar relationship between roleplaying games and textuality.

In many ways a role playing game has the potential to be the penultimate expression of the Dadaist ideal.

What? Oh good you are just going to take my word on that, very wise of you. Now sign over all your possessions and get in the Kool-Aid line. Well it is always worth a shot.

So let me break down what it is a roleplaying game is actually doing. The game master writes a book. He comes up with a setting, populates the setting wit interesting charecters that all have wants, needs, desires of thier own, he starts planning out villinas, which will pave the way for exciting fights, and harrowing moments, then it comes time for the main charecters.

Except during the creation of the main charecters, something happens, they some how become sentient. Not only that but they all have free will, and a hatred for their new god. They will often times, sometimes as often as possible, act in irrational ways, offend kings, run off with queens, burn down your lovingly crafted complex little villiages filled with, wants, needs, desires, and hopes. They will go to the east, east the direction where you planned nothing because everything of interest happens in the west. However, they don't care about the west because there are already things there. Its time to go east to see what new things there are to be seen.

Suddenly your lovingly crafted story is coming apart at the seams, being pulled in all directions by the sentient monsters you just created. Now as a game master, or god as it were, you have three options. bring down the ban hammer and become the despotic lord of all things you were meant to be. This usually leaves you sitting in the corrner of the game store, cackling, alone. You can let them tear the world asunder leaving nothing left but tears and ashes, but if you do they will just migrate like locusts to ELsewhere in the name of finding something new to kill and break, or three you can ride with it.

The thing about roleplaying games is that while one person may do the brunt of the grunt work it is just as much everyone elses story as it is yours. So, if you are good, you choose choice three and roll with it. When you do everrything becomes increadbly free form and more than slightly beautiful and you find yourself scrabbling the depths of creativity you never through you had in order to keep up with the other gods sitting around the table with you. Things will happen in ways you never would of originally concieved of, events spirial outwards like a blooming locust spiraling in all directions into an endless fractal pattern that is simply impossible alone.

There isn't much more random than a human beings need to rebel against someone elses established order.

So to make absolutely sure that there would be no normalcy what so ever, most pass fail situations are handled by a random number generator rather than things like dramatic nessesity.

There really isn't anything like running a roleplaying group, even the most well behaved one will take your plot for a ride and hang it out to dry before you get midway through the third game session, and when you get a really chaotic group best watch out, else half of them will end up dead because they will insist on taste testing everything, no matter how much of a bad idea it is.

Alrighty, that's it for this week, next week I'll update when I am able to, which may either be not very often or super often depending on who the writting process goes, and after that who know!

For now though, I am going to plot a future that will be ignored in favor for everything I haven't thought of, and god bless them for it.

Oh yes it occures to me that in order for it to be a truelly dadaist experience we would all take turns as being the game master. This is more than possible, I hope to show you how someday. So its only 85% dada which is still pretty intense.