It doesn’t matter if you are awesome

There is a lot of advice out there for DMs. What you don’t see a ton of is advice for players. I’ve played with a lot of players: I was in Living Greyhawk from 2002 until its end, which means convention play with random people. I’ve seen a lot of players, and they played even more characters and I saw what worked and what didn’t. I’m not saying I’m an amazing player —I can see something work without having the skill, patience or inclination to do it myself— but I like to think I’ve got a good sense of what works and what doesn’t. From this I’ve learned something that may shock a lot of you:

It doesn’t matter how awesome your character is if they don’t help the party.

The biggest thing that people tend to forget, even really, really skilled gamers that I admire, is that modern D&D is a team game. There are games where players are constantly backstabbing each other and whatnot,  but most games follow the assumption the designers work with: That a team of specialists, go do heroic things as a team.

As I’ve mentioned before, Penny Arcade and Weregeek both describe sports with gaming (MMO) metaphores, and you can easily convert these into gaming terms. Each player in a sport has a job, and they are very good at doing that job. Now, I don’t know sports that well, but even I know that you don’t have all quarterbacks on a football team, or all…um, goalies on a hockey  team. Ok, so I really don’t know sports: I think of it more like a commando team, a group of elite agents working together to beat obstacles that would break lesser foes: I’m told that The Dirty Dozen and Ocean’s Eleven are the archtypical examples of this, but as I haven’t seen those I think of The Mass Effect Series (Mass Effect 2 was 90% building your team), Firefly, The A-Team, Star Trek (The Original Series is the best example), and similarly nerdy things.

Now, look at these teams: For the most part there aren’t any characters that can’t pull their own weight, and have some talent they lend the group. Sure, they are usually fairly competent on their own, but they really work best as a team. Kirk is awesome, but he’d be lost without McCoy putting him back together, Spock advising him, Scotty running the engines, and so on.

So, when making a D&D character don’t think of how you can make them awesome. Think of how you can make them help the team. You aren’t going to be fighting the monsters by yourself, so why should you focus on doing things yourself?

I’m going to try keeping my posts to a reasonable length for the next bit, so I’m going to give examples of some do and do nots next time. Until then, stay geeky.

—Canageek

Why should we bring you with us?

I’ve given you the advice that you should focus on how your character can help the team they work for, not how they can be awesome by themselves. But what does this mean? Think of your D&D character like an elite team of specialists: Why are we bringing you with us? In Mass Effect I bring Tali for her ability to break into anything and hack bad guys. I bring Liara because she can toss enemies into the air so I can pick them off with ease. Why would I bring you?

So, lets assume I always have the option of bringing the four core characters; A fighter, a cleric, a wizard and a Thief/Rogue/whatever.

Being awesome doesn’t mean you can help the party. No one is going to call a straight class fighter with the obvious feats awesome. However, he can help the part a lot.  For example Suppose you make a character that no one can harm. However, you can’t harm anyone else. I don’t really see any reason to bring you along, as the enemies are just going to walk around you and attack the rest of the party. The fighter is going to be more help, as if enemies try and slip past him, he can smack them upside the head.
This is an actual example from play: A bunch of gamers, skilled ones that I respect, created a series of fighters with crazy high con and some feats when 4e was new. That meant they got temp HP every time they were hit or some such. However, they drained all their other stats to boost con, so that they’d get more temp HP and be invincible. However, since they didn’t have much strength, and all their feats were in that special ability, everyone else could just walk past them; their marks didn’t have any force behind them.

Then there was the fighter with too many HP to die. He dumped everything into HP, all his feats, stats, everything. No one could touch him. I think he did OK damage as well. However, he had no defence, so he always was taking hits, and thus after battle it would drain a crazy amount of the clerics spells to heal him back up. In my opinion he was more of a drain on the party then a boon. I’d rather have your standard, run of the mill fighter, that isn’t going to suck my cleric dry after every fight.

See? These characters, made by decent and sometimes great, players, don’t help the party much. Sure, they’ve are really awesome. They’d work great as the star of a book, but they don’t work well on a team. D&D isn’t a story about Snake Plissken; it is a story about The A-Team. When building a character think: What am I going to do to help the party? Sure, this is a great ability, but is it contributing anything?

Think on that, and next time I’ll plumb the depths of the horrid jack of all trades.
Until then, stay geeky
—Canageek

100th post!

Or at least WordPress tells me it is: I’ve deleted some posts, and made some hidden, so I’m not sure how many are visible to the public. My, I kinda suck at blogging, considering I started this in July 2009. That is just over 2 a month. Not much compared to awesome people like Chet of The CRPG Addict, Trickster of The Adventure Gamer, or Trey of From the Sorcerer’s Skull. Heck, my Dad manages to update his blog, 600 Days to Brewmastery almost every day (thus the name).

On the other hand, I’m no where near as creative and talented as Trey, and don’t have the motivation of a book at the end of it to keep me going. I’m also don’t have a specific goal like the other blogs I listed: I’m not trying to finish every game in a set genre, or chronicle a journey I’m taking. I just made this blog so that I’d have a place to type out longer things that didn’t fit on twitter. Then I got into it, and enjoyed setting down some ideas I had. However, lately I seem to be less inspired, and have trouble posting. This is probably because I’m spending less time thinking about RPGs: I’ve been gaming less, as various gaming groups have dissolved, and I’ve been moving around more so I’ve had less time to form them.

Hopefully this will change soon. I’m getting that gaming itch again, I’m listening to podcasts again, which is where I get a lot of my gaming inspiration for some reason, and I’m rejoining a sweet GURPS game I was in back in 2011, now that I’m back on the West Coast. Additionally, #RPGChat is providing me a lot of inspiration, though it tends to come in the form of points I’m trying to convey, rather then setting and roleplaying ideas.

I’ve had fun writing this blog, and really, my only regret is that every time I start to establish any sort of a community I don’t post for ages and ages and everyone stops reading it.

Anyway, if there is anyone out there still reading this: Thank you. I’m glad someone enjoys my ramblings and ravings. If nothing else, I know a lot of you have found my post on Keep on the Shadowfell Maps (by far my most popular post, and one I created just to keep track of the links I was finding. I was horribly embarrassed when I discovered I hadn’t even spell checked it, and it was my most read post by a factor of ten).

Thank you for reading these 100 posts, and lets hope it doesn’t take me another 4 years to get to 200.

Until next time, stay geeky.
–Canageek

Things I learned at my last gaming convention: Don’t have fun at the expense of the party

Alright, so in my last post I covered what happened in my Sunday morning game. Now we are going back a little earlier, to Saturday Afternoon. Due to a cancellation we wound up playing D&D 4th edition, which I’ve not played in several years. It isn’t my favourite game, and I know the person I was playing with isn’t found of it, but hey, we decided to make the best of it.

So the DM hands us out characters, and I grab a half-orc ranger, and the guy I’m playing with gets an old, knight (Paladin) at the end of his career. Now, each character has a secret mission: Mine is the simplest: I have to either slay or bloody the head orc, or a certain number of other orcs…or betray the party, embrace the orcs and slay or bloody at least one PC. An interesting choice, I think, and carefully watch how the rest of the party treats me as we roleplay. My buddy had the mission to refuse all healing (Note: The DM pointed out that if he was unconscious he couldn’t refuse healing) and then die in battle, and being the only one to die in the adventure. Someone else’s mission was to reveal to my mentor (a half-elf) that she was the Elven mother he had never met, and I don’t know the rest of them.

Now, it being a 4 hour con game the DM cuts out a lot of the roleplaying to fit it in, which makes a lot of the missions pointless, since we have no time to get to know one another.

Then comes the first fight: It turns out there this is the fight with the leader of the orc army: I don’t have any reason to betray the party; no one has treated me badly, so I don’t have any animosity towards them, and we are winning, so why would I switch to fighting on the losing side?. So I stay with the party, and we easily win the fight. Not even many tense moments. Cool, lots of healing left, the Paladin is in rough shape though, but whatever. We go into the next fight, with a red dragon. A big red dragon.

I go nuclear and do 84 points of damage in the first round, but that taps me out of my daily and encounter powers, and I don’t really have much other then sit there and whale on the dragon after that. The fighter works his way around to flank the dragon with me and the paladin, so it takes a penalty if it breaths on us. None the less, it does, killing the paladin outright. Now, we’ve still got 5 people, and our tank is pretty much unharmed, and the cleric has all her daily and encounter healing abilities.

Now earlier in the adventure the fighter tried to leap through a window, as he liked to do odd and unexpected things. So, at this moment, when the best thing he could do was stay there and distract the dragon and try and draw fire, he decides that isn’t what he is going to do. What does he do instead? He leaps through a nearby window (gets a 20 on acrobatics) then runs past the dragon towards the party, leaps through another window (another 20) then as we all hold our breath and wait to see what he does….he runs off to safety, abandoning the rest of the party to die. So he did his odd, unexpected thing, which I’m sure he greatly enjoyed by leaping through two windows as a full-plate fighter, and abandoning the rest of the party.

Was surviving so he could see his wife and kids part of his mission? NOPE. He was an exiled knight whom hadn’t been back to the capital for years. A knight who was sent out to this monastery to learn humility due to his overwhelming arrogance and pride. A knight who was mentioned on all our character sheets as having grown into a brave and noble knight in his time here. So yeah, the DM is confused, the party is confused and now we have no tank (Defender in 4e parlance). I’ve got the most hitpoints, so I try, but I don’t have any abilities to draw fire or anything, just to hit the dragon harder. Meanwhile the dragon is breathing on us, everyone else is tapped out, and there are only 4 of us, so our damage output is way down.

We lose. At the end the dragon had 7 hit point left. If that guy had played his character at all like he was supposed to, or even stayed around to hit the dragon ONCE more, we would have won.

What makes this more of a demonstration of this principle is the game he did it in: 4th edition D&D, a game that, love it or hate it, is all built around teamwork. This is true in most D&D games, but 4e just plain doesn’t work if people don’t work together. As Penny Arcade and Weregeek point out, D&D is surprisingly like sports; everyone has to work together to win. He didn’t play as a team, we lost as a result, and it was really, really boring and frustrating.

My stance is always that you shouldn’t have fun at the expense of the group. This one guy decided to have fun, and as a result, 5 people were bored and frustrated. This leaves me conflicted: Would it have been OK to betray the group if they’d treated me badly? I think it may have been, if the adventure had been set up better. If I’d had the oppertinity to betray them in the final fight, and had motivation to do so (they’d treated me badly) I think it would have been a cool story we could have all enjoyed. Also, I get to keep playing, instead of having to sit out the rolelpaying between fights and the final battle with the dragon. As it was, they’d treated me well, so me betraying them, killing one PC and then running away in the middle of the adventure, leaving them to die against the dragon would have been really boring, as we saw.

So yeah, long story short: Think about others when you decide your characters actions. Is what you are about to do going to ruin the game for everyone else? Are we going to walk away from the table thinking “What a dick!”? Or will you’re betrayal read like an epic tale, spun by bards?

Anyway, I hope I didn’t meander about this too much.
Until next time, stay geeky
–Canageek

Things I learned at my last gaming convention: Beware of kids

A few weeks ago I attended a local gaming convention. Now, I’ve been going to this con on and off for about 10 years now, and pretty much every convention I’ve had fun at. This time, sadly, was an exception. I did have fun, but unlike most past cons where I’ve had mostly great games, I only really had 2 great games this year, and 2 OK games. Now, I’d like to specify, this wasn’t the cons fault. The staff were very professional, great about tracking drop outs and getting walkins into games they wanted to play, and had wicked prize support (I got so. much. stuff.). In some cases it wasn’t even the DMs fault; a player was a jerk in one, for example. However, I decided to do a series of blog posts on what I think went wrong with each game, and how they could be improved, as in some cases I don’t think the person that was ruining the game, whether player or DM realized what they were doing. Given that, I have decided to do a series of blog posts detailing the various problems I had at this con.

I’ve decided to start with one of the decent, but not great games. None of the players were painfully bad, the DM was competent, the the adventure was OK, if not great. However, the DM and one of the players showed up with their kids. Both very young, six perhaps? It was obviously prepared ahead of time, as both kids knew each other and one came in costume as “his” character, a halfling ninja known as “Red Ghost”.

Now, I’d played with the adult actually playing Red Ghost before, and he was normally quite good, even if he went off alone and got into trouble more then I prefer in the party’s rogue. However after they brought their kids….the kids were well behaved for the first hour or so, happily rolling the dice and trying to follow what was going on. The second and third hours were less pleasant. The DM had to keep track of his kid, and what 6 players were doing all at the same time. That didn’t go so well. The last bit of the game was more salvageable, but only because the con gave the group a giant foam d20 as prize support, and there was an open area near our table where the kids could run around and throw it at each other without bothering the table.

Yeah. Con advice from Canageek: Until your kids are older and more mature, don’t try bringing them to cons, at least not a 4 hour, serious, game. None of us want to lose a character we’ve spent 8-12 hours (it was only a 1st level adventure) levelling to die because you were too busy keeping track of a kid to pay attention to the map. This goes double for the DM, since you have more work then any of the players, keeping track of all of us AND all your monsters.

Four hour games are just too long for young kids: Get them into gaming at home, when you can take breaks when their attention span is used up. Perhaps find a con with shorter games more suited to kids (Kobolds Ate my Baby comes to mind as an easy one to teach them). But for Gygax’s sake, don’t subject them and us to 4 hours of pathfinder with a child OBVIOUSLY bored out of his head. It isn’t fair to either them or us.

Until next time, Stay Geeky.

–Canageek

Edit: Some people are misunderstanding what I’m saying: I’m not saying kids shouldn’t be gaming. I’m not saying don’t being them to the con at all. I am saying pick appropriate events for them.
For example: The board game room has a lot of games that the kids could have been full participants of, rather then being bored and just rolling the dice then going off to play by themselves or falling asleep.

Alternatively, one of the people was the DM. Why not instead of signing up to run a Pathfinder Society game, sign up to run something that the kids could have been a full part of, with their own characters. Kobold’s Ate My Baby keeps coming to mind, as it is silly and immature. Off the top of my head, Ada used to run a game of RPGKids for her two kids. You know, something they can enjoy, instead of suffering through it.

I think getting kids active and involved in gaming; having them sit there bored isn’t the way to do it. Get them involved with a game they can enjoy.

Obstacles Breed Creativity

Recently I was discussing spells with someone, and if they should be well defined or loosely defined. Interestingly, we both argue our positions based on what will encourage creativity the most. UbAh advocates loosely defined spells so that players can add on their own spins to solve problems outside of combat. I advocate strong definitions so that players can do the same. I think UbAh’s argument, that if you can think up creative things to do with magic, and then can do it, it encourages creativity, is pretty obvious, so I’m going to spend some time stating my own, less obvious argument.

I think challenges and speedbumps are important. The fun in roleplaying games comes from challenges you have to overcome; a game where you walk into the dungeon, find no traps and no monsters is pretty boring, as my players can tell you when I tried to run the sample adventure included in the 2nd edition Traveller book on the fly. Heck, it doesn’t even make a good story. You need challenges to make a good story, a good game and so on.

Think about this: If the players have magic that can do anything they can think of, why don’t they just use magic to bypass your puzzle? I’ll give you an example from one of my favourite Living Greyhawk Ket adventures: There is a monk tied to a chair. The chair is on a platform that is suspended 30 feet or so over a deep pool of water. It is suspended by a long, greased, pole. The monk is able to keep balanced on the platform, but she has been doing it for a while and is getting tired. You need to rescue her.

Now, if you have a spell that can undo her ropes, or levitate her and her chair over to you, the puzzle is trivial, no creativity is needed; you need to unscrew a screw, and are holding a screwdriver. However, if you have magic, but NOT one of those effects, things get more interesting. For example, one solution I’ve thought of is to use reduce person on a gnome or a halfling to make them tiny and just really light, tie their feet to the middle of a rope, then have one PC on each side suspend them where he or she can untie the ropes. Another is to use stoneshape to bend the rock around the pole, so it can no longer rotate freely, things like that. You don’t have the exact spell you want, so you have to use what you are given.

Now, this depends on your spells working the same way each time, or else you can’t be sure if your solution will work in any specific instance. You need enough flexibility in it to allow any pretty much any spell to be used outside of combat, but if you have too much freedom the players can do exactly what they want, which removes the need for them to be creative.

Why saying No is imporant when DMing

One again RPGChat generated an interesting discussion I’d like to explain here. It started when I griped that “Yes, And” and “Say Yes or Roll Dice” should be banished from RPGs. In retrospect, these both represent a valid playstyle that I’m sure people enjoy. However, I feel that the style of play opposed to these is under attack in this age of lightweight, shared narration games, with people writing all new, flashy shared narrative control games and forgetting the Game in Role  Playing Games, so I thought I would explain my perspective, so that perhaps some of you young, improve schooled whippersnappers would give it a try. Possibly even write some new, traditional games for me to play. Therefore I am going to outline why “Yes, And” is just one tool that a DM should use, and not be an absolute rule as it is in improve, while “Say Yes or Roll Dice”, as an absolute rule, is not conductive to my style of gaming.

Anyway, despite being young in years I tend to follow a very traditional game model when DMing. There is one DM and one to six players, sometimes more. I have a vague outline of what is going on in my game, usually a published adventure, from which I will base what will happen off of. Now, the players are going to suggest things I haven’t thought of, at which point I’ll improvise as best I can to keep things moving and consistent. Anyway, players are going to ask me things “Is there a bank in town, are there any footprints in the grass, can we follow that blood trail, does the Duke of Madeupian have blue eyes, and so on.

I am not going to say yes to all of these. Lets say I’m running a 1920s investigative adventure set in Arkham (Since I’m the most familiar with it). In this case, for the above questions I’d look at my notes, and see if there are footprints on the grass. I don’t just say yes and improve; I give them a clue that will lead them towards the murderer (Or inform them it rained since then, or give them a red herring, you get the idea). For example, if the players know that the killer has blue eyes, I’m going to have figured out which potential suspects are blue eyes ahead of time. So if the Duke isn’t the killer, I’m probably going to say No quite a lot, as if I said Yes, And then every suspect would have blue eyes, rendering me unable to use that as a method for letting them eliminate suspects. In fact, how can you ever eliminate suspects if I can’t say no?

Additionally what happens when players ask for ridiculous things? Can I invent gunpowder? Can I invent a steam engine? Can I make a flamethrower out of this insecticide sprayer I found in a D&D supplement? (Complete Adventurer I think? It was years ago), Can I have a Zeppelin? Of the proceeding, all but the question about the steam engine have all been asked within my game. Of those, the only one that I said yes to was the Zeppelin. Why did I say yes to it, and either said no, or would have said no to the others? Zeppelins are appropriate to a 1920s pulp-action-horror game. Gunpowder, steam engines and flame throwers are not appropriate for the magical fantasy settings in which the questions took place. I will say no to preserve the sprite and feel of the setting I am running, and I feel any good DM should do the same.

A final example, is that sometimes it is a better story to say no. For example, when Gimli asks to destroy the ring, Lord of the Rings would have been a pretty lame book if they’d hit it with a hammer, the end. Saying No, you have to do X, Y and Z first gave a much better story. It also allows Mr. Tolkien to keep using the rest of the campaign he had written, and before I hear any cried of railroading, I’m betting if he was a DM he was not expecting them to split the party and do three adventures at once. In my games I wasn’t expecting the players to use a zeppelin to go hire Louis Armstrong to play at their club, to give them a chance to answer some questions about a trumpet he was reported to have owned. Oddly enough the adventure didn’t account for that, so I let my players fly up to New York and talk with him. It was in character, in setting and there was no reason to say no, and I made up the consequences. Saying yes IS appropriate some of the time, even most of the time. But NO should be a tool in a DM’s toolbox.

Until next time, stay geeky,

–Canageek

Edit: Some people have taken this to mean ‘Say No unless I’d previously planned something’. Rather it should be taken as a “Say yes or no based on the DMs best judgment about what will make an interesting, fun game and challenge the players.” I didn’t have it anywhere in my notes that a player would have an airship, but I let him have it as I couldn’t think of a reason not to. Whereas in other cases I say no, as it would make a less fun game or break the premise I had in mind. So: Best judgment, not silly one line rules.

Explaining Intellectual Challenge in RPGs

Alright, #RPGChat had an interesting discussion today. We were having a discussion on time management at the table, when when Iserith said “Ask yourself, “Would this be in the Director’s Cut or on editing room floor?” If so, it doesn’t get table time. Move on.” I pointed out that RPGs are not movies, and some things can’t be glossed over, for example the planning sequence. This appeared to confuse everyone there, except Iserith him- or her- self. Everyone else was very confused by the fact the players would need a plan and why you couldn’t write it in afterwards.

Lets take an example here. Lets say we are running a spy RPG, and there is a house with McGuffin that needs to be ‘liberated’ from a strong room on the 2nd floor. Outside is a guard dog, there is a guard who makes rounds of the house all night, and 4 more guards sleeping on the ground floor. The party knows all this, and has a blueprint of the house.

Now, how does the party get it? Sneak in through the window? Which one, front or back? Front is further from the guard, but there is a chance of being seen. How will they get past the guard dog? Drugged meat? Distraction? What about the patrolling guard? How will they escape afterwards? Will they spend some time scouting tonight and risk the McGuffin being moved, or go in and risk bumping into a guard’s route they didn’t plan.

All this has to be decided by the players. I typically leave the table so that I don’t get confused by draft plans, or subconsciously change what will happen based on what they will do. That lets them plan knowing what happens next will be fair; If there is a guard by the left window it isn’t because I know that is the one they are going to break into. In this type of game the plan is essential, as I don’t have any way for them to get in to the house in mind. I just set out the problem, it is up to them to provide the solution.

If the players can change their plan retroactively, then where is the challenge? Hindsight is always 20/20 or better. “Of course we remember to arrange for an escape car” takes the challenge out of making the plan, and thus diminishes the reward you get at the end. Now, I’m not hardcore on this point; I do like rules that allow players to have common sense items in their car or on there person, particularly in modern day adventures. Also systems that have a “GM hint roll” function, to prevent frustration if the players get stuck (Call of Cthulhu’s intelligence check is often used for this at my table).  I’ll also make up details I hadn’t thought of on the fly with an eye towards making the game more interesting, rather then planning things out to the nth degree like a good stimulationist GM.

So why am I writing all this out? To show people that this modern narrative gaming trend isn’t the only way to play, that there are alternatives, and that you don’t have to put up with their snooty assumptions about what is fun. Yes, Narr games are what the cool kids are playing, with their Leverage, Apocolypse World, Smalllville, Coretex+ and FATE. These things can be fun, but there are traditional games which can be even more fun, and more satisfying for the right type of person. Knowing you overcame something with your wits and intelligence is incredibly satisfying, and isn’t a feeling a narrative game can produce, since you can always alter things to give yourself and edge. When I played Dresden Files our thief used a Fate Point to have a window in the building we were sneaking into unlocked.  That isn’t nearly as satisfying as figuring out the way in yourself, in that you just toss a chip on the table and you win. So, give it a try. Challenge yourself, taste victory by your own hand.

Until next time, stay geeky

–Canageek

Writing a Roguelike?

First some news: Provided I don’t fail either of the classes I’m in right now (highly, highly unlikely) I will be finishing my undergraduate degree within the next 2 weeks. Also, I should be getting an acceptance letter to go to graduate school shortly, based on what the professor who has hired me tells me. However, due to my brother being sick I’ve asked to delay officially starting graduate school until May, the start of the summer semester, so that I can be here if he needs me. This leaves me with a lot of spare time, as it isn’t quite long enough to get a job, and if my brother gets better I’ll see about moving up my start date. I’m going to try to fill my time with some colloquium, possibly auditing a class or two, and reviewing older classes before starting grad school, but I’m thinking I might want to start a project to fill my time.

On that note, I’ve been listening to the Roguelike Radio podcast as of late, and it is bringing an idea I’ve had a while back to mind. I’ve wanted to work on my programming skills for a while, and I’ve wanted to write an RPG system for a while. I am thinking that I might want to code a simple Roguelike to teach myself Object Oriented programming, or at least improve the programming I do know. My background in programming is a bit weak; I learned QBASIC in high school, took a class on C in first year, and a class on C++ last year. I’ve also taken a bunch of theoretical classes on algorithms and such, and used simple programming and scripting at a few of my jobs. However, I’ve never gotten into the more advanced features of any language, and only touched Object Oriented code once. I’d like to learn it, because it seems powerful, but I get turned off reading about it, as it is always held up as the “One true way of programming” and tells you to do things without any explanation, or draws all the reasons why it is better from working with a large team, whereas I would never be working with a large team. Anyway, I was writing up my emails to send to a friend, and thought I might as well post them here and see what people thought of them.

Why I donated to Desert Bus For Hope and Child’s Play

This entry is a bit different from my usual blog entry. For one thing, I’m not usually fighting back tears. My brother has cancer. He is 21. At the end of his first year of university he started to get really sick; losing a lot of weight, and some psychiatric problems that he’d never had before. It turned out he had what they thought was a non-cancerous brain tumour. After half a year of radiation therapy it had shrunk enough to be operable, and they removed the parts pressing on his brain, and we thought it was over.

When I found that out it was the best day of my life.

This fall he started having those problems again, and they found the tumour is back, and cancerous. He is now undergoing chemotherapy. The outlook is, he tells us, really positive, and hopefully he will only have to do 3-4 months of twice a week chemo. I’m still more scared then I’ve ever been in my life. Last time I was optimistic, everything seemed good, he could beat this. This time…I’m terrified out of my mind. I can’t do much to help him, aside from chat with him about movies and such, stay up with him when he comes home on the weekends as he is a night owl.

One thing I can do is give a bit of my money to charity, to hopefully help others.

I just finished giving some money to Child’s Play, via Desert Bus For Hope.

Desert Bus is the creating of a Canadian comedy group called Loading Ready Run. They play the worlds worst game for about 5 days, the exact amount of time determined by how much money for Child’s Play they raise. Child’s Play is a charity started by the webcomic Penny Arcade (Often NSFW) that gets video games for kids in hospital.

I am not sure exactly when I started watching Desert Bus; I *think* it was Desert Bus 1, as I remember it being a new thing, it was in a basement of some sort, and recall something about the camera and an elastic band. I didn’t watch much, as I had exams, so I can’t be sure. Anyway, I enjoyed watching, but never donated money as I preferred to give to places that funded research, like the Canadian Cancer Society. This made sense to my scientific Asperger’s brain; you could save more people that way. That has changed now, as I’ve seen what a comfort having a game can be.

Last year my brother was sick enough that he had to drop out of classes on medical leave. He tried to develop some hobbies to fill his time, but he didn’t have much energy, and as the radiation sickness got work, enough focus. He started out reading a lot of books, but rapidly found he couldn’t concentrate enough to read for long periods. He became a movie buff, something he has kept up; He made a list of every movie he wanted to see, and as of early last summer he’d watched something like 130 of them. However, you can only watch so many movies, or so he tells me. He spent a lot of time playing games. During the summer while I was in BC he became a huge fan of Mass Effect and beat the first two several times, to get all the options; he was really looking forward to the ending, and once told me that he really wanted to finish the radiation by the time it came out, so he’d be healthy enough to play it. (He did, beat it 3 times, and was pissed at the ending). The first game I remember talking to him a lot about was Skyrim. He was playing that about the time he moved back home, playing a Wood Elf sniper. I made a Breton mage and we spent a fair bit of time talking about the game, but he got sicker, and didn’t have the energy to focus on it. Then he moved to other games, I don’t remember them as well, as I didn’t play them. Racing games I think? Some sports games? I recall some XBLA arcade football game that he played a lot of back on the N64, and a golf game. A lot of League of Legends (he plays support).

Anyway, games were one of the things he could do a lot, except when he was at his most sick. He could lie on the couch and play on the xbox, even when he couldn’t walk very well, though his left hand shaking restricted the type of games as I recall. It was one of the few things I could talk to him about, since I understand games, even if we don’t normally like the same genres. I…I want to give other kids some of that comfort, now that I’ve seen how much that helped him. That is why I gave to Child’s Play. I’m not saying you should, but you know, if you have some extra money, instead of buying a game for yourself why not send the Desert Bus guys some cash? If you want to give to some place to help treat other people with cancer, that is also cool.

Thank you to anyone who does give money.

Sorry this was so long, I’m not thinking very clearly, and don’t have the strength to reread and edit it.

Oh, I also wanted to say thank you to the Loading Ready Run people. There have been some really dark days recently, and on some of them your videos helped me smile again, thank you.

–Canageek