On Dungeons and Dragons and the Sonars... a rambling

Backstory

The Sonars often engage in very enthusiastic make-believe play.  They travel to the far-reaches of time and space, hunting treasures, battling bad guys, and saving the universe.  Often, they each take on a special persona, with a name, special powers, a background, a special mission.  They still surprise me with the detail of their fantasy play.  And their earnestness is hilarious. 

Fantasy play is their default mode.  And has been for years (no exaggeration)  Oh sure, sometimes they play with Lego and K’nex, or with bike-riding or skateboards.  But even these mere toys are swallowed up by make-believe adventures.  That wacky, arty, pseudo-aesthetic K’nex thing? Oh, that’s the computer interface of a prototype time machine.  The bike?  Vehicle to chase the bad guys, of course.  

They glean detail from all of their media consumption and incorporate it into their games.  They play World of Goo on the computer (great game, by the way), and so their own Goo Ball creations appear in make-believe adventures through the yard.  Characters and elements from books regularly appear in their narratives.  Expelliarmus continues to be a favorite spell cast against invisible foes, even a year after we finished reading the Harry Potter books together.  

Fast-forward to this summer.  

Sonar X9 read a book from the library called The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe. (No, we didn’t realize the content when he started reading it, but we really can’t pre-read everything anymore. Yes, we have ongoing talks about adolescence, addiction, drug use, sex and bodies and finding balance in life).  This is a book about growing up a first-wave player of Dungeons & Dragons in England in the 1970s.  

Kids soak up a lot from all of their experiences, and we can’t always tell what they’ll take away from a particular experience, or in this case, book.  X9 took away from Elfish Gene a curiosity about the actual game.  

The ideas of Role-Playing.  The DICE.  The joke about MU’s.  He wanted to know more.  Partner and I never D&D’d ourselves but we know people who did.  We looked up things on the ‘net, talked to uncles, and ultimately looked at bookstores for guidance. 

Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons has a starter kit (more on the editions later).  X9 had birthday money, so he got one.  Starter booklets.  DICE.  Grids and tokens.  Sweet.  

We start thinking this could be a fun activity.  Our kids are into board games, they’re into imaginative play, they’re bright.  This seems like a game they could enjoy, with some support.  The starter set gave us pre-set characters and a basic three-part encounter.  (I’m a Dragonborn Paladin, by the way.  Moria.  Charmed to meet you.  Watch out for the acid breath.)

The game is complicated for newbies.  There is a lot to think about, a lot to develop and manage.  X9 is convinced he wants to be the Dungeon Master, but he needs a lot of support right now.  X4 wants to participate, pays attention, listens, dances around the table, and fiercely defends his right to make his own choices about his character, but does better when we help narrow down and describe his choices.  X6 seems to relish all the detail.  All the choices.  All of the things he can REMEMBER.  

At first we were caught up in the mechanics of the game and neglected the story, the imagination.  The story is what makes this game so alluring, and we’re getting better at incorporating story and PLAY into our play.  In addition to some pre-fab characters, the Starter Guide gives a Very Basic introduction to building your own encounters and a handful of monsters to populate them.  This guide does not teach you how to build your own character, to the disappointment of the Sonars.  Building their own Characters captivated them before we got the guide, and continues to do so.  

So we headed back to the ‘net and the bookstores.  Must have a Player’s Handbook (one of the three Core Rulebooks, together with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual, that are the foundation of all gameplay).  The books have been through many editions over the past thirty years, leading up to a drastically revised fourth edition released last year.  The books are pricey when new, and too new to readily find local used copies.  We did find a used 2nd edition Player’s Guide.  We hesitated.  Spend $10 on an older version of the game, or save that money for a new edition compatible with the Starter set we have?  X9’s impatience won out and he bought the 2nd ed. guide.  It was educational, but not user friendly.  And not at all compatible with our beginner’s guide.  We began to understand the history, the classes and races available for characters, and the complexity of character building.  But something big had shifted in the numbers between the 2nd ed. and the 4th and we couldn’t work it out.  

Flush from our summer travels, we were rummaging through another bookstore and came across a new 4th ed. Player’s Handbook.  MSRP $35.  Ouch.  But we flipped through and liked what we saw.  Much better interface from 2nd ed.  The kids had already rubbed the cover off the beginner’s guide, reading every page, trying to understand the way things could work.  Building basic encounters.  This is a game that captures their attention and their imaginations.  We decided to go ahead and buy the new guide. 

Talk about throwing gasoline on a bonfire.  The kids thumb through it, they read it, they study it, they imagine, they argue about it.  I should be more accurate here.  Mostly Sonar X6 pours over it.  X9 regularly reads and checks it.  X4 reads some of it here and there (when he can get it away from the other two).

They have Built Their Own Characters.  A Tiefling Warlock.  A Dragonborn Warlord.  A Human Cleric (nice that one of them isn’t bashing things).  

To be sure, they need help to play (we sometimes feel like WE need help to play).  This is not a game we can Send Them Off to play.  We ALL play.  We might make it to Christmas before we break down and get a Dungeon Master’s Guide and a Monster Manual.  Maybe. 

It still takes us ages to get through every round of play in an encounter.  Tonight it took an hour-and-a-half to play two rounds.  But we were all there together.  We were all there engaged, even X4.  

So, to sum up this seemingly endless ramble…

On the plus side:  

Heavy use of imagination, togetherness (collective awwwww), teamwork, the management of several ideas at once, the advantages of studying and remembering.  

Drawbacks:

—Cost.  The books are pricey, though a little imagination and a willingness to Build Your Own adventures will get a lot of miles out of them.  

—Obsessiveness.  Barrowcliffe addresses the addictive potentialities of the game in his book.  It is easy to get drawn into the details.  It’s easy to obsess about those details.  It is almost the only thing the kids talk about.  Here again, a little play goes a long way, and we have to emphasize balance.  

—Violence.  The game can be a little grisly and a lot violent.  The focus is on the powers and weapons and equipment you have to bash and curse the bad guys.  For family play, we have steered away from Killing Strokes.  When an enemy drops to zero Hit Points, it’s OUT.  End of story.  Ok, except for when we take its weapons and search its pockets at the end of the encounter.  We’ve got to pay the imaginary bills, after all.  We hope to build more adventures that focus on exploration and puzzle rather than combat.  It’s difficult to eliminate the combat altogether.  The Defeat of Adversaries seems sort of essential to this Game of Heroes.  But we hope to think carefully about the rhetoric of the game as well.  

Overall, I’m hopeful that this will be a good game for us to explore as a family, even though the kids are quite young.  Who knows how long their interest will last or what the lasting effects of the game will be for them.  I’ll keep watching.  

I just hope that X6’s first-grade teacher doesn’t freak out when he doodles Morning Stars, and Flails, and Bastard Swords during Writer’s Workshop.  

Recent Lessons

Lesson 1: Occam’s Sewing Razor

When the squeak on the sewing machine becomes so maddening, and the top thread is breaking every five minutes, before I stick my head into the partially dismantled, Running sewing machine, I should consider making sure that the needle is installed in the correct orientation.  That didn’t solve the squeak.  Still had to stick my head in the machine to find that.  But now I Know.  

Lesson 2:  My eyes are bigger than my hands

I am enamored of the art of much knitting.  Sometimes I see a really incredible design and I must try it.  Often it’s about Trying a particular technique, a particular decrease, a clever little design element.  Lately (i.e. for the past several months), the projects I have fallen in love with have been either large or complicated (or in two cases, both).  This all by itself slowed down the knitting considerably.  On top of that, I got myself into a sort finger/hand/wrist/arm/shoulder spiral that is difficult to get myself out of.  This brought the knitting to a screaming halt.  So there are three lovely, but oh so far from finished, big and/or complicated projects staring at me, begging to be finished, but I can knit no more than a few minutes a day, if that, without bringing about the need for icepacks and narcotics.  

This is not fun.  This is not right.  It has also led to more sewing than knitting this Christmas season.  

Also, these projects are also intended for other people.  Other people who know about them and hope to actually hold them in their hands someday.  I feel an obligation to finish them, which makes the knitting feel more like Work than like this cool hobby that I do because I get a little thrill from taking a long piece of string and knotting it just so over and over (and over and over) and Voila! Clever, three-dimensional, useful object!

So I have learned that I really do prefer simple designs that I can hold in my hands, carry in my wee bag.  That aren’t huge.  This is what I really really prefer.  Now, if I can just get through the big complicated things, so I can get to some small simple things.  

Lesson 3: Should vs. Could, a lesson from Billy Jean King

I saw some round-table discussion on You Tube or something.  Oh, I remember, it was from Oprah, and O was chatting with Billy Jean King, Maria Shriver, and Gloria Steinem.  I forget what they were talking about, but Ms. King said that one of the ways she overcomes stress and guilt and all such self-defeating sorts of thinking is to replace “should” with “could” when it pops up in her head.  I.e. I should scrub the fingerprints off of the lightswitch plate in the kitchen.  vs.  I could scrub the fingerprints….  “Should” is a do it or feel bad about it kind of word, whereas “could” is a word of potential and, more importantly, choice.  As in, I could choose to do it or not.  

I was thinking that the holidays should be happy.  Ding ding ding.  The holidays ‘could’ be happy.  Which is a weird one, because either one suggests that the holidays aren’t actually happy, when really they sort of are, but they’re also sort of stressful.  But the source of that stress may be trying to live up to some idealized fantasy of what it ‘should’ be.  If we consider the idealized fantasy as something that ‘could’ be if we had infinite time and resources and and and, it becomes much easier to let that ideal go and still be satisfied with what the holidays actually are.  Which in my case, is a time when I get together with at least some of the people that I dearly love, or at least touch base with many of the important people in my life.  

More people ‘could’ choose to not worry about whether they have the most perfectly decorated tree, or the most Christmas lights on the block, or the perfect gift, and just look around and breathe in what is already around them.  More people could.  Yes, indeedy.  

*smooch*

Partner sweater countdown

I managed to finish the Body of the Partner Sweater this morning (two sleeves left).  I started binding it off last night.  I chose a bind-off that is supposedly lovely and stretchy.  Perfect, I thought, to finish the ribbing at the bottom of this sweater without losing the lovely stretchiness of the bottom ribbing.  I got halfway through the binding-off last night, and with hands cramping, I left it and went to bed.  

When I woke up this morning, I decided I didn’t like the way that bind-off looked.  It was sort of thick, and sort of forced the ribbing to splay in an unattractive way.  So I undid it.  

Undoing has been the hardest thing for me to learn in knitting.  Not that it’s hard.  Undoing is often much much easier than the original doing.  That was the case for this ribbing.  But undoing is psychologically very hard for me.  I mean, I spent an hour on those ninety bind-off stitches (that sounds crazy-long to me too, but it’s true).  I could take it out in less than ten minutes and that work was pfffft! gone forever.  

I used to hate undoing so much—even when I had made ugly mistakes in the knitting—that I’d figure out ways to fix or hide or ignore rather than undo and redo.  I have left knitting sitting in my closet for months, years even, with a mistake or an unsatisfying bit of knitting, because I was paralyzed with a lack of wanting to undo.  

I have come to realize in my advancing age (can you hear my creaking rocking chair?) that the part I love most about knitting, though, is the actual knitting.  You know, the part where I’m sitting here knitting.  Making one loop of yarn after another in tidy little rows and rounds and columns.  So, I figure, undoing something (which has lovely little names like Ripping, Frogging, Tinking, or just plain old Un-Knitting), just gives me the opportunity to do more of the part that I love when I get to do it over.  

Plus, seriously, if I’m going to spend hours and hours and hours making something that will hang out in my life or the life of someone I love for a long time, I should take the time to make it right.  Compared to the time invested in knitting the whole garment, the Redos don’t usually add up to much (I say usually, because I know that there have been times when I’ve had to completely undo something because a mistake occurred wayyyyyy back at the beginning, or because the thing turned out wayyyyy too small or too big—and don’t talk to me about too small right now, because this sweater is just almost too small for Partner, but I refuse to undo it completely because I really like it, and if it doesn’t end up fitting him after I block it [which it should because the swatch I made at the beginning did the same thing, loosening up tremendously when I washed it], then it’s mine).  

(Go ahead.  Tell me to quit with the parentheses already.)

So on the sweater, I undid the fancy bind-off (which might still be good for binding off lace, but which I will not use for ribbing again), and started over, doing my usual bind-off on bigger needles to make sure the bottom edge didn’t bind up.  And guess what?  I love it.  It’s perfect.  The bind-off just sort of disappears into that bottom ribbing.  

Now, the question remains, can I meet my goal?  Can I knit two sleeves in three days in order to finish this sweater before the Olympics start?  Actually, less than three days depending on whether I count until the Olympics actually start in Beijing (which would be Friday morning at 7 a.m. for me, what with the 13-hour time difference between here and Beijing) or when the start will be televised for me, which is sometime Friday night.  Either way, the chances are slim.  

So what am I still doing sitting here typing, parenthetically no less?

Teeth, and the Last Day of School

I really love to brush my teeth.  It feels good.  Leaves my mouth fresh.  Satisfies that obsessive part of my brain that is into patterns and repetition and order.  That’s not to say that I brush my teeth as often as I should.  I’m pretty good about brushing in the morning, unless it’s a weekend and my day starts off in a slower, more lazy way.  

I’m very hit-or-miss about nighttime brushing.  And it seems to me that nighttime brushing is even more important than morning brushing in terms of overall mouth health.  I mean, at night there’s no saliva flowing, no movement of the inside-the-mouth parts, and whether we sleep with our mouths open or closed, if there is food residue in there while we’re sleeping, we’re just setting up a wonderland playground for the little germs that live in there and eat our teeth when we’re not looking.   But skipping the nighttime brushing is so much easier perhaps because there is no social stigma.  I mean, skipping the morning brushing leaves you breathing horror into the faces of anyone you talk to, while skipping the nighttime brushing offends only you, or perhaps the person that shares your bed and suffers your open-mouthed breathing in his or her face.  

Still, I do a fairly good job of both morning and nighttime brushing when I’m on a set schedule.  When I am regularly required to do certain things at a certain time and/or place.  

I am about to be cut loose from most such constraints for eleven weeks because today is the last day of the school year.  After today, our only regularly scheduled stop will be Thursday storytime at the library, that and the need to generally get the children food and sleep at approximately the same times each day.  

Before you assume that I’ll be sleeping in and eating bon-bons all day, let me reassure you that laundry and dishes and cooking and entertainment and vetting of media and discipline and mediation and education and legos and the carving out of time to have adult conversation with Partner and squeeze in some personal intellectual development and the enaction of my own dreams and goals and aspirations—not to mention a birthday party for an eight-year-old— will all still occur.  I’ll just be able to do it without having to get up at the crack of dawn or go to bed before midnight.  

I’m just not sure I’ll remember to brush my teeth.  

Runner?

Recently queried about when I’d start running again, first I stammered, “Uh—.”  Then I whined about how hot it is here right now.  Not hot, so much as humid.  Ok, hot and humid.  

Check out the Wiki article on humidity.  As they point out in the article, we’re usually referring to “relative humidity” when we use that term.  The relative part refers to the different moisture capacity of the air at different temperatures.  The higher the temperatures, the higher the moisture capacity.  So 90% humidity at 75 degrees is much less water than 90% humidity at 80.6F/26C (our current conditions, down from 90F earlier—no, no rain).  Through some magical voodoo one can arrive at a heat index of 87F/30C for that data.  In other words, because there is 90% relative humidity right now, it *feels* like 87, even though it’s only 80.  Go figure.  

This is the kind of weather where I can walk very slowly out the door and begin dripping sweat before the door shuts behind me.  The kind of weather where I “dry off” after a shower, but I’m never really dry, just sort of less damp at some point several hours later.  

So, you can probably understand why the thought of physical exertion out there leads me to whine.  I find it hard to continue to whine, however, after my previous post, in which I extolled the bravery and fortitude of my middle child.  

I haven’t actually done any kind of running for a long time.  I generally refer to April—the Month of Endless Demon Virus—as my excuse for slacking off in the running.  But I haven’t actually run regularly since just after my race back at the beginning of March.  Since I only ran for a smidge over two months, and have NOT run for almost three months, I’m not sure it’s honest or fair to call myself a runner over there in the left-hand margin.  

I can honestly call myself most of those other things, knitter especially.  There has been a decent amount of knitting and knit-planning.  A fair amount of legoing.  Not so much writing.  That one I can blame on the running, but that is for another post.  

I’m disappointed in the lack of running.  I really liked the running.  My brain felt good.  My body felt good.  Ok, you know, not in the moments immediately after the running, but in the times in between the running, when I was sleeping better, feeling stronger, and generally having more energy and enthusiasm for things in general.  

So, what I should be doing right now is promising to me that I will start running again.

Tomorrow.  

When I think that though, at least a dozen excuses pop into my brain, most having to do with wet air and knitting.