Autumnal
Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
My Indiana Jones Stalker
Being a true history by Bruce Baugh
This happened mostly on RPG Net, more than a decade ago. It followed in the wake of the cobringing fun a bunch of folks had with White Wolf’s game Adventure, which Andrew Bates and I co-developed. Every so often someone would ask a question about how the game worked, and sometimes I’d answer with an explanation.
Questions were (and are) most likely to involve what we called dramatic editing, a system for players to do some rewriting of the game world around the characters in the characters’ favor. The GM could also use it to spin out complications on the fly in a structured way. Each character, and the GM, has a pool of Inspiration points which grows and shrinks during play; dramatic edits cost more as you move from “I’ve definitely got this thing I need in my pocket” through “and that’s how we miraculously survived our car going off the cliff at the end of last session” and beyond.
Being me, I often illustrated the kind of thing we had in mind with examples from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was the list movies we aspired to make possible to play out with our game (and we mostly succeeded, I think). For instance, at the start of the movie, when Belloq takes the idol from Jones and says “You could warm them…if only you spoke Hovito.”, there’s a strategic use of a small focused dramatic edit. Normally, we’d expect Jones’ player to make a roll to see whether he could manage at least a few words of Hovito, but now that’s blocked. (The player gets a compensatory benefit.)
And as I explained that one day, the roof fell in.
So there was this guy I’d known for a decade or so, thanks to the amateur press association Alarums & Excursions and then Usenet, and got along with pretty well. He was prone to occasional bouts of nasty outbursts followed by being offline a few days or weeks and then coming back on an even keel again. I could already recognize the signs of recurrent stress, likely underlain by recurrent physical and/or mental health trouble. But he’d never before lashed out at me. Until this day.
He lashed out with startling intensity. How dare I say such a thing?
I was boggled. How dare I say what?
Gradually I worked out that he was offended at my example because I was giving people a completely wrong view of filmmaking.
I…what?
Screenwriters don’t use game-type mechanics at all. They just write, and consult and revise. Writing a script is nothing like playing a roleplaying game.
Well, yeah. No kidding.
The blast went on and on. I knew that. I was using the events of the film to illustrate how one might use Adventure to play out events of the same kind. (If they’d unclear to anyone reading this, let me know, please. I like to check my assumptions and often enough discover they were wrong.) no explanation of mine helped anything.
Eventually the moderators stepped in, the blast got smothered, and life went on.
Until, that is, a few days later and a different thread, when he showed up to make basically the same rant, albeit less energetically. I made an explanation for others and let it go.
And it happened again and again through the next year. Same obsession: I was cheating Adventure players out of an honest understanding of screenwriting with this self-aggrandizing swiping of credit. I knew to keep engagement to a minimum and by now he wasn’t sustaining the flames, so no such moment lasted and I was more baffled than angered or distressed.
He brought it up elsewhere, too. I don’t remember now if it happened here at all, but I do remember he interjected into Usenet and the game’s mailing list. Where there were moderators, they shut him now, and where not, I did my part by not sustaining anything. He’d show up just about anywhere I might be posting, on subjects from science fiction fandom to history, but never lingered long.
Gradually his interventions became less frequent, and finally he went offline for several years. I regretted whatever was going wrong on his end to spark so much outbursts but enjoyed relief from there.
Then he came back, in substantially worse style. He went after me in, as I recall, a thread about Trinity or Vampire over the same Adventure non-issue. He went off on others with the same intensity and lack of evident sense and comprehension. It didn’t take him very long to earn a perma-ban from Big Purple, and he soon after dropped out of sight in other venues as well.
I’ve never crossed paths with him again. Out of unhappiness for the lost friendship, I used to do Deja News and Google searches for him every year or two, but gradually stopped. I fear that he may have died or been institutionalized or suffered some other ghastly fate and I kind of don’t want to know. So I don’t - nobody has ever brought him or his later circumstances up around me.
And that’s how Indiana Jones brought me a stalker.
Being a true history by Bruce Baugh
This happened mostly on RPG Net, more than a decade ago. It followed in the wake of the cobringing fun a bunch of folks had with White Wolf’s game Adventure, which Andrew Bates and I co-developed. Every so often someone would ask a question about how the game worked, and sometimes I’d answer with an explanation.
Questions were (and are) most likely to involve what we called dramatic editing, a system for players to do some rewriting of the game world around the characters in the characters’ favor. The GM could also use it to spin out complications on the fly in a structured way. Each character, and the GM, has a pool of Inspiration points which grows and shrinks during play; dramatic edits cost more as you move from “I’ve definitely got this thing I need in my pocket” through “and that’s how we miraculously survived our car going off the cliff at the end of last session” and beyond.
Being me, I often illustrated the kind of thing we had in mind with examples from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was the list movies we aspired to make possible to play out with our game (and we mostly succeeded, I think). For instance, at the start of the movie, when Belloq takes the idol from Jones and says “You could warm them…if only you spoke Hovito.”, there’s a strategic use of a small focused dramatic edit. Normally, we’d expect Jones’ player to make a roll to see whether he could manage at least a few words of Hovito, but now that’s blocked. (The player gets a compensatory benefit.)
And as I explained that one day, the roof fell in.
So there was this guy I’d known for a decade or so, thanks to the amateur press association Alarums & Excursions and then Usenet, and got along with pretty well. He was prone to occasional bouts of nasty outbursts followed by being offline a few days or weeks and then coming back on an even keel again. I could already recognize the signs of recurrent stress, likely underlain by recurrent physical and/or mental health trouble. But he’d never before lashed out at me. Until this day.
He lashed out with startling intensity. How dare I say such a thing?
I was boggled. How dare I say what?
Gradually I worked out that he was offended at my example because I was giving people a completely wrong view of filmmaking.
I…what?
Screenwriters don’t use game-type mechanics at all. They just write, and consult and revise. Writing a script is nothing like playing a roleplaying game.
Well, yeah. No kidding.
The blast went on and on. I knew that. I was using the events of the film to illustrate how one might use Adventure to play out events of the same kind. (If they’d unclear to anyone reading this, let me know, please. I like to check my assumptions and often enough discover they were wrong.) no explanation of mine helped anything.
Eventually the moderators stepped in, the blast got smothered, and life went on.
Until, that is, a few days later and a different thread, when he showed up to make basically the same rant, albeit less energetically. I made an explanation for others and let it go.
And it happened again and again through the next year. Same obsession: I was cheating Adventure players out of an honest understanding of screenwriting with this self-aggrandizing swiping of credit. I knew to keep engagement to a minimum and by now he wasn’t sustaining the flames, so no such moment lasted and I was more baffled than angered or distressed.
He brought it up elsewhere, too. I don’t remember now if it happened here at all, but I do remember he interjected into Usenet and the game’s mailing list. Where there were moderators, they shut him now, and where not, I did my part by not sustaining anything. He’d show up just about anywhere I might be posting, on subjects from science fiction fandom to history, but never lingered long.
Gradually his interventions became less frequent, and finally he went offline for several years. I regretted whatever was going wrong on his end to spark so much outbursts but enjoyed relief from there.
Then he came back, in substantially worse style. He went after me in, as I recall, a thread about Trinity or Vampire over the same Adventure non-issue. He went off on others with the same intensity and lack of evident sense and comprehension. It didn’t take him very long to earn a perma-ban from Big Purple, and he soon after dropped out of sight in other venues as well.
I’ve never crossed paths with him again. Out of unhappiness for the lost friendship, I used to do Deja News and Google searches for him every year or two, but gradually stopped. I fear that he may have died or been institutionalized or suffered some other ghastly fate and I kind of don’t want to know. So I don’t - nobody has ever brought him or his later circumstances up around me.
And that’s how Indiana Jones brought me a stalker.
