So, Game Mastering is like making love to a beautiful woman – Lots of work, but if you do it well and you do a lot of it, it gives you something to talk about when you’re golfing with your divorce lawyer.

Cosmo, GQ and other magazines are full of seduction tips. To be honest, half of the tips are basic human interaction stuff just put into words so that people realize what they are already doing / what they are already doing wrong. The other half of the tips are something that can be used by a good GM to accomplish something in the games they’re running. So, in spirit of these – a top ten list of seduction tips that have their uses for GMs.

10 – Be the Alpha

In social animals, the alpha is the individual in the community to whom the others follow and defer.

- Wikipedia

This neat little tip has two ways it relates to RPG sessions and Game Mastering. First, while it doesn’t necessarily mean that when one of the lower-ranking members of the group gets out of line, you’ll dry hump them against the table until they recognize your superiority, it does mean that you are expected to have some charge of the situation. While there are games where the Game Master isn’t the ultimate authority in the game world, it is a fact that if you’re the one inviting people over to play and organizing the gaming situation, you’re in a way responsible of keeping things rolling. This is an authority position and you should embrace it as such. Someone needs to think of the game first, and that’s sort of your role. If the others think about it as well, that’s good too.

The second thing about being an alpha in a game is that you need to be able to stand confidently behind your words. If you say that something is happening in the game world, then that is happening in the game world. If you constantly have to go about correcting yourself, you appear insecure, and the rest of the pack will a) eat you alive b) leave you behind to the wolves. Depending if you’re carnivores or vegetarians. The most common type of failure in taking charge of your actions is demonstrated best by the following:

Players: “We enter the room”

You: “There are three menacing yeti in the room”

Player 1: “Yeti, sweet. My character has this special ability to make any yeti my friend. I’ll use that.”

You: “You can’t do that, they seem to be uhmn… mind controlled yeti!”

Player 2: “Great, I’ll use my character’s de-mind-control -power to make them not mind controlled. And then P1 can make them his friend!”

You: “Uhmn… They’re robots. They attack! Roll for Initiative!”

If you say they’re yeti, be man enough to keep them yeti even if it that doesn’t lead to the result you were originally hoping for. Don’t let that weakness seep through. The players are most likely expecting you to be the reliable leader that is best for their pack. Act the role. (Note: Being an alpha doesn’t mean being macho or even manly. You don’t need to boast – let the actions speak for you.)

9 – Stay Fit, Have a Life

If you sit in your mom’s basement and just watch TV and eat cheeseburgers, you might get great ideas for your games and your friends might really like the way you run them. But seriously, for a game master, there are two great reasons for staying fit and having a life.

First is that frankly you’re a lot better off when you’re in good shape and have some form of social life beyond your gaming group. Being fit makes you more cheerful and less lethargic. And an energetic game master is a good thing to have. The second, a bit less obvious bit is that having a life and being in shape means you’ll be out and about. Meeting interesting new personalities and getting mugged by yet another generation of street thugs. Experiencing the life outside the four walls of your home. By having a larger social peer group you will not be obsessing about games as much, and you’ll be guaranteed to get some real inspiration out of that. You’ll hear stories that are odd and wonderful. Low key and world shattering to the people telling them. A new person you meet might give you an idea for a new character. Or she might turn out to be the love of your life, for that matter. But the first thing is to get off your ass and go get a life.

Also, there is no shame in dressing in something else than black jeans and the Metallica T-Shirt you bought 15 years ago. Getting a shave and a haircut wouldn’t hurt either. Just saying. Real job maybe?

8 – You Cannot Seduce Someone Who Doesn’t Want To Be Seduced

Sometimes there are players and games that just aren’t meant to work together. Maybe the player has very different ideas about roleplaying than you, or maybe she just doesn’t like you, the fellow players or the game. Maybe she’s going through a rough patch and the game isn’t what she needs just now. Maybe she’s a pretentious bitch who thinks you’re a lowly brute for your interest in 12th century underwear. You just need to set your personal motivations aside and let her slide. The game will be harmed more by the obtrusive player than it will be by her leaving the group.

If you notice a player who is constantly away from your games, or cancels at the last possible moment, or just doesn’t seem like she’s really that interested, be frank about it and offer her a way out of the group. If you can’t say “Okay, this doesn’t work and I don’t want you to come to this game anymore,” tell her a lie – something along the lines that there is a friend who would like to join the game and could take over her character. It gives her a way out that leaves everyone feeling a bit better. Sure, saying to someone that it might be better to “do it” with someone else is painful, but will help a lot in the long run.

7 – Seduction Is As Much About Conceal As It’s About Reveal

The age old wisdom from the TV series Lost is that a good way to keep the audience hooked to a show is to generate more questions than you give answers to. Also, the same show has taught us that if you overdo this, it just gets ridiculous. When you have a good group together and you’re selling your game to them, keep them wanting more – keep them waiting to find out what happens next. And after teasing them for a while, give them a reward for their patience. Reveal to them some of the things you’ve been teasing them with.

You can use this question-answer cycle as a motive for the game to move forward – if you leave something hanging in the air, you can then have the characters go explore it. By doing that they’ll find out things about it, but also new questions. Don’t answer all the questions you have posed with new questions. That just gets frustrating for everyone.

6 – Use Stories To Sell You

This has actually more to do with selling NPCs than selling you. When you introduce a person to the game and want it to be interesting, give it a story to tell the players. By a story I don’t mean a full-fledged narrative, but something that is interesting and tells the players something about the NPC. Could be something like when the new recruit to the team comes in a bit late, she says “Hi guys, check my new gloves – I had to actually tear them from this chav chick’s hands over at the store. They were the last pair and I weren’t going to let some skank have them before me. So, what’s going on?” This is something that will help the players relate to the NPC a bit better instantly. Even if the game is about fighting supernatural terrors from beyond, a character that nearly got into a fight at the H&M will be remembered better and with more personal attachment than some cute chick with neat gloves.

In fact, keep a few different stories around for each character and tell them as the game progresses – to re-introduce the NPCs to the players every now and then. Maybe every few gaming sessions.

5 – Be Interested In What She Has To Say

Interaction is the core of RPGs. This means that you have to pay attention to what the other side is saying. And by paying attention, I mean really paying attention. What are the things that keep coming up again and again when they talk? Which parts of your GMing they react to? When are they being non-responsive? When you’re playing with other people, these are the ways they can and will give you clues of what they want from the game. Sometimes a direct approach helps (asking “What do you want from the game?”) but might also lead them to just bullshit their way out of the situation – telling you what you want to hear. What you want from the game. Thus, being interested in what they say when in actual game situations comes in handy.

Also, this leads to another seduction tip that I have to mention here – Eye contact. Eye contact. Eye contact. Don’t just observe, show that you’re observing. If you’re hunching into your rulebook while the player is trying to explain her ideas, you’re discouraging her. She will think that you’re dismissing her ideas outright and will not go all the way with them. Even if you were actually listening while reading, you’ll miss on content as the other party thinks you’re not interested.

4 – Mirror Her

Now, a mirroring technique in seduction means something where you are copying a person’s movements and gestures and eventually noticing how she starts to mimic you, and you’ll be able to get her bend over backwards for you. In RPGs the techniques are more about you being willing to let the players influence how the game works to get them drawn in and using that to your advantage.  If you paid attention a moment ago when I was talking about paying attention or even bothered to read the player’s character sheet, you already know quite many things about what a player wants to do in the game. And more often than not these wants and needs the player has are in opposition to your own ideas about what the game should be about.

How is it done? Simple. Pay attention when the players are explaining their characters to you and start the game with the players having their characters involved in exactly what they’re wanting. Give them positive things to associate with the game by doing what they like to do and then slowly introduce your own ideas.

The benefit of this is that the players get more excited about games where the things they like are happening. So if you give them a game where the focus is on these things, they’ll be eager for more, even when you start bringing in plot elements that aren’t the ones they were originally interested in.

3 – Learn From Each Encounter

Sometimes things go right, sometimes things go wrong. What is important is to know what worked and what didn’t.

After each game, try to think what was good and what was bad. And then think how to replicate the good in future games. And how to avoid the bad. Much more demanding than it sounds. Players are usually horrible at giving feedback, especially negative. You’ll have to listen to what they say went well and then fill in the holes as “ok, they didn’t say this thing was good. Was it mediocre or bad?” And every time you start a new gaming session, try to fix one of the things that have been going wrong and hold on to one of the things that went well (if you manage more, that’s even better, of course). Eventually you’ll get the hang of what went right and what went wrong.

2 – Don’t Say Things Just To Impress Her

A good player can spot bullshit a mile away. When you try to feed her stuff that is not really you, you’ll get made. Of course, as a Game Master, you will have to create NPCs and tell stories. But try to be something you’re not cut for and you’ll end up with the players rolling their eyes. If you can’t create great action scenes, settle on creating good ones, but make the social interaction great. If you have problems running games with huge complicated conspiracies, run games that don’t have them. And if you decide to make a scene that seems really cool, make sure both you and the players have emotional investment to it so that you’re not just running it to impress everyone while your heart is not in it.

Also, know your shit. The more things you need to pull out out your ass, the more your authority ends up under inspection. If you are playing with a new system, try to know most of it beforehand. And if you don’t know something, say “I’m not 100% sure about this, but is it okay with all of us if we use a variant of this rule here,” at least you’re being honest. And honesty can be a great thing when you’re getting called on doing things differently than the rulebook said.

1 – The Best Way To Get Over a Bad Lay Is To Have Ten Great Ones

And when everything went to hell, and half of the players aren’t talking to you anymore after you tried some experimental Norwegian artsy things they didn’t like, the best way to get back on the horse is to get back on the horse. Play something light everyone likes, don’t try too much. Roll AD&D characters and play a scenario you found on the internet while laughing together at how bad it is. The best way to get over a bad game is to ignore all the fancy things, all the roleplaying game theory you know, and just to hang out with your friends. And roll some dice.

On one hand, I managed to get my father’s printer working and he’s happy.

On the other, I just heard my godmother had died.

Lately, thanks to a three-week long sick leave, my “human interaction” has pretty much been virtual. That in practice means MSN/IRC, Facebook, Left 4 Dead and City of Heroes. I also logged on to Second Life after a pause to collect my weekly free money.

On IRC, I “hang out” on about a dozen channels these days. There’s one that’s actually quite active, but sadly, the activity is something that doesn’t really concern my life a lot anymore – it’s the channel for my old main subject’s student group. Then there’s a “nowplaying” channel, where music I listen to gets pasted on, in real time. Pretty much like last.fm does. Sadly, haven’t found a spotify-mIRC plugin, so not much of the music I listen to these days actually gets pasted there. And it’s very rarely someone listens to something there that grabs my attention. Then there are a couple of “legacy” channels – channels that used to be active, but have gone into some form of a hibernation in the past years. I join the channels, and hope someone would talk about something, but the best they can do really is paste a couple of links and not really comment on anything. Some of the channels I’m on are only about organizing games these days. RPGs or Online Games, depending on the mood and time. But there is nothing really interesting to chat about there either. And on the rest of the channels, people hang out because it would be impolite to leave the channel as the two or three other people you know would take offense. Some of these channels are silly to the point that the people on the channel won’t talk to you on the channel, but start a private conversation, killing any hope of some conversation happening on-channel.

In case it doesn’t show, I’m thinking of quitting IRC.

On MSN the situation is actually much better – While there’s only a handful of people I talk on it, the conversations are much better. Even if there’s not a community feel to the conversations, they at least seem to exsist. But there are a lot of dead contacts there as well. I don’t even know why I have half of the contacts I do, anymore.

Facebook, as Larsa put it the other day, is something that you thought you would hate, but is actually quite great when you got into it. For me, it’s not that important, except for the few people I keep touch in through it. There are of course downsides to every coin, but mostly it’s a very “cute” system of staying in touch with people without actually staying in touch. Or to internet-stalk your ex-girlfriends, if you’re into that sort of thing. The only thing that really bothers me about it is the careless way some people seem to regard their own personal information. Somehow there’s been an abundance of memes going round that, when seen by wrong people, can be used for malice. Like provide the reader with information like “your mother’s maiden name”, something that is used quite commonly as a user verification question.

City of Heroes has seen some turmoil in the past few weeks – the EU offices are being shut down and moved to the US, something that might cause horrors to the EU players. But that’s something that only time will tell. Meanwhile, a small group of people that I know only through the game provide me with lots of great humor and good cheer. The group of us (all many-year veterans of the game) do a couple of hours of teaming every now and then and catch on on the latest gossip. Stories of what has happened to one another (who has gotten married, who has been in a drunken bar fight this time) and to those that we haven’t seen online in a while (but someone in the group happens to know in real life). Compared to the other communication channels, the fact that I haven’t met any of the people I play these days with in real life makes it quite unique compared to the others.

Which leads to Left 4 Dead, another game I’ve been playing actively. The main difference between CoH and L4D crowds for me is the fact that there is voice chat in the game. The people I play with vary from those I know in real life to those I’ve never met. But not having to rely on keyboard to expres yourself, and the game being very action-oriented, changes the communication quite a bit – most of the things said are very much related to the gameplay, which leads to text that’s very, very shallow – I have no idea what’s going on in the other players’ lives, whereas in CoH someone might curse his girlfriend’s cat or other small things that are in no way relevant to the game, but are quite intimate.

I also mentioned Second Life. I’ve been a user for so long that they’re actually paying me to log in every week, but I’ve never really “got” the environment. I guess it’s all those flying obscenities that man can imagine that keep me distant from it, but I must admit, there are some good things here and there – “specs of light” as one might say. One is a garden decor store a friend of mine runs there – a shop full of very “normal” things for sale. It’s almost unnerving to see someone sell a well-crafted rock when you’re mostly used to seeing … well, unnerving things. And another thing I’m going to have to buff is the Second Life Shakespeare Company, that try to provide some meaning to the damn place.

None of these really beat human interaction on a “real” level. A phonecall from a friend usually means a lot more than him pasteing you a link of people walking across a road.

So a player from our gaming group asked me to help him get a new tattoo – my job was to compile a composite from his source material to a form the actual artist can work with. He asked me to do that about a year and a half ago. Well, now it’s out of my hands, and as suspected, that’s a good feeling. And kind of weird one at the same time. The stuff I tinkered with will eventually find form on someone else’s skin. There is something near-sacred about that. My own view on tattoos is on some level close to semi-mystical reverence. Things etched on the skin telling a truth more deep than all the clothes and mannerisms out there. My father still wears the “Sailor’s Shallow Grave” tattoo on his arm, even if he hasn’t been sailing the high seas in years. He’s not exactly proudly presenting it to people, but it’s something he’ll have for life and no amount of suburbanizing will take that aspect of his life away from him. Of course there are stupid tattoos (although some behind that link are really awesome), I’d love to think that quite a good portion of people, when selecting a tattoo, attach some meaning to it.

So when in RPGs someone has a tattoo, it’s quite sad for me to see what it’s usually there for.here seems to be three typical possibilities why it’s there. 1) It’s cool. “The mysterious stranger has this awesome tattoo of a thundercloud on his face that is so fetch” 2) It’s magical “The mysterious stranger’s tattoo shoots a burst of salami at you” or 3) it’s to mark the wearer as a part of a group “The mysterious stranger’s thundercloud tattoo means he’s part of the thunderous pasta chefs’ ninja-pirate group”

It’s very rare to see a tattoo in RPGs (both in sourcebooks or actual games) that’s there beyond those reasons. In other media tattoos that are there for the character instead of for the story somehow aren’t that uncommon anymore (Battlestar Galactica‘s the first that comes to mind). But not in RPGs, really. For example, in the d20 Future campaign I’m currently playing, two or three of the characters have high profile tattoos, and if I recall correctly, all of them are of type 2. And any tattoo we’ve come across on NPCs have been of type 3. Maybe some of them have started as Type 1s, but moved to the group identity thing quite fast. None outside that.

I try to recall my own campaigns, but can’t come up with many that had tattoos in them outside the “Look at Me, I’m Important” -sphere. I ran a campaign called Käärmeuurna (Snake Urn) that had a minor theme of body modification in it. I think there might have been a character with a tattoo that wasn’t there because it was important or especially cool. But most likely I’m lying if I’m saying that. I do vaguely recall that one of the player characters getting a non-uniform, not-just-for-cool, non-magical tattoo in that very game, but that might have been something she was planning on getting, not really sure if she really actually got it. Closest to getting a normal, character-based tattoo on any game so-far, I think.

The sad thing is that having a tattoo on a character quite easily falls into the superficial cool side instead of anything else. Might be time to actively change that in the next campaign I run. And in case one or more of the people in our gaming group are reading this, I’ll ask you: Have we had regular, “human” tattoos in our games?

So, just paid some money and will be going to Knutepunkt this year. Which means that I’ll be in conferences/related hulabaloo most of the end of April this year. May will not be pretty. I predict a massive hangover after Vappu.

I’m currently annoyed at:

• Not having a pair of 3-D glasses
• Facebook meme “25 things” that includes tagging your friends so they “can” do the quiz too
• The realization where things went wrong with the game I’m running, midway the campaign.
• Slight flu
• Having to postpone a LARP I’ve been planning for my birthday on account of not being in the country
• Forgetting the Lady GaGa CD in the car
• Not being able to express myself in written form as well as I’m wishing (or “not having an editor on my retainer”)
• Television series with Filler Episodes
• Missing laser tag tonight
• Not moving on with things
• End of Last Watch. Too Deus-Exy, in my opinion, even if the metaphysics were sound
• Life in a distant corner of the world

Since there is an emergent trend of cat blogs, I’ll post one post about them here, now. It is a blog about the zany life of my three cats, Mörri, Tallukka and Töppönen.

Be warned, post contains cat photos.

Mörri and Tallukka are planning to take over the world. You are probably on their very long kill list.

Töppönen doesn’t bother with their schemes. He knows he will be the king when the time comes.

This was the last picture ever taken by a nameless photographer. It was taken on that special day on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Moments later, shots were heard and Kennedy was shot. There is no apparent connection between these two things.

That is the life of the kitties here. They’re like the Great Old Ones, waiting for the stars to be right for their reign to begin. Until that day arrives, I will be a loyal servant, et cetera.

Spiritual awakening is a lei’d cat

Taken on my cameraphone, thus the excellent quality.

After a cellphoneless holidays, my phone is back on. What I have learned is that a cellphone always present greatly increases my stress levels and that I should do something about my cellphone habits. Returning to a landline might not be an impossible thing either. I think things were much simpler when we weren’t available all of the time.