Willy Wonka And The Polyamory Factory

Here’s a common mistake I see among newbie poly couples: Charlie has just gotten a Golden Ticket to see Willy Wonka’s Magical Chocolate Factory, which in this case is defined as “the really cute girl who does all of the freaky things that his current partner is not interested in.”
And the partner says this:
“Yes!  I’m so glad!  You can totally go to the factory!  Just… don’t eat the caramel.  And if he wants to show you the room where he beats the chocolate, don’t eat the grass.  Or the candy flowers.  And don’t go in the tunnel, I’m not cool with that.  And if he wants to give you the factory, that’s crazy responsibility, say no.”
Now, it could be argued that hey, at least this way Charlie gets to see some of the factory – but realistically, he’s going to spend so much time worrying about whether he’s going to partner his wife off if he hugs an Oompa-Loompa that honestly, he’s going to either hate the factory or hate her.
(Obligatory note: this is not gender-specific, Charlie could be a woman, overprotective spouses come in all genders, thankyouverymuch.)
What’s usually happening when you get the Great Golden Ticket Disclaimers is that the wife doesn’t want to tell her husband, “No, you can’t go to the factory” because she knows Charlie is actually Augustus Gloop and he’s going to fall in the damn candy river.  But she doesn’t want to say that, because then she’ll be a Bad Poly Partner and Charlie will be all mad… so instead, she comes up with a list of a few, uh, provisos, a couple of quid pro quos, until she’s essentially walled off all the best parts of the candy factory.
And you know what?
Charlie usually falls in the damn candy river anyway.
Sex/love/affection has an uncanny way of seeping around protective clauses.  The goal with a a poly relationship should be to find someone everyone is comfortable with, not to take someone and rules-lawyer them into a semi-acceptable form.  If you have to do that much work to make the candy factory safe to travel through, then you should just condemn the fucker and not let Charlie go.
And Charlie will be mad.  Charlie may actually be pretty stupid, because people tend not to learn from reading essays or being given advice by friends.  No, people learn from grabbing the special Three-Course-Dinner gum off the table and cramming it in their mouth and blowing up into a big purple mess when the dessert portion doesn’t work quite right, and only after they’re squooshed back down into somewhat normal size by Willy Wonka’s extremely painful machines do they say, “Wow, I probably should listen to Willy Wonka when he tells me no!”
Which leaves you with an uncomfortable choice, when the Golden Ticket appears: do you say “no,” and let them seethe for the rest of their lives about what a gloriously perfect experience the Chocolate Factory would have been… or do you let them go, watch them fall in the chocolate river, and hope they learn? Or do you let them go and discover that indeed your partner is Charlie Bucket, and gets the factory, and deal with the stress of being a lucrative candy magnate?
There’s never a good answer there.  And I’m not saying, though people will doubtlessly misinterpret me, that restrictions are bad.  (“Safe sex” is a pretty darned good restriction, f’rex.)   What I am saying is that raising fifty million provisos because you’re too afraid to say “no” is often way more harmful than the flat “no” – because if, by some magnificent chance, Charlie follows all your guidelines and emerges from the candy factory whole, chances are good he won’t think, “Wow, all those guidelines protected me from danger!”  He’ll think, “I could have had so much more fun if I wasn’t held back by all these stupid rules!”
But it really is okay to say “no.”  It’s tough, when those golden gates are opening.  You may even find Charlie running off, alone.  But if you never wanted to own a candy factory, or deal with the unique form of PTSD one only gets when you’ve been sucked through the garbage chutes of a chocolate factory and are barely saved from the incinerator, then maybe letting him go off is the wiser choice.

On Killing A Player Character

I had to kill a PC last night.  It’s the first time I’ve ever killed a PC.
I’m still a little upset about that.
Now, when I say “I had to kill a PC,” that’s a ludicrous statement: I’m the GM, the guy who runs the game.  I control reality.  I could have turned the villain into a cloud of balloons, or had Superman fly in from above to save them, or given the merciless Borglike creature attacking poor Gigi a change of heart.
Yet all of those alternatives would have radically changed the nature of the world I’d created.  In a game, you try to set up a realistic set of expectations, and ensure that those expectations are met.  In some games, that expectation is, “You will never die, because you are a hero,” and to that end almost any bending of the rules is okay.  In other games, that expectation is “Death comes easily to anyone, often for trivial reasons,” and in games like that you would feel cheated if someone did fudge a die roll to save you.
My game – like most games, I think – has the implicit expectation of “I’ll try not to kill you, since you’re the hero, but if you make a lot of bad tactical moves, then death is an option.”  And a lot of bad tactical moves were made.
Thing is, I tried to stop her.  When poor Gigi abandoned her fellow PCs, hell-bent on tracking down a wussy enemy of hers in a dark warren called The Murder Holes, she snuck off alone without telling anyone.  She encountered a hidden nest of spiders, whose razor-sharp webs did damage to her, which was my attempt to say “Hey, you’re injured, go back to your healer and group up” – the player interpreted that as “These warrens are dangerous with webs and traps, I shouldn’t backtrack.”  I used an echo to show that her enemy was mutating into a monster that shot energy bolts from his fingers, energy bolts that incinerated a whole nest of spiders – but the information that Joe McWuss here may be transforming into an actual threat was dismissed.  I made it clear by cutting to a scene with the other PCs that they were at least fifteen to twenty minutes away from helping her, and that got overlooked.
The overwhelming display of power I had the now-mutated boss monster – who had been designed to face down three PCs and their sidekick and fight them to a standstill – merely convinced Gigi’s player that retreat was useless, put her back against the wall.  When I had the boss monster say, “You’re getting tired, I can sense it,” that was me, trying to tell Gigi’s player You are running low on hit points, GTFO – but it was taken as taunting, the kind of thing every paper monster says to make victory all the sweeter.  
When Gigi took the fatal hit, I put the game on hold and walked in the yard for a while.  How could I save Gigi?  I eventually said, “Okay, instead of killing her, the monster will infect her and the other PCs can save her.”  And due to more subtle miscommunications, the players approached this Big Boss as “We can kill this monster!” instead of “We need to rescue Gigi and get out!” and by the time they finally decided it was time to flee, they consciously and purposely left Gigi behind.
Now, I could have reduced the threat of the boss monster (who’s intended to be the main nemesis of much of the campaign), or magically transported the other PCs fifteen minutes ahead in time so they charged into battle just as Gigi was about to fall, or any number of other subtle changes.  I didn’t.  And when the players left her for dead, I couldn’t think of a way to save her that didn’t involve things I found to be unbelievable stretches of the imagination.
So I looked Gigi’s player dead in the face and said what all GMs essentially say whenever they kill a PC:
“Your character’s life is not as important as my game’s reality.” 
That’s a tough goddamned call.
And yet, for me, that kind of call is necessary.  I don’t want to play in a game where my success is a given – hell, isn’t that obvious from my love of Magic, programming, and writing, three skills where you learn by slamming your face into failure?  I want a game where if I screw up, significant losses can accrue, where every battle has a chance of going really badly if you don’t plan carefully. Where death is not a given, but always a potential concern.
If I had chosen to save Gigi, I feel – and every GM has to make their own call on this – that I would have irreparably damaged the contract I quietly hold with the players: namely, that actions have consequences, and when actions are not wise, not all of those consequences will be pleasant ones.  I would have saved one game session at the cost of future ones, bending the game towards a style of play I dislike.  (And though I am in charge of trying to provide a fun adventure for my players, as the GM, I am not their bitch.  My enjoyment has to count for something, too.)
Gigi’s player was irritated, which is understandable.  Nobody wants to lose someone they’re attached to.  Yet I remember when we were playing Delta Green a few weeks ago, when Gigi’s player, frustrated by me constantly asking, “Uh, are you sure that’s a good idea?” finally exploded and told me, “Look, just let us make the stupid moves and let us deal with the consequences!”
Well, this time, I let them make the stupid moves and doled out consequences.  Yet that didn’t go over well, either.
That’s not necessarily hypocritical.  People go to games for escapism.  Being in a game that’s frustrating or involves losing is not fun.  Discovering that the GM does not share your opinion on the effectiveness of your tactics is not fun.  Spending your entire game getting killed is not fun.
And tonight, I ran a very not fun game, and as I said, I’m still a little upset about that.
Yet those not fun nights will happen occasionally as a GM.  To Gigi’s player, Gigi was making a solid call.  She had an enemy who she’d wanted to kill since the first game, one who she had a firm shot at, who she could finally track down in isolation.  To Gigi’s player, I have no doubt that this seemed like an awesome idea – and in many games, it probably would have been.  If I’d been running a game where the PCs triumph no matter what, I would have twisted things so Gigi would have been rewarded for her bold initiative and taken out her enemy in style.
But it wasn’t.  I was running the kind of game where running off alone into a dark maze of tunnels to kill a mutating opponent wasn’t a very good idea.  And I was running the kind of game where the philosophy is, “Some nights suck when you lose, but the victories are so much sweeter when you finally figure out the right tactics.”
Nobody wants to be told that their tactics aren’t the right ones. As a GM, it’s my job to say “yes!” as often as possible when players devise weird new approaches.  Yet it’s also my job to judge when a plan simply wouldn’t work, and that causes friction when the player thinks this is a good idea and you do not.
As a GM, it’s also my job to tell the players what kind of world they live in, and to enforce those boundaries – and if my world is the one where all roads don’t lead inevitably to triumph, then that means some nights they’re gonna have the Empire Strikes Back of the soul.
Maybe they like that style of game, in which case they stay.  Or they don’t, in which case I hope the thrills they get when they win offset the occasional nights of suck, and that they learn to pick up when I’m flailing my GMly arms to send signals that whoah, pull back, retreat, this is not working!  Because I suspect a lot of tonight’s death came from a quiet misalignment of gaming philosophies – acting like the hero of Die Hard works if you’re in Die Hard, but what happens if this is Game of Thrones?
I’m a little upset because I don’t like upsetting my players.  But I’m also a little upset because I don’t really see what else I could have done and kept playing the sort of game I want to run, and that’s a rough beat.  A very rough beat.

On Those Horrible Magic Players With Their Big Ol' Ass Cracks

I’d like to repost a comment here from one Andrew Wright:

I’m a 6’4″ 300 lb Magic player and I don’t wear tailored clothes to a tournament. I like clever t-shirts and get them in the largest possible sizes when I can (always paying extra when I do) but clever t-shirts do not come in “Long” sizes.
When you see a 2x or 3x t-shirt, they are designed and built for people with large guts and/or barrel chests, not for people with a long torso.
After a bare minimum number of washes, even the long t-shirts start to shrink vertically (and the short/wide shirts become unwearable). Bowling shirts and other top shirts can hide this fact for only so long. T-Shirts I loved supporting webcomics, local stores, and other favorite artists are stacked up in my closet waiting until that day in the vague and distant future I ask for someone with a sewing machine to make them into a quilt.
This makes me massively sad.
I am a married man, a volunteer, a recognized leader in my community, and an announcer for a Roller Derby league for going on 6 years now, where I’ve won Volunteer of the Year in 3 of the seasons I’ve served. One does not earn these accolades by being a “cat-piss” person around women. And shaming men who look like me doesn’t make it easier to find clever t-shirts.
How well my t-shirt fits me does not tell you the story of who I am any more than what a woman is wearing tells me what kind of person she is.
So jerks like this guy who take photos making fun of people that face the same problem that I do without their knowledge or consent and post them to on the net for a comedy bit that uses these images as a take down of innocent bystanders, they need to know that’s not ok.
I don’t care what the “other people” think of my Magic habit, but I do care if people like me are going to be made fun of by their peers in public due to the oversight of t-shirt design companies.
Basically, if it’s not okay to shame someone or degrade someone for what they wear, does it matter whether that shamed or degraded person is male or female?

Mur Lafferty asked the very good question, “Do people view the Magic buttcrack incident any different from People of Walmart?” And the answer is that I personally do not. I’m pretty much not cool on people taking secret photos of ordinary citizens and then making fun of them.  That feels an awful lot like what bullies did in high school when I didn’t dress well.
And you know what?  All that bully-shaming didn’t actually make me dress better, as some people suppose it would.  What it did was make me ashamed of any clothes I had on, and eventually decide to wear a unitard-like outfit of “black pants, black shirt, sneakers” to everywhere I went because I didn’t even want to think about clothing, and felt uncomfortable any time I had to wear so much as a button-down shirt.  And I was so disinterested in clothing for years afterwards that I wore stained T-shirts and pants because clothing had become this null-zone for me.  My not caring had become, in a way, a rebellion against the assholes who hurt me.
Mockery is a remarkably shitty way of changing people’s minds.
Now, if someone had taken me aside and complimented me on the rare occasion I wore a shirt that looked good, and quietly pulled me aside to tell me that my hair was really wild that day and could maybe use some combing, and made me feel like they were on my side and happy to be with me no matter what, then I probably would have been a much better dresser.  I know, because this is what happened when Gini quietly started heaping praise on me for wearing more color, and when I finally found something that expressed myself without being too crazy, then I flourished into Hawaaian shirts and shiny boots and fingernails.  I shave now.  I pay a lot of attention to those details.
And that helps.  People look at me better in my stylish hat.  They treat me differently.  It’s actually somewhat of a revelation how clothes can make people treat you better.
Because when a bunch of kids are pointing and making fun of your pants, you don’t think, “Gee, if only I wore something snappier, I’d win their love!”
You think what you wear has the possibility of shaming you, and wear the least offensive thing you can – and don’t bother to learn the rest of the rules that go with it.
So yeah, I’m not down with the whole thing.  Some fat people have problems getting clothing they like, and have this awkward positioning between finding clothes they like and ass-exposure, and don’t always find that balance.  Or maybe they don’t even know.  And while yeah, I can see the argument that ass alley is unpleasant to some – it’s not to me, because my attitude is that as long as someone’s hygenic and isn’t stinking up the place, who cares what skin they’re showing? – I think if it’s an issue then that’s best done by quietly taking someone aside and telling them quietly that their ass is showing, as it should be in most places.
Because, as I’ve noted here before, shaming fat people actually makes them gain weight.  If you’re really concerned about these fat people cleaning up their act to make Magic tournaments more “welcoming” in some obscure way, then you’ll talk to them as human beings and try to resolve the issue quietly. Maybe suggest some T-shirt manufacturers who have better fits for the large gentlemen.  Discuss some practical approaches to reduce the sagging pants.
Otherwise: you’re there to mock and shame people, wrapped in a thin veneer of so-called humor.  That’s fine.  Be honest about what a callous jerk you are, and stop pretending this is somehow about “helping” them.

Why Are Millennials More Liberal And Less Trusting?

David Frum, who’s the kind of conservative I wish was heading the party, notes some distressing tendencies of Millennials – namely, that they’re more liberal, less patriotic, and less trusting.  He then goes on to attribute this to the usual dubious studies showing that increased ethnical diversity causes people to be less trusting.
I think the answer is simpler: the Republicans have eroded the very concepts of “trust” and “patriotism” with their policies.
Now, of course, no single answer is going to sum up a whole generation’s tendencies – a full compilation of answers regarding “Why are Millennials less patriotic and trust less?” would include “cynicism generated from the Internet,” “the still-ongoing echo of independence from the 1960s counterculture,” “distrust of a government that’s often shown itself to be distrustful,” and a thousand other things.  It’s never as simple as a single vector, and problem-solvers should always acknowledge that.
But the problem with the Republican party is that it’s forever trying to recreate the hard-work culture of the 1950s without incorporating all of those obligations that employers felt to workers.
I’m just old enough to remember the 1980s shocks of layoffs.  There was a time when, if you got a job, you could expect to earn a decent wage from it for life.  Think about how crazy that sounds today: you got one job, and you could, if you wanted, stay at the same company until you retired.  Hell, my Dad and my stepdad both lived that particular dream.
That’s because, culturally, the idea of layoffs was something repugnant.  People didn’t want to do it, because they felt some obligation to their employees – I’m not idealizing the worker/employer relationship back then, but there was some sense among the top executives that if you hired a man, you couldn’t just fling him out the door without a very good reason.  And that reason was not “We need to look good for our shareholders this quarter.”
But the Reagan Revolution sold us on the idea that layoffs were good!  They increased business mobility!  They allowed people to get rid of the deadwood!  They made it so you didn’t have to be so careful hiring people who you might have to keep for years!  And so, within my lifetime, we’ve seen a situation where companies treat workers as disposable cogs…
…and workers, who are not dumb, have adjusted by treating their employers as dispensably as their employers treat them.
Most people have jobs, now, but they’re on the lookout.  They could be laid off at any moment.  They could get fired.  They don’t expect to be here for twenty years, or ten, or even five – at some point they’ll get a better offer and move on.
…and you wonder why this generation doesn’t trust?  Hell, there’s a straight line to be drawn downwards, and you note it, David: “Just 19% of millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Generation Xers, 37% of the silent generation and 40% of boomers.”
If you want patriotism, yeah, it sounds good to call to Kennedy and ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.  But that Kennedy line was set in a time where the government did do things for its citizens, assive efforts: it helped soldiers everywhere get housing and education after World War II, because it felt an obligation to those who’d helped it.
The Republican party is not that government.  The Republicans wrap themselves in a philosophy of sacrifice, but the truth is that the sacrifice is all on your end.  Want a guarantee of a job?  Can’t do that.  Want assistance if the corporations decide to start hiring overseas?  Can’t do that.  Want some help if you fought for our country and need a hand?  Uh, no, we just voted that down.
What I’d like to see would be a conservative call for obligation – not the slavering ass-kissing to the glorious job creators, but a serious questioning of the contract between employer and employee beyond just the paycheck.  And then a serious analysis of what we owe to the men we ask to go and get shot, traumatized, and killed to protect US interests.
It’s all very well to spout the Ayn Rand line that we should all be self-sufficient, but telling us “You’re on your own” encourages neither patriotism nor trust.  It encourages a cold-hearted analysis of one’s own interest, in true Ayn Rand style, which tells us that we should use people for our own needs and walk away.
And that’s the conservative culture.  That’s the Tea Party, telling us that if you’re not rich it’s your fault, and only the hard-working will survive.  That’s throwing this new generation into a snakepit – and it is a snakepit that Reagan and his ilk created.  This distrust is the direct result of his policies.
Maddening thing is, there’s good bits in the conservative culture, a wellspring of charity and help to those they think are needy that doesn’t get highlighted enough.  But when you say, “Nobody should take money from my pockets to give to the lazy!”, what you are saying in a very real sense is, “If you fall, you’re on your own.  And no government will help you willingly.”
Is it any wonder that the Millennials are hearing that message all too clearly?

The Most Helpful Stephen King Quote Ever. I Mean This.

My dear friend Kara, who’s got her own fantasy series coming out soon and a couple of nonfiction books on the shelf, was angsting a bit at the state of her career.  I got an agent.  Maybe she should have gotten an agent!  Is she doing writing wrong?
To which I always think back to the most helpful thing ever told to me by a writer, and of course that writer is Stephen King:

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

Seriously.  I love that quote.  Because on one level, selling enough writing to pay the light bill is not that hard.  In Ohio, that could be $75 depending on the time of year and your house.  It’s a tiny sale.
On another level, selling that fiction is hard.  That’s a three-cent-a-word story, and the markets for those are ridiculously competitive, and getting in there is a hell of a job.  Or self-publishing in an overcrowded, noisy market well enough to stand out and make $75 from individual people is a hell of a job.
Seriously x2.  Writing is a tough goddamned business to be in, and most writers I know have this magical ability to erase all of their past accomplishments and focus on what they don’t have, leading to the inevitable neurosis string of I’d be happy if I just sold a story.  I’d be happy if I just sold a story to a pro market.  I’d be happy if I just sold three pro stories to get into SFWA.  I’d be happy if I just got nominated for an award.  I’d be happy if I just won an award.  I’d be happy if I got an agent.  I’d be happy if I….
This is why sane people don’t marry writers.
And yeah, Kara hasn’t written her bestseller yet.  Maybe she hasn’t earned tens of thousands from her writing.  But damn, selling enough to pay a light bill is a mark of courage, and in her rush forward to better things let her (and us) not forget this grand achievement.
And if you haven’t yet paid your light bill, let me tell you: one story to the right market can do it.  And then, quite seriously, I’ll consider you talented.  I may consider you talented without any story sales, of course, but paying one light bill is the perfect goal for a beginner: it’s both really difficult and very much within reach.  And it’s a fine mark of distinction.
Get out there.  Get your light bulb on.