Hey, Ben—

Dunno if you’ve been following this (guessing not since you’re busy moving) but Wizards of the Coast has backed off significantly from the worldofwarcraftification of 4th Ed. in favor of more improvisation and roleplaying.

There’s a fairly hefty section in the new basic rules (free PDF download) on character personality and background (including sexual preference, gender identity, and gender presentation) that has me thinking about the differences between the D&D approach to building “character” and (my limited experience of) the more ‘actorly’ systems that seem to be in vogue. D&D doesn’t explicitly model your relationships with other players or your current motivation, but it wants to know your name and sex and gender and height and weight and alignment (inescapable :P) and personality quirks and ideals, but it also wants to know what languages you speak and what god you worship or what thieves’ guild you were a member of or what lord’s army you used to serve in. It’s an enormously long list of choices (or dice rolls/table lookups) and while it all provides flavor most of it (even more than in the actorly systems) is going to stay on the mantlepiece during any one play session.

D&D’s default assumption is that every character has a (character-)life-long campaign(-plus) to look forward to and a world to explore / change / transcend, that (despite, certainly, all my experience to the contrary) a character is for life, not just for an evening. Wizards has of course sound economic reasons to try to enmesh you in an ongoing campaign (or at least to entice you with the possibility of one) and to try to interest you in purchasing some or all of their fine collection of geographically- or advanced-character-developmentally-themed sourcebooks, but there is a legit source of reader or rather player pleasure there.

It makes me reevaluate our discovery some years back that my default approach to character in fiction was to situate the character in society and your default approach was to situate the character in a network of interpersonal relationships. Maybe there’s always a never-to-be-written multi-volume epic in the back of my head, whereas you’re focused on completing the story at hand.

—D.

Number of books by women appearing in the Locus All-Centuries Poll top 50 best 20th century SF novels: 4.

Number of women authors represented on the same poll: 3.

Number of books by famous male authors appearing twice due to poor data normalization: 1.

Number of books by women appearing on the top 15 best 21st century SF list: 2.

Number of books on the top 15 best 21st century SF list only appearing there on account of the reputation their authors made writing other books back in the 20th century: at least 3.

Number of books sufficiently embarassed to be on the best 20th century SF list that they’ll just hang around the punch bowl for fifteen minutes or so and then quietly slink off: at least 7, if there’s any justice.

Number of books by women appearing in the Locus All-Centuries Poll top 50 best 20th century fantasy novels: 8.

Number of those books not by J.K. Rowling: 5.

Number of books by women appearing in the top 15 best 21st century fantasy novels: 4.

Number of those books not by Lois McMaster Bujold: 2.

Number of books on the best 20th century fantasy list that would arguably deserve to be there even if the rest of the series they’re in had never been written: 6, maybe 7 tops.

Number of books on the best 20th century fantasy list that nobody would remember if it weren’t for the rest of the books in the series: I ran out of fingers.

Number of books on the best 20th century fantasy list that should be embarrassed to be there, but aren’t, that instead are crowded around the bar, drinking up all the good stuff, talking loudly over each other just to hear their own voices and occasionally sneaking uneasy glances at The Master and Margarita and The Once and Future King and The Little Prince and wondering who the hell they are and who let them in: probably 9 or 10.

Number of George R. R. Martin’s current doorstop series that didn’t make any list, probably because the 21st century list only runs to 15 titles: 1

Words of wisdom from Havoc Pennington:

It would be wonderful discipline for any software dev team serious about Linux “on the desktop” (whatever that means) to ban their own use of terminals. Of course, none of us have ever done this, and that explains a lot about the resulting products.