This Is Why I Can Never Just Sit Down And Pick Something

So now, in addition to some kind of "living dungeon/sandbox" D&D 4e game, I also want to run a wing-it based GURPS 4e game. Because I like winging it, and if I actually put together a decent setting, I think I could get it to work, with GURPS.

But my books are falling apart. They're 1st printing with the really terrible binding and I haven't gotten around to getting them replaced yet.

By next month, I will have discovered yet another shiny thing to obsess over.

Books Are Our Friends, Not Food

Heard about White Wolf's new promotion? You tear out the pages of your D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook, and they give you a copy of Exalted, for free, and a diploma that says you've graduated from the world of "standard fantasy" and "10' by 10' rooms."

This, not surprisingly, has pissed some people off. There's talk on the boards of elitism and failure and what have you. Pisses me off, too, but not because I'm insulted by White Wolf implying that Exalted is "better" than D&D. (Maybe it is. I don't care.)

It pisses me off because they're encouraging people to destroy books. Books! I have a hard time writing in books. And they're trying to get people to tear the pages out? Blasphemy!

I don't play Exalted because the two people who have tried to get me to play it were irritating. I want to hear what's fun about the game, not how much what I'm playing sucks. But honestly, that's neither here nor there. Exalted does look somewhat intriguing, and I'm sure that with the right group, I could have had fun playing it.

But support a company that encourages the destruction of fine printed hardbacks? No way.

E. Gary Gygax

I've been trying to think of something to say. Not just any old thing, something good.

All I can think of is "thanks."

"You All Meet . . . at a Funeral"

I'm planning to start out my next D&D game with a funeral. Sketch out an NPC dead guy, and have everyone make characters with some kind of connection to said dead guy. Then, at the funeral, they discover something untoward about the circumstances of his death, or something odd he was up to before it. Being PCs, they investigate, and it's off to adventure.

I Am Not Dumb and I Must Scream

I am not stupid.

My mother is not stupid. My grandmothers, my aunts, my cousins are not stupid. I have no stupid friends. (Even the guys.)

Women are not stupid.

I watch General Hospital. I play The Sims. I've fainted. I bake. I feel emotions other than rage and triumph.

I'm still not stupid.

Maybe I am a mutant. Maybe the fact that I play Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, (it has math!) Oblivion, and Civilization, that I don't read romance novels, watch Grey's Anatomy, or talk about Botox, that I have aced every standardized test I have ever taken, can do Calculus, and help my boyfriend with his math homework means that I am part of that cadre of "brilliant outliers."

Maybe.

Or maybe, just maybe, gender is a little more complicated that brain scans and IQ tests. Maybe there are more kinds of intelligence than abstract logic and suppressing your emotions. Maybe there are a lot of women who are good at "male" things--and a lot of men who are good at "female" things.

Maybe gender and intelligence are both way too messy and complicated to declare that "women are dumb" with a handful of studies and some circumstantial evidence.

I am not "dim." Not deep down, not even a little bit, not even secretly.

I live in a society that undervalues what women are good at, and then tells them to go take care of "men and children and the weak" because they obviously aren't useful for anything else. I live in a society that is obsessed with measuring and testing and putting people into categories so it can confirm what it already knows about race and gender and class.

But I'm not stupid.

And Charlotte Allen isn't, either.