Exchange of Realities

Those of you who weren’t with me when I started might wonder about my designation of “Impractical Applications” for my weekly riffs on my own gaming. So here’s the explanation.

I sparked on the name long before I ever began writing these riffs, back when I was in college. It had actually come out of a discussion I’d had with a classics major in my game group. There he was, bemoaning the lack of uses for his major—and not, as one might expect, the lack of real-world uses, but the lack of things that could be applied to running games. This from a guy whose list included Ancient Architecture, talking to someone who at the time was taking basic chemistry, basic biology, one class focused on understanding Otherness (which I’ll admit came in handy a lot) and something that was basically “Let’s read things that follow the same pattern as the Odyssey all semester”.

My initial “You’re kidding, right?” didn’t seem to help much. He pointed out that people being chased by a big guy with a bigger sword weren’t going to be too concerned with whether the columns they were ducking behind were Ionic or Corinthian. True, that, but missing the point. But the game isn’t just the fights; as I pointed out, it’s easier to hide compartment latches and switches and things in Corinthian columns than Ionic, or either than Doric. And there are places where one’s likelier to put the study of a house just for comfort’s sake—useful when you happen to be trying to get to their documents, and we’d in fact taken advantage of that the session before—and of course, the old standby of the Caryatid columns turning out to be stone golems or something similarly unfriendly. (Or, for that matter, taking advantage of people who expect that sort of twist and making them paranoid, but at the time I didn’t think about that part.) It seemed easy to me, compared to using my classes; then again, I have an ancient city whose elevated transportation system was inspired by motor proteins.

Technically, you could consider things like that practical applications, as they are putting the information in practice. But why settle for that when you can add a rotten pun and getting to zing people who don’t consider anything having to do with gaming or fiction writing to be even remotely practical into the bargain? So even before I was running my own game, I was cheerfully explaining about my ability to find impractical applications to almost anything.

Cut to when I’m starting to write this blog. I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to be able to fit too many hands-on examples into a given article; being a science major, though, I realized the need for hands-on examples. Case studies, if you will. A way to show and not necessarily tell. Originally I’d planned to line them up with my topics, and sometimes it even succeeded, as in the case of the insane gods under the mountain—or ended up a week later due to potential spoilers, as with my “How I sowed fear in my players” riff. But my group is unpredictable, and not all my examples are current, so as often as not it’d be something from long before, a now-finished situation or a character who’s been in the background for a while.

As a result—case studies. Introduce a topic, show how it worked, find problems with it, repeat the following week.