As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be playing Oliver du Boys in As You Like It this summer with Shakespeare & Company. This will actually be the second time I’ve appeared in a production of As You Like It, the first being my inaugural show in college during the University of Minnesota’s 1999-2000 season.

This leads to an interesting story:

Cast lists for the University of Minnesota were posted on a bulletin board in the basement of the theater building. Wendy Knox, the director of As You Like It, had chosen to list the roles in alphabetical order by the actor’s last name. My name, of course, appeared right at or near the top of the list. So I almost immediately spotted it:

JUSTIN ALEXANDER – JACQUES DU BOYS

My heart leapt for joy. This was going to be my first show in college.

While I had seen a couple productions of the play before, it had been several years and I had never been particularly familiar with it. So I headed home, grabbed my copy of the Complete Works, flipped it open to As You Like It, and began to read — eager to see what my role was.

It was only a couple of scenes before I saw my cue: Enter Jacques.

As I read I got more and more excited. Jacques is a major character in the play. Among other things, he says the famous lines about “the seven ages of man”. This was going to be awesome.

I continued reading. And then, on literally the second-to-last page of the play, I read another stage direction: Enter Jacques du Boys.

Yup. A completely different character also named Jacques.

Now, Jacques du Boy gets a nice, meaty monologue. It’s a lengthy piece that basically ends the play. It’s a nifty little part. Plus, I ended up getting a variety of other lines for characters like “First Lord” to pad it out a bit. But Jacques du Boys sure as heck isn’t Jacques.

Okay, fast forward eight years. I get a voice message from Shakespeare & Company offering me two roles: Bolingbrooke in Richard II (Richard’s nemesis and the guy who becomes Henry IV) and “Oliver in As You Like It“.

Hey! I already know this one! Oliver du Boys is the elder brother of Orlando, the main character character in the play. (He’s also the older brother of Jacques du Boys — who really shouldn’t be confused with Jacques.) Oliver is a fun little villain who tries to kill Orlando and, thus, kick-starts the entire play. He’s going to be a lot of fun.

So I pull out my Complete Works again and flip it open to As You Like It. I glance at the cast list, and what do I see?

SIR OLIVER MARTEXT

… you have gotta be kidding me.

Sir Oliver Martext is the name of the priest who comes on at the end of the play and performs some marriages. (Does saying that there are marriages at the end of a Shakespearean comedy constitute a spoiler?) He has a grand total of three lines. He is so totally inconsequential that I didn’t even know who he was and I had been in the play before.

Surely this couldn’t be happening again… could it?

Nah. It wasn’t. I’m playing Oliver du Boys. (Which, coincidentally, means that I’m making my way through the du Boys brothers. I figure the next time I’m in As You Like It that I’ll be a shoe-in for Orlando.) But I find it amusing nonetheless.

And, seriously, what was Shakespeare thinking? Why do all of these characters have the same first name?

I figure it’s personal. Shakespeare’s just fucking with me. I must’ve done something to piss him off and now he’s holding a grudge against me. I’m like Rob Paravonian, only instead of Pachelbel, the du Boys boys are my personal cross to bear.

The Hollow runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through June 1st. But I’ve already started work on my next project: From June 28th through August 3rd of this year, I’ll be appearing with Shakespeare & Company as Bolingbrooke in Richard II and as Oliver du Boys in As You Like It. (The company is also producing Servant of Two Masters.)

These shows run in repertory, and this’ll be my first experience with that. I’m looking forward to it. I’m also looking forward to taking a large bite out of Shakespeare. Working with his words and his characters is a pure joy.

Lucas Gerstner is playing the title role in Richard II and Orlando in As You Like It.

Lucas and I first worked together earlier this year in Henry V at Theater in the Round: He played the Duke of Orleans and I played the Constable of France.

We’re currently working together on The Hollow: I’m playing Inspector Colquhoun and he plays Edward Angkatell — one of the suspects.

As Lucas puts it, our theatrical career together seems to be deteriorating: We started out on the same team. Then I suspected him of murder. Now I’m trying to kill him. Twice.

I figured that it could only go uphill from here. But then I realized there was always the chance that I could end up directing him in a production of Sartre’s No Exit and literally send him to hell.

I’m not very good at publicity.

I’d like to say that this is because I’m a humble man. But I suspect the truth is that I’m egotistical enough that I believe everyone should recognize my brilliance without me having to tell them about it. (I kid… or do I?)

Seriously, though, the reality is that I just don’t like dealing with bureaucracy, busywork, or paperwork. Publicity lies somewhere in the interstice between the three, and if I can figure out some way to procrastinate it, then I’ll end up procrastinating it.

This is why Hervé Jeune had to spend about 5 years trying to get me to send him a biography so that he could put it up on the Guide du roliste, a French roleplaying/gaming site. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that: Every 45 days he would send me an e-mail like clockwork, asking me very politely to send him a biography. And every time I got the e-mail I would dutifully think to myself, “Yup, I should definitely do that.”

And then it would sit in my Inbox until it would expire and disappear (Hervé had the AOL address I’ve had for a decade and a half). And then, a few days later, the new e-mail would pop up and I would think, “Yup, I should definitely do that.”

Well, several months ago I finally got around to doing it. A couple of weeks later, Hervé sent me an e-mail telling me that the whole thing had been translated and that it could be found here. I can’t read a word of it, but it looks pretty nifty. In fact, the whole site looks nifty.

Of course, Hervé sent me that e-mail more than two months ago and I’m only getting around to mentioning it here on the site now.

Which, I suppose, goes to show that I’m no better about publicity now than I’ve ever been.

Ah well…

COLLECTED EDITION OF AN ESSAY BY JUSTIN ALEXANDER

UPDATE 2: This essay is the original use of the term “dissociated mechanics”, but it was written during a time when I was still trying to figure out what that term meant. If you’re looking for a better understanding of the term, I recommend reading the improved and updated “Dissociated Mechanics – A Brief Primer” instead.

UPDATE 1: This essay was originally written in May 2008, more than a month before the core rulebooks for 4th Edition were first released. My general analysis of both the design ethos of the new edition and many of the new mechanics to be found in the new edition were right on the money, but it should be noted that there are a few individual mechanics which were either previewed inaccurately or which I made the wrong conclusions about.

But these differences have no meaningful impact on the most important points being made here. Most importantly, the central conclusions regarding the nature of dissociated mechanics — they’re bad and they’re antithetical to roleplaying — remain as true as ever.

You can might also be interested in reading my thoughts on actually Playtesting 4th Edition.

(more…)

Go to Part 1

Okay, I’m almost done ranting about dissociated mechanics. This is the last post in this sequence.

But before I signed off on the subject, I did want to briefly discuss one area where I think the basic structure of a skill challenge works very well: Social encounters.

One of the reasons they work well is that human behavior is not easily quantifiable. If, all things being equal, a wall is harder to climb one day than the next, that’s inexplicable. If, on the other hand, I’m happy to take the garbage out one day and then get snippy with my girlfriend when she asks me to do it the next day… well, I’m just being grouchy.

In other words, the inherent dissociation of the mechanics gets lost in the chaotic intricacies of human relationships. In fact, things like the probability skewing we were talking about can actually end up being features instead of bugs when you’re dealing with social scenarios.

Of course, you’d want to sidestep the railroading WotC demonstrates in their own sample skill challenge. But once you’ve done that, even the basic skill challenge mechanics we’ve seen for 4th Edition offer a more robust — if still fairly simplistic — improv structure that is preferable to a situation in which the group is either left rudderless or in which the DM boils the whole thing down into a single opposed roll.

Ideally, however, I’d want to make the system more robust, dynamic, and responsive. A few ideas:

(1) Good guidelines for determining the degree of the skill challenge (how many successes) and the difficulty of the skill challenge (ratio of failures). Are the relationship and risk-vs-reward scales that I use for my current Diplomacy rules a starting point for such guidelines?

(2) Opposition. NPCs who are actively working against the PCs. Their successes count as failures for the PCs, but their successes can also be undone.

(3) Obstacles. These are tools for modeling more dynamic situations. For example, the main challenge might be 8/4 — but before you can start tackling that main problem, you first have to overcome a 2/3 obstacle or a 6/3 obstacle. (It might be interesting to define opposition as a specific kind of obstacle: You could eliminate the opposition entirely by overcoming the obstacle, or just deal with them complicating matters as you focus on the main challenge.)

(4) Tactics. These might also be thought of as templates or tactics. I’d be drawing generic inspiration from some of the material in Penumbra’s Dynasties & Demagogues (among other sources).

Over the past few years there has been an increasing move towards trying to figure out “social combat” mechanics in RPGs — with the general idea being that you’re bringing the robustness of combat mechanics to roleplaying encounters. In my experience, however, most of these systems end up categorizing all social interaction as a form of warfare. This has limited truth to it. And even when it is true, it usually ends up being a gross over-simplification.

In the ideas of social challenge mechanics, on the other hand, I find the nascent promise of a mechanically interesting system for handling social encounters that doesn’t try to ape combat mechanics.

I’m hopeful that something interesting might come out of this. If it does, you guys will be the first to know. (There’s also a part of me still hoping that I’m wrong about 4th Edition’s skill challenges and that the core rulebooks will, in fact, unveil something far more impressive than the lame and crippled examples they’ve proffered to date.)