CANISLUP.US

Audio only. A sound file of me dramatically reading Jabberwocky from 2008. Read more »

I took a few pictures of my tidied up dorm room.

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Originally written 14 March 2008.
Now officially published on the NPR This I Believe web site.

Our modern, media-visible leaders seem to be forgetful people. Celebrities who marry on a whim, divorce three months later, develop an eating disorder, then repeat; big businesses who outsource American manufacturing to foreign countries where they can rob impoverished laborers of their rights; politicians motivated by greed who bypass the needs of the masses to promote the wants of the wealthy few: these are some of today’s leaders. Aggressive self-interest all too often plays substitute for the scarcely-recalled humility that true leadership requires.

“Leadership,” “service,”–conjoined ideals that resurfaced multiple times throughout my student career as lofty words I thought speakers threw around just to sound impressive–I never imagined anyone expected us to actually take them seriously, or even understand them. No amount of nudging opened my eyes to the correlation. It was a realization I had to find for myself, slowly, from a jumble of sources. The strongest was my adoption of the alias Thain; research into the word’s origin revealed it to be derived from the Old English title thegn, meaning the retainer of a king. A thegn’s duty was not only to serve the king, but to lead his own warband as both soldier and lord–they were warriors who toiled beside the common people on the battlefield as well as the noble administrators of their lands. In other words, whenever appropriate a thegn was a servant of the king and a leader of men. I decided I wanted Thain to mean me, an expression of who I was and hoped to become; in the ancient thegns I recognized a straightforward simultaneousness of leadership and service that I wanted to achieve. It took years before I realized that the themes I thought I had linked all by myself had been weaving themselves in and out of my education ever since my grade school years at a small private Catholic school, Our Lady of Lourdes, where our motto was “enter to grow and learn, leave to lead and serve.” When I applied to join my high school’s chapter of the National Honor Society, there they were again, disguised as airy, purposeless words, their significance obscured by flowery ceremony. With shock I connected this to my own principles a long time afterwards, having discovered the convictions it had been trying to convey. I think this lesson had to be self-taught for me to truly understand it; without my own reflections, “leadership” and “service” would still have the substance of air for me.

I believe that true leaders are servants. Though leadership is outwardly perceived as domination, in truth humility is its foremost requisite, because every leader’s first duty is to those who follow. A leader is someone who leads; the occupation becomes redundant if there is no one who needs that guidance. In essence, anyone who provides direction for others performs service for them. Leadership is not about power. Seeking leadership with the sole desire to wield power is abuse. True leadership is about asking oneself, “What I can step forward to do for others?” True leaders realize that in order to lead, one must first desire to serve.

Whatever setting you’re placed in, a certain amount of realism is required to make the roleplay enjoyably believable. Unless there is an exception, always assume that normal physics will apply. Since this is the case, any action can be expected to have reasonable consequences. “Wait, I thought I had complete control over my character! If something I don’t like happens to my character, can’t I just ignore it?” No, o ignoramus pupil. You have control over your character, but you are never outside the laws of the universe. You are expected to be altered somehow by anything you do not actively prevent from affecting your character. This means that if you take no action to avoid the speeding ox-cart headed your way, it is going to crush you. However, every player retains the right of life and death over their respective characters. You are expected to be realistically affected by not avoiding the rampaging ox-cart, whether this is player-chosen death or an incapacitating injury that takes several weeks to recover from. Every in character action has an in character consequence.

Coincidentally, this also means that they should not have out of character consequences. Meaning: You don’t get pissed just because things aren’t going your way in the RP. If you don’t like the way they are going, then think of a way to change it within the bounds of the RP universe! Roleplay is a excursion in creative thought. Treat it as such.

In roleplay, action is always more important than description. You can write ten paragraphs detailing the stitching on your trousers or the daydreams in your head, and I’ll still be bored to death and write it off as a loss. Why? Because roleplaying is an exchange. There has to be something in your post that can be responded to; an action that another character can observe in some way and react to. Internal monologue and detailed settings are all very well, but without a substantial amount of accompanying action that can be replied to, they are rendered completely pointless in standard roleplay.

HOWEVER,

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t describe anything. Action gives us something to respond to; description gives us something to work with. “Shane walked across the room” becomes much more interesting when you say “Shane’s weary boots thudded against the oak floorboards as he strode swiftly across the dim bar room, the tails of his coat billowing behind.” What is the difference here from what I mentioned before? This kind of description has a purpose: it adds richness to the action rather than distracting from it, giving us more to reply to rather than leaving us with nothing.

So, the lesson here? Always keep in mind that successful roleplay is based in action and reaction; don’t sacrifice the backbone of your post just to play with pretty words. (Oh, and don’t worry. It’s an occasional guilt of mine, too. Mmmm, words.)

In certain circles it has become fashionable to be exceedingly obtuse in one’s word choice and vocabulary usage, with players regularly overusing a specific set of words, which are at best very stretched metaphors, to mean things they certainly do not. This vocabulary tends to go along with a peculiar tendency to purge articles and pronouns or unnecessarily truncate sentences. This is, generally, a very bad practice. It makes one’s writing unnecessarily difficult to read (except to experts of this obtuse gibberish), interrupts the flow of the roleplay, and is an abuse of standard English. The main problem with using such words is that the usage usually completely ignores the standard definition of the words and, quite importantly, their accompanying connotations. For example, “brute” is a word commonly used to mean “male” among these circles, often completely ignoring the word’s usual insinuations of savagery. Likewise “bruja” (your character is a witch?), “fae” (one of the faerie folk?), daggers (bladed weapons?)…

When you must provide a glossary to redefine what the word you have used is referring to, something has gone terribly wrong. Roleplaying is, first and foremost, a form of writing. Something that cannot be read and comprehended by an intelligent English speaker should NEVER be passed off as skillful writing, for the purpose of roleplay or otherwise.

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