Let's Go Heavy, Let's Go Hard

At work I have a running joke with one of my bosses, where whenever I work with him, I say “Let’s go heavy, let’s go fockin’ hard”. It comes from what we dub the beloved Toronto accent, because the further you go east in Canada, the more people sound like indigenous surfers until you go all the way east, and then you just can’t understand what anyone is saying at all. It’s hard to explain in text, and even harder to my readership who I’d imagine is mostly American, but I’ll attempt to now, and it’s something like this:

“Oh fock yah, bud, totally. It’s a fockin shitshow out there today, eh? I was tryna get my cahr out the driveway and the fockin piece o’ shit was slidin’ all over tha fockin’ place.”

Anyways.

I think it’s why Australian humor works so well for me. Because the bogan/derro personality types you see depicted in various shows are kind of kindred spirits with more eastern leaning Canadians, though that particular dialect is not uncommon to see peppered where I am in western Canada, especially among oil and gas guys and tradesmen. My supervisor has that same affectation, and so did the singer of the band I recently left, who at the beginning of some of our shows would say “Let’s go heavy, let’s go fockin’ hard”. So I adopted it as a sort of playful poke at the affectation, and it’s stuck since. There is a clip on YouTube of one of our shows where he “says the thing” for reference.

Digging into Traveller5 has made it apparent that it is not the completely indecipherable text that it has been hyped up to be, but that it is very dense, and that it deserves the oft thrown around label of being “difficult”. I don’t think you need to be a genius to understand or get use out of it, and though the long game of T5 is very referential, at this point in my discovery of it, I’d say that a cursory read is a necessity. It’s also quite repetitious in parts, and many of its concepts are reinforced throughout ensuring that if you are following it carefully, you will come across the information you need even if its fairly remote in location from where you might initially expect it. And it does have a logic to its organization, just one that could be considered unconventional by the expectations of modern RPG manuals.

But with all that said, I guess the real question is - who cares? Or, why?

Why bother with T5 when T2e by Mongoose exists and is far more palatable? Or Stars Without Number? Or Starfinder? Or any other number of simpler games where Star is in the name?

I think the answer might be a shallow one. I think there is some inherent stubbornness in me where when I hear about something being “impossible” by the standards of a reviewer, or whoever, I get it in my head that “yeah it can’t be that hard”. I’m usually wrong, and it usually is, and sometimes, things are just shit and they are bad because they are incomprehensible and there is nothing anyone could do to salvage them. With T5, I saw the potential of an incredibly comprehensive set of tools for generating a universe. But it took me several years of mulling it over to finally take the plunge and put my money in Marc Millers bank account because the reception was all over the place. Some people just bounced off of it, or didn’t like it for one reason or another, and it took a lot of reading of forums and reviews to make a good decision about if their assessment was objective, or if there was just some failure of understanding or friction with the layout that was causing them to become frustrated with it.

It’s happenstance that I had the brilliant revelation that I actually own a laptop that can play video games, and that I haven’t been taking advantage of that portability and doing the obvious thing, which is to take it to work to play Doom Eternal on my breaks. Eternal is a game I’ve dumped a lot of time in, the most in one sitting being a straight 24 hour long run of the game on Nightmare shortly after I bought it for a charity event called Extra Life. And I’ll tell you something - 24 hours of straight gaming is an emotional rollercoaster especially when you are rotating through a diet of caffeine pills, coffee, and energy drinks along the way. The dizzying highs, the harrowing lows, I don’t know how I got through it but I did, and by the 23 hour mark I had finally reached the end credits. We also raised two thousand bucks for the local children’s hospital, so it was an endeavor worth enduring.

But Doom Eternal is another thing that has been simultaneously celebrated and vehemently disliked. If you go back through old Reddit posts about the game you will find confusion, betrayal, and awe at just how much the difficulty was ramped up from 2016. The demands it places on the player are biblical, which in context makes sense since you will be fighting both the proverbial demons and angels of Doom’s modern Warhammer 40,000 coded world. It’s so involved that I never figured out the perfect configuration to use on an Xbox controller due to the placement of the d-pad, which even when optimized and using a claw formation with the index and middle fingers to reach more buttons is not completely sufficient for high level play.

Doom Eternal demands an understanding of a critical loop of actions in order to contend with its highest difficulty levels, and even the toned down difficulty settings can be very overwhelming for new players. I’ll admit, it was overwhelming for me, and Doom is in my DNA. The first run of Doom Eternal did not become fun or comfortable for me until the very end of the game. And since, I’ve looped through it more times than I can count, on every difficulty setting except Ultra Nightmare, which is one of those bullshit ironman modes where one death sends you back to the beginning of the game. And that is the hard limit of my masochism.

I squarely and obviously fall into the camp that loves the game to death and is still playing it six years later. The less I say about Doom: The Dark Ages the better, because I really don’t have anything nice to say about it. And I’m venturing to keep the tone around here a little more positive post 100th Compleat DM article about how writing is a curse like a Kids in the Hall sketch with Manny Coon.

But I can tell you right now, were it not for that high level of challenge, I wouldn’t like the game as much. It keeps bringing me back because I never quite feel comfortable. It still throws curveballs at me that stress me out, and there are still areas that consistently give me trouble. Because once something feels easy, or trivial, it stops being compelling. This is part of the reason I don’t talk much about D&D proper. Not because I am some master DM - I know my flaws, I’m comfortable admitting where I fail as a DM, but I know my strengths as well. That being said, we have had a movement going on the better part of 20 years now who have been dissecting D&D as a construct both through analysis and deconstructing, and iteration. We have entire movements now dedicated to digging up every possible nugget throughout the history of RPG’s and wargaming and people who are experimenting with new/old concepts every day. So there is now an entire section of the hobby who is not even arguable is the majority who seem slavishly dedicated to treading rapidly hardening concrete to convey advice and information that has been hammered to death so handedly that it looks more like a pony than a horse now, if there is anything left but a pile of viscera and bone that has been smashed to oblivion.

I don’t have any contempt for any of these people, it’s just so exhaustively deflating to see the same conversations and arguments circling the drain. And for at least a portion, the game has become so homogenized, it’s just questions like, “Why even have paper? Why have pencils? Why have dice? Why even talk to eachother? You can play an RPG in your head just by being locked up in solitary confinement in the dark in the recesses of your mind. Why do anything at all, you’re just going to die someday anyways.” I mean I guess its a fair cop, but…jeez.

At this point, I just don’t think I can look at another B/X styles character sheet, no matter how fancy the art or the design is, no matter how much style drips off of it. I got into the OSR stuff around 2010, and I’ll admit that it really rejuvenated my interest in the hobby. And I ran several good campaigns, one shots, whatevers, using systems like Dungeon Crawl Classics, B/X, AD&D, White Box, OSE, Swords and Wizardry and others. I paid attention to the burgeoning design pholosophies of the time, and the stripped down, straight-ahead approach of the OSR oriented DM. And it felt novel, and new, and interesting. And it’s kind of amazing that it held my interest for the better part of 16 years, up until I found out about the BROSR, and Braunstein, where I played with 1:1 time, and ran my own single session Streetstein, and experimented with mass combat, etc, etc. And all of these things posed significant challenges to some of my preconceptions, and I did NOT explore them on the level they probably deserved, because by that point, my attention was starting to drift away.

I wanted the grit of Cyberpunk. The rust of Battletech. The odds ratios of OGRE and the 4x loops of Space Empires. I was envisioning something bigger than anything I had done prior with D&D, partly because, to be honest, I couldn’t stomach the idea of having to roll HP for another fucking goblin. Sure, the new concepts were interesting, but I just wanted something that was really going to crush my brain. Something that wasn’t structured around the same familiar framework. Something that felt new, and challenging.

Sometimes I wish I could just shut my brain off and enjoy the familiar, the comfortable, the easy. But when it comes to games, however they manifest, I just don’t get much out of them if they aren’t in my face, taunting me, judging me for my failures, and pushing me to “git gud” in some way or another. I don’t want to be casual about them, or enjoy them casually. I want to sit down at my desk for twelve hours and crunch out numbers over a set of Traveller5 books, or run through Doom Eternal Master Levels on the highest difficulty settings, swearing, cursing, and sweating the whole way through. To feel all hope leave my heart as I reach a late stage boss in Battle Garegga before losing all of my lives in the space of a few seconds. To feel the elation of victory, and the agony of defeat.

I want to go heavy and go hard. And I never know what that’s going to look like next, but I know it is always a challenge, and that a challenge is always interesting.

Will I get 16 years out of T5? Will I even be alive for 16 more years?

What a stupid question.

Of COURSE I might maybe.